CHAPTER XI
THE WHITE FLAG
HUGH had thought, when he saw those first snowflakes, that he understood a little of what was before them. He had later to learn that winter as he knew it and winter as it could be in northern Minnesota were two very different matters. To lose all their possessions at just the season when cold weather was closing in was a mishap desperate indeed, yet the boys, after a moment of being stunned by the gravity of the situation, faced it gayly.
That same night Hugh insisted on going out to look for the fishing basket that he had thrown aside when he ran to the rescue of Hulda. With Nicholas to help him, he managed to find it, so, that evening at least, they did not have to go supperless to bed. Early next morning they arose to search the ruins of the storehouse for anything that might have escaped destruction. Part of a side of bacon was found wedged under a fallen beam and a very small quantity of flour, happening to be in a tin container, had not been consumed. That was the whole extent of their salvage.
The snow had only been falling fitfully during the night, but about the middle of the morning the storm settled down, like a blinding white curtain that shut off all the rest of the world. Once or twice the rising wind tore the dense veil apart, showing them the stormy lake, the bowing woods and Jasper Peak for a fleeting moment, before all was blotted out again. The boys had managed to mend the hole burned in the roof and to shut off the door that had once led into the storehouse, and now were warming themselves at the fire after their severe labors outside. Dick went to the window and took a long survey of the snow.
“If I know anything of Minnesota weather,” he remarked, “this is the sort of storm that will last for days, three or four, at least, and then it will clear and get cold, colder than anything you ever dreamed of—thirty—forty—fifty below zero, maybe. If we should start now, we might be able to get to Rudolm, but if we wait until the snow is deep we could not even attempt it. What do you say, Hugh, shall we go or stay?”
“I don’t know,” answered Hugh from beside the fire; “do you want to go?”
“I do not,” returned Dick promptly, “but we have got to decide which is the wiser thing to do.”
Hugh looked up at the calendar on the wall.
“Oscar has been gone two weeks and three days,” he said, “so his time for proving up on the claim will be over in five days. Jake arranged his plan well. He meant to burn the cabin and just give himself time to get down to the Land Office to make trouble over Oscar’s statement that the land is improved and so tie the whole thing up. He knows we have lost our stores; he is watching from over there to see if we go. He will still have time to put the thing through if we do.”
“Then let’s stay,” decided Dick with determination. “We have food enough for two days and we’ll whistle for luck for the other three. Fortunately we have plenty of wood.”
“And let’s make a big smoke in the chimney,” said Hugh, “so that when the storm lifts for a second Jake can see that we are still here and are going to stay.”
It was a welcome idea and quickly carried out. Certainly if Half-Breed Jake had any curiosity as to whether the cottage was still inhabited, he had no need to cross the valley to find out, on that day at least. Dick and Hugh built up such a roaring blaze that there was danger of their setting fire to the cabin again; then they sat down before it, toasting their shins and reflecting on the probable disappointment of the Pirate of Jasper Peak.
The hours passed very slowly, for the two had little to do and had chosen to have no midday meal, but to eat of their scanty stock only night and morning. The storm increased; the snowfall was no longer steady, but came in whirling gusts, piling high before the cabin door. About the middle of the afternoon, Dick took his rifle and sallied forth with Nicholas in desperate hope of bringing home some game. He was gone two hours, returning at last empty-handed.
“And very lucky I was to get home at all,” he said as he came in, stamping the snow off his big boots. “I vow I have been walking in a circle for five miles: it was only Nicholas who ever got me here again.”
All night the wind screamed in the chimney and fairly rocked the walls of their little dwelling. The snow seemed twice as deep when they fought their way out to the stable to attend to the wants of Hulda. Her placid air was somewhat reassuring, although Hugh observed wisely:
“She really doesn’t know just how things are.”
The pail of milk that they carried back between them was even more comforting, for it was plain that with Hulda’s help they could not quite starve.
“We can get pretty hungry, though,” observed Hugh grimly as he saw Nicholas disposing of his share in three laps and then looking up to beg mutely for more.
There could be no thought now of going out to shoot. The snow was drifted over the window sills and banked against the door and still filled the air in white clouds driven by the roaring wind. The spring, their one water supply, was as inaccessible as though it had been ten miles away, so they melted snow in a pot over the fire and found it a most unsatisfactory process, since, as Dick said, “A bucketful of snow makes about a thimbleful of water.”
Their supply of food was quite gone by the fourth day, in spite of all their care, so there was nothing left but the milk night and morning.
“That won’t keep one very long,” Hugh remarked.
He had been obliged to gulp down his share in the stable, being much too hungry to wait until he got back to the house. Dick immediately followed his example and, when he had finished, stood eying the storm through the narrow slit of a window.
“It can’t last a great deal longer, it simply can’t,” he asserted.
Hugh, shaking down hay for Hulda, envied her the pleasure with which she ate it and answered gloomily:
“Perhaps it can’t, but I am beginning to think that it will.”
This day also wore by somehow and at last night came.
“There certainly will be a change by morning,” Hugh assured himself as he fell asleep.
When he awoke, however, and got up at once to press his face against the snow-blurred window he saw just the same blinding, swirling storm. It looked like some sort of dream that would go on and on and never end. Dick, awaking, sat up quickly, but, on looking at Hugh’s face, forebore to ask any questions.
“You had better lie down again,” he advised, dropping his head once more upon the pillow. “It is wiser to spend as much time sleeping as you possibly can.”
Stumbling out through the drifts to Hulda, Hugh began suddenly to realize such weakness that he wondered whether he could make the journey again without dropping in the snow. Through the day he noticed that Dick no longer prowled from door to window, looking at the storm. He sat, instead, immovable in the big chair by the fire, only stirring now and then to add fresh logs to the blaze. The strain of his journey through the wood, his anxiety about his brother, with these present hardships, had tended to break him sooner than Hugh. He tried to speak some words of broken apology when Hugh went about the work of the cabin alone, but the truth was plain enough, that he could scarcely move. Nicholas lay listlessly in a corner, following Hugh always with great hungry eyes. Night seemed to come with unbelievable slowness, even though the winter days had grown so short.
They crawled into bed at last, too weak and dispirited, almost, to bid each other good-night. Hugh tossed and turned upon his bunk; he was too hungry to sleep. Suddenly sitting bolt upright, he addressed Dick, who was awake also, even though he lay so still.
“Dick,” he said sharply, “are you sorry we stayed?”
“No,” came the answer promptly. “No, by George, I'm not sorry, no matter what happens.”
“Nor I,” said Hugh, and lay down again, quieted somehow, so that soon he went to sleep.
He awoke, hours later, with a vague knowledge that something was wrong. After rubbing the drowsiness from his eyes and thinking a little, he decided that, even under his mountain of blankets, he was very cold. He got up hastily, huddled on all of his clothes, even to his mackinaw coat, and went into the other room to crouch before the hearth. The fire was not yet dead, but such warmth as it could give made little impression upon the terrible benumbing chill that filled the cottage. Nicholas, shivering and whining, came to his side and the two crept close together, each getting a little comfort from the other. Dick was still asleep; they could hear his breathing in the utter quiet, and the clock tick-ticking above them on the wall. In the flickering light Hugh could see the hands moving slowly until they pointed to twelve.
It was midnight, the last hour of Oscar’s last day. The cabin was safe, the claim was his, the first step of his great plan was made certain at last.
“We’ve beaten Jake,” cried Hugh, in a quick whisper and threw his arms about Nicholas in a great hug of delight. Then he got up stiffly and went to the window to survey the weather. He pushed aside the curtain, rubbed a clear space in the thick frost on the pane and looked out. He gasped and looked once more, with a cry of amazement, as though some strange vision had been presented to his eyes. Yet all he saw was calm, quiet night, a world of glittering snowfields and a clear sky all alight with stars.
“Dick, Dick,“ he shouted, and his comrade jumped up hastily.
“What is it?“ he asked. “Oh, brr-rr, but it is cold.“
He came to Hugh's side, looked out also and gave the same gasp of joy.
“I didn’t know,” he cried, his voice almost breaking, “I didn’t know that stars could shine so bright, Hugh!”
What happened next would have shocked Linda Ingmarsson, careful houskeeper that she was, and might even have given some pain to Oscar’s tidy Swedish soul. For both boys, fully dressed, got into one bunk together, with Nicholas between them, “just for company,” as Hugh said. The big dog accomplished wonders in the matter of doubling up his long legs, so that the combined supply of blankets sufficed to cover them all. Gradually, as they began to be a little warmer, both the boys relaxed a little from their long anxiety during the storm. The claim was safe, there was a chance that they could go into the woods in the morning and shoot a partridge or two, if they could manage to drag themselves that far. And now the storm was over, certainly Oscar would come soon. Hugh did not think upon these matters long, however, for he was growing very drowsy.
“Listen,” said Dick at last, rousing himself very sleepily; “what is that sound at the door? Look, Nicholas hears it too.”
The dog had raised his head and was sniffing anxiously, but without moving, as though he, too, were too weary to stir. Hugh listened and heard a sound outside like a soft shuffling in the snow.
“I don’t care what it is,” he announced. “There is nothing on earth that can make me get up now that I am warm and sleepy at last. Here, Nicholas, spare me a bit more blanket. I am going to sleep for a hundred years and dream of a million ham sandwiches.”
He dropped off almost while he was still speaking and Dick, apparently no more energetic than he, closed his eyes also. Nicholas lay with cocked ears listening until the soft sounds gradually ceased, then he, too, dropped into the unheeding slumber that held them all until daylight.
When Hugh awoke his first thought was that it was a pleasant dream he had had of the storm’s being over and the stars visible. Yet when he sat up and saw bright sunlight pouring through the windows of the little cabin he knew that it must be true and sprang from his bunk with a hurrah of delight. The air was of a more bitter cold than anything he had ever imagined, the breath rose from his nostrils in two columns like steam and was frozen in white crystals all along the edge of the blanket where Dick still lay. Nicholas jumped down after him, shook himself by way of making a morning toilet and ran to sniff and snuffle under the door. There returned to Hugh a vague recollection of the sounds he had heard in the night, so that he undid the fastenings hurriedly and threw the door open. The dazzling sparkle of the snow almost blinded him for a moment, while the rush of intense cold made him draw his breath in quick gasps. Yet nothing could blind his eyes to what lay upon the doorstep—a big sack of flour, a bag of dried beans and the frozen carcass of a deer.
The sight of food when one is nearly starved has sometimes a strange and disquieting effect. Hugh was ashamed of the savage eagerness with which he fell upon the treasures and dragged them within. He kept thinking that they must vanish from his sight even as he held them and wished earnestly that Dick were not asleep that he might ask him whether he saw them too. It seemed too bad to wake him if the gifts did not turn out to be real. Yet the food remained very solid and genuine in his hands, even while he was preparing it for cooking and cutting off a venison steak. It afforded presently a perfume more delicious than all the sweets of Araby, when at last the meat began to broil. Nicholas lay with his nose almost in the fire, his eyes never moving from the feast as Hugh turned it over and over before the blaze.
“You are going to have the first one,” said Hugh. “You deserve it if ever a dog did. You are the only one of the three of us that has not grumbled.”
The second steak was nearly ready, flapjacks were browning in the pan and the beans had been buried in the coals to bake for another meal, when Dick awoke. Hugh laughed delightedly at the sight of him, sitting bolt upright among the blankets, his mouth and eyes both round with unbelieving astonishment.
“What is it, Hugh?” he asked, sniffing delightedly. “I could live on that smell for a week. Did the witches or the angels bring it?”
“I don’t know,” laughed Hugh delightedly, “but however it came, it’s real. Get up quickly or I will eat it all without you.”
They speculated long over every possible source for the mysterious gift, but could come to no conclusion. On examining the space before the cottage they saw that some one had come on snowshoes up the hill and had removed them to walk in the narrow trampled path that the boys had made, deep in the drifts, up to their door. They could see where the snowshoes had been stuck upright against a bank while the owner came up to the doorstone: the footsteps were short, shuffling ones made by moccasined feet.
“But no Indian man that ever I saw walks with such a short stride as that,” Dick insisted, staring thoughtfully at the marks in the snow, “and think what a load he must have carried!”
Hugh had a sudden rapid memory of two figures he had seen that first day he walked through the streets of Rudolm, a swift, silent Indian striding ahead and behind him his wife bearing just such a load as this on her bent shoulders and by the deerskin strap across her forehead. Yet he did not speak of the thought in his mind, it was far too fantastic and impossible.
They dined like lords that day, but spent most of the time still hugging the fire, for the cold was as fierce as had been the storm that went before it. The sun shone brilliantly, turning everything to diamond and silver and making their little world, as they looked out upon it, a strange and unfamiliar place. Jasper Peak opposite was sheathed in white from base to summit, with high-banked drifts and curving blue-shadowed hollows. The lake’s surface was blue again, an odd clear greenish blue, for it was ice. During the tumult of the storm it could not freeze over, but now was a glistening expanse, with white broken rifts here and there, where the floating masses of ice had been caught and frozen in. The long shore showed sharp lines of dark and white in its crowded pine trees with their burden of snow.
An hour after noon they had gone out to clear a path to the stable, a heavy task in snow that had drifted six and seven feet high wherever shelter offered. Nicholas, running about them, floundered shoulder deep in even the open places and more than once succeeded in burying himself entirely.
“Hugh,” said Dick at last—he had been leaning on his shovel and staring across the ravine—“I wish you would look over there at the pirates’ cabin and tell me what you see.”
Hugh turned to look as he was bid, yet for a moment saw only the half-buried shack and the group of pointed, snow-covered pines behind it.
“I don’t see anything,” he answered. “What do you think is there?”
“Come over by me so that the chimney is in line with those trees. Don’t you see now, something fluttering on a pole?”
Hugh came close and looked again, long and carefully.
“Why, they have a flag flying,” he exclaimed at last, “and, Dick, it’s a white one!”
“That’s it,” cried Dick excitedly. “I thought I saw it this morning, but with the sun in our eyes I couldn’t make it out. It is plain enough now; it looks as though they wanted help.”
“They deserve to get it, don’t they?” commented Hugh bitterly, digging his shovel very deep into the snow.
They finished clearing the path in silence, then walked slowly back to the cottage. They sat before the fire for a little, each deep in the same thought.
“He shot Oscar’s dog,” Hugh suddenly broke out. “He made it so that Oscar couldn’t go to war, he—he—Dick, does a man who can do such things deserve any help?”
“He has done worse things than any you know about,” returned Dick, “and I know now that he had a hand in that Indian Kaniska’s leaving us to starve in the woods; he has done every sort of thing, but—but—”
As if with one movement, they both looked up at Oscar’s snowshoes hanging on the wall.
“There is only one pair,” observed Hugh. “We can’t both go.”
“Then,” said Dick, and neither had occasion to tell the other that a final conclusion had been reached, “then we will have to draw straws. And it is very generous of me to give you even a chance, because I know I am better on snowshoes than you.”
“I have tried them in the Adirondacks,” Hugh replied. “I am not so clumsy with them as you seem to think. Well, straws it is. The longest one goes.”
They arranged the straws with great show of fairness and secrecy and drew.
“Oh, Hugh, you have all the luck!” exclaimed Dick in bitter disappointment as he gazed at his abbreviated straw and at Hugh’s irrepressible grin of satisfaction.
“It is really better,” was Hugh’s answer, in which he tried to keep the excited delight from his tone. “We have not either of us come through this last week feeling any too husky, but it has been harder on you because it was your second try at starving. If we weren’t both of us so well fed now, I think we would quarrel.”
“It isn’t fair,” cried Dick jealously. “After all, you ought to stay here. Some one must milk Hulda and I don’t know how.”
“Nonsense,” returned Hugh rudely. “For myself, I never want to see milk again. Where is that extra revolver? Lend me your mittens, they are drier than mine.”
He strapped on the snowshoes, ordered Nicholas back in spite of the delighted preparations the dog was making to join the expedition, bade Dick a sympathizing good-by and turned his face stoutly toward Jasper Peak. The dry, stinging cold was so intense as almost to take his breath away, but he was growing a little more used to it at last. The big snowshoes seemed awkward at first; he soon fell into the proper swing, however, and made good speed down the hill to the edge of the stream. The brook itself had disappeared completely under snow which was so soft that here he sank and floundered in spite of the snowshoes. It was difficult going up the steep incline on the other side, but in his eagerness and curiosity he managed to climb quickly.
There was no sign of life about Jake's cabin, only the white flag—it looked like a torn shirt—was still fluttering from its rough pole beside the chimney. There were footprints about the door, those same heavy, shuffling steps that he had seen before their own cabin. He knocked loudly and stood waiting, thinking of the last time he had stood upon that doorstep. There was a pause and such silence that he could hear his heart hammering excitedly against his ribs. Then a sound of slow, dragging feet came from within, there was a fumbling at the lock, the door opened and a broad awkward figure appeared on the threshold. Somehow, in spite of his surprise, he felt that he had half expected to see that swarthy face and wide, strange, mirthless smile. It was Laughing Mary.