Читать книгу Lords of the North - Agnes C. Laut - Страница 11

"I'll be hanged, now, if I'm not jealous," he began. "You'll stare the lady out of countenance——" But at this moment the Indian who had come up the bank behind us came round and interrupted Laplante's merriment by tossing a piece of bethumbed paper between my comrade's knees.

"The deuce!" exclaimed Louis, bulging his tongue into one cheek and glancing at me with a queer, quizzical look as he unfolded and read the paper.

If he had not spoken I might not have turned; but having turned I could not but notice two things. Louis jerked back from me, as if I might try to read the soiled note in his hand, and in raising the paper displayed on the back the stamp of the commissariat department from Quebec Citadel.

Neither Laplante's suppressed surprise, nor my observations of his movement, escaped the big squaw. She came quickly round the fire to us both.

"Give me that," she commanded, holding out her hand to the French youth.

"The deuce I will," he returned, twisting the paper up in his clenched fist. Half in jest, half in earnest, just as Louis used to be punished at the seminary, she gave him a prompt box on the ear. He took it in perfect good-nature. And the whole encampment laughed. The squaw went back to the other side of the fire. Laplante leaned forward and threw the paper towards the flames; but without his knowledge, he overshot the mark; and when the trader was looking elsewhere the big squaw stooped, picked up the coveted note and slipped it into her skirt pocket.

"Now, Louis, nonsense aside," I began.

"With all my soul, if I have one," said he, lying back languidly with a perceptible cooling of the cordiality he had first evinced.

I told him my errand, and that I wished to search every wigwam for trace of the lost woman and child. He listened with shut eyes.

"It isn't," I explained in a low voice, eager to arouse his interest, "it isn't in the least, Laplante, that we suspect these people; but you know the kidnappers might have traded the clothing to your people——"

"Oh! Go ahead!" he interjected impatiently. "Don't beat round the bush! What do you want of me?"

"To go through the tents with me and help me. By Jove! Laplante! I thought at least a spark of the man would suggest that without my speaking," I broke out hotly.

He was on his feet with an alacrity that brought old Paul Larocque round to my side and the squaw to his.

"Curse you," he cried out roughly, shoving the squaw back. For a moment I was uncertain whether he were addressing the woman or myself. "You mind your own business and go to your Indian! Here, Gillespie, I'll do the tents with you. Get off with you," he muttered at the squaw, rumbling out a lingo of persuasive expletives; and he led the way to the first wigwam.

But the squaw was not to be dismissed; for when I followed the Frenchman, she closed in behind looking thunder, not at her abuser, but at me; and The Mute, fearing foul play and pole in hand, loyally brought up the rear of our strange procession. I shall not retail that search through robes and skins and blankets and boxes, in foul-smelling, vermin-infested wigwams. It was fruitless. I only recall the lowering face of the big squaw looking over my shoulder at every turn, with heavy brows contracted and gashed lips grinning an evil, malicious challenge. I thought she kept her hands uncomfortably near the ivory handle in the agate belt; but Larocque, good fellow, never took his beady eyes off those same hands and kept a grip of the leaping pole.

Thus we examined the tents and made a circuit of the people round the fire, but found nothing to reveal the whereabouts of Miriam and the child. Laplante and I were on one side of the robe, Larocque and the squaw on the other.

"And why is that tent apart from the rest and who is in it?" I asked Laplante, pointing to the lone tepee on the crest of the hill.

The fire cracked so loudly I became aware there was ominous silence among the loungers of the camp. They were listening as well as watching. Up to this time I had not thought they were paying the slightest attention to us. Laplante was not answering, and when I faced him suddenly I found the squaw's eyes fastened on his, holding them whether he would or no, just as she had mine.

"Eh! man?" I cried, seizing him fiercely, a nameless suspicion getting possession of me. "Why don't you answer?"

The spell was broken. He turned to me nonchalantly, as he used to face accusers in the school-days of long ago, and spoke almost gently, with downcast eyes, and a quiet, deprecating smile.

"You know, Rufus," he answered, using the schoolboy name. "We should have told you before. But remember we didn't invite you here. We didn't lead you into it."

"Well?" I demanded.

"Well," he replied in a voice too low for any of the listeners but the squaw to hear, "there's a very bad case of smallpox up in that tent and we're keeping the man apart till he gets better. That, in fact, is why we're all here. You must go. It is not safe."

"Thanks, Laplante," said I. "Good-by." But he did not offer me his hand when I made to take leave.

"Come," he said. "I'll go as far as the gorge with you;" and he stood on the embankment and waved as we passed into the lengthening shadows of the valley.

Now, in these days of health officers and vaccination, people can have no idea of the terrors of a smallpox scourge at the beginning of this century. The habitant is as indifferent to smallpox as to measles, and accepts both as dispensations of Providence by exposing his children to the contagion as early as possible; but I was not so minded, and hurried down the gorge as fast as my snow-shoes would carry me. Then I remembered that the Indian population of the north had been reduced to a skeleton of its former numbers by the pestilence in 1780, and recalled that my Uncle Jack had said the native's superstitious dread of this disease knew no bounds. That recollection checked my sudden flight. If the Indians had such fear, why had this band camped within a mile of the pest tent? It would be more like Indian character to reverse Samaritan practises and leave the victim to die. This man might, of course, be a French-Canadian trapper, but I would take no risks of a trick, so I ordered Paul to lead me back to that tepee.

The Mute seemed to understand I had no wish to be seen by the campers. He skirted round the base of the hill till we were on the side remote from the tribe. Then he motioned me to remain in the gorge while he scrambled up the cliff to reconnoitre. I knew he received a surprise as soon as his head was on a level with the top of the bank; for he curled himself up behind a snow-pile and gave a low whistle for me. I was beside him with one bound. We were not twenty pole-lengths from the wigwam. There was no appearance of life. The tent flaps had been laced up and a solitary watch-dog was tied to a stake before the entrance. Down the valley the setting sun shone through the naked trees like a wall of fire, and dyed all the glistening snow-drifts primrose and opal. At one place in the forest the red light burst through and struck against the tent on the hill-top, giving the skins a peculiar appearance of being streaked with blood. The faintest breath of wind, a mere sigh of moving air-currents peculiar to snow-padded areas, came up from the woods with far-away echoes of the trappers' voices. Perhaps this was heard by the watch-dog, or it may have felt the disturbing presence of my half-wild habitant guide; for it sat back on its haunches and throwing up its head, let out the most doleful howlings imaginable.

"Oh! Monsieur," shuddered out the superstitious habitant shivering like an aspen leaf, "sick man moan—moan—moan hard! He die, Monsieur, he die, he die now when dog cry lak dat," and full of fear he scrambled down into the gorge, making silent gestures for me to follow.

For a time—but not long, I must acknowledge—I lay there alone, watching and listening. Paul's ears might hear the moans of a sick man, mine could not: nor would I return to the Chateau without ascertaining for a certainty what was in that wigwam. Slipping off the snow-shoes, I rose and tip-toed over the snow with the full intention of silencing the dog with my pole; but I was suddenly arrested by the distinct sound of pain-racked groaning. Then the brute of a dog detected my approach and with a furious leaping that almost hung him with his own rope set up a vicious barking. Suddenly the black head of an Indian, or trapper, popped through the tent flaps and a voice shouted in perfect English—"Go away! Go away! The pest! The pest!"

"Who has smallpox?" I bawled back.

"A trader, a Nor'-Wester," said he. "If you have anything for him lay it on the snow and I'll come for it."

As honor pledged me to serve Hamilton until he found his wife, I was not particularly anxious to exchange civilities at close range with a man from a smallpox tent; so I quickly retraced my way to the gorge and hurried homeward with The Mute. My old school-fellow's sudden change towards me when he received the letter written on Citadel paper, and the big squaw's suspicion of my every movement, now came back to me with a significance I had not felt when I was at the camp. Either intuitions like those of my habitant guide, which instinctively put out feelers with the caution of an insect's antennæ for the presence of vague, unknown evil, lay dormant in my own nature and had been aroused by the incidents at the camp, or else the mind, by the mere fact of holding information in solution, widens its own knowledge. For now, in addition to the letter from the Citadel and the squaw's animosity, came the one missing factor—Adderly. I felt, rather than knew, that Louis Laplante had deceived me. Had he lied? A lie is the clumsy invention of the novice. An expert accomplishes his deceit without anything so grossly and tangibly honest as a lie; and Louis was an expert. Though I had not a vestige of proof, I could have sworn that Adderly and the squaw and Louis were leagued against me for some dark purpose. I was indeed learning the first lessons of the trapper's life: never to open my lips on my own affairs to another man, and never to believe another man when he opened his lips to me.