CHAPTER VIII
THE FIGHT AT DAWN
For a few moments Jan stood with his back to Melisse and his eyes uponthe carnival about the great fire. As he looked, the third caribou waspulled down from its spit, and the multitude of dogs rushed in upon theabandoned carcasses of the other two.
He caught his breath quickly as a loud shout and the wailing yelp of ahurt dog rose for an instant above all other sounds. Only one thing waswanting to complete another picture in his brain--a scene which hadburned itself into his life for ever, and which he strove to fight backas he stood staring from the doorway. He half expected it to come--theshrill scream of a boyish voice, an instant's sullen quiet, then thelow-throated thunder of impending vengeance--and the fight!
With marvelous quickness his excited mind reconstructed the scenebefore him into the scene that had been. He heard the scream again,which had been HIS voice; saw, as if in a dream, the frenzied rush ofmen and the flash of knives; and then, from where he lay trampled andbleeding in the snow, the long, lean team of swift huskies that hadcarried in mad flight the one whose life those knives sought.
Williams had been there; he had seen the fight--his knife had flashedwith the others in its demand for life. And yet he--Jan Thoreau--hadnot been recognized by the factor out there beside the caribou roast!
He hurried toward the fire. Half-way across the open he stopped. Fromout of the forest opposite Cummins' cabin there trailed slowly a teamof dogs. In the shadows of the spruce, hidden from the revelers, theteam halted. Jan heard the low voices of men, and a figure detacheditself from the gloom, walking slowly and in the manner of one near toexhaustion in the direction of the carnival.
It was a new team. It had come from the trails to the east, and Jan'sheart gave a sudden jump as he thought of the missionary who wasexpected with the overdue mail. At first he had a mind to intercept thefigure laboring across the open, but without apparent reason he changedhis course and approached the sledge.
As he came nearer, he observed a second figure, which rose from behindthe dogs and advanced to meet him. A dozen paces ahead of the team itstopped and waited.
"Our dogs are so near exhaustion that we're afraid to take them anynearer," said a voice. "They'd die like puppies under those packs!"
The voice thrilled Jan. He advanced with his back to the fire, so thathe could see the stranger.
"You come from Churchill?" he asked.
His words were hardly a question. They were more of an excuse for himto draw nearer, and he turned a little, so that for an instant theglowing fire flashed in his eyes.
"Yes, we started from the Etawney just a week ago to-day."
Jan had come very near. The stranger interrupted himself to stare intothe thin, fierce face that had grown like a white cameo almost withinreach of him. With a startled cry, he drew a step back, and Jan'sviolin dropped to the snow.
For no longer than a breath there was silence. The man wormed himselfback into the shadows inch by inch, followed by the white face of theboy. Then there came shrilly from Jan's lips the mad shrieking of aname, and his knife flashed as he leaped at the other's breast.
The stranger was quicker than he. With a sudden movement he clearedhimself of the blow; and as Jan's arm went past him, the point of theknife ripping his coat-sleeve, he shot out a powerful fist and sent theboy reeling to the ground.
Stunned and bleeding, Jan dragged himself to his knees. He saw the dogsturning, heard a low voice urging them to the trail, and saw the sledgedisappear into the forest. He staggered from his knees to his feet, andstood swaying in his weakness. Then he followed.
He forgot that he was leaving his knife in the snow, forgot that backthere about the fire there were other dogs and other men. He only knewthat once before he had seen a sledge slip off into the wilderness;that its going had left him a life of hatred and bitterness and desirefor vengeance; and that this was the same man who was slipping awayfrom him in the same way again.
He followed, sickened by the blow, but gaining strength as he pursued.Ahead of him he could hear the sound of the toboggan and the cautiouslashing of a whip over the backs of the tired huskies. The soundsfilled him with fierce strength. He wiped away the warm trickle ofblood that ran over his cheek, and began to run, slowly at first,swinging in the easy wolf-lope of the forest runner, with his elbowsclose to his sides.
At that pace he could have followed for hours, losing when the packtook a spurt, gaining when they lagged, an insistent Nemesis justbehind when the weighted dogs lay down in their traces. But there wasneither the coolness of Mukee nor the cleverness of Jean de Gravois inthe manner of Jan's running. When he heard the cracking of the whipgrowing fainter, he dropped his arms straight to his sides and ran moreswiftly, his brain reeling with the madness of his desire to reach thesledge--to drag from it the man who had struck him, to choke life fromthe face that haunted that mental picture of his, grinning at him andgloating always from the shadow world, just beyond the pale, sweetloveliness of the woman who lived in it.
That picture came to him now as he ran, more and more vividly, and fromout of it the woman urged him on to the vengeance which she demanded ofhim, her great eyes glowing like fire, her beautiful face torn with theagony which he had last seen in it in life.
To Jan Thoreau there seemed almost to come from that face a livingvoice, crying to him its prayer for retribution, pleading with him tofasten his lithe, brown hands about the throat of the monster upon thesledge ahead, and choke from it all life. It drove reason from him,leaving him with the one thought that the monster was almost withinreach; and he replied to the prayer with the breath that came inmoaning exhaustion from between his lips.
He did not feel the soft, sun-packed snow under the beat of his feet.He received the lash of low-hanging bushes without experiencing thesensation of their sting. Only he knew that he wanted air--more andmore air; and to get it he ran with open mouth, struggling and gaspingfor it, and yet not knowing that Jean de Gravois would have called hima fool for the manner in which he sought it.
He heard more and more faintly the run of the sledge. Then he heard itno longer, and even the cracking of the whip died away. His heartswelled in a final bursting effort, and he plunged on, until at lasthis legs crumpled under him and he pitched face downward in the snow,like a thing stung by sudden death.
It was then, with his scratched and bleeding face lying in the snow,that reason began to return to him. After a little while he draggedhimself weakly to his knees, still panting from the mad effort he hadmade to overtake the sledge. From a great distance he heard faintly thenoise of shouting, the whispering echo of half a hundred voices, and heknew that the sound came from the revelers at the post. It was proof tohim that there had been no interruption to the carnival, and that thescene at the edge of the forest had been witnessed by none. Quickly hismental faculties readjusted themselves. He rose to his feet, and for afew moments stood hesitatingly. He had no weapon; but as his handrested upon the empty knife-sheath at his belt, there came to him athought of the way in which Mukee had avenged Cummins' wife, and heturned again upon the trail. He no longer touched the low-hangingbushes. He was no more than a shadow, appearing and disappearingwithout warning, trailing as the white ermine follows its prey,noiseless, alert, his body responding sinuously and without apparenteffort to the working commands of his brain.
Where the forest broke into an open, lighted by the stars, he foundblood in the footprints of the leading dog. Half-way across the open,he saw where the leader had swung out from the trail and the others ofthe pack had crowded about him, to be urged on by the lashings of theman's whip. Other signs of the pack's growing exhaustion followed close.
The man now traveled beside the sledge where the trail was rough, androde where it was smooth and hard. The deep imprints of his heeledboots in the soft snow showed that he ran for only a short distance ata time--a hundred yards or less--and that after each running spell hebrought the pack to a walk. He was heavy and lacked endurance, and thisdisco
very brought a low cry of exultation to Jan's lips.
He fell into a dog-trot. Mile after mile dropped behind him; othermiles were ahead of him, an endless wilderness of miles, and throughthem the tired pack persisted, keeping always beyond sound and vision.
The stars began fading out of the skies. The shadows of the forest grewdeeper and blacker, and where the aurora had lightened the heavensthere crept the somber gray film that preceded dawn by three hours.
Jan followed more and more slowly. There was hard-breathing effort nowin his running--effort that caused him physical pain and discomfort.His feet stumbled occasionally in the snow; his legs, from thigh toknee, began to ache with the gnawing torment that centers in themarrowbone; and with this beginning of the "runner's cramp" he wasfilled with a new and poignant terror.
Would the dogs beat him out? Sloughing in the trail, bleeding at everyfoot, would they still drag their burden beyond the reach of hisvengeance? The fear fastened itself upon him, urging him to greatereffort, and he called upon the last of his strength in a spurt thatcarried him to where the thick spruce gave place to thin bush, and thebush to the barren and rocky side of a huge ridge, up which the trailclimbed strong and well defined. For a few paces he followed it, thenslipped and rolled back as the fatal paralysis deadened all power ofmovement in his limbs. He lay where he fell, moaning out his grief withhis wide-staring eyes turned straight up into the cold gray of thestarless sky.
For a long time he was motionless. From the top of the ridge, where thetrail cut over the mountain, he looked like a bit of fire-blackenedwood half buried in the snow. Half-way up the ridge a wolf, slinkinghungrily, sniffed first up the trail and then down, and broke thestillness of the gray night-end with a mournful howl. It did not stirJan Thoreau.
Long after the wolf had passed on, he moved a little, twisting himselfso that his eyes could follow the tracks made by the sledge and dogs.When he came to where the snow-covered backbone of the ridge cut itselfin faint outline against the desolate coldness of the sky, there fellfrom him the first sound of returning life. Up there he was sure thathe had seen something move--an object which at first he had taken for abush, and which he knew was not the wolf.
He watched for its reappearance, until all sorts of gray dawn shadowsdanced before his eyes. Then he began slowly to crawl up the trail.Some of the dull, paralytic ache was gone from his limbs, and as heworked his blood began to warm them into new strength, until he stoodup and sniffed like an animal in the wind that was coming over theridge from the south.
There was something in that wind that thrilled him. It stung hisnostrils to a quick sensing of the nearness of something that washuman. He smelled smoke. In it there was the pungent odor of greenbalsam, mixed with a faint perfume of pitch pine; and because the odorof pitch grew stronger as he ascended, he knew that it was a small firethat was making the smoke, with none of the fierce, dry woods to burnup the smell. It was a fire hidden among the rocks, a tiny fire, overwhich the fleeing missioner was cooking his breakfast.
Jan almost moaned aloud in his gladness, and the old mad strengthreturned to his body. Near the summit of the ridge he picked up a club.It was a short, thick club, with the heavy end knotted and twisted.
Cautiously he lifted his face over the rocks, and looked out upon aplateau, still deep in snow, swept bare by the winter's winds, andcovered with rocks and bushes. His face was so white that at a littledistance it might have been taken for a snow hare. It went whiter when,a few yards away, he saw the fire, the man, and the dogs.
The man was close to the little blaze, his broad shoulders hunchedover, steadying a small pot over the flame. Beyond him were the dogshuddled about the sledge, inanimate as death.
Jan drew himself over the rocks. Once he had seen a big-footed lynxcreep upon a wide-awake fox, and like that lynx he crept upon the manbeside the fire. One of the tired dogs moved, and his pointed nostrilsquivered in the air. Jan lay flat in the snow. Then the dog's muzzledropped between his paws, and the boy moved on.
Inch by inch he advanced. The inches multiplied themselves into a foot,the foot lengthened into yards, and still the man remained hunched overhis simmering pot.
Jan rose gently from his hands and knees to his feet, a furnace ofmadness blazing in his eyes. The restless dog raised his head again. Hesniffed danger--near, menacing danger--and sprang up with a snarlingcry that brought the man over the fire to quick attention. In a flashJan took the last leap, and his club crashed down upon the missioner'shead. The man pitched over like a log, and with a shrill cry the boywas at his throat.
"I am Jan Thoreau!" he shrieked. "I am Jan Thoreau--Jan Thoreau--cometo keel you!" He dropped his club, and was upon the man's chest, hisslender fingers tightening like steel wire about the thick throat ofhis enemy. "I keel you slow--slow!" he cried, as the missionerstruggled weakly.
The great thick body heaved under him, and he put all his strength intohis hands. Something struck him in the face. Something struck him againand again, but he felt neither the pain nor the force of it, and hisvoice sobbed out his triumph as he choked. The man's hands reached upand tore at his hair; but Jan saw only the missioner's mottled facegrowing more mottled, and his eyes staring in greater agony up into hisown.
"I am Jan Thoreau," he panted again and again. "I am Jan Thoreau, an' Ikeel you--keel you!"
The blood poured from his face. It blinded him until he could no longersee the one from which he was choking life. He bent down his head toescape the blows. The man's body heaved more and more; it turned untilhe was half under it; but still he hung to the thick throat, as theweasel hangs in tenacious death to the jugular of its prey.
The missioner's weight was upon him in crushing force now. His hugehands struck and tore at the boy's head and face, and then they hadfastened themselves at his neck. Jan was conscious of a terrible effortto take in breath, but he was not conscious of pain. The clutch did notfrighten him. It did not make him loosen his grip. His fingers dugdeeper. He strove to cry out still his words of triumph; but he couldmake no sound, except a gasping like that which came from between thegaping jaws of the man whose life his body and soul were fighting tosmother.
There was death in each of the two grips; but the man's was thestronger, and his neck was larger and tougher, so that after a time hestaggered to his knees and then to his feet, while Jan lay upon hisback, his face and hair red with blood, his eyes wide open and with alifeless glare in them. The missioner looked down upon his victim inhorror. As the life that had nearly ebbed out of him poured back intohis body, he staggered among the dogs, fastened them to the sledge, andurged them down the mountain into the plain. There was soon no sound ofthe sledge.
From a bush a dozen yards away a wondering moose-bird had watched theterrible struggle. Now he hopped boldly upon Jan's motionless body, andperked his head inquisitively as he examined the strange face, coveredwith blood and twisted in torture.
The gray film of dawn dissolved itself into the white beginning of day.Far to the south, a bit of the red sunrise was creeping into thenorthern world.