The Honor of the Big Snows - James Oliver Curwood (best ereader for pdf and epub .txt) 📗

a great bear, overturning the chairs, and allowing the room to fill with smoke in his wild joy.
"It's what you saw through the window that made you sick, Melisse," he cried, putting her down at last. "I thought--" He paused, and added, his voice trembling: "I thought you were going to be sick for more than one day, my sweet little woman!"
He opened one of the windows to let in the fresh air of the morning.
When Croisset returned, he did not find a red flag over Cummins' cabin; nor did he bring word of Jan. For three days he had followed the trails to the south without finding the boy. But he brought back other news. Williams was sick with the plague in a Cree wigwam on the lower Porcupine. It was the last they ever heard of the factor, except that he died some time in March, and was burned by the Crees.
Croisset went back over the Churchill trail, and found his wife ready to greet him with open arms. After that he joined Per-ee, who came in from the north, in another search for Jan. They found neither trace nor word of him after passing the Gray Otter, and Cummins gave up hope.
It was not for long that their fears could be kept from Melisse. This first bitter grief that had come into her life fell upon her with a force which alarmed Cummins, and cast him into deep gloom. She no longer loved to play with her things in the cabin. For days at a time she would not touch the books which Jan had brought from Churchill, and which he had taught her to read. She found little to interest her in the things which had been her life a few weeks before.
With growing despair, Cummins saw his own efforts fail. As the days passed Melisse mingled more and more with the Indian and half-breed children, and spent much of her time at the company's store, listening to the talk of the men, silent, attentive, unresponsive to any efforts they might make to engage her smiles. From her own heart she looked out upon a world that had become a void for her. Jan had been mother, brother, and everything that was tender and sweet to her--and he was gone. Mukee, whom she had loved, was gone. Williams was gone. The world was changed, terribly and suddenly, and it added years to her perspective of things.
Each day, as the weeks went on, and the spring sun began to soften the snow, she became a little more like the wild children at Lac Bain and in the forest. For Jan, she had kept her hair soft and bright, because he praised her for it and told her it was pretty. Now it hung in tangles down her back.
There came a night when she forgot her prayer, and Cummins did not notice it. He failed to notice it the next night, and the next. Plunged deep in his own gloom, he was unobservant of many other things, so that, in place of laughter and joy and merry rompings, only gloomy and oppressive shadows of things that had come and gone filled the life of the little cabin.
They were eating dinner, one day in the early spring, with the sunshine flooding in upon them, when a quick, low footfall caused Melisse to lift her eyes in the direction of the open door. A strange figure stood there, with bloodless face, staring eyes, and garments hanging in tatters--but its arms were stretched out, as those same arms had been held out to her a thousand times before, and, with the old glad cry, Melisse darted with the swiftness of a sun-shadow beyond Cummins, crying:
"Jan, Jan--my Jan!"
Words choked in Cummins' throat when he saw the white-faced figure clutching Melisse to its breast.
At last he gasped "Jan!" and threw out his arms, so that both were caught in their embrace.
For an instant Jan turned his face up to the light The other stared and understood.
"You have been sick," he said, "but it has left no marks."
"Thank God!" breathed Jan.
Melisse raised her head, and stroked his cheeks with her two hands. That night she remembered her prayer, and at its end she added:
"Dear Father in Heaven, thank you for sending back Jan!"


CHAPTER XV
ALMOST A WOMAN
Peace followed in the blighted trails of the Red Terror. Again the forest world breathed without fear; but from Hudson's Bay to Athabasca, and as far south as the thousand waters of the Reindeer country, the winds whispered of a terrible grief that would remain until babes were men and men went to their graves.
Life had been torn and broken in a cataclysm more fearful than that which levels cities and disrupts the earth. Slowly it began its readjustment. There was no other life to give aid or sympathy; and just as they had suffered alone, so now the forest people struggled back into life alone, building up from the wreck of what had been, the things that were to be.
For months the Crees wailed their death dirges as they sought out the bones of their dead. Men dragged themselves into the posts, wifeless and childless, leaving deep in the wilderness all that they had known to love and give them comfort. Now and then came a woman, and around the black scars of burned cabins and teepees dogs howled mournfully for masters that were gone.
The plague had taken a thousand souls, and yet the laughing, dancing millions in that other big world beyond the edge of the wilderness caught only a passing rumor of what had happened.
Lac Bain suffered least of the far northern posts, with the exception of Churchill, where the icy winds down-pouring from the Arctic had sent the Red Terror shivering to the westward. In the late snows, word came that Cummins was to take Williams' place as factor, and Per-ee at once set off for the Fond du Lac to bring back Jean de Gravois as "chief man." Croisset gave up his fox-hunting to fill Mukee's place.
The changes brought new happiness to Melisse. Croisset's wife was a good woman who had spent her girlhood in Montreal, and Iowaka, now the mother of a fire-eating little Jean and a handsome daughter, was a soft-voiced young Venus who had grown sweeter and prettier with her years--which is not usually the case with half-breed women.
"But it's good blood in her, beautiful blood," vaunted Jean proudly, whenever the opportunity came. "Her mother was a princess, and her father a pure Frenchman, whose father's father was a chef de bataillon. What better than that, eh? I say, what better could there be than that?"
So, for the first time in her life, Melisse discovered the joys of companionship with those of her own kind.
This new companionship, pleasant as it was, did not come between her and Jan. If anything, they were more to each other than ever. The terrible months through which they had passed had changed them both, and had given them, according to their years, the fruits which are often ripened in the black gloom of disaster rather than in the sunshine of prosperity.
To Melisse they had opened up a new world of thought, a new vision of the things that existed about her. The sternest teacher of all had brought to her the knowledge that comes of grief, of terror, and of death, and she had passed beyond her years, just as the cumulative processes of generations made the Indian children pass beyond theirs.
She no longer looked upon Jan as a mere playmate, a being whose diversion was to amuse and to love her. He had become a man. In her eyes he was a hero, who had gone forth to fight the death of which she still heard word and whisper all about her. Croisset's wife and Iowaka told her that he had done the bravest thing that a man might do on earth. She spoke proudly of him to the Indian children, who called him the "torch-bearer." She noticed that he was as tall as Croisset, and taller by half a head than Jean, and that he lifted her now with one arm as easily as if she were no heavier than a stick of wood.
Together they resumed their studies, devoting hours to them each day, and through all that summer he taught her to play upon his violin. The warm months were a time of idleness at Lac Bain, and Jan made the most of them in his teaching of Melisse. She learned to read the books which he had used at Fort Churchill, and by midsummer she could read those which he had used at York Factory. At night they wrote letters to each other and delivered them across the table in the cabin, while Cummins looked on and smoked, laughing happily at what they read aloud to him.
One night, late enough in the season for a fire to be crackling merrily in the stove, Jan was reading one of these letters, when Melisse cried:
"Stop, Jan--stop THERE!"
Jan caught himself, and he blushed mightily when he read the next lines:
"'I think you have beautiful eyes. I love them.'"
"What is it?" cried Cummins interestedly. "Read on, Jan."
"Don't!" commanded Melisse, springing to her feet and running around the table. "I didn't mean you to read that!"
She snatched the paper from Jan's hand and threw it into the fire.
Jan's blood filled with pleasure, and at the bottom of his next letter he wrote back:
"I think you have beautiful hair. I love it."
That winter Jan was appointed post hunter, and this gave him much time at home, for meat was plentiful along the edge of the barrens. The two continued at their books until they came to the end of what Jan knew in them. After that, like searchers in strange places, they felt their way onward, slowly and with caution. During the next summer they labored through all the books which were in the little box in the corner of the cabin.
It was Melisse who now played most on the violin, and Jan listened, his eyes glowing proudly as he saw how cleverly her little fingers danced over the strings, his face flushed with a joy that was growing stronger in him every day. One day she looked curiously into the F- hole of the instrument, and her pretty mouth puckered itself into a round, red "O" of astonishment when Jan quickly snatched the violin from her hands.
"Excuses-moi, ma belle Melisse," he laughed at her in French. "I am going to play you something new!"
That same day he took the little cloth-covered roll from the violin and gave it another hiding-place. It recalled to him the strange spirit which had once moved him at Fort Churchill, and which had remained with him for a time at Lac Bain. That spirit was now gone, luring him no longer. Time had drawn a softening veil over things that had passed. He was happy.
The wilderness became more beautiful to him as Melisse grew older. Each summer increased his happiness; each succeeding winter made it larger and more complete. Every fiber of his being sang in joyful response as he watched Melisse pass from childhood into young girlhood. He marked every turn in her development, the slightest change in her transformation, as if she had been a beautiful flower.
He possessed none of the quick impetuosity of Jean de Gravois. Years gave the silence of the North to his tongue, and his exultation was quiet and deep in his own heart. With an eagerness which no one guessed he watched the growing beauty of her hair, marked its brightening luster when he saw it