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

room, dropped upon his knees before the box, and drew back the curtain. Jan knelt beside him. "They were HER books," he repeated. There was a sobbing catch in his throat, and his head fell a little upon his breast. "Now --we will give them--to Melisse."
He drew the books out, one by one, his fingers trembling and his breath coming quickly as he touched them--a dozen worn, dusty things, holding within them more than John Cummins would ever know of the woman he had lost. These volumes of dead voices had come with her into the wilderness from that other world she had known. They breathed the pathos of her love from out of their ragged pages, mended in a hundred places to keep them from falling into utter ruin. Slowly the man gathered them against his breast, and held them there silently, as he might have held the woman, fighting hard to keep back his grief.
Jan thrust a hand deeper into the box, and brought forth something else--a few magazines and papers, as ragged and worn as the books. In these other treasures there were pictures--pictures of the things in civilization, which Jan had never seen, and which were too wonderful for him to comprehend at first. His eyes burned excitedly as he held up a gaudily covered fashion paper to John Cummins.
"Theese are picture for Melisse!" he whispered tensely. "We teach her --we show her--we mak her know about ceevilize people!"
Cummins replaced the books, one at a time, and each he held tenderly for a moment, wiping and blowing away the dust gathered upon it. At the last one of all, which was more ragged and worn than the others, he gazed for a long time. It was a little Bible, his wife's Bible, finger-worn, patched, pathetic in its poverty. The man gulped hard.
"She loved this, Jan," he said huskily. "She loved this worn, old book more than anything else, and little Melisse must love it also. Melisse must be a Christian."
"Ah, yes, ze leetle Melisse mus' love ze great God!" said Jan softly.
Cummins rose to his feet and stood for a moment looking at the sleeping baby.
"A missionary is coming over from Fort Churchill to talk to our trappers when they come in. She shall be baptized!"
Like a cat Jan was on his feet, his eyes flashing, his long, thin fingers clenched, his body quivering with a terrible excitement.
"No--no--not baptize by missioner!" he cried. "She shall be good, an' love ze great God, but not baptize by missioner! No--no--no!"
Cummins turned upon him in astonishment. Before him Jan Thoreau stood for a minute like one gone mad, his whole being consumed in a passion terrible to look upon. Lithe giant of muscle and, fearlessness that he was, Cummins involuntarily drew back a step, and the mainspring of instinct within him prompted him to lift a hand, as if to ward off a leaping thing from his breast.
Jan noted the backward step, the guarded uplift of hand, and with an agonized cry he buried his face in his hands. In another instant he had turned, and, before Cummins' startled voice found words, had opened the door and run out into the night. The man saw him darting swiftly toward the forest, and called to him, but there was no response.
There was a hot fire burning in Jan's brain, a blazing, writhing contortion of things that brought a low moaning from his lips. He ran tirelessly and swiftly until he sank down upon the snow in a silent place far from where he had left John Cummins. His eyes still blazed with their strange fire upon the desolation about him, his fingers clenched and unclenched themselves, digging their nails into his flesh, and he spoke softly to himself, over and over again, the name of the little Melisse.
Painting itself each instant more plainly through the tumult of his emotions was what Jan had come to know as the picture in his brain. Shadowy and indistinct at first, in pale, elusive lines of mental fabric, he saw the picture growing; and in its growth he saw first the soft, sweet outlines of a woman's face, and then great luring eyes, dark like his own--and before these eyes, which gazed upon him with overwhelming love, all else faded away from before Jan Thoreau. The fire went out of his eyes, his fingers relaxed, and after a little while he got up out of the snow, shivering, and went back to the cabin.
Cummins asked no questions. He looked at Jan from his cot, and watched the boy silently as he undressed and went to bed; and in the morning the whole incident passed from his mind. The intangible holds but little fascination for the simple folk who live under the Arctic Circle. Their struggle is with life, their joys are in its achievement, in their constant struggle to keep life running strong and red within them. Such an existence of solitude and of strife with nature leaves small room for curiosity. So the nature of John Cummins led him to forget what had happened, as he would have forgotten the senseless running away of a sledge-dog, and its subsequent return. He saw no tragedy, and no promise of tragedy, in the thing that had occurred.
There was no recurrence of the strange excitement in Jan. He gave no hint of it in word or action, and the thing seemed to be forgotten between the two.
The education of the little Melisse began at once, while the post was still deserted. It began, first of all, with Maballa. She stared dumbly and with shattered faith at these two creatures who told her of wonderful things in the upbringing of a child--things of which she had never so much as heard rumor before. Her mother instincts were aroused, but with Cree stoicism she made no betrayal of them.
The leather-tanned immobility of her face underwent no whit of change when Cummins solemnly declared that the little Melisse was about to begin teething. She sat grimly and watched them in silence when between them, upon a bearskin stretched on the floor, they tried vainly to persuade Melisse to use her feet.
It was great fun for Melisse, and she enjoyed it immensely; so that as the days passed, and the post still remained deserted, John Cummins and Jan Thoreau spent much of their time upon their knees. In their eyes, the child's progress was remarkable. They saw in her an unceasing physical growth, and countless symptoms of forthcoming mental development. She delighted to pull the strings of Jan's violin, which was an unmistakable token of her musical genius. She went into ecstasies over the gaudy plates in the fashion paper. She fingered them in suggestive and inquiring silence, or with still more suggestive grunts, and made futile efforts to eat them, which was the greatest token of all.
Weeks passed, and Williams came in from the southern forests. Mukee followed him from the edge of the barrens. Per-ee returned from the Eskimo people, three-quarters starved and with half of his dogs stolen. From the north, east, west, and south the post's fur-rangers trailed back. Life was resumed. There was a softness in the air, a growing warmth in the midday sun. The days of the big change were near. And when they came, John Cummins and Jan Thoreau, of all the factor's people, wore patches at their knee.


CHAPTER VI
DAYS OF TRIUMPH
One afternoon, in the beginning of the mush-snow, a long team of rakish Malemutes, driven by an Athabasca French-Canadian, raced wildly into the clearing about the post. A series of yells, and the wild cracking of a thirty-foot caribou-gut whip, announced that the big change was at hand--that the wilderness was awakening, and life was drawing near.
The entire post rushed out to meet the new-comer--men and dogs, the little black-and-tan children, and even Williams' fat and lethargic wife. For a few moments there was a scene of wild disorder, of fighting Malemutes buried under a rush of angry huskies, while men shouted, and the yelling Frenchman leaped about and cut his caribou- gut in vicious slashes over the wolfish horde around his heavily laden sledge.
Partial order being restored, Mukee and Per-ee took charge of the snarling Malemutes, and, surrounded by Williams' men, the trapper stalked to the company's office. He was Jean de Gravois, the most important man in the Fond du Lac country, for whose good-will the company paid a small bonus. That he had made a record catch even the children knew by the size of the packs on his sledge and by the swagger in his walk.
Gravois was usually one of the last to appear at the annual gathering of the wilderness fur-gatherers. He was a big man in reputation, as he was small in stature. He was known as far west as the Peace River, and eastward to Fort Churchill. He loved to make his appearance at the post in a wild and picturesque rush when the rest of the forest rovers were there to look on, and to envy or admire. He was one of the few of his kind who had developed personal vanity along with unerring cunning in the ways of the wild. Everybody liked Gravois, for he had a big soul in him and was as fearless as a lynx; and he liked everybody, including himself.
He explained his early arrival by announcing in a nonchalant manner that after he had given his Malemutes a day's rest he was going on to Fort Churchill, to bring back a wife. He hinted, with a punctuating crack of his whip, that he would make a second visit, and a more interesting one, at just about the time when the trappers were there in force.
Jan Thoreau listened to him, hunching his shoulders a little at the other's manifest air of importance. In turn, the French-Canadian scrutinized Jan good-naturedly. Neither of them knew the part which Jean de Gravois was to play in Jan's life.
Every hour after the half-breed's arrival quickened the pulse of expectancy at the post. For six months it had been a small and solitary unit of life in the heart of a big desolation. The first snow had smothered it in a loneliness that was almost the loneliness of desertion. With that first snow began the harvest days of the people of the wilderness. Far and wide they were busy along their trap-lines, their lonely shacks hidden in the shelter of thick swamps, in deep chasms and dense forests. For six months the short days and the long nights had been days and nights of fur-gathering.
During those months the post was silent. It lived and breathed, but that was all. Its life, for Williams and the few people whom the company kept with him, was a life of waiting. Now the change was at hand. It was like the breath of spring to the awakening wilderness. The forest people were moving. Trap-lines were being broken, shacks abandoned, sledge-dogs put to harness. On the day that Jean de Gravois left for Hudson's Bay, the company's supplies came in from Fort Churchill--seven toboggans drawn by Eskimo dogs, laden with flour and cloth; fifty pounds of beads, ammunition, and a hundred other things to be exchanged for the furs that would soon be in London and Paris.
Fearfully Jan Thoreau ran out to meet the sledges. There were seven Indians and one white man. Jan thrust himself close to look at the white man. He wore two revolver-holsters and carried an automatic. Unquestionably he was not a missionary, but an agent of the company well prepared to care for the company's treasure.
Jan hurried back to the cabin, his heart bubbling with a strange joy.
"There ees no missioner, Melisse!" he cried triumphantly, dropping beside