Back to God's Country and Other Stories - James Oliver Curwood (summer reads .txt) 📗

near I am to killing you. I think I shall shoot unless you have the meat and kindlings put on Peter’s sledge immediately and give Uppy instructions—in English—to drive us to Fort Confidence. Peter and I will both go with the six-dog sledge. Give the instructions quickly, Mr. Blake!”

Blake, recovering from the shock she had given him, flashed back at her his cool and cynical smile. In spite of being caught in an unpleasant lie, he admired this golden-haired, blue-eyed slip of a woman for the colossal bluff she was playing. “Personally, I’m sorry,” he said, “but I couldn’t help it. Rydal—”

“I am sure, unless you give the instructions quickly, that I shall shoot,” she interrupted him. Her voice was so quiet that Peter was amazed. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Keith. But—”

A flash of fire blinded him, and with the flash Blake staggered back with a cry of pain and stood swaying unsteadily in the starlight, clutching with one hand at an arm which hung limp and useless at his side.

“That time, I broke your arm,” said Dolores, with scarcely more excitement than if she had made a bull’s-eye on the Piping Rock range. “If I fire again, I am quite positive that I shall kill you!”

The Eskimos had not moved. They were like three lifeless, staring gargoyles. For another second or two Blake stood clutching at his arm. Then he said,

“Uppy, put the dog meat and the kindlings on the big sledge—and drive like hell for Fort Confidence!” And then, before she could stop him, he followed up his words swiftly and furiously in Eskimo.

“Stop!”

She almost shrieked the one word of warning, and with it a second shot burned its way through the flesh of Blake’s shoulder and he went down. The revolver turned on Uppy, and instantly he was electrified into life. Thirty seconds later, at the head of the team, he was leading the way out into the chaotic gloom of the night. Hovering over Peter, riding with her hand on the gee-bar of the sledge, Dolores looked back to see Blake staggering to his feet. He shouted after them, and what he said was in Uppy’s tongue. And this time she could not stop him.

She had forgotten Wapi. But as the night swallowed them up, she still looked back, and through the gloom she saw a shadow coming swiftly. In a few moments Wapi was running at the tail of the sledge. Then she leaned over Peter and encircled his shoulders with her furry arms.

“We’re off!” she cried, a breaking note of gladness in her voice. “We’re off! And, Peter dear, wasn’t it perfectly thrilling!”

A few minutes later she called upon Uppy to stop the team. Then she faced him, close to Peter, with the revolver in her hand.

“Uppy,” she demanded, speaking slowly and distinctly, “what was it Blake said to you?”

For a moment Uppy made as if to feign stupidity. The revolver covered a spot half-way between his narrow-slit eyes.

“I shall shoot—”

Uppy gave a choking gasp. “He said—no take trail For’ Con’dence—go wrong—he come soon get you.”

“Yes, he said just that.” She picked her words even more slowly. “Uppy, listen to me. If you let them come up with us—unless you get us to Fort Confidence—I will kill you. Do you understand?”

She poked her revolver a foot nearer, and Uppy nodded emphatically. She smiled. It was almost funny to see Uppy’s understanding liven up at the point of the gun, and she felt a thrill that tingled to her finger-tips. The little devils of adventure were wide-awake in her, and, smiling at Uppy, she told him to hold up the end of his driving whip. He obeyed. The revolver flashed, and a muffled yell came from him as he felt the shock of the bullet as it struck fairly against the butt of his whip. In the same instant there came a snarling deep-throated growl from Wapi. From the sledge Peter gave a cry of warning. Uppy shrank back, and Dolores cried out sharply and put herself swiftly between Wapi and the Eskimo. The huge dog, ready to spring, slunk back to the end of the sledge at the command of her voice. She patted his big head before she got on the sledge behind Peter.

There was no indecision in the manner of Uppy’S going now. He struck out swift and straight for the pale constellation of stars that hung over Fort Confidence. It was splendid traveling. The surface of the arctic plain was frozen solid. What little wind there was came from behind them, and the dogs were big and fresh. Uppy ran briskly, snapping the lash of his whip and la-looing to the dogs in the manner of the Eskimo driver. Dolores did not wait for Peter’s demand for a further explanation of their running away and her remarkable words to Blake. She told him. She omitted, for the sake of Peter’s peace of mind, the physical insults she had suffered at Captain Rydal’s hands. She did not tell him that Rydal had forced her into his arms a few hours before and kissed her. What she did reveal made Peter’s arms and shoulders grow tense and he groaned in his helplessness.

“If you’d only told me!” he protested. Dolores laughed triumphantly, with her arm about his shoulder. “I knew my dear old Peter too well for that,” she exulted. “If I had told you, what a pretty mess we’d be in now, Peter! You would have insisted on calling Captain Rydal into our cabin and shooting him from the bed—and then where would we have been? Don’t you think I’m handling it pretty well, Peter dear?”

Peter’s reply was smothered against her hooded cheek.

He began to question her more directly now, and with his ability to grasp at the significance of things he pointed out quickly the tremendous hazard of their position. There were many more dogs and other sledges at Blake’s place, and it was utterly inconceivable that Blake and Captain Rydal would permit them to reach Fort Confidence without making every effort in their power to stop them. Once they succeeded in placing certain facts in the hands of the Mounted Police, both Rydal and Blake would be done for. He impressed this uncomfortable truth on Dolores and suggested that if she could have smuggled a rifle along in the dunnage sack it would have helped matters considerably. For Rydal and Blake would not hesitate at shooting. For them it must be either capture or kill—death for him, anyway, for he was the one factor not wanted in the equation. He summed up their chances and their danger calmly and pointedly, as he always looked at troubling things. And Dolores felt her heart sinking within her. After all, she had not handled the situation any too well. She almost wished she had killed Rydal herself and called it self-defense. At least she had been criminally negligent in not smuggling along a rifle.

“But we’ll beat them out,” she argued hopefully. “We’ve got a splendid team, Peter, and I’ll take off my coat and run behind the sledge as much as I can. Uppy won’t dare play a trick on us now, for he knows that if I should miss him, Wapi would tear the life out of him at a word from me. We’ll win out, Peter dear. See if we don’t!”

Peter hugged his thoughts to himself. He did not tell her that Blake and Rydal would pursue with a ten-or twelve-dog team, and that there was almost no chance at all of a straight get-away. Instead, he pulled her head down and kissed her.

To Wapi there had come at last a response to the great yearning that was in him. Instinct, summer and winter, had drawn him south, had turned him always in that direction, filled with the uneasiness of the mysterious something that was calling to him through the years of forty generations of his kind. And now he was going south. He sensed the fact that this journey would not end at the edge of the Arctic plain and that he was not to hunt caribou or bear. His mental formulae necessitated no process of reasoning. They were simple and to the point His world had suddenly divided itself into two parts; one contained the woman, and the other his old masters and slavery. And the woman stood against these masters. They were her enemies as well as his own. Experience had taught him the power and the significance of firearms, just as it had made him understand the uses for which spears, and harpoons, and whips were made. He had seen the woman shoot Blake, and he had seen her ready to shoot at Uppy. Therefore he understood that they were enemies and that all associated with them were enemies. At a word from her he was ready to spring ahead and tear the life out of the Eskimo driver and even out of the dogs that were pulling the sledge. It did not take him long to comprehend that the man on the sledge was a part of the woman.

He hung well back, twenty or thirty paces behind the sledge, and unless Peter or the woman called to him, or the sledge stopped for some reason, he seldom came nearer.

It took only a word from Dolores to bring him to her side.

Hour after hour the journey continued. The plain was level as a floor, and at intervals Dolores would run in the trail that the load might be lightened and the dogs might make better time. It was then that Peter watched Uppy with the revolver, and it was also in these intervals—running close beside the woman—that the blood in Wapi’s veins was fired with a riotous joy.

For three hours there was almost no slackening in Uppy’s speed. The fourth and fifth were slower. In the sixth and seventh the pace began to tell. And the plain was no longer hard and level, swept like a floor by the polar winds. Rolling undulations grew into ridges of snow and ice; in places the dogs dragged the sledge over thin crusts that broke under the runners; fields of drift snow, fine as shot, lay in their way; and in the eighth hour Uppy stopped the lagging dogs and held up his two hands in the mute signal of the Eskimo that they could go no farther without a rest.

Wapi dropped on his belly and watched. His eyes followed Uppy suspiciously as he strung up the tent on its whalebone supports to keep the bite of the wind from the sledge on which Dolores sat at Peter’s feet. Then Uppy built a fire of kindlings, and scraped up a pot of ice for tea-water. After that, while the water was heating, he gave each of the trace dogs a frozen fish. Dolores herself picked out one of the largest and tossed it to Wapi. Then she sat down again and began to talk to Peter, bundled up in his furs. After a time they ate, and drank hot tea, and after he had devoured a chunk of raw meat the size of his two fists, Uppy rolled himself in his sleeping bag near the dogs. A little at a time Wapi dragged himself nearer until his head lay on Dolores’ coat. After that there was a long silence broken only by the low voices of the woman and the man, and the heavy breathing of the tired dogs. Wapi himself dozed off, but never for long. Then Dolores nodded, and her head drooped until it found a pillow on Peter’s shoulder. Gently Peter drew a bearskin about her, and for a long time sat wide-awake, guarding Uppy and baring his ears at intervals to listen. A dozen times he saw Wapi’s bloodshot