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

diable, I cannot whip him but I can kill him—and if I went—and the thing happens which I guess is going to happen—”

“Qui? Surely you will tell me—”

“Yes, I will tell you. Jacques Dupont knows that Elise has never stopped loving the Yellow-back. I do not believe she has ever tried to hide it from him. Why should she? And there is a rumor, m’sieu, that the Yellow-back will be at the Lac Bain dog sale.”

Reese Beaudin rose slowly to his feet, and yawned in that smoke-filled cabin.

“And if the Yellow-back should turn the tables, Joe Delesse, think of what a fine thing you will miss,” he said.

Joe Delesse also rose, with a contemptuous laugh.

“That fiddler, that picture-drawer, that book-reader—Pouff! You are tired, m’sieu, that is your bunk.”

Reese Beaudin held out a hand. The bulk of the two stood out in the lamp-glow, and Joe Delesse was so much the bigger man that his hand was half again the size of Reese Beaudin’s. They gripped. And then a strange look went over the face of Joe Delesse. A cry came from out of his beard. His mouth grew twisted. His knees doubled slowly under him, and in the space of ten seconds his huge bulk was kneeling on the floor, while Reese Beaudin looked at him, smiling.

“Has Jacques Dupont a greater grip than that, Joe Delesse?” he asked in a voice that was so soft it was almost a woman’s.

“Mon Dieu!” gasped Delesse. He staggered to his feet, clutching his crushed hand. “M’sieu—”

Reese Beaudin put his hands to the other’s shoulders, smiling, friendly.

“I will apologize, I will explain, mon ami,” he said. “But first, you must tell me the name of that Yellow-back who ran away years ago. Do you remember it?”

“Oui, but what has that to do with my crushed hand? The Yellow-back’s name was Reese Beaudin—”

“And I am Reese Beaudin,” laughed the other gently.

On that day—the day of Wakoa, the dog sale—seven fat caribou were roasting on great spits at Post Lac Bain, and under them were seven fires burning red and hot of seasoned birch, and around the seven fires were seven groups of men who slowly turned the roasting carcasses.

It was the Big Day of the midwinter festival, and Post Lac Bain, with a population of twenty in times of quiet, was a seething wilderness metropolis of two hundred excited souls and twice as many dogs. From all directions they had come, from north and south and east and west; from near and from far, from the Barrens, from the swamps, from the farther forests, from river and lake and hidden trail—a few white men, mostly French; halfbreeds and ‘breeds, Chippewans, and Crees, and here and there a strange, dark-visaged little interloper from the north with his strain of Eskimo blood. Foregathered were all the breeds and creeds and fashions of the wilderness.

Over all this, pervading the air like an incense, stirring the desire of man and beast, floated the aroma of the roasting caribou. The feast-hour was at hand. With cries that rose above the last words of a wild song the seven groups of men rushed to seven pairs of props and tore them away. The great carcasses swayed in mid-air, bent slowly over their spits, and then crashed into the snow fifteen feet from the fire. About each carcass five men with razor-sharp knives ripped off hunks of the roasted flesh and passed them into eager hands of the hungry multitude. First came the women and children, and last the men.

On this there peered forth from a window in the factor’s house the darkly bearded, smiling face of Reese Beaudin.

“I have seen him three times, wandering about in the crowd, seeking someone,” he said. “Bien, he shall find that someone very soon!”

In the face of McDougall, the factor, was a strange look. For he had listened to a strange story, and there was still something of shock and amazement and disbelief in his eyes.

“Reese Beaudin, it is hard for me to believe.”

“And yet you shall find that it is true,” smiled Reese.

“He will kill you. He is a monster—a giant!”

“I shall die hard,” replied Reese.

He turned from the window again, and took from the table a violin wrapped in buckskin, and softly he played one of their old love songs. It was not much more than a whisper, and yet it was filled with a joyous exultation. He laid the violin down when he was finished, and laughed, and filled his pipe, and lighted it.

“It is good for a man’s soul to know that a woman loves him, and has been true,” he said. “Mon pere, will you tell me again what she said? It is strength for me—and I must soon be going.”

McDougall repeated, as if under a strain from which he could not free himself:

“She came to me late last night, unknown to Dupont. She had received your message, and knew you were coming. And I tell you again that I saw something in her eyes which makes me afraid! She told me, then, that her father killed Bedore in a quarrel, and that she married Dupont to save him from the law—and kneeling there, with her hand on the cross at her breast, she swore that each day of her life she has let Dupont know that she hates him, and that she loves you, and that some day Reese Beaudin would return to avenge her. Yes, she told him that—I know it by what I saw in her eyes. With that cross clutched in her fingers she swore that she had suffered torture and shame, and that never a word of it had she whispered to a living soul, that she might turn the passion of Jacques Dupont’s black heart into a great hatred. And today—Jacques Dupont will kill you!”

“I shall die hard,” Reese repeated again.

He tucked the violin in its buckskin covering under his arm. From the table he took his cap and placed it on his head.

In a last effort McDougall sprang from his chair and caught the other’s arm.

“Reese Beaudin—you are going to your death! As factor of Lac Bain—agent of justice under power of the Police—I forbid it!”

“So-o-o-o,” spoke Reese Beaudin gently. “Mon pere—”

He unbuttoned his coat, which had remained buttoned. Under the coat was a heavy shirt; and the shirt he opened, smiling into the factor’s eyes, and McDougall’s face froze, and the breath was cut short on his lips.

“That!” he gasped.

Reese Beaudin nodded.

Then he opened the door and went out.

Joe Delesse had been watching the factor’s house, and he worked his way slowly along the edge of the feasters so that he might casually come into the path of Reese Beaudin. And there was one other man who also had watched, and who came in the same direction. He was a stranger, tall, closely hooded, his mustached face an Indian bronze. No one had ever seen him at Lac Bain before, yet in the excitement of the carnival the fact passed without conjecture or significance. And from the cabin of Henri Paquette another pair of eyes saw Reese Beaudin, and Mother Paquette heard a sob that in itself was a prayer.

In and out among the devourers of caribou-flesh, scanning the groups and the ones and the twos and the threes, passed Jacques Dupont, and with him walked his friend, one-eyed Layonne. Layonne was a big man, but Dupont was taller by half a head. The brutishness of his face was hidden under a coarse red beard; but the devil in him glowered from his deep-set, inhuman eyes; it walked in his gait, in the hulk of his great shoulders, in the gorilla-like slouch of his hips. His huge hands hung partly clenched at his sides. His breath was heavy with whisky that Layonne himself had smuggled in, and in his heart was black murder.

“He has not come!” he cried for the twentieth time. “He has not come!”

He moved on, and Reese Beaudin—ten feet away—turned and smiled at Joe Delesse with triumph in his eyes. He moved nearer.

“Did I not tell you he would not find in me that narrow-shouldered, smooth-faced stripling of five years ago?” he asked. “N’est-ce pas, friend Delesse?”

The face of Joe Delesse was heavy with a somber fear.

“His fist is like a wood-sledge, m’sieu.”

“So it was years ago.”

“His forearm is as big as the calf of your leg.”

“Oui, friend Delesse, it is the forearm of a giant.”

“He is half again your weight.”

“Or more, friend Delesse.”

“He will kill you! As the great God lives, he will kill you!”

“I shall die hard,” repeated Reese Beaudin for the third time that day.

Joe Delesse turned slowly, doggedly. His voice rumbled.

“The sale is about to begin, m’sieu. See!”

A man had mounted the log platform raised to the height of a man’s shoulders at the far end of the clearing. It was Henri Paquette, master of the day’s ceremonies, and appointed auctioneer of the great wakao. A man of many tongues was Paquette. To his lips he raised a great megaphone of birchbark, and sonorously his call rang out—in French, in Cree, in Chippewan, and the packed throng about the caribou-fires heaved like a living billow, and to a man and a woman and a child it moved toward the appointed place.

“The time has come,” said Reese Beaudin. “And all Lac Bain shall see!”

Behind them—watching, always watching—followed the bronze-faced stranger in his close-drawn hood.

For an hour the men of Lac Bain gathered close-wedged about the log platform on which stood Henri Paquette and his Indian helper. Behind the men were the women and children, and through the cordon there ran a babiche-roped pathway along which the dogs were brought.

The platform was twenty feet square, with the floor side of the logs hewn flat, and there was no lack of space for the gesticulation and wild pantomime of Paquette. In one hand he held a notebook, and in the other a pencil. In the notebook the sales of twenty dogs were already tabulated, and the prices paid.

Anxiously, Reese Beaudin was waiting. Each time that a new dog came up he looked at Joe Delesse, but, as yet Joe had failed to give the signal.

On the platform the Indian was holding two malamutes in leash now and Paquette was crying, in a well simulated fit of great fury:

“What, you cheap kimootisks, will you let this pair of malamutes go for seven mink and a cross fox. Are you men? Are you poverty-stricken? Are you blind? A breed dog and a male giant for seven mink and a cross fox? Non, I will buy them myself first, and kill them, and use their flesh for dog-feed, and their hides for fools’ caps! I will—”

“Twelve mink and a Number Two Cross,” came a voice out of the crowd.

“Twelve mink and a Number One,” shouted another.

“A little better—a little better!” wailed Paquette. “You are waking up, but slowly—mon Dieu, so slowly! Twelve mink and—”

A voice rose in Cree:

“Nesi-tu-now-unisk!”

Paquette gave a triumphant yell.

“The Indian beats you! The Indian from Little Neck Lake—an Indian beats the white man! He offers twenty beaver—prime skins! And beaver are wanted in Paris now. They’re wanted in London. Beaver and gold—they are the same! But they are the price of one dog alone. Shall they both go at that? Shall the Indian have them for twenty beaver—twenty beaver that may be taken from a single house in a day—while it has taken these malamutes two and a half years to grow? I say, you cheap kimootisks—”

And then an amazing thing happened. It was like a bomb falling in that