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God's Country and The Woman, a novel by James Oliver Curwood |
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Chapter 24 |
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_ CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR For a moment John Adare stood like an avenging demon in the midst of the startled faces of the forest men. His shaggy hair blew out from under his gray lynx cap. His eyes were red and glaring with the lights of the hunting wolf. His deep chest rose and fell in panting breaths. Then he saw Jean and Philip, side by side. Toward them he came, as if to crush them, and Philip sprang toward him, so that he was ahead of Jean. Adare stopped. The wind rattled in his throat. "And you came WITHOUT ME--" His voice was a rumble, deep, tense, like the muttering vibration before an explosion. Philip's hands gripped his arms, and those arms were as hard as oak. In one hand Adare held a gun. His other fist was knotted, heavy. "Yes, Mon Pere, we came without you," said Philip. "It is terrible. We did not want you two to suffer. We did not want you to know until it was all over, and Josephine was back in your arms. We thought it drive her mother mad. And you, Mon Pere, we wanted to save you!" Adare's face relaxed. His arm dropped. His red eyes shifted to the faces about him, and he said, as he looked: "It was Breuil. He said you and Josephine were not at his cabin. He came to tell Mignonne the child was so much better. I cornered Metoosin, and he told me. I have been coming fast, running." He drew in a deep breath. Then suddenly he became like a tiger. He sprang among the men, and threw up his great arms. His voice rose more than human, fierce and savage, above the growing tumult of the dogs and the wailing of the wind. "Ye are with me, men?" A rumble of voice answered him. "Then come!" He had seen that they were ready, and he strode on ahead of them. He was leader now, and Philip saw Father George close at his side, clutching his arm, talking. In Jean's face there was a great fear. He spoke low to Philip. "If he meets Lang, if he fights face to face with Thoreau, or if they call upon us to parley, all is lost! M'sieur, for the love of God, hold your fire for those two! We must kill them. If a parley is granted, they will come to us. We will kill them--even as they come toward us with a white flag, if we must!" "No truce will be granted!" cried Philip. As if John Adare himself had heard his words, he stopped and faced those behind him. They were in the shelter of the forest. In the gray gloom of dawn they were only a sea of shifting shadows. "Men, there is to be no mercy this day!" he said, and his voice rumbled like an echo through the aisles of the forest. "We are not on the trail of men, but of beasts and murderers. The Law that is three hundred miles away has let them live in our midst. It has let them kill. It said nothing when they stole Red Fawn from her father's tepee and ravaged her to death. It has said: 'Give us proof that Thoreau killed Reville, and that his wife did not die a natural death.' We are our own law. In these forests we are masters. And yet with this brothel at our doors we are not safe, our wives and daughters are within the reach of monsters. To-day it is my daughter--her husband's wife. To-morrow it may be yours. There can be no mercy. We must kill--kill and burn! Am I right, men?" This time it was not a murmur but a low thunder of voice that answered. Philip and Jean forged ahead to his side. Shoulder to shoulder they led the way. From the camp at the Forks it was eighteen miles to the Devil's Nest, where hung on the edge of a chasm the log buildings that sheltered Lang and his crew. To these men of the trails those eighteen miles meant nothing. White-bearded Janesse's trapline was sixty miles long, and he covered it in two days, stripping his pelts as he went. Renault had run sixty miles with his dogs between daybreak and dusk, and "Mad" Joe Horn had come down one hundred and eighty miles from the North in five days. These were not records. They were the average. Those who followed the master of Adare were thin-legged, small-footed, narrow-waisted--but their sinews were like rawhide, and their lungs filled chests that were deep and wide. With the break of day the wind fell, the sky cleared, and it grew colder. In silence John Adare, Jean, and Philip broke the trail. In silence followed close behind them the Missioner with his smooth-bore. In silence followed the French and half-breeds and Crees. Now and then came the sharp clink of steel as rifle barrel struck rifle barrel. Voices were low, monosyllabic; breaths were deep, the throbbing of hearts like that of engines. Here were friends who were meeting for the first time in months, yet they spoke no word of each other, of the fortunes of the "line," of wives or children. There was but one thought in their brains, pumping the blood through their veins, setting their dark faces in lines of iron, filling their eyes with the feverish fires of excitement. Yet this excitement, the tremendous passion that was working in them, found no vent in wild outcry. It was like the deadly undertow of the maelstroms in the spring floods. It was there, unseen--silent as death. And this thought, blinding them to all else, insensating them to all emotions but that of vengeance, was thought of Josephine. John Adare himself seemed possessed of a strange madness. He said no word to Jean or Philip. Hour after hour he strode ahead, until it seemed that tendons must snap and legs give way under the strain. Not once did he stop for rest until, hours later, they reached the summit of a ridge, and he pointed far off into the plain below. They could see the smoke rising up from the Devil's Nest. A breath like a great sigh swept through the band. And now, silently, there slipped away behind a rock Kaskisoon and his Indians. From under his blanket-coat the chief brought forth the thing that had bulged there, a tom-tom. Philip and the waiting men heard then the low Te-dum--Te-dum--Te-dum of it, as Kaskisoon turned his face first to the east and then the west, north and then south, calling upon Iskootawapoo to come from out of the valley of Silent Men and lead them to triumph. And the waiting men were silent--deadly silent--as they listened. For they knew that the low Te-dum was the call to death. Their hands gripped harder at the barrels of their guns, and when Kaskisoon and his braves came from behind the rock they faced the smoke above the Devil's Nest, wiped their eyes to see more clearly, and followed John Adare down into the plain. And to other ears than their own the medicine-drum had carried the Song of Death. Down in the thick spruce of the plain a man on the trail of a caribou had heard. He looked up, and on the cap of the ridge he saw. He was old in the ways and the unwritten laws of the North, and like a deer he turned and sped back unseen in the direction of the Devil's Nest. And as the avengers came down into the plain Kaskisoon chanted in a low monotone: Our fathers--come! And those who heard did not laugh. Father George crossed himself, and muttered something that might have been a prayer. For in this hour Kaskisoon's God was very near. _ |
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