Chapter 16. Jean's Story

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_ CHAPTER XVI. JEAN'S STORY

It was the candle-light that dragged Howland quickly back into consciousness and pain. He knew that he was no longer in the snow. His fingers dug into damp earth as he made an effort to raise himself, and with that effort it seemed as though a red-hot knife had cleft him from the top of his skull to his chest. The agony of that instant's pain drew a sharp cry from him and he clutched both hands to his head, waiting and fearing. It did not come again and he sat up. A hundred candles danced and blinked before him like so many taunting eyes and turned him dizzy with a sickening nausea. One by one the lights faded away after that until there was left only the steady glow of the real candle.

The fingers of Howland's right hand were sticky when he drew them away from his head, and he shivered. The tongue of flame leaping out of the night, the thunderous report, the deluge of fire that had filled his brain, all bore their meaning for him now. It had been a close call, so close that shivering chills ran up and down his spine as he struggled little by little to lift himself to his knees. His enemy's shot had grazed his head. A quarter of an inch more, an eighth of an inch even, and there would have been no awakening. He closed his eyes for a few moments, and when he opened them his vision had gained distance. About him he made out indistinctly the black encompassing walls of his prison.

It seemed an interminable time before he could rise and stand on his feet and reach the candle. Slowly he felt his way along the wall until he came to a low, heavy door, barred from the outside, and just beyond this door he found a narrow aperture cut through the decaying logs. It was a yard in length and barely wide enough for him to thrust through an arm. Three more of these narrow slits in his prison walls he found before he came back again to the door. They reminded him of the hole through which he had looked out on the plague-stricken cabin at the _Maison de Mort Rouge_, and he guessed that through them came what little fresh air found its way into the dungeon.

Near the table on which he replaced the candle was a stool, and he sat down. Carefully he went through his pockets. His belt and revolver were gone. He had been stripped of letters and papers. Not so much as a match had been left him by his captors.

He stopped in his search and listened. Faintly there came to him the ticking of his watch. He felt in his watch pocket. It was empty. Again he listened. This time he was sure that the sound came from his feet and he lowered the candle until the light of it glistened on something yellow an arm's distance away. It was his watch, and close beside it lay his leather wallet. What money he had carried in the pocketbook was untouched, but his personal cards and half a dozen papers that it had contained were gone.

He looked at the time. The hour hand pointed to four. Was it possible that he had been unconscious for more than six hours? He had left Jean on the mountain top soon after nightfall--it was not later than nine o'clock when he had seen Meleese. Seven hours! Again he lifted his hands to his head. His hair was stiff and matted with blood. It had congealed thickly on his cheek and neck and had soaked the top of his coat. He had bled a great deal, so much that he wondered he was alive, and yet during those hours his captors had given him no assistance, had not even bound a cloth about his head.

Did they believe that the shot had killed him, that he was already dead when they flung him into the dungeon? Or was this only one other instance of the barbaric brutishness of those who so insistently sought his life? The fighting blood rose in him with returning strength. If they had left him a weapon, even the small knife they had taken from his pocket, he would still make an effort to settle a last score or two. But now he was helpless.

There was, however, a ray of hope in the possibility that they believed him dead. If they who had flung him into the dungeon believed this, then he was safe for several hours. No one would come for his body until broad day, and possibly not until the following night, when a grave could be dug and he could be carried out with some secrecy. In that time, if he could escape from his prison, he would be well on his way to the Wekusko. He had no doubt that Jean was still a prisoner on the mountain top. The dogs and sledge were there and both rifles were where he had concealed them. It would be a hard race--a running fight perhaps--but he would win, and after a time Meleese would come to him, away down at the little hotel on the Saskatchewan.

He rose to his feet, his blood growing warm, his eyes shining in the candle-light. The thought of the girl as she had come to him out in the night put back into him all of his old fighting strength, all of his unconquerable hope and confidence. She had followed him when the dog yelped at his heels, as the first shots had been fired; she had knelt beside him in the snow as he lay bleeding at the feet of his enemies. He had heard her voice calling to him, had felt the thrilling touch of her arms, the terror and love of her lips as she thought him dying. She had given herself to him; and she would come to him--his lady of the snows--if he could escape.

He went to the door and shoved against it with his shoulder. It was immovable. Again he thrust his hand and arm through the first of the narrow ventilating apertures. The wood with which his fingers came in contact was rotting from moisture and age and he found that he could tear out handfuls of it. He fell to work, digging with the fierce eagerness of an animal. At the rate the soft pulpy wood gave way he could win his freedom long before the earliest risers at the post were awake.

A sound stopped him, a hollow cough from out of the blackness beyond the dungeon wall. It was followed an instant later by a gleam of light and Howland darted quickly back to the table. He heard the slipping of a bolt outside the door and it flashed on him then that he should have thrown himself back into his old position on the floor. It was too late for this action now. The door swung open and a shaft of light shot into the chamber. For a space Howland was blinded by it and it was not until the bearer of the lamp had advanced half-way to the table that he recognized his visitor as Jean Croisset. The Frenchman's face was wild and haggard. His eyes gleamed red and bloodshot as he stared at the engineer.

"_Mon Dieu_, I had hoped to find you dead," he whispered huskily.

He reached up to hang the big oil lamp he carried to a hook in the log ceiling, and Howland sat amazed at the expression on his face. Jean's great eyes gleamed like living coals from out of a death-mask. Either fear or pain had wrought deep lines in his face. His hands trembled as he steadied the lamp. The few hours that had passed since Howland had left him a prisoner on the mountain top had transformed him into an old man. Even his shoulders were hunched forward with an air of weakness and despair as he turned from the lamp to the engineer.

"I had hoped to find you dead, M'seur," he repeated in a voice so low it could not have been heard beyond the door. "That is why I did not bind your wound and give you water when they turned you over to my care. I wanted you to bleed to death. It would have been easier--for both of us."

From under the table he drew forth a second stool and sat down opposite Howland. The two men stared at each other over the sputtering remnant of the candle. Before the engineer had recovered from his astonishment at the sudden appearance of the man whom he believed to be safely imprisoned in the old cabin, Croisset's shifting eyes fell on the mass of torn wood under the aperture.

"Too late, M'seur," he said meaningly. "They are waiting up there now. It is impossible for you to escape."

"That is what I thought about you," replied Howland, forcing himself to speak coolly. "How did you manage it?"

"They came up to free me soon after they got you, M'seur. I am grateful to you for thinking of me, for if you had not told them I might have stayed there and starved like a beast in a trap."

"It was Meleese," said Howland. "I told her."

Jean dropped his head in his hands.

"I have just come from Meleese," he whispered softly. "She sends you her love, M'seur, and tells you not to give up hope. The great God, if she only knew--if she only knew what is about to happen! No one has told her. She is a prisoner in her room, and after that--after that out on the plain--when she came to you and fought like one gone mad to save you--they will not give her freedom until all is over. What time is it, M'seur?"

A clammy chill passed over Howland as he read the time.

"Half-past four."

The Frenchman shivered; his fingers clasped and unclasped nervously as he leaned nearer his companion.

"The Virgin bear me witness that I wish I might strike ten years off my life and give you freedom," he breathed quickly. "I would do it this instant, M'seur. I would help you to escape if it were in any way possible. But they are in the room at the head of the stair--waiting. At six--"

Something seemed to choke him and he stopped.

"At six--what then?" urged Howland. "My God, man, what makes you look so? What is to happen at six?"

Jean stiffened. A flash of the old fire gleamed in his eyes, and his voice was steady and clear when he spoke again.

"I have no time to lose in further talk like this, M'seur," he said almost harshly. "They know now that it was I who fought for you and for Meleese on the Great North Trail. They know that it is I who saved you at Wekusko. Meleese can no more save me than she can save you, and to make my task a little harder they have made me their messenger, and--"

Again he stopped, choking for words.

"What?" insisted Howland, leaning toward him, his face as white as the tallow in the little dish on the table.

"Their executioner, M'seur."

With his hands gripped tightly on the table in front of him Jack Howland sat as rigid as though an electric shock had passed through him.

"Great God!" he gasped.

"First I am to tell you a story, M'seur," continued Croisset, leveling his reddened eyes to the engineer's. "It will not be long, and I pray the Virgin to make you understand it as we people of the North understand it. It begins sixteen years ago."

"I shall understand, Jean," whispered Howland. "Go on."

"It was at one of the company's posts that it happened," Jean began, "and the story has to do with Le M'seur, the Factor, and his wife, _L'Ange Blanc_--that is what she was called, M'seur--the White Angel. _Mon Dieu_, how we loved her! Not with a wicked love, M'seur, but with something very near to that which we give our Blessed Virgin. And our love was but a pitiful thing when compared with the love of these two, each for the other. She was beautiful, gloriously beautiful as we know women up in the big snows; like Meleese, who was the youngest of their children.

"Ours was the happiest post in all this great northland, M'seur," continued Croisset after a moment's pause; "and it was all because of this woman and the man, but mostly because of the woman. And when the little Meleese came--she was the first white girl baby that any of us had ever seen--our love for these two became something that I fear was almost a sacrilege to our dear Lady of God. Perhaps you can not understand such a love, M'seur; I know that it can not be understood down in that world which you call civilization, for I have been there and have seen. We would have died for the little Meleese, and the other Meleese, her mother. And also, M'seur, we would have killed our own brothers had they as much as spoken a word against them or cast at the mother even as much as a look which was not the purest. That is how we loved her sixteen years ago this winter, M'seur, and that is how we love her memory still."

"She is dead," uttered Howland, forgetting in these tense moments the significance Jean's story might hold for him.

"Yes; she is dead. M'seur, shall I tell you how she died?"

Croisset sprang to his feet, his eyes flashing, his lithe body twitching like a wolf's as he stood for an instant half leaning over the engineer.

"Shall I tell you how she died, M'seur?" he repeated, falling back on his stool, his long arms stretched over the table. "It happened like this, sixteen years ago, when the little Meleese was four years old and the oldest of the three sons was fourteen. That winter a man and his boy came up from Churchill. He had letters from the Factor at the Bay, and our Factor and his wife opened their doors to him and to his son, and gave them all that it was in their power to give.

"_Mon Dieu_, this man was from that glorious civilization of yours, M'seur--from that land to the south where they say that Christ's temples stand on every four corners, but he could not understand the strange God and the strange laws of our people! For months he had been away from the companionship of women, and in this great wilderness the Factor's wife came into his life as the flower blossoms in the desert. Ah, M'seur, I can see now how his wicked heart strove to accomplish the things, and how he failed because the glory of our womanhood up here has come straight down from Heaven. And in failing he went mad--mad with that passion of the race I have seen in Montreal, and then--ah, the Great God, M'seur, do you not understand what happened next?"

Croisset lifted his head, his face twisted in a torture that was half grief, half madness, and stared at Howland, with quivering nostrils and heaving chest. In his companion's face he saw only a dead white pallor of waiting, of half comprehension. He leaned over the table again, controlling himself by a mighty effort.

"It was at that time when most of us were out among the trappers, just before our big spring caribou roast, when the forest people came in with their furs, M'seur. The post was almost deserted. Do you understand? The woman was alone in her cabin with the little Meleese--and when we came back at night she was dead. Yes, M'seur, she killed herself, leaving a few written words to the Factor telling him what had happened.

"The man and the boy escaped on a sledge after the crime. _Mon Dieu_, how the forest people leaped in pursuit! Runners carried the word over the mountains and through the swamps, and a hundred sledge parties searched the forest trails for the man-fiend and his son. It was the Factor himself and his youngest boy who found them, far out on the Churchill trail. And what happened then, M'seur? Just this: While the man-fiend urged on his dogs the son fired back with a rifle, and one of his bullets went straight through the heart of the pursuing Factor, so that in the space of one day and one night the little Meleese was made both motherless and fatherless by these two whom the devil had sent to destroy the most beautiful thing we have ever known in this North. Ah, M'seur, you turn white! Does it bring a vision to you now? Do you hear the crack of that rifle? Can you see--"

"My God!" gasped Howland. Even now he understood nothing of what this tragedy might mean to him--forgot everything but that he was listening to the terrible tragedy that had come to the woman who was the mother of the girl he loved. He half rose from his seat as Croisset paused; his eyes glittered, his death-white face was set in tense fierce lines, his finger-nails dug into the board table, as he demanded, "What happened then, Croisset?"

Jean was eying him like an animal. His voice was low.

"They escaped, M'seur."

With a deep breath Howland sank back. In a moment he leaned again toward Jean as he saw come into the Frenchman's eyes a slumbering fire that a few seconds later blazed into vengeful malignity when he drew slowly from an inside pocket of his coat a small parcel wrapped and tied in soft buckskin.

"They have sent you this, M'seur," he said. "'At the very last,' they told me, 'let him read this.'"

With his eyes on the parcel, scarcely breathing, Howland waited while with exasperating slowness Croisset's brown fingers untied the cord that secured it.

"First you must understand what this meant to us in the North, M'seur," said Jean, his hands covering the parcel after he had finished with the cord. "We are different who live up here--different from those who live in Montreal, and beyond. With us a lifetime is not too long to spend in avenging a cruel wrong. It is our honor of the North. I was fifteen then, and had been fostered by the Factor and his wife since the day my mother died of the smallpox and I dragged myself into the post, almost dead of starvation. So it happened that I was like a brother to Meleese and the other three. The years passed, and the desire for vengeance grew in us as we became older, until it was the one thing that we most desired in life, even filling the gentle heart of Meleese, whom we sent to school in Montreal when she was eleven, M'seur. It was three years later--while she was still in Montreal--that I went on one of my wandering searches to a post at the head of the Great Slave, and there, M'seur--there--"

Croisset had risen. His long arms were stretched high, his head thrown back, his upturned face aflame with a passion that was almost that of prayer.

"M'seur, I thank the great God in Heaven that it was given to Jean Croisset to meet one of those whom we had pledged our lives to find--and I slew him!"

He stood silent, eyes partly closed, still as if in prayer. When he sank into his chair again the look of hatred had gone from his face.

"It was the father, and I killed him, M'seur--killed him slowly, telling him of what he had done as I choked the life from him; and then, a little at a time, I let the life back into him, forcing him to tell me where I would find his son, the slayer of Meleese's father. And after that I closed on his throat until he was dead, and my dogs dragged his body through three hundred miles of snow that the others might look on him and know that he was dead. That was six years ago, M'seur."

Howland was scarcely breathing.

"And the other--the son--" he whispered densely. "You found him, Croisset? You killed him?"

"What would you have done, M'seur?"

Howland's hands gripped those that guarded the little parcel.

"I would have killed him, Jean."

He spoke slowly, deliberately.

"I would have killed him," he repeated.

"I am glad of that, M'seur."

Jean was unwrapping the buckskin, fold after fold of it, until at last there was revealed a roll of paper, soiled and yellow along the edges.

"These pages are taken from the day-book at the post where the woman lived," he explained softly, smoothing them under his hands. "Each day the Factor of a post keeps a reckoning of incidents as they pass, as I have heard that sea captains do on shipboard. It has been a company law for hundreds of years. We have kept these pages to ourselves, M'seur. They tell of what happened at our post sixteen years ago this winter."

As he spoke the half-breed came to Howland's side, smoothing the first page on the table in front of him, his slim forefinger pointing to the first few lines.

"They came on this day," he said, his breath close to the engineer's ear. "These are their names, M'seur--the names of the two who destroyed the paradise that our Blessed Lady gave to us many years ago."

In an instant Howland had read the lines. His blood seemed to dry in his veins and his heart to stand still. For these were the words he read: "On this day there came to our post, from the Churchill way, John Howland and his son."

With a sharp cry he sprang to his feet, overturning the stool, facing Croisset, his hands clenched, his body bent as if about to spring. Jean stood calmly, his white teeth agleam. Then, slowly, he stretched out a hand.

"M'seur John Howland, will you read what happened to the father and mother of the little Meleese sixteen years ago? Will you read, and understand why your life was sought on the Great North Trail, why you were placed on a case of dynamite in the Wekusko coyote, and why, with the coming of this morning's dawn--at six--"

He paused, shivering. Howland seemed not to notice the tremendous effort Croisset was making to control himself. With the dazed speechlessness of one recovering from a sudden blow he turned to the table and bent over the papers that the Frenchman had laid out before him. Five minutes later he raised his head. His face was as white as chalk. Deep lines had settled about his mouth. As a sick man might, he lifted his hand and passed it over his face and through his hair. But his eyes were afire. Involuntarily Jean's body gathered itself as if to meet attack.

"I have read it," he said huskily, as though the speaking of the words caused him a great effort. "I understand now. My name is John Howland. And my father's name was John Howland. I understand."

There was silence, in which the eyes of the two men met.

"I understand," repeated the engineer, advancing a step. "And you, Jean Croisset--do you believe that I am _that_ John Howland--the John Howland--the son who--"

He stopped, waiting for Jean to comprehend, to speak.

"M'seur, it makes no difference what I believe now. I have but one other thing to tell you here--and one thing to give to you," replied Jean. "Those who have tried to kill you are the three brothers. Meleese is their sister. Ours is a strange country, M'seur, governed since the beginning of our time by laws which we have made ourselves. To those who are waiting above no torture is too great for you. They have condemned you to death. This morning, exactly as the minute hand of your watch counts off the hour of six, you will be shot to death through one of these holes in the dungeon walls. And this--this note from Meleese--is the last thing I have to give you."

He dropped a folded bit of paper on the table. Mechanically Howland reached for it. Stunned and speechless, cold with the horror of his death sentence, he smoothed out the note. There were only a few words, apparently written in great haste.

"I have been praying for you all night. If God fails to answer my prayers I will still do as I have promised--and follow you." "Meleese."

He heard a movement and lifted his eyes. Jean was gone. The door was swinging slowly inward. He heard the wooden bolt slip into place, and after that there was not even the sound of a moccasined foot stealing through the outer darkness. _

Read next: Chapter 17. Meleese

Read previous: Chapter 15. In The Bedroom Chamber

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