Chapter 6

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_ CHAPTER VI

Sunshine followed storm. The winter sun was cresting the tree tops when Thoreau got out of his bed to build a fire in the big stove. It was nine o'clock, and bitterly cold. The frost lay thick upon the windows, with the sun staining it like the silver and gold of old cathedral glass, and as the fox breeder opened the cabin door to look at his thermometer he heard the snap and crack of that cold in the trees outside, and in the timbers of the log walls. He always looked at the thermometer before he built his fire--a fixed habit in him; he wanted to know, first of all, whether it had been a good night for his foxes, and whether it had been too cold for the furred creatures of the forest to travel. Fifty degrees below zero was bad for fisher and marten and lynx; on such nights they preferred the warmth of snug holes and deep windfalls to full stomachs, and his traps were usually empty. This morning it was forty-seven degrees below zero. Cold enough! He turned, closed the door, shivered. Then he stopped halfway to the stove, and stared.

Last night, or rather in that black part of the early day when they had gone to bed, Father Roland had warned him to make no noise in the morning; that they would let David sleep until noon; that he was sick, worn out, and needed rest. And there he stood now in the doorway of his room, even before the fire was started--looking five years younger than he looked last night, nodding cheerfully.

Thoreau grinned.

"_Boo-jou, m'sieu_," he said in his Cree-French. "My order was to make no noise and to let you sleep," and he nodded toward the Missioner's room.

"The sun woke me," said David. "Come here. I want you to see it!"

Thoreau went and stood beside him, and David pointed to the one window of his room, which faced the rising sun. The window was covered with frost, and the frost as they looked at it was like a golden fire.

"I think that was what woke me," he said. "At least my eyes were on it when I opened them. It is wonderful!"

"It is very cold, and the frost is thick," said Thoreau. "It will go quickly after I have built a fire, m'sieu. And then you will see the sun--the real sun."

David watched him as he built the fire. The first crackling of it sent a comfort through him. He had slept well, so soundly that not once had he roused himself during his six hours in bed. It was the first time he had slept like that in months. His blood tingled with a new warmth. He had no headache. There was not that dull pain behind his eyes. He breathed more easily--the air passed like a tonic into his lungs. It was as if those wonderful hours of sleep had wrested some deadly obstruction out of his veins. The fire crackled. It roared up the big chimney. The jack-pine knots, heavy with pitch, gave to the top of the stove a rosy glow. Thoreau stuffed more fuel into the blazing firepot, and the glow spread cheerfully, and with the warmth that was filling the cabin there mingled the sweet scent of the pine-pitch and burning balsam. David rubbed his hands. He was rubbing them when Marie came into the room, plaiting the second of her two great ropes of shining black hair. He nodded. Marie smiled, showing her white teeth, her dark eyes clear as a fawn's. He felt within him a strange rejoicing--for Thoreau. Thoreau was a lucky man. He could see proof of it in the Cree woman's face. Both were lucky. They were happy--a man and woman together, as things should be.

Thoreau had broken the ice in a pail and now he filled the wash-basin for him. Ice water for his morning ablution was a new thing for David. But he plunged his face into it recklessly. Little particles of ice pricked his skin, and the chill of the water seemed to sink into his vitals. It was a sudden change from water as hot as he could stand--to this. His teeth clicked as he wiped himself on the burlap towelling. Marie used the basin next, and then Thoreau. When Marie had dried her face he noted the old-rose flush in her cheeks, the fire of rich, red blood glowing under her dark skin. Thoreau himself blubbered and spouted in his ice-water bath like a joyous porpoise, and he rubbed himself on the burlap until the two apple-red spots above his beard shone like the glow that had spread over the top of the stove. David found himself noticing these things--very small things though they were; he discovered himself taking a sudden and curious interest in events and things of no importance at all, even in the quick, deft slash of the Frenchman's long knife as he cut up the huge whitefish that was to be their breakfast. He watched Marie as she wallowed the thick slices in yellow corn-meal, and listened to the first hissing sputter of them as they were dropped into the hot grease of the skillet. And the odour of the fish, taken only yesterday from the net which Thoreau kept in the frozen lake, made him hungry. This was unusual. It was unexpected as other things that had happened. It puzzled him.

He returned to his room, with a suspicion in his mind that he should put on a collar and tie, and his coat. He changed his mind when he saw the photograph in its newspaper wrapping on the table. In another moment it was in his hands. Now, with day in the room, the sun shining, he expected to see a change. But there was no change in her; she was there, as he had left her last night; the question was in her eyes, unspoken words still on her lips. Then, suddenly, it swept upon him where he had been in those first hours of peaceful slumber that had come to him--beside a quiet, dark pool--gently whispering forests about him--an angel standing close to him, on a rock, shrouded in her hair--watching over him. A thrill passed through him. Was it possible?... He did not finish the question. He could not bring himself to ask whether this picture--some strange spirit it might possess--had reached out to him, quieted him, made him sleep, brought him dreams that were like a healing medicine. And yet....

He remembered that in one of his leather bags there was a magnifying glass, and he assured himself that he was merely curious--most casually curious--as he hunted it out from among his belongings and scanned the almost illegible writing on the back of the cardboard mount. He made out the date quite easily now, impressed in the cardboard by the point of a pencil. It was only a little more than a year old. It was unaccountable why this discovery should affect him as it did. He made no effort to measure or sound the satisfaction it gave him--this knowledge that the girl had stood so recently on that rock beside the pool. He was beginning to personalize her unconsciously, beginning to think of her mentally as the Girl. She was a bit friendly. With her looking at him like that he did not feel quite so alone with himself. And there could not be much of a change in her since that yesterday of a year ago, when some one had startled her there.

It was Father Roland's voice that made him wrap up the picture again, this time not in its old covering, but in a silk handkerchief which he had pawed out of his bag, and which he dropped back again, and locked in. Thoreau was telling the Missioner about David's early rising when the latter reappeared. They shook hands, and the Missioner, looking David keenly in the eyes, saw the change in him.

"No need to tell me you had a good night!" he exclaimed.

"Splendid," affirmed David.

The window was blazing with the golden sun now; it shot through where the frost was giving way, and a ray of it fell like a fiery shaft on Marie's glossy head as she bent over the table. Father Roland pointed to the window with one hand on David's arm.

"Wait until you get out into _that_," he said. "This is just a beginning, David--just a beginning!"

They sat down to breakfast, fish and coffee, bread and potatoes--and beans. It was almost finished when David split open his third piece of fish, white as snow under its crisp brown, and asked quite casually:

"Did you ever hear of the Stikine River, Father?"

Father Roland sat up, stopped his eating, and looked at David for a moment as though the question struck an unusual personal interest in him.

"I know a man who lived for a great many years along the Stikine," he replied then. "He knows every mile of it from where it empties into the sea at Point Rothshay to the Lost Country between Mount Finlay and the Sheep Mountains. It's in the northern part of British Columbia, with its upper waters reaching into the Yukon. A wild country. A country less known than it was sixty years ago, when there was a gold rush up over the old telegraph trail. Tavish has told me a lot about it. A queer man--this Tavish. We hit his cabin on our way to God's Lake."

"Did he ever tell you," said David, with an odd quiver in his throat--"Did he ever tell you of a stream, a tributary stream, called Firepan Creek?"

"Firepan Creek--Firepan Creek," mumbled the Little Missioner. "He has told me a great many things, this Tavish, but I can't remember that. _Firepan Creek_! Yes, he did! I remember, now. He had a cabin on it one year, the year he had small-pox. He almost died there. I want you to meet Tavish, David. We will stay overnight at his cabin. He is a strange character--a great object lesson." Suddenly he came back to David's question. "What do you want to know about Stikine River and Firepan Creek?" he asked.

"I was reading something about them that interested me," replied David. "A _very_ wild country, I take it, from what Tavish has told you. Probably no white people."

"Always, everywhere, there are a few white people," said Father Roland. "Tavish is white, and he was there. Sixty years ago, in the gold rush, there must have been many. But I fancy there are very few now. Tavish can tell us. He came from there only a year ago this last September."

David asked no more questions. He turned his attention entirely to his fish. In that same moment there came an outburst from the foxes that made Thoreau grin. Their yapping rose until it was a clamorous demand. Then the dogs joined in. To David it seemed as though there must be a thousand foxes out in the Frenchman's pens, and at least a hundred dogs just beyond the cabin walls. The sound was blood-curdling in a way. He had heard nothing like it before in all his life; it almost made one shiver to think of going outside. The chorus kept up for fully a minute. Then it began to die out, and David could hear the chill clink of chains. Through it all Thoreau was grinning.

"It's two hours over feeding time for the foxes, and they know it, m'sieur," he explained to David. "Their outcry excites the huskies, and when the two go together--_Mon Dieu_! it is enough to raise the dead." He pushed himself back from the table and rose to his feet. "I am going to feed them now. Would you like to see it, m'sieu?"

Father Roland answered for him.

"Give us ten minutes and we shall be ready," he said, seizing David by the arm, and speaking to Thoreau. "Come with me, David. I have something waiting for you."

They went into the Little Missioner's room, and pointing to his tumbled bed, Father Roland said:

"Now, David, strip!"

David had noticed with some concern the garments worn that morning by Father Roland and the Frenchman--their thick woollen shirts, their strange-looking, heavy trousers that were met just below the knees by the tops of bulky German socks, turned over as he had worn his more fashionable hosiery in the college days when golf suits, bulldog pipes, and white terriers were the rage. He had stared furtively at Thoreau's great feet in their moose-hide moccasins, thinking of his own vici kids, the heaviest footwear he had brought with him. The problem of outfitting was solved for him now, as he looked at the bed, and as Father Roland withdrew, rubbing his hands until they cracked, David began undressing. In less than a quarter of an hour he was ready for the big outdoors. When the Missioner returned to give him a first lesson in properly "stringing up" his moccasins, he brought with him a fur cap very similar to that worn by Thoreau. He was amazed to find how perfectly it fitted.

"You see," said Father Roland, pleased at David's wonder, "I always take back a bale of this stuff with me, of different sizes; it comes in handy, you know. And the cap...."

He chuckled as David surveyed as much as he could see of himself in a small mirror.

"The cap is Marie's work," he finished. "She got the size from your hat and made it while we were asleep. A fine fisher-coat that--Thoreau's best. And a good fit, eh?"

"Marie ... did this ... for me?" demanded David.

The Missioner nodded.

"And the pay, Father...."

"Among friends of the forests, David, never speak of pay."

"But this skin! It is beautiful--valuable...."

"And it is yours," said Father Roland. "I am glad you mentioned payment to me, and not to Thoreau or Marie. They might not have understood, and it would have hurt them. If there had been anything to pay, _they_ would have mentioned it in the giving; _I_ would have mentioned it. That is a fine point of etiquette, isn't it?"

Slowly there came a look into David's face which the other did not at first understand. After a moment he said, without looking at the Missioner, and in a voice that had a curious hard note in it:

"But for this ... Marie will let me give her something in return--a little something I have no use for now? A little gift--my thanks--my friendship...."

He did not wait for the Missioner to reply, but went to one of his two leather bags. He unlocked the one in which he had placed the photograph of the girl. Out of it he took a small plush box. It was so small that it lay in the palm of his hand as he held it out to Father Roland.

Deeper lines had gathered about his mouth.

"Give this to Marie--for me."

Father Roland took the box. He did not look at it. Steadily he gazed into David's eyes.

"What is it?" he asked.

"A locket," replied David. "It belonged to _her_. In it is a picture--her picture--the only one I have. Will you--please--destroy the picture before you give the locket to Marie?"

Father Roland saw the quick, sudden throb in David's throat. He gripped the little box in his hand until it seemed as though he would crush it, and his heart was beating with the triumph of a drum. He spoke but one word, his eyes meeting David's eyes, but that one word was a whisper from straight out of his soul, and the word was:

"_Victory!_" _

Read next: Chapter 7

Read previous: Chapter 5

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