(Cover page of The Popular Magazine issue containing the story)
The Shaman
By Roy Norton
Author of “The Shark and the Sentimentalist,” “David and Goliath,” Etc.
It was in the days when Alaska’s silent solitudes were unknown and unsought by this white race of ours—before the cry of “Gold!” rang round the world. Yet into those frozen silences on a strange mission of their own had pierced Hathaway and Braith. And there their bones would have whitened had it not been for the mysterious “Lady Malitka”—and Peluk, the shaman. Shaman? Cæsar was a shaman—so was Washington—so was Mohammed; and obscure though he was Peluk was brother to these. Whether he was also an unmitigated villain or a greatly benevolent man is for you who read this fine tale to judge.
(A Complete Novel)
CHAPTER I
ASIDE from its physical beauty gold is not worth much, after all!
Because its dominion has been for so many ages undisputed; because the hunger for it has betrayed souls; because myriads of men and women have throughout all time gambled blood, lives, and honor for its possession, none of these has made me either detest it or bow head and knee in reverence. I recognized it as a metal. Beautiful? Yes. The most beautiful of all—enduring, unrusting, maintaining its dignified luster though buried beneath the clean, unbroken earth, or recovered after long handling from the muck heaps of human cesspools.
For that undefilable, unconquerable, austere quality I honor it; but for that alone. Yet this I who am now old and gray can boast: that not any of it ever came other than clean to my hands nor left thereafter polluted by my transient touch. I have no gold that I did not earn by the sweat of physical effort or the barter of such mental creations as were my inheritance, save that which came from Peluk, the shaman.
A shaman? To me it seems strange that there are those who do not know the word in its value. For it means many things. It is more than a mere title. It cannot be conferred by potentate, autocrat, or king. It is an endowment of respect rather than election, bestowed upon those who, wise in the lore, history, or accomplishments of a tribe of men are given due and merited deference. The quality of the service depends upon the ideals of the tribe. Gibbon, the historian, was a shaman to those of the English-speaking race. Napoleon, but for his fall, might have become a shaman to the French. Cæsar was shaman to his own. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were American shamen in their day. And, doubtless, so was Tamerlane and Mohammed and Herodotus, as well as the chief of that South Seas cannibal tribe who decreed that the most certain way of disposing of Captain Cook was not only to kill him, but thereafter to eat and digest him. And so, great or small, down through all human history they pass.
It is of one of the obscure shamen that I would tell. Whether he was a great murderer, an unmitigated villain, a monster, or a benevolent despot, I leave to judgment.
Interwoven with this memory of the shaman is the Lady Malitka, concerning whose reputation and characteristics there was at one time much dispute. Whether, as some of her followers and supporters declared, she was a martyr, or, as her enemies and detractors insisted, a human tigress, is also a matter of opinion. She is still alive and, of all, cares least.
That the genesis of a sinister sequence of trying adventures was toward the day when John Braith and I first heard her name, is certain. That was in the days when the silent North slept, unknown, unsought, the goal or desire of none of this white race of ours. Its vast solitude, majestic and severe, swept from the shores of the Bering on the west, to Hudson Bay on the east, a dormant and hardly accessible land, carpeted with flowers beneath the short summer's suns, blanketed in the long arctic night beneath frozen snows; filled in summer with the songs of breeding and unmolested birds; silent in winter with a stillness so profound, so unreal, so intense, that life in any form seemed unknown, impossible.
And it was through this latter season that, spent, starving, teamed together with skeleton dogs, dying, as were we, and yet desperately and together fighting for life, Jack Braith and I staggered down the white expanse of a river that still is unknown to the maps.
Braith, my partner, was snow-blind. For five days we had traveled thus, he, poor fellow—as white a man as ever lived!—clinging to the handlebars of the sled. Our last sight of human beings had been at a little, squalid native village whose inhabitants were themselves on the verge of starvation. The younger men were all gone, in quest of game, and an old tyune made us understand that they could furnish us with neither food nor a guide; but with a “story knife” he drew on the earthen floor of the kashime a map indicating how the next village might be reached. “Four sleeps,” he said, indicating that ours must be a journey of four days. And then looking at our starved dogs he shook a doubtful head, pointed at the animals, and corrected it to “five sleeps.”
Both my partner and I knew a few words of the native tongue used in that village, but not enough to understand his guttural patter through which at regular intervals came a word, “Malitka.”
“What do you suppose that means?” Braith asked, staring at me. “That word Malitka that he uses so much.”
I took from the tyune's gnarled hand his story knife and drew a crude picture of native huts and then questioned: “Malitka?” He nodded his head in assent; but to our bewilderment now drew a picture of a woman and, tapping it with his knife, said, “Malitka.”
“I can't make out whether that's the name of an Indian village or an Indian woman,” I said to Jack, and we gave it up after making a copy of the route map on the back of an envelope which the headman finally took from my hands and elaborated to indicate mountain passes we must find and other places to be avoided.
The tyune's prediction that it would require “five sleeps” proved wrong; for it was on the second day after our departure from that village and its miseries that the winter terror of the North, snow blindness, smote my partner's sight and put drags upon our progress. He suffered silently throughout the brief hours of daylight; he suffered grimly throughout the long nights, making no complaint, passing no remarks save to deplore the extra burdens imposed upon me. And I, whose eyes must serve for two, whose visual judgment must serve lest we lose our way through the great wastes and piled-up mountains, traveled with fear in my heart.
It was on the sixth night, in the tiny trail tent, after I had trickled warm water into those widely staring, blood-red, tortured eyes, that Braith reached up from where he lay flat on his back on the blankets and caught my hand in his.
“Old man,” he said, and there was neither fear nor wavering in his voice, “I've been thinking it over as we came along to-day and, although I can't see, I know how things are going.”
“Oh, but we're getting along all right,” I insisted.
“No. No use in evading me, partner,” he said, shaking his head. “I can still hear, although I can't see. To-day there were only five dogs left in the team. The sixth was too weak to pull and you left him out. He followed us all day, sometimes falling far behind, then in desperate terror catching up again. Yesterday morning you slipped away from the camp and put one out of its misery with an ax, not using your gun lest I hear the sound. To-night you pretended to eat but didn't. I found it out while you were out of the tent by counting the remaining fish—I counted them last night, too. You didn't”
“Count nothing! You might have found one bundle of the dog fish on which all of us are working on mighty small rations; but the other bundle”
“It won't do,” he interrupted. “There is no other bundle. The time has come when we've got to have a straight talk. We've been together some years now—you and I—Jim, and I don't think I've ever given you reason to think that I couldn't stand the gaft when things came to the worst. Well, they must be about there now.”
I could not at that moment answer. I was weak, hungry, nearly whipped. Outside a famished dog moaned and whimpered to the cold, merciless stars.
“Jim,” he said, sitting up on the blankets and staring at me with those pitifully blinded eyes as if he could see through the red veil, “tell me the truth. Do you think we've got off in the wrong direction and have missed the way to that village or woman, or what ever it is?”
Again I could not answer. He had voiced the fear that tormented my own mind.
“Come,” he said patiently. “Let's have the truth. I could feel that half dozen times to-day you stopped and took from underneath your parka that map we drew—a copy of the old native's route. You took it out to study it because you were uncertain. It's no use trying to keep things from me. And—I must know to-night. Must know now!”
For another moment I hesitated, sitting there with those sightless eyes fixed on me. Then, half-despairing, I told the truth.
“I have been worried,” I admitted. “Either the old fellow's map was not clear, or—or—I was too stupid to read it. All day I have traveled without a landmark that I could identify.”
For a long time he pondered while I, cold, hungry, sat helpless. Our situation indeed seemed hopeless.
“Then,” said Braith at last, very gently, “there is but one thing Left to do. To-morrow you must take the trail alone.”
“Alone? Leave you here—alone?” I stammered, scarcely able to believe my ears.
“Yes,” he said. “There's no use in both of us dying. You must take the dogs that can still travel, and the grub, and—go on, Jim. Go on to the end—whatever it is.”
I refused volubly, with that stark, violent language that one employs in desperation. But he was immovable. I argued; persuaded; begged; but it was all of no avail. He was determined—intent on giving me at least an opportunity for my life, resolutely bent on self-sacrifice that I might have a one-thousandth chance to survive. He attempted to convince me that if I went on alone and found this native village—that infinitesimally small spot in thousands of square miles of a frozen, unknown land, I could then return and succor him.
I suppose that there is a point where human endurance reaches mental rather than physical break, that sanity may go first leaving behind but an animal entity fighting to the last for self-preservation. It doesn't matter. All that is of moment is in what I did. For before I went to sleep that night, beaten by hunger and exhaustion into a nightmare of semiconsciousness, my plan was formed. I was determined that we should survive or die together, somewhere out there in the snows that stretched ahead for thousands of miles.
Jack was still asleep when I quietly threw the blankets off in the terrible cold of the new dawn, the one that promised to prove our last. He was greatly my physical superior—a man of prodigious strength and activity. Blind though he was, my sole hope of conquest and subjugation rested in overpowering him and rendering him helpless. I cannot even yet be certain which of us was the madman. I presume it may have been I who had slipped across that borderland.
I got the pack lashings, the long, slender rope with which we bound our sled for each day's journey, and with infinite pains and gentle movement lest I disturb him, got a loop over one outflung arm as it lay upon his chest, brought it over his back, and slipped it beneath another unheeding wrist. I cut it there and then bent over his feet that rested closely together in the bottom folds. I hobbled him effectually without awakening him. And then, with an abrupt pull, I tightened and bound his hands behind him. Startled, alert, angry, he struggled for a moment, and then, recognizing his helplessness, he lay still.
“Jack,” I said, “it's just as well to take things easy. You can't help yourself. You wouldn't give in last night. You've got to, now. I'll not leave you behind. To-day you'll ride. It's one of just two things; the last ride you'll ever take, or the worst one you'll ever have.”
I could discern that he believed himself in the power of a maniac who loved him, but a maniac nevertheless. I surmise that I was. I cannot entirely remember what I thought then. Yet I can remember this much: that I made no effort to remove either the tent, or its tiny square of sheet metal stove, and considered nothing save the little bundle of moldy dog fish, the sled and the dogs. In a reckless mood I fed the starving dogs the last food we had. I envied them as they tore the scanty, filthy food. To me they were devouring epicurean morsels beyond value. My sole hope was that they might gain strength for this crucial day that must be our last hope. To-night or wherever we paused when spent, one of them must die, be murdered, that we and his team mates might try for one day more. To-morrow, if we survived the day, another dog must die and the sled, which the others would not have sufficient strength to pull, be abandoned.
“Well, will you walk, or must I throw you on the sled and haul you?” I demanded of my partner when all my preparations to start had been made.
“I can't help myself,” he muttered. “You are mad! Clean mad! What do you intend to do with me?”
“If you'll promise to walk, I'll loosen your feet and tether your hands to the handlebars of the sled so you can run behind. If you won't do that, I'll throw you on top of the blankets on the sled, tie you there, and go on.”
“You may loosen my feet and tie my hands,” he said.
It is impossible, for me to remember the start or the stages of our progress; but I can imagine reeling dogs and reeling men, silent, hopeless, staggering down a white valley which in summertime must have been marked in its center by a stream but was now a white, hollow channel between high hills. I can picture one man whose hands were tied to the handles of a birch sled, moving, stumbling in blindness wheresoever he was dragged. I see a swerving, uncertain figure, a scarecrow, a half-dead lunatic in front, cursing through frostbitten lips the dogs, the man behind, and the cold topaz of arctic skies, and striving to lead the way.
But I can vividly recall a time when, with bent head, I saw traces in the snow—human traces—the sign of a sled pulled by dogs, the faint impact of moccasin-clad feet behind. I can still recall the bewilderment, the time it took me to appreciate that human beings had traversed this perilous waste. I can bring back the mental struggle to gather something from this sign, the conclusion that, inasmuch as this trail was fairly fresh and going in a certain direction, our sole hope lay in following it; I vaguely remember when the dog Barth fell and the weight of his body, still lashed to the sled, brought the panting dogs to a halt. I picked him up, laid him on the sled, slashed off a piece of pack rope and thereafter, with it across my shoulder pulled to assist the dogs—nothing more than a dying dog myself, feeling an awful kinship with the brutes.
The trail led upward over what appeared to be the frozen bed of a tiny stream that wound through great high hills and was bordered by cliffs so abrupt that it would have been impossible to scale them. After a time it abruptly passed through mountain gates into a valley. And there, to my bewilderment, I saw an Indian village different from any I had ever seen before.
Here, instead of squalid barrabaras—mere holes in the ground entered by tiny tunnels through which one must creep on hands and knees over refuse and filth to emerge in a cellarlike habitation in whose center was a fire pit—here, I say, instead of such barrabaras, were cabins built of logs. Outside of them were caches such as white men build, elevated in the air on log pillars, accessible only by the aid of ladders, dry, well roofed, secure. I had no time to bestow more than a startled glance before the dogs gave tongue and rushed forward recklessly expending their last reserve of energy. Poor brutes! I appreciated what scent and what they saw told to them! Food and shelter from the cold that was so intense that it burned and branded like living flame.
From the village there swept outward an answering pack, turbulent, resentful, strong. It rushed toward us a living and menacing flood, ready to gnash and tear our feeble bodies. Alarmed, I rushed to the sled and seized a rifle, prepared to fight to the last. Suddenly a shrill whistle shrieked through the still air, and the pack was checked. Doors opened and figures appeared upon the great white snows. As if amazed by such an unprecedented sight as that of travelers, these figures were slow to move. Then, as if recovering from a spell, they rushed toward us, men, women, and children, clad in skins, or voluminous denims, and shouting guttural expostulations to their dogs. They closed down upon us where in a little black group on the snow we waited. They breathed soft, but audible “Ah-h-h-hs!” at the sight of two white men, one of whom lay still and blanketed on the sled, and the other who, still clinging to a rifle, waited to learn whether this reception meant life or death.
Suddenly they parted, muttering “Peluk! Peluk!” and with something akin to deference made way for a man who walked hastily toward us and came to a stop. Tall as he was, for he was at least six feet in stature, he appeared squatty, by reason of his enormous width of shoulders, his gorilla-like chest and arms, and his great pillars of legs that braced apart and became rigid when he halted. His head was bare, as if he defied the cold, and his bristling hair, cropped, coarse, and thick, was blue-black save where an occasional thread of white bespoke age or hardship.
His face was massive, with high cheek bones, and his chin scarcely concealed by a sparse black growth of beard, was formidable. His thin-lipped, firm, almost cruel mouth was unsmiling. Nor was there a gleam of any discernible emotion, anger or mercy, in his black eyes that, sharp as those of a bird of prey, slowly and carefully scrutinized us. They stared from beneath eye brows heavier than I have ever seen in any Indian of the North. The nose might have been that of a great Sioux chieftain; a warrior's nose; the nose of a fierce and relentless conqueror.
And then, to my astonishment, he spoke in English:
“Put down gun. Don't shoot. You starved. Me know. Dogs most dead. You most dead. This man—him already dead? No, think not; for then why haul on sled? Come. We help.”
I dropped my rifle and then in soft and decisive gutturals he addressed his followers. Babbling like children released from authority, some of them drove the village dogs away while others, with hands on the sides of the birch rails, pushed the sled forward at a run. Our dogs ran lightly with unstretched harness. Peluk, after another look into my face, patted me on the back and said, “Not far now. Me understan'. You not strong. Here! I help!”
He thrust a sturdy hand under my armpit and assisted me in that last lap of the race against death in which we—Jack Braith, myself, and the dogs had won.
CHAPTER II
Up a slight bank we stumbled and out upon the long, gently ascending slope where the village was built. My astonishment increased when I observed that the cabins were so situated that they formed an orderly whole and bordered a straight and well-defined street. At its upper and higher end, as if posted where it might overlook all, stood a log structure larger than any of the others in the village which it appeared to dominate. A dozen glazed windows stared at us. A porch with hewn pine pillars, the first of its kind I had ever seen in Alaska, was centered by a storm door. It seemed a long way off, and yet my relentless guide prevented us from rushing into the first cabin for succor and forced us forward until we came to a halt in front of the great house.
“The Lady Malitka!” he said, as if in apologetic explanation. “Malitka must see—and speak.”
Doubtless the excitement created by our arrival had warned her of our coming. She may even have observed us through some one of the windows. But we were compelled to wait there in front of the house, like those seeking royal audience, for perhaps ten full minutes. Eventually the door opened and through it stalked a figure which, much to my surprise, was not clad in the customary native garb or the garb of the trader or that of the few white denizens of the North lands.
Her clothing was akin to the garments of civilization, being made of heavy wool that must have come from some English or perhaps American loom, fashioned into a short skirt and a straight-hanging, loose coat not unlike that of a woman's sporting costume. Her feet were incased in exquisitely made boots of soft leather that reached above her knees. She stopped and from the vantage of the raised porch looked down upon us. Instantly the natives made gestures of grave respect and all their garrulous clamor died to silence.
She called to my conductor and I think must have asked him to explain what he knew of our presence, for the shaman spoke at length in his own tongue, pointing now and then at the back trail, at our wearied dogs that had fallen upon the snow too nearly spent to resist the chance for rest. Then, leaving my side, he stepped to the sled and abruptly pulled back the blankets, exposing my partner, who lay as if unconscious.
Malitka moved quickly forward, and looked down at Braith for a moment before turning her scrutiny upon me. It may have been due to the weakness of my condition or the unexpected situation in which we stood, but I somehow felt that she was coldly considering our fate as an aloof judge might in a case involving life and death; I felt that if I did not find some favor in her sight I, with my helpless companion and starving dogs, might be whipped out into the wastes to inevitable death.
Her face was turned fully to mine and on a level—for, although I am five feet seven inches in stature, she was as tall as I. Hers was a clean-cut face with an aquiline nose, firm chin, and with nothing in it to suggest Indian blood. Her mouth was not Indian. It was too well formed, too small, too thin-lipped, and now it suggested inflexibility, perhaps mercilessness, that was disturbing to one in my position. Her head was bare and great masses of hair, nearly blue-black, were plainly but well done up, which was also a most unusual thing for a native woman.
But it was her eyes that held me, that probed, asking unvoiced questions, that disconcerted me with their still stare. I think that had I been confronted by any less austere being, any woman betraying more humanity, I should have cried to her in exasperation to make an end to this wait inflicted upon one helpless, unconscious man, and another who was giddy from fatigue and starvation.
“Who are you?” she suddenly asked. “And how did you find your way here?”
“We found our way here only because we came upon a sled trail and are—as you see—and we followed it,” I answered.
“But you have not answered my first question? I suppose therefore that you are either prospectors or traders, and”
“We are neither,” I interrupted, eager to be done with this inquisition, and for the first time I saw an actual break of something human in that stern face of hers, for she started as if curious to learn what other motives might bring men from that thousands-of-miles-distant civilization to such an unknown land as this.
“You are then—what?” she demanded, still staring at me with those extraordinarily cold eyes.
“If you must know,” I exclaimed, exasperated and resolved to put an end to this delay that meant more, I feared, to my partner than to myself, “my friend and I took on the task of coming into this country to find a man named Harris Barnes, or to get proof of his death. We were employed by a firm of lawyers and”
I stopped as abruptly as I had spoken. I was momentarily consternated when the woman lifted both hands upward with a jerk, held them there arrested after that involuntary movement, and her lips opened as if to speak, while her head bent suddenly forward and her eyes opened widely and fired with a different light. She was alive, at that moment, vivid, intense, startled.
“You came to—you came here—thus far—to—to” she began, then stopped as if catching herself and as if become impatient of further dalliance after reaching swift decision.
Quickly she turned from me, slapping her hands together as if to emphasize the decisiveness of commands, and spoke in their tongue to the waiting shaman, and to the villagers, who sprang to obedience. Some of them leaped forward, unharnessed our poor dogs, picked them up in their arms and carried them away. Others under the shaman's direction gently lifted my partner from the sled and solicitously carried him into the great house in front of which we stood. Bewildered, feverish with starvation, relieved as I was, I could not but note the astonishment of these natives whose demeanor indicated that this was a most unprecedented event. They even hesitated as if questioning whether they had heard her order aright, until she sharply repeated it. They glanced at me with a new and strange look of respect. Their previous attitude of expectant, obedient waiting was dissipated. In my wonderment I stood stolidly alone, until the woman returned from the foot of the steps whither she had walked while giving directions, I think, and herself put a hand on my arm.
“Come,” she said in that same peculiar English that, while flawless in expression and construction, had yet in it a faint foreign accent. “They are taking your companion to a room in my house, where I will give him attention. You, too, are my guest. I am sorry for the delay. But—it was important. Your friend is smitten by the snows and starvation. You are in but little better state. Can I assist you?”
She had changed remarkably, and was now but a woman, sympathetic, succoring, pitying. Her shapely hand, strong and firm, caught itself beneath my arm and helped me, weak, staggering, surrendering at last in a great let-down from resolution and distress, until we also stood within the warmth of her home. She conducted me into a huge room and indicated a chair.
“Sit there, for the time being,” she said, “until I have cared for your friend.”
Again she made that sharp clapping sound with her hands, and as I sank into the depths of a comfortable chair I was but half aware that in response to her summons a neatly clad native woman appeared, was given some quick orders, and disappeared, followed immediately by this strange hostess. I think that, overcome, I must have propped back and closed my eyes, for I have no recollection of any emotion—not even of curiosity—until I was aroused by softly spoken words:
“Drink! Must now drink this. Hope not too hot. Drink. Open eyes and drink.”
I opened my eyes obediently and my nostrils caught an odor that made of me for the moment little other than a famishing beast, the sharp pungent scent of beef tea. I clutched the cup with the wolfish hands of a starving man. I tore it from the brown hands of the servitor, as a famished wolf snatches ravenously at food. Heedless of its temperature, I drained the cup with great gulps, nor could I have restrained my desire had its heat scalded my throat.
“More!” I cried. “For the love of God! Bring more!”
Half frightened by my shout, the native woman took the cup from my hand and backed away. It seems odd to me, now, that even then I paid no attention or regard to my surroundings; that I sat there watching the door through which the woman had disappeared; and that I twitched restlessly in my seat, angry with delay because another cup, other pints, whole gallons of that warming and life-restoring fluid were not immediately put at my disposal. I heard muttered conversation in that unknown tongue outside the door—unmistakably conveying to me that the servant woman had addressed herself to her mistress, as if seeking directions, and unmistakably the quiet, steady instructions in reply.
I waited through an agony of famine, an interval that may have lasted for five minutes. And then again a cup—too small!—a mere tantalizing thing of torture, it seemed to me—was tendered for my grasp. Again I drained it to its dregs, holding it bottom upward in the air that its last faint trickle of contents might minister to my need.
“Enough now! Bimeby more. Lady Malitka say so. Not good too much too soon, or bimeby be sick!” said the native woman, in her hesitant use of my language. “No! No!” she expostulated, when I insisted. “Too much no good. Pretty soon have more. Must wait. Lady say so.”
Sometimes, thinking of it all, I see myself as I must have appeared there in that room, after she again left me alone. A gaunt skeleton of a man, gray-haired and bearded, booted with mukluks in which were many holes of camp fire and wear, and with sprawling, tired feet, a torn cap of skins on his head, skinny, twitching hands, unwashed, chapped and cracked, thrown listlessly on the arms of a denim-covered chair, with feverish eyes fixed vacantly upward, and cursing perhaps because more food was not immediately forthcoming. All of that time is still hazy. But, so quick is the marvelous recovery of one's brain and body by replenishment of supply, that I think in perhaps no more than half an hour I straightened in my chair and for the first time appreciated my surroundings.
The room was the largest I had ever seen in a structure of logs. At one end a great fireplace of rough country rock was filled with live coals and a glowing section of log, and on the mantlepiece were collected, haphazard, crude curios of Indian origin. Above it were other rare things of native craft or significance. Story knives of bone, precious possessions of long-dead hands; fish and game spears; great bows with thongs of caribou sinew; miniature canoes, bidarkas, oumilaks of birch or skin; caribou belts with their tale of teeth attesting the prowess of the hunter; ancient war clubs of knotted root and natural shape; buttons and medallions of carven bone; a great tusk of a mammoth dug from some glacial belt and intricately depicting the chase of ancient times; tanned skins upon whose brown surfaces had been burned or pigmented the crude conceptions of some struggling creative artist of his tribe who may have been, to it, a master.
I then observed a lounge fashioned after the comfortable shapes that we of the civilized world have evolved, chairs of various shapes, skins of precious worth, from that of the monstrous white polar bear to the red fox and the caribou, covering a time-polished floor, and in one corner was a Russian stove of porcelain whose white tiles seemed out of place and incongruous in such a setting. Its glow, through tiny grates, seemed watching and malevolently triumphant over the broader but less utilitarian blaze of the open fire.
In the ceiling the stained beams that served as rafters were alternately carved in grotesque patterns as if the concept of them had been stolen from ancient totem poles in villages far away, villages washed by the tides of the open sea. At one side of the room were crude cases containing books, whose bindings, in orderly array, protested that they at least were not of barbaric origin. A huge Russian lamp was suspended above a generous center table on which were carelessly thrown many things, indicating the amenities of civilization grotesquely placed here in the heart of the unknown, thousands of miles from the place of their origin.
My impatience for food gave way to curiosity, and it was well that it did, for I was compelled to wait another half hour before I was served with something more substantial. I was hungrily finishing the last crumbs when Malitka entered and, standing in the doorway, said, “Your friend has recovered quite well. You may see him if you wish.”
I arose and followed her into a comfortable bedroom in which were two substantial beds evidently made by an amateur cabinet-maker, a washstand with a square mirror in its center and, best of all, a portable bath-tub filled to the brim with steaming water. Jack was sitting in a comfortable chair wrapped in a blanket and with a bandage around his head to shield his eyes. The door closed behind Malitka as she disappeared.
“What on earth do you make of all this?” he asked. “Where are we? I've had food and a woman who talks English put some wonderfully cooling lotion on my eyes, provided me with a bath that was about the most enjoyable one I've ever had—after all these weeks on the trail and in dirty barrabaras—and, from the sound, I judge they have emptied the tub and filled it again for your benefit. Also it seems that somewhere here in the room are two suits of clothes and some clean underwear of some sort that are put out for use. Where the deuce are we, anyhow? I can't understand it at all!”
“No more can I,” I replied. “It beats me.”
I found the two changes and saw that the underwear was of the coarse type provided at trading posts. It was not new and, furthermore, must have been packed away for some time in a moth-proof preparation. The two suits of clothing, Mackinaw trousers and coats, also betrayed wear and storage, although clean. But I did not pause long to consider these matters, for the bath was an enticement.
CHAPTER III
The short arctic day was gone long before I had finished my welcome change into cleanliness; and then, leading my partner, I emerged and wondered whether I should be permitted to return to the living room with out an invitation. It is a fact that I was still perplexed by this strange woman's demeanor. Despite her attention and hospitality she radiated a chill aloofness, amounting almost to an expression of dislike, and quite as if whatever she had done for us was through sheer impulse of humanity and nothing more. Yet it seemed impossible that in that land so unknown, so remote, any human being would not gladly and eagerly welcome another, particularly if that other came from the distant outside world and spoke the tongue of civilization. In all my varied wanderings, for I was a habituated explorer, I had never before come upon such a peculiar, preposterous situation as this in which Jack and I found ourselves.
While I stood there in the hallway, hesitating, the door of the big living room opened as if Madame Malitka had heard our approach, and she appeared to reassure us.
“You will come this way,” she said, more as if accustomed to giving orders than invitations.
We followed her into the room and took seats, suffering embarrassment through the slightly prolonged silence that ensued. She had seated herself beside the fireplace whose roaring flames furnished the sole light in the great room, making across the heavy-beamed ceiling constantly shifting and flickering shadows. Heavy curtains had been drawn across the windows, lending an air of profound seclusion. Yet here in this big, comfortable, well-furnished room, it was difficult to realize that we were not dwellers in the midst of a hundred other similar dwellings, rubbing elbows with erudition and within reach of the entire populated world. It seemed incredible that thousands of unmapped miles of mountain waste, barren, snow-clad plains, and cold Northern seas intervened between us and the nearest touch that we might make to all that teeming life of the lower latitudes.
Madame Malitka had changed her garb. I have wondered many times since that night whether it was through a vanity that could not be entirely subjugated, or a fixed habit of clinging to that slight but rigid hold upon self-respect which every being who has known civilized forms can never quite abandon and lose.
She sat beside us, silent, staring at the fire as if perplexed by some untoward event, clad in a simple blouse of some white woolen material, a skirt of regulation length that fell in plain folds to meet the tops of regulation shoes. I use the word “regulation” because I can think of no other to signify such an astounding factor of importance as the sight of a pair of woman's leather shoes in such a place. In any great city on earth they might have been deemed coarse, perhaps unfashionable, but here, in the heart of remoteness, they became pregnant with meaning. Plain leather shoes of calfskin in a land thousands of miles from where the skins of beef calves are tanned or produced!
The woman wore none of the ornaments customary to her sex. Her delicately shaped ears bore no jewels, and stood white and clear against the masses of her black hair. Her face, in profile to me, with the light of the fire illuminating one white side, was Minervalike in its chiseled outline, clean cut, cold, judicial, and yet capable of many nobilities. It was the profile of a face that might soften into summer's warmth with love, yet might harden to winter's chill with hatred. It suggested tragedies; dead ambitions; betrayed confidences; conquered hopes!
As she made a slight movement with her slender, yet capable hands, my inquisitive eyes caught a glint of gold, and I saw upon one of her fingers a wedding ring.
“You are feeling better?” she questioned, and both Jack and I, not knowing which of us she addressed, told her that we were, and each in turn thanked her.
“Snow blindness,” she said, without shifting her gaze from the fire, “passes swiftly with care and treatment.” She paused and then, turning toward me, asked, “Where did you come from—up here?”
“From a village that I think the natives call Thluckstova,” I replied. “We had hoped to get food there. They were starving.”
“Doubtless! she said, and repeated, “doubtless. The Indians of this country lack foresight. And so, when the warmest seasons cause the game to go far northward, they—pay the penalty. Death teaches much—too late!”
I turned and stared at her. My partner, lifting bandaged eyes, also faced her as if wondering what peculiar place this might be and how peculiar this hostess of ours.
“The natives of this place that you call Thluckstova—I think it lies many days' journey to the southeast—they gave you directions how to reach this place?”
I cannot to this day tell what there was in her voice, rather than in her words of mere idle gossip and inquiry, that put me on guard. I answered evasively:
“No, madame. The natives of that village did not tell us how to reach you. We could not understand their tongue, but we gathered from their vague signs that somewhere in this direction might live those who would help us. We could not have found you save for a random trail of sled runners upon snow which we followed.”
“I must find out who made them,” she muttered as if speaking to herself. “The unforeseen chance—one in a thousand—the detail overlooked! Others might see the same and”
With a quick, sharp movement she faced me as if about to ask something more, met my eyes, and then turned away.
“Well,” she said, “you are here, and safe. The chance in a thousand. Do you know how far you must have gone to the northwest to find another human being? More than two hundred miles!”
“We should have died,” I admitted.
“Then,” she said., suddenly facing me again, and staring at me across the firelit space, “you acknowledge some obligation? That which I impose upon you is secrecy. For certain reasons which are not to be questioned I, and those who live in this village, desire to remain undisturbed, unknown. Is it agreed that if you leave here, you will tell no one of this place?”
I did not immediately answer; but Braith, deep-voiced, intent as none but a blind man can be, swung toward her and said, “Of course! Does one betray that other who saves him? Madame, or miss, whatever you may be, I call you to mark that my friend and I are gentlemen. To such the wish of a woman who has saved them is a command.”
I saw her turn and study him, as if an unexpected and vital being had interposed in her orbit. His bandaged eyes were directed toward hers by instinct. It was as if they stared at each other.
“For some reason that neither of us can question,” he continued while she considered speech, “you request silence. And so, when we pass from here, we forget. Your motives we cannot question. That is a fair compact. Is it not?”
She nodded her head as if his sightless eyes could discern her acceptance, regarded him for a moment more and then, as if recalling my presence, turned toward me and said, “Perhaps it would be better to light the lamp. Will you favor me—no—I”
“Permit me,” I said' and took from her hand a box of matches and, after a period of fumbling, lighted the Russian lamp that hung from a beam above the center table.
Both Jack and I hoped that she was about to vouchsafe some explanation of herself, her strange village, or her desire for secrecy. This was not her intention; for she fell to cross-questioning me regarding our mission, and I suspected that before beginning this examination she wished the light full on my face as if to gather possible ocular evidence that I was telling the whole truth. I saw no reason why I should evade, for neither Jack nor I had the slightest ulterior motive, nor any mission other than that of which I had told her.
“A man named Harris Barnes,” I explained, upon discovering that she expected me to give a full and explicit account of ourselves, “if alive, is sole heir to property in Boston valued at about a quarter of a million dollars. A considerable number of years ago—about twelve as I remember it—he had a quarrel and final estrangement with his father who never saw him again and never again communicated with him. Barnes, the elder, died nearly two years ago; but before doing so, and conceiving the quarrel to have been due to his own irascibility of temper, he made a will in which he sought to make amends to his son.
“He not only left him the entire property, but added thereto a perfectly legal but peculiar codicil in which he laid upon his executors the obligation of administering the property intact for a period of five years in which they were to exhaust every possible effort to locate Harris Barnes, or to find acceptable and authentic proof of his death. In the latter event, if Harris Barnes had in the meantime left a widow, she, on proof of good character and worthiness, was to come into possession of one hundred thousand dollars, and the remainder of the estate was to be divided among certain distant kinsmen of the family and numerous charities.
“The charitable associations have the most to gain. One or two of them are in need of funds and have been most active in the matter. The executors, but one of whom ever knew the younger Barnes personally, are all men of means and prominence and disinterested. I have met them and believe them honest men, although perhaps they are of an older-fashioned and rather—I am inclined to think—well, to put it baldly, a strait-laced, puritanical type. They lay considerable stress on that clause pertaining to the past, moral reputation and so forth, of the widow, if there be such. They are the kind of men who would far rather see the money all go to charitable institutions and churches than into the possession of a woman who was not up to their rather harsh ideals.”
Madame Malitka had sat thus far without interruption, steadily eying me, and evincing nothing more than listening attention; but now, as I paused, she commented in a mirthless bitter voice, “There are many such men in the world from which you come. I have known and—yes, suffered!—from such. Narrow-mindedness, injustice! These are the curses one finds in the world that make isolated spots such as my village seem a paradise of contentment!”
Her suppressed vehemence for an instant shocked me by its appalling fervor, as if she had exposed one hot glimpse of the smoldering volcano of hatred against civilization seething in her brain—the civilization of which, it could not be doubted, she must at some time have been a part. Nor could one doubt that her place had been one of refinement in that dead life, for her every movement and attitude proved it. There was a suggestion of the imperial in all that I had observed of her demeanor that could not possibly have been gained through the sole experience of dominating, directing, and dictating to a mere village inhabited by natives.
I was aroused from a momentary abstraction, and a lull of silence that may have lasted a full minute, by her voice asking, “Well, and what then? You have not explained your presence here.”
“Oh,” I replied, “as-to that Ummh! Where was I? Yes, I have told of the Eastern situation. Well, the younger Barnes was traced until most of his movements were known with the exception of an interim of some two or three years which were of no importance, for he returned to his previous haunt, Seattle, and from there he sailed aboard the Merman, a sailing schooner which he had chartered for Katmai, on Shelikof Straits, Alaska. She was laden with trading supplies and there was no attempt on Barnes' part to conceal the fact that his intention was to found one or perhaps a chain of trading posts for furs in this country.
“The Merman never returned to port. She was lost with all hands; but it was learned through a half-breed native of the tiny village of Katmai that she came there and landed her cargo; that Barnes bought scores of dogs there and transported others from Kadiak, which is a large settlement, and with native drivers and guides set off into the unknown interior which no white man was ever known to have invaded.”
I was thinking of that backward trail when Jack spoke.
“Madame,” he said, “my friend seems to believe that he has told all there is to tell. You have asked for an explanation. It is your right. But an explanation, to be worth while, must be complete. Shall I finish it, or is what he has told sufficient?”
Glancing at our hostess, I could not be certain whether it was the story that interested her, or merely a desire to hear him speak that caused her to reply.
“Yes, I should like to hear the remainder.”
“When the inquiries had reached that point,” Jack said, turning his bandaged eyes toward her, as if despite his temporary blindness he could see through the wrappings, “those men in Boston, whom I have never met, sought a man of some reputation who was qualified to undertake the task that was left them. An absurd task! One that could never have been contemplated save through ignorance. Good Lord! Think of it! Trying to find one man in an unmapped country a third the size of the United States of America, bigger than half the dinky principalities, some of the dukedoms, and half the kingdoms of Europe! This partner of mine has crossed Africa, Tibet, and mapped the Cordilleras. He can use letters after his name. Under that hard old gray head of his are many memories and that which is learned by much experience. He's not old—though if you didn't know his age you might think so. His hair turned white because of the places he had fought into and out of. He knows wild lands and how to live in them. So when this Boston bunch came to an end of their trail at Katmai, they went after him to finish the job. We had been together in Africa and—some pretty tough times, Jim, eh? And I had been in the arctic.
“There was money in this venture. He wrote to me to join him. Partners are that way, once they understand each other, and always know just what the other will do if it comes to hard trails and a bad pinch. So we took on the job. Partly because men such as we always need money, partly because it gave an excuse to travel into a country which was unknown. There's always something interesting in places that are unmapped. We've tried some of them, my friend and I—for just that reason!”
He laughed quietly as if at the absurdity of our characteristics, and ran his hand upward across his bearded, strong, and not unhandsome face; for this partner of mine was of the viking type.
Madame Malitka sat quietly in the depths of her chair with one hand supporting her firm chin and regarding him with a fixed and almost disinterested immobility.
“It seems that some of the Barnes outfit—most of them—died there on Katmai Pass. A wind-swept place of torture. It's—it's an awful place—a frigid hell! The natives don't tackle it very often. They come to its foot and camp. Sometimes for days and days at a time they watch the tip of one high and mighty peak off in the distance. If above it there comes a swirl of snow that makes a cloud, they will not dare. Sometimes, day after day, there comes that cloud. They loaf in their camp. Then comes a day when the sky is topaz, the air sharp and keen as a knife, the white peaks reaching up and up as if in contact with God, and—they rush to throw the packs on the sleds, to lash the trail canvas over them, to gather and harness the dogs. The men take a last look at the camp to see that nothing has been left behind or half buried in the trodden snow, and then—'Mush! March on!' every one cries and there is a race.
“It runs upward, downward, skirts great white swales, clings to narrow places where if a sled were to skid or sway, both sled, men, and panting dogs might fall a thousand feet. And always their eyes are on that far peak. A funnel of the world this! A place where if comes a wrathful wind it sweeps men, dogs, sleds, everything to eternity. Natives have died on that pass within a hundred yards of security. It's a known fact that an iron teakettle weighing pounds was lost off the wreck of a sled owned by an early explorer, Colonel Ebereley, of Tacoma, Washington, and was blown across a hollow a mile in width, up over a rolling mountain more than two hundred feet high and later recovered in a valley beyond that hill.
“A storm must have overtaken the Barnes expedition when it was in the midst of that enormous funnel in the tops of the miles-long hills. Nobody knows who escaped. The few who did never returned to Katmai. The bodies of those who were lost, a big portion of Barnes' stock in trade, and dead dogs were found in that mountain pass a year later. We learned all this, my partner and I, from Petalin, the half-breed trader at Katmai.
“But we learned something else; that there was a rumor among the natives that Barnes survived and with the remnant of his natives and dog teams pressed on into the interior. I've an idea that he was all man. At Sevenoski, an Indian village on the banks of Lake Illiac, they tell of a white man who, with but a few natives and dogs, came and went, heading northwest. They say these men made a camp on Lake Illiac, to rest and recuperate, and then disappeared. Going on, you understand, northward, seeking some indefinite goal.
“That country is hard. Natives in there used to have tribal wars. They were unfriendly. A guide might take a traveler just so far and no farther, if travelers there were. Bethel wasn't known then; but there are natives in that hinterland who say that the first and only white man they had ever seen came through, passed, was gone. That man could have been no other than Barnes.
“My friend and I are on that long-obliterated trail; looking for a man who may be dead or alive. The game has gone northward because the season is milder than usual. The natives for more than a hundred miles southward starve. We have starved, too. Had we not accidentally found you, we must have died, I think, unless there is another native village beyond on which we might have stumbled.”
Madame Malitka, whose gaze had never for an instant wavered from his face, lifted her hands and with a decidedly foreign gesture snapped both thumbs and fingers, as if dismissing something of which she knew.
“Another native village? Beyond this to the northwest or northward? There is none for more than two hundred miles, as I told you.”
“Then, that being so,” Jack said, bending forward, “we have been fortunate in finding you. There is, after all, something in the mercy of God bestowed upon the lost. A something bigger and greater, madame, than I would wish you who have been so kind to us may ever require. Perhaps you have never wanted it. If so you can't understand what it is worth.”
It is quite impossible for me to make clear all that I had discerned in this strange woman, that sense of aloofness that encircled her like an invisible shroud, that inhuman, uncanny expression of being entirely foreign to ordinary emotions; so that I was actually surprised when I saw her white hands lift upward in a gesture of impulse, half reach toward Jack, and then fall limply back as if vanquished and helpless. I think that in that moment she might have told us much save for the intrusion of her native servant who opened the door, hastened to the table, and with the air of a trained menial made preparations for our evening meal.
CHAPTER IV
I awoke on the following morning to hear a peculiar scraping noise in the room that was still in the gloom of the arctic forenoon, and oddly enough it did not seem unnatural that I should be there resting in a comfortable bed in a very comfortable room which was not uncomfortably cold because of a half-opened door leading to the hallway in a well-heated house.
The noise continued. I leaned upon an elbow, lifted my head, and discovered Jack in the painful act of shaving his face. Shaving away a beard of weeks' growth is trying, enough for a man with full use of his eyes: but for one who is blinded and works by touch I presume it must be a harrowing operation. I could gather this from muttered objurgations, subdued lest by full explosion they disturb me.
“Hello! Why for the remarkable toilet?” I queried.
He turned toward me, with razor in hand.
“Wish to the Lord I could see! It seems to me we're in a place where it's a sort of duty to at least look clean. Would you mind taking a look to see if I'm unpresentable?”
He wasn't, by any means.
We were awaiting our breakfast in the main room when Madame Malitka appeared, and I observed that she was attracted by the change in Braith. She gave me a subtle feeling that she had sufficient femininity left to consider her own toilet. I saw her eyes glance downward at her own apparel, and then back at Braith's bandages. Upon me she bestowed no more than a glance. Why should she? She was young, I a gray-haired, hard-visaged man with the scars of my wanderings and my years ineradicably imprinted upon what had never been a comely face. I doubt if her years were more than thirty. My partner was almost young enough to be my son, a bare thirty-three.
“You will be pleased to learn that your dogs are well on their feet again,” observed Madame Malitka, “and that within a few days they will be as good as ever. That leader of yours has too much timber wolf in him to make friends readily, but he permitted me to caress him this morning.”
“You have been out to see them—this morning? So early?” I asked, pausing to stare at her.
“Yes. I make a round of the village every morning, long before this hour. Natives are but children, after all. The only way through which they can be disciplined is by an example of regularity. I set their tasks, hear their complaints, render judgment in disputes. Sometimes it requires much patience, and—the demands for things that hurt! But one must not flinch.”
She frowned, and then, recalling herself as if from unpleasant memories, diverted us from the topic by making inquiries concerning the broader affairs and happenings of the outside world from which we had ventured. It was not until we had finished our breakfast and the brief cold glare of a mid-winter arctic sun had arisen to its strongest light that she turned to me.
“Your friend,” she said, “must not, of course, venture out. Within a few days he may; but now he must submit to his bandages and treatment. I will care for him. But, if you feel restless, you may move as you will. Your dogs are being kept by Peluk, the shaman. If you wish to see them, or him, his house is the last down the street you see—the big double cabin at the end.”
I didn't know whether to take this as a leave of absence or a discharge at liberty. But I was eager for a more studied inspection of our unique surroundings.
“Yes,” I admitted, “I should like to take a walk. I do wish to see our dogs. They've saved us, after working for us until they were but hide and bone.”
I garbed myself for outdoors and walked slowly along the village street. Now that my brain had come back to its own, I marveled more than ever at what I saw; for here were indubitable evidences of orderliness and cleanliness. There was not a cabin that did not have at least one glazed window. To one who has never been in such a country as that great interior was at that time, this may seem a strange cause for amazement; for only the experienced can know that a pane of glass was far more difficult to obtain than gold. Another strange feature was that the cabins were not crude hovels, but were well constructed with corners turned in the curious fashion employed by none but Russians. This led me to believe that at one time or another, perhaps prior to the Alaskan purchase, a Russian trader or perhaps officer with his tiny garrison has founded this place.
Readily enough, I found my way to the shaman's house, escorted by a pack of curious dogs, great, well-fed beasts somewhat crossed into the wolf breed—an increasing pack that appeared none too friendly. The shaman himself came rushing from his door to scatter them with guttural shouts.
“You better,” he commented. “Feel all right now? You come see dogs?”
When I told him that I had he led me around to the rear of his cabin where, in a warm little outhouse, half cellar, but cozy and comfortable, my faithful friends charged round me with that welcome which not even a man may surpass. I knelt among them patting the upturned heads, caressing the bony bodies, talking to them.
“Very good. Pretty soon all right. Few days plenty grub,” the shaman said as we dosed the door and he led me toward his own house. “You come in while? Ummh?”
Secretly eager to learn whether the outward indications of thrift and cleanliness were maintained within, I followed. I was scarcely surprised, so accustomed had I be come to the unexpected in this extraordinary place, to find that the house was floored with what was evidently worn, whipsawed timber, that it contained rough but substantial furniture, and that there were not wanting many small devices of civilization, including an alarm clock and a cheap little phonograph that from its prominence of position I deemed to be the shaman's most prized possession. A squaw, fat and ungainly, but clean, and dressed in denim, stood stupidly staring at us until reminded of her manners when she grinned fatly and said, “How-do.”
The shaman insisted on my taking a seat.
“Very good you found trail here. Lady Malitka very angry by those trail. Young men go with no word from her or me—who must say 'yes' before anybody come or go.”
“What's that?” I asked, to make sure that his hesitant painful English had not been at fault. “You say no one can come or go out of this valley without madame's or your consent?”
“Yes. That it. Just so.”
“But—but suppose any one refused? Suppose they came or went, anyhow?”
“Oh, we killum! That's all,” he said complacently. “Long time now since must killum any one. Two mans from village long way off come here. Make lies. Get one mans here who think like go with 'em and maybe come back with lots mans. We find out after they slip 'way. Klootch tell what she hear talk. Me take ten men. Go after. Very hard work. They go fast. Nine sleeps before we can catchum and shootum. One man white, same as you. Very big man. Scar on face. Black beard. Black hair those man had.”
For an instant I did not speak in response to this callously told tale; for in my head ran that description. It pretty accurately fitted that of Barnes, whom, or news of whose fate, we sought. Had this been his finish, after all? Seeking a place to establish his trading posts, had he come upon this well-made village, a remnant of staid and substantial Russian architecture that had, in its situation and substantiality, the ideal requisites for his purposes and plans? If he had, and could have established himself here and then thrown out radiating outposts, he certainly might have commanded in time a little kingdom that even the great Hudson's Bay Company could not destroy. And by the time the company learned of it, for it was far distant from their nearest posts, his ramifications would have been unassailable.
For the moment I did not consider the possibilities of our own peril; but now they recurred to me, together with a vague speculation on the extent of mercilessness that apparently lay masked in the heart of Madame Malitka. The thought prompted me to caution.
“Of course natives from other villages can come here?” I questioned idly, as if not much interested in this ruffian's story of murder.
He grinned meaningly, almost happily at me, and his eyes twinkled as if with savage delight.
“Nope. Know better. Keep long way off. Afraid. Think lady very bad spirit witch. Makeum die if come, maybe makeum die if talk. All keep long way—many sleeps off. Many not know that village here at all. Think, many years ago, this place got spirits—what you say—ghosts.”
Suddenly it dawned on me why I had been unable to follow the map given by that ancient native so many miles away. Out of his kindness of heart that aged man had given me a map to the best of his ability, showing us not how to reach this village and Malitka, its evil spirit, but how to avoid it! Truly our escape from starvation had been by the mere accident of restlessness of some of her young hunters who had broken her hard laws and left a trail.
Fearing that my face might betray my anxieties, I asked him casually where he had learned to speak English.
“Lady Malitka teach some. And some I” He stopped, as if weighing his words and then added: “Me shaman. When need things from outside—clocks, music machines, flour, medicine, white man's clothes, matches, tobacco—all that—must go myself. Must speak little English. Ummh? So learn all can. Me travel far. Once go on big ship to Juneau where mining ma chines go clumpety-clump all time. You been Juneau?”
His sharp eyes that had been inspecting the floor suddenly fixed themselves upon me as if he were a lawyer in cross-examination.
“No,” I admitted, “I have never been there. Why?”
He chuckled heavily and said: “When go to Juneau, buy things lady wanted, paid gold. White miners try find where got gold. When leave, follow long time. Hard work loseum. Think maybe they never got back to Juneau.”
There was a grin of significance in his final sentence that did not escape me, and warned me against inquisitiveness. I took advantage of the rushing entrance of a small boy to twist in my chair and look away. The boy paused, regarded me doubtfully for a moment, and then with a delightful little smile came forward and made friends. I caught the chubby, black-eyed little chap up to my knee, and for the moment forgot Peluk. I was made aware of his regard by his next words.
“Very funny, ummh? That boy not make friends so easy most times. Him got no father, no mother." Him got nobody but her” He pointed a strong finger at the old woman who had suddenly approached and, as if horrified by the child's familiarity, clutched him from my arms and carried him, rebellious, away.
“That old devil,” said the shaman with a grin, “my mother's sister. Keep my house. That boy's mother her daughter. His father got squaw already. So when that boy born, Indians go kill boy's father and kill boy's mother. That natives' law. Unnerstan'! That boy what you call bassard, ummh? What think now?”
“That, Peluk,” said I, somewhat overcome with indignation, “is not the boy's fault. He may grow up to be better than any of those who killed his mother. The brutes!”
“White man not do same?” he questioned me. And then, when I did not immediately find words to explain the white man's attitude toward the illegitimate offspring of their tribes, he added softly: “Think your people not likeum either, ummh? Maybe not kill father, mother, but makeum what you call hell for child what not can help itself, ummh?”
And then I couldn't answer; for it was true. With an absurd sense of being cornered by a mere savage, I blurted, “I don't give a damn what others do! I'll not visit the sins of the parents on their children who can't help themselves.”
“Ummh? Say again. Slow. No can unnerstan' when speak quick,” he said, and I repeated it. He made no response or comment.
“So you did as I would have done—took the boy in and cared for him, did you?” I asked when the wait became irksome.
“Yes,” he said. And then, after a time, “And Malitka stop all that kill girl who go bad. Same with many things. Maybe Indian not lissen to me but—what lady say—well, mus' be done.”
“And suppose they didn't obey what she says?” I queried, more interested in his reply than he knew.
“Then they die. We killum,” he answered without hesitation.
“Good Lord!” I cried aghast. “You kill any one that doesn't do what you tell them to do?”
He stopped and then at my look of horror became more eloquent.
“You think not best, ummh? Fool! Many sleeps away, Indian village where live dirty. Starve when bad winter. Die. Here—no. There cold. Here—warm. There bad barrabara—here good cabeen. There dirty—here clean. There nothings—here rich. Long time natives here not unnerstan'; then, bimeby, see this way best. Lady tell us. We do. So what lady says, muss be done, ummh? Me shaman. Makeum do. If don't do, muss killum. Now everybody see this way best. Faugh! Other Indians nothing! We reech, beeg! Got all this!”
He waved his hand around with a gesture that embraced all his proud possessions and evidence of wealth. I suppose that from his viewpoint he was a Croesus with everything his heart might wish at his command. Perhaps he was right. There are dwellers in other places who know neither bodily com fort, freedom from want, nor satisfaction of possession. A great and powerful man this urbane, semibarbarous savage who was prime minister to an accepted and respected queen.
I returned to the big house at the end of the street with many queries in my mind and many doubts; but of one thing I was convinced, that only by cultivating the shaman to a point of confidence could I gain proof of what I suspected, which was that the white man he and his companion trailers had killed was Barnes. I had reached the very doorstep before I came to the conclusion that it were better for me to retain what knowledge I had gained to myself for the time being, lest Jack, if he knew of it, might so change his attitude as to lead our dangerous hostess to alter her mind about our departure. I found them quietly conversing, and it was difficult for me to think that this undoubtedly cultured and apparently refined woman could, on occasion, calmly pass sentence of remorseless death on any who crossed her will.
CHAPTER V
I shall never be certain what the outcome of our visit to Madame Malitka's village might have been had her prediction that my partner's eyes would recover within a few days been fulfilled; for, considerably to my alarm, it developed into something like iritis. I could do nothing to assist or relieve him; but madame's ministrations never ceased, as if beneath her calm and habitual coldness there dwelt a full and womanly sympathy. Time hung heavily on my hands, for have never been one who can long content himself with books, but who craves outdoor activity.
I became a commonplace object to the natives, to their children, to the very dogs. I wandered at will, and there were at least a score of houses in that settlement that at some time I entered. The evident distrust that at first marked the demeanor of the shaman's people gave way to tolerance, as if being accepted by both madame and him were sufficient.
One brilliant moonlight night I was awakened by the clamor of the village dogs, and the barking of others in response. So keen becomes one's curiosity and interest in trifling things under such humdrum conditions that I climbed from my bed and went to the window. It opened to the rear of the great house, looking out across a considerable clearing to the foremost phalanxes of the great dark forest and to the chill, jagged mountain peaks that stood sentinel in the far distance over this secluded valley. I saw coming out of the dense forest where I had never surmised there could be any trail a dog team of the great strong beasts that were so carefully bred in this settlement. They were harnessed in doubles, with a huge, gaunt, wolf-crossed leader at their head—nine in all, while on the sled I made out the dark figure of a man at rest while an other ran behind at the handlebars.
They came rapidly, the dogs running in the long wolf trot as if eager to gain a known home. Then with another swirl there emerged another identical team, and, to my further curiosity, two more, all racing inward. They passed almost beneath my window, so close that I could see the sharp steam of panting breaths, the little skirl of frozen snow dust arising from the hurrying pads and the lolling tongues.
I turned toward Jack, expecting him to have been aroused by the night sounds; but I presume that madame had given him a potion to ease his pain, for he slept, and I did not disturb him. For a long time I lay in my bed, staring at the dimness of the moonlit room and puzzled by what I had seen. It was evident that teams such as these were used for heavy hauling and not for speed; that they had come from some place unloaded and that their journey had been one of many miles, for otherwise they would not have traveled so late into the night.
After a time the faint noises, and the barking of village dogs died away into that profound silence that never seems so compact, so deathly, as in the great North. I heard as if far back in the forest from which these ghostly travelers came the long-drawn cry of timber wolves, as if they had accompanied them in that journey, and now, baffled, feared to venture beyond the darkness of the forest in the hope of prey.
In this strange refuge of ours I learned discretion; but it was difficult when we three were seated at breakfast not to mention the happening of the night. Madame, calm, neat, competent as usual, seemed unusually silent. It was not until she was pouring the coffee, which was a table task she intrusted to none other, that she said, “I trust you were not disturbed in the night by—by anything?”
It was that instant's hesitation that put me on guard. I looked up at her and found her eyes directed to mine with more interest than her words had implied.
“I thought, I heard wolves in the night,” I said. “But perhaps I merely dreamed of them. I have never before heard any—that is, since we came here.”
I thought I discerned a look of relief in her inscrutable eyes,
“Yes,” she said, bestowing calm attention to her coffeepot, and shifting her regard, “it must have been a dream. There are wolves sometimes, I am told, in the depths of the forest behind us, but they seldom venture this far. The villagers have no occasion to go that way, so I suppose that whenever a wandering pack comes it remains unmolested.”
She paused, and then with unwonted volubility said that the great game regions lay in the opposite direction, and discoursed on the reasons therefor.
“The younger men of the village then, I take it, go that way for their hunting and trapping?” I said, as if not much interested.
“Yes, meat as well as furs for trading must be had somewhere,” she said in an equally casual manner. “Of course, in the summer season they lay in catches of salmon which they smoke for storage, and in the fall seasons they take grayling in quantities. The fish you are eating have been frozen for more than three months.”
“How far distant is the nearest trading post?” I asked, and saw her slowly raise her eyes as if questioning whether there could be anything concealed in my words.
“Oh, a long way from here, to the northwest,” she answered evasively, and immediately addressed Jack as if to end my inquisitiveness.
But the thought ran through my head as I sat in silence and enjoying a most excellent breakfast, that the dog teams I had seen in the night came from due south. Long after the meal was concluded I sat pretending to read, but thinking. I recalled seeing my snowshoes, whose worn webs had been repaired during our enforced rest, hanging on a wooden peg out at the end of the house.
I said nothing to Jack after she had left for what I knew was her daily round of inspection, but slipped quietly out and took the familiar long frames from their hooks. I kept the house between me and the village, slipped my feet into the new thongs, and then, as if merely curious to try them, lest some of the servants in the house be watching, trudged away toward the south east, making pretense now and then to readjust a thong and thus finally gained the edge of the forest into which I leisurely moved until screened from sight. I plunged into it for some hundreds of yards, and then turned due west on my course, and with long, free strides traveled a mile or more before I came to a greater surprise.
I saw, cut through the woods, a clean, narrow roadway leading southward, and in its middle lay the new tracks of the sleds I had seen the night before—snows trampled by the paws of many dogs and interlaced here and there with the marks of moccasined feet. I fell back into the forest and for more than two hours skirted that beaten trail; but never once did I venture out to where my own traces in the snow might conflict, or lead to detection.
I came to a place where the forest thinned, and saw that the worn trail was now ascending and leading to a pass in the high mountains that could not have been seen from the village, so abrupt and sharp was its opening. I was mystified by this matter. I wished that I had time to follow it farther; but time was already spent if I wished to return so that my absence might not attract attention. And so, reluctantly, I swung back and retraced my course, thinking of some excuse I might offer that would account for my considerable outing. I remembered then that we had several times had upon the table the pine hen of the North, a game bird that properly cooked is most edible. I decided that this might prove my pretext.
That afternoon I loitered with the shaman, but found him strangely occupied and aloof, and eager to have me go. Deciding that I was in his way, for some reason or another, I returned to the house and did actually become interested in a novel that twice before I had attempted to read. We played chess, madame and I, that evening, and as usual she beat me. But now and then I thought she prolonged the game as if to keep me absorbed. It was late when we retired but, thinking over the mysteries I had encountered, I could not sleep. It must have been nearly midnight when I heard outside a single “woof” of protest, as if a dog had come in contact with another, and jumping from my bed I again stood at my window.
In all that day I had seen in the village no sign of anything unusual—not a strange dog, a strange sled, or a strange man. But now laboring through the moonlight I saw the teams straining into harness, pulling heavy loads, while in front of each walked a man, and behind each another clung to and steadied the sled handles. Again they passed, ghostly, slowly, until the blackness of the trees outlined against the snow-clad clearing swallowed them from sight. They were off into the unknown trail that I had traced for so many miles. Of their goal I was curious; but again my reason told me that either their destination was very distant, or so close at hand that they expected to reach it before the wane of the moon. The latter seemed most probable.
I resolved to wait another day that any lurking suspicion might be allayed, and then to learn, if I could, whither that trail went and why. Such knowledge might eventually prove vital for our escape. My pretext of being ennuied by lack of movement and my announcement that I proposed to travel eastward into the rolling highlands to spend a whole day shooting pine hens was accepted without comment. I took the precaution to tell the shaman, who grinned and said that they could most likely be flushed on the ridge that he pointed out. That, too, was eastward, quite away from that southern trail. He offered to go with me as guide and companion; but when I told him that it wasn't worth while, and that maybe I shouldn't go as far as the ridge, he relaxed into fat contentment and crudely philosophized on the follies of exerting one's self in a temperature of thirty degrees below zero when it was possible to remain warmly sheltered.
I was off at as early an hour in the morning as I dared, and swung out again in a false direction. I lost no time, after the forest had hidden me, in turning westward, and settled myself to do my best in what might prove a long chase.
The trail, when reached, I found too cut and lumpy to permit of as rapid progress as I could make on its sides, and so, “letting myself out” to the utmost, enjoying the movement in the cold, pure air, and strong after my rest, I made most excellent time until I reached the point where I had abandoned the chase on my first visit. The trail now led through a narrow valley, bordered with high rolling hills. Its ascent became much steeper and harder.
It turned upward to one side and passed completely over a foothill, thence downward a short distance and into what I judged to be in summer a watercourse. The rolling hills gave way to savage mountains, rough, tortuous, and reaching coldly upward like innumerable Titanic needles thrust into the sky. In some places the trail passed between cliffs high and sheer and with a cleft so narrow that one could almost stretch his hands cut and touch the opposing walls of rock. The windings were so frequent that seldom was it possible to see more than thirty or forty yards ahead, where nothing but interminable walls were visible as if there the passage must end; but invariably on coming to these places another narrow way would be exposed, up which the laden sleds had been toilfully dragged. I understood now the necessity for two men and such splendid teams for each outfit.
Up, up, through gorge after gorge, each successive one seeming steeper, I climbed until I reached one where the signs disclosed that the laden sleds had been unpacked, the contents carried piecemeal by hand, and even the empty sleds pulled upward by main force. The place was almost as steep as the pitched roof of a house and could be scaled only by the employment of hands as well as feet. For a hundred yards it bored upward through a cleft that was at no time more than ten or twenty feet in width and whose black walls were so sheer that not even light-falling snow had found lodgment to soften their rugged faces. The outlet appeared to end abruptly in the blue sky between two walls, exactly as if one stared through an enormous gateway to the heavens.
It was difficult for me, traveling light and carrying nothing but shotgun and snowshoes across my back, to make that final ascent, and I was panting heavily when I reached the top, where I halted in swift amazement. I jumped backward impulsively, threw myself on my belly and rested. When my breathing had returned to normal I first divested myself of snowshoes and gun, took off my cap and powdered it white with snow from the trail, likewise my shoulders, and edged upward again until I could rest there and look.
In front of me the trail led downward over a descent almost as abrupt and steep as the one I had just climbed. I beheld its end, a veritable cup in the mountains far beneath me—perhaps a thousand feet below. But that was not the strangest part! I looked down upon the snow-laden roofs of cabins from whose chimneys smoke, gray and pale, curled lazily upward. The cabins appeared, from the distance, to be of the same substantial log structural form that distinguished the village from which I had come. Of these houses there were a score, one being much larger than the others and with chimneys at each end.
The presence of this secret camp was instantly explained to an experienced eye by several great black heaps some hundreds of yards beyond it. No snow was on these, and near each stood the familiar form of a windlass, at two of which men toiled and twisted, hoisting the pay dirt from shafts in the earth. A great pile of sluice boxes carefully stacked, probably at the end of the previous season's work, added further proof that here was gold placer mining on a considerable scale.
As I rested, there flashed through my mind the danger of the position in which my curiosity had placed me. I had ventured into the lion's mouth if ever any man had. Here was the explanation of many peculiarities and mysteries that were integral parts of Madame Malitka's domain; the evasiveness regarding hunting, trapping, and trading relations; the extravagant evidences of thrift and wealth in every Indian's domicile as well as her own; the rigid discipline of the inhabitants who were not even permitted to wander into the great barren beyond without special permission and then, doubtless, only when such journeys became imperatively necessary. It explained the establishing of a ghostly legend filling the superstitious minds of those natives who had heard of the place with dread and causing them to avoid mentioning it, visiting it, or approaching it. It gave the reason for the reception we two white men, starving, had endured when we blundered into this native stronghold and—yes—the interrogations to which we had been compelled to submit before being reluctantly succored!
It was but too plain now that, had we been merely wandering prospectors or explorers, sorely stricken though we were on that hour of our arrival, we would have been driven forth again into the great hopeless mercilessness of the steppes to certain death. Nothing could have saved us from that tortured end save the stern kindness of the shaman's men whom he would probably have sent after us to speed our demise.
For a moment, lying there on the snow, I cursed that strange, tyrannical ruler of this tribe; and then another recollection calmed my hatred, the thought that she had accepted our given pledges that never after our departure would we make known to living man what we had learned, or ever return. She had accepted us as men of honor,
It was a highly embarrassing thought. Honor? That implied that we as her unwelcome, but received guests, could not be expected to spy upon her doings or her motives. And here was I, skin-clad, snow-powdered, prone upon a hidden trail, and spying upon the great secret she strove to maintain! I, one of her guests, permitted to wander at will because she had trusted this honor of mine, although perhaps deeming it impossible that I might discover that which she so inexorably hid. I loathed my discovery and regretted that it had been made.
It was in this state of mind that I quickly crawled backward until detection from any wandering eye in the village below—eyes that are so quick to detect the merest, small movement in spaces so devoid of change—was rendered impossible. And then I resumed my light burden of snowshoes thrown across my shoulders and of shotgun in the crook of my arm and slithered back over the descent. I took pains to obliterate any stray mark of my passage. I took it for granted that in the great confusion of trampled snow any footprint leading upward would pass unobserved, and heeded only the effacement of my downward steps.
The way was very long and the work arduous before I came, in the dusk of the short arctic winter day, to a place where I could leave the trail and plunge into the shadows of the forest. Finally I reached the great belt of pine and fir forest which, owing to its density, was already dark. Here no faint light of moon or star might penetrate and here, off to one side, I heard the abrupt and warning howl of a great timber wolf, disturbed in its quest, uttering the far-reaching call of the pack and of the hunt! No casual wail of protest to the moon, this, but the fierce call that comes in the early dusk when unexpected prey has been sighted and hunger lends desperate courage to attack.
The hour was still early, when measured by hours in lower latitudes where now it could have been but mid-afternoon. But here, in this winter month on whose most benevolent day the sun barely approached the edge of the horizon, and then, unseen, slipped away as from an inhospitable land, it was late.
Once, some years before, I had heard that wolf cry in Siberia when going from one village to another in midday. And now I ran! Of what service to me the shotgun now lashed upon my back, when in my pockets were shells loaded with nothing more heavy than light shot!
It was well for me in that afternoon that I was trained as no athlete can be save through trail and stress, that I was physically endowed as but few athletes are, and that I was bodily replenished and fit. The first pack call came from the left; within a few minutes it was answered from the right. The first lean, dark shape I saw was to my right and running almost abreast. The wolf tactics, unless driven to that extremity of hunger where ferocity creates individual courage, are ever the same—to assemble the pack before making an attack upon man kind.
As I ran, panting but steady, a new and disturbing feature of my situation came to mind, which was that, inasmuch as my only chance for life rested in my reaching the village before I could be overwhelmed, I must take the most direct way which must inevitably bring me out near where the gold trail entered the clearing. It would be impossible for me to extend the chase through the forest and bear eastward so that I might emerge from the direction in which I had that morning started. Furthermore, if at last I were driven to fire, the report of my shotgun would in itself betray the direction of my course.
The wolf pack seemed to be aware of my intent and to know that if I reached the clearing first in that terrible race its prey would be lost; for now the animals closed in more recklessly as if preparing to spring. There was nothing for it but to fire. I surprised them by suddenly swerving closer toward them, and discharged both barrels at a great gray beast that led the pack. I surmised that the pellets could do him small injury even if capable of penetrating his coat of winter fur; but fortune favored me in that both charges must have found muzzle and eyes; my shots were answered with a loud howl of pain, the brute stopped and fell into the snow where it began writhing, and the pack, stunned by the explosion and for the moment terrified, hesitated.
Leaping away I ejected the empty shells and threw in two more cartridges. I do not know whether the beasts fell upon their fallen leader and canniballike devoured him, or whether they were for a few moments terrified into halt; but the thinning light be tokening the edge of the clearing was plain ahead of me before they again came with a rush—and this time I fired one barrel after the other without halting. In a moment more I was out into the clearing, the dogs of the village in an enormous pack were giving tongue and bounding in my direction, doors were opening and natives were rushing forth with rifles and the habitual stillness gave way to a fierce clamor.
So ravenous was the wolf pack that it dared follow me a little way into the clearing, and again I was compelled to fire. The village dogs, brave to a certain point but themselves terrified of the great wolves that make no more of killing a dog than a rabbit, stopped. Their Indian masters with shouts came on. Spurts of flame and the whistling of well-aimed bullets, made possible in that broader light of the clearing, were followed by the shrill howling of stricken animals. For an instant the wolves milled round in confusion, and then turned and fled back to the forest shadows, leaving two or three that gnashed and twisted in agony on the snow. The natives rushed in and dispatched these before any one addressed me. A larger shape that ran heavily, as if unable to race to my rescue as quickly as his younger companions, reached me and I recognized the shaman.
“You very good luck. Me tell you! No can unnerstan' so many wolves. Many years since him pack thees way so close village. Mus' be caribou scarce. Sorry not know wolves in mountains here. Then tell you better not go shootum pine hen. Too bad. But all right now. Ummh?”
The end of the great house was but a hundred yards away, and now I saw emerge from it madame, who came forward to investigate the cause of so much excitement.
“Ah, it is you,” she said, and glancing around observed, “I see you have had a narrow escape from a wolf pack. Most unusual! It is the first time to my knowledge that they have ever appeared in numbers in this valley. I wonder”
She stopped as if suddenly alarmed by some thought and, turning from me, spoke quietly and rapidly to the shaman in his own tongue.
He, too, manifested signs of uneasiness, and I saw him glance in the direction of the gold trail. I knew then that both madame and he were apprehensive for the safety of that supply train that had gone forth but a couple of nights previous; wondering if the wolf pack had been sufficiently formidable to attack and destroy the gold workers in some of the distant reaches that I had that day seen. I could have answered their queries, allayed their fears; told them that the sled trails ran uninterrupted and true to that mining camp up behind in the rugged mountains. It was on the tip of my tongue to do so.
I wished afterward that I had. But I stood silent. And I maintained that silence after the excitement was gone and I found myself back in madame's stronghold, comfortable in body but perplexed in mind.
CHAPTER VI
After the household was still that night and we had all retired, I lay for a long time considering the numerous aspects of our situation in the light of my day's experience. Jack had endured a day of suffering and madame had given him a sleeping potion. He moaned in his sleep. I would have given years from my span of life that night to have him restored to sight and strength, for I conceived our predicament to be one of danger. Moreover, I chafed against the peculiar restraints imposed upon me by his helpless condition. I decided that nothing could be gained by telling him of my discoveries, and that much might be lost, in that anxiety could but torture his mind and therefore retard his recovery.
“No,” thought I, “it is futile and harmful to confide in him at this time.”
I weighed the advisability of a frank conversation with madame; but there again was the difficulty of many strange barriers. Her coldness and aloofness, despite her unbending and steadfast courtesy and hospitality, did not encourage unlimited candor. On the contrary, they impelled one to reticence. And then another aspect of my day's venture presented itself with almost terrifying apprehension. Suppose that those runners, who would most certainly on the forthcoming day take the gold trail to reassure themselves of the survival of the mine packers, should discover signs of my having blundered into their great secret? Suppose that my own wood lore and wild craft had overlooked some little point that might lead them to suspect? Suppose that through mere hunter's instinct, or casual curiosity, any of the runners were to leave the narrow passage cut through that primeval forest and there find, within a hundred yards of its border, the trail of my webs upon the snow as I had gone and returned?
Too well I knew how in the deathly, motionless stillness and quietude of the Far North a snow trace remains unaltered as if engraved upon stone for weeks on end; some times until the heat of the late spring suns leaves that compressed snow standing in clear and readable form upon the very brown of the earth itself. Useless to pray for a swift change and raising of temperature that might bring another generous coating of white to conceal the marks of my journey. Nature has her own ways that are so seldom varied. My sole hope lay in the scales of luck. If my discovery were not exposed by an unkind chance, the day might come when we could travel outward unmolested, unsuspected, under the safe passport of this extraordinary woman who ruled this extraordinary domain.
If fortune went against us Then I could not conjecture the end.
It is difficult for me to recount the suspense in which I lived for the following forty-eight hours. I expected at any hour to be sternly confronted by Madame Malitka and Peluk, the shaman, accused, proven guilty, asked for my defense, and then given judgment that might perhaps involve execution.
When at the expiration of forty-eight hours nothing inimical had chanced and there was no change in the attitude of madame, I began to breathe more freely. In that time I had not again seen the shaman, but decided that if he had learned anything it would be most difficult for him, a superior savage, to conceal that knowledge from me. Accordingly I made it a point to visit his house. He welcomed me with his fat, friendly grin. The little boy came and mounted trustingly to my lap.
“You get all shootum want, ummh? Pine hen no good when mus' be chase by wolfs, ummh?”
“Never again!”
Squatted rather than seated on a stool, Peluk was carving an ornate button of bone, painstakingly making thereon the head and horns of a caribou, and holding the round disk between his legs on a block of wood. I hoped for some further reference to my adventure, but he got up, crossed to a box on a shelf, and took therefrom one of the crude native drills made to revolve by pulling backward and forward a bowstring fastened to a tiny but sturdy bow, and began drilling the hole for an eyelet. I did not interrupt him and finally he stood up, triumphantly, and then most critically examined the finished specimen of his handicraft.
“Him very good button, ummh?” he asked. “Now got three. Bimeby make three more. Very nice, ummh?”
He had all of a small boy's exultation over achievement. I had no need to flatter him in my commendation. It was to me rather astonishing that those fat yet powerful fingers of his could be so deft and that his sense of form was so highly developed. There was much of the artist in old Peluk and his ways of doing things.
“If some time could catchum gold, make very fine button; but where could catchum so much gold, ummh?” he asked, and suddenly looked me squarely in the eyes. I thought I discerned in his a half-mocking light, but could not be certain.
“I thought you said one time that you went on a big ship to Juneau where you bought that phonograph and paid for it with gold? Couldn't you find more gold where that came from—enough to make a button?” I asked, calmly giving stare for stare.
“Ummh, yes, mebbe did so tell. Sometimes me heap big liar,” he replied with his usual grin and urbane manner. The customary soft, musical guttural of his voice seemed a trifle lacking at this admission of mendacity. He thought for a moment and then added, “But little gold go long way. Sometimes, way up there many, many, many sleeps, native find some pieces of gold.” He pointed northward and turned his head as if looking across long distances to where the gold had been found. Then with a little laugh he remarked, “What poor shaman do with gold? No can use gold for nice button when can get nice music box for same piece gold. Music box heap better than gold button, yes?”
“Of course,” I assented, and stared out of the window and yawned.
“All white mans like gold. Heap like gold, yes?” he persisted, when I showed disinclination to discuss the matter further.
“Not all,” I said.
For a time he pondered and then remarked, “I think that dam lie.”
I scarcely knew whether to take this as an insult or not, but on glancing at his broad grin decided to take it as his only method of expressing disagreement, due either to lack of vocabulary or ignorance of a white man's insult.
“Not all of them,” I insisted. “I have known many who cared more for other things. I know one man who learns much about trees, grass, moss. Another who is an entomologist, who”
“What that mean?” he demanded sharply. “Anty—antyologis—what”
“A man who gathers and saves bugs, flies, mosquitoes—maybe birds,” I explained lamely, trying to make him comprehend.
His answer unwittingly betrayed another secret of the place.
“Ugh! Mebbe so! Mebbe so! One time, when I take sleds, go long way, many, many sleeps, whole moons—place call Kadiak. Great village mos' as big as Juneau. Go there, too, same as Juneau, buy theengs for lady—buy good knives, needles, rifles what you call—ummh!—cloths make clothes, kettles, teapot, all sort theengs. And I see man who catchum bugs, butterfly, takeum stickum on paper with pins. Heaps. Catchum plenty. But thees man say no care for gold. I think mebbe tell lie to find out where I ketchum gold what pay for theengs bring here. I think him not such fool as other white mans who ask many questions. All time ask questions where from come, where go, how come and—I think mebbe bug man smart and want know too much. Anyway, when go, he not one who follow us to try find where from come. Mebbe so bug man not like gold. Like bugs better. Humph! Head go bad mebbe. All same what you say—clazy?”
It came to me as he talked that I had stumbled on to another one of madame's extremely secret methods of purchasing what she wanted. Once it was from Juneau, many hundreds of miles away, and another time from Kadiak, hundreds of miles distant from Juneau. By never sending her emissaries twice to the same place she minimized the chances of discovery. Knowing the nomads and natives of the earth as I did, I yet marveled at this extraordinary old Indian's daring in making journeys that would have appalled many of even the superior men of the white race by their unknown terrors and hardships. The shaman's boast made on that first day when he had gossiped came to mind, “Me go far,” his way of asserting superiority—that he had been a great traveler. Aye, he had gone far! He had perhaps known the very long, hard trails over which Jack and I had painfully suffered and traveled, that trail that he must have taken from Katmai. I sought to induce my garrulous acquaintance to gossip further.
“Kadiak! Kadiak? You don't mean that you have ever been that far away?” I remarked. “It's a very long way—many sleeps—isn't it? Big mountains and”
“And much water! Great waters!” The shaman rose to my bait of adulation. “Take big umiaks.”
The umiak is a monstrous canoe of walrus or other skins that the coast natives of Alaska handle through seas in which even a small schooner might not survive. I have known of one that had twenty paddlers. Swift and sturdy they are, like the Dyak pirate proas of Borneo, and capable of much.
“Take umiak—many umiak to cross bad waters from Katmai to Kadiak. Wait for still day. Go fast. Paddle hard.”
Intent upon another of his bone disks from which he planned to add another button to his collection, the shaman threatened to relapse into silence.
“And so,” I queried, “when you left Kadiak the bug man did not try to follow?”
“No. But other white mans did. Many white mans.”
He chuckled and then stood contemplating the bone disk in his hand. The light through the window, despite the pallor of the arctic day, appeared to slip round him and to touch the interior of his clean cabin, incongruous with its evidences of the two great extremes of barbarism and the latest achievements of science. It lingered over a sheaf of fish spears, bows and arrows hanging on pegs on one side, rifles and cartridge belts on the other, a pair of mukluks on the floor, an alarm clock on the shelf, and phonograph on a table.
“Many nights we wait to start. Many times start. Always white mans, hungry for gold, watch and start when we start. Bimeby when dark night we go. Very dark. Go very quiet. Make no noise. Dip paddle still—so! Get away. Bimeby paddle very hard. Paddle all night. Think all right. Think no white mans follow. Come day. You know place call Shelikoff water? No?”
He stopped and when I evaded his question looked at me sharply, and then made expansive gestures.
“Waters there very bad. Make very rough sometimes. Rough when that day come. Think mebbe not get across. Mebbe get die in water. Then see, mebbe mile behind, other boat. White mans boat. Follow to find where we get gold. But—bug man no there. Nope. Bug man not one of white mans.”
He stopped as if considering the peculiarities of one who had other ambitions than gold and muttered something that sounded to me like, “Mebbe so! Mebbe some white mans no want gold. Mebbe bug man like better” and then his voice mumbled away in diminuendo to silence.
“How do you know he wasn't one of the white men who followed?” I demanded.
His attention was scarcely distracted from the captivation of carving that crude bone disk into a lasting depiction of animal form when he explained, without bothering himself to look up.
“Oh, me know! Tell other umiaks go ahead to land. Make my umiak mans turn back. Row hard. Row fast. White mans in boat wait. Wait long time. Then think best better turn and go home—back to Kadiak. Mebbe sorry follow. No can tell. They row very hard. What good. Me have strong mans in paddles. Know how. Paddle fast. Too fast for white mans who—yes—very good. But we catchum. Got new rifles. Shoot very good. Shoot far. Bimeby one white mans stops. Falls in bottom. Other white mans stops, shoots back. Killum one man by me. Me shoots again. Shoot very good, me! Very fine shoot. White man go down in boat bottom.
“Two other white mans grab rifles. Shoot. Three other mans my umiak fall down—die. Very good young mans, mine. Make me mad. Me shoot two time. Catchum! Two time. No more!” He held up two fingers to make certain that I appreciated his numerals and his marksmanship. “Both white mans go down. One fall on edge boat. Me go slow. Afraid mebbe white mans still shoot. No. No can shoot not any more. All petituk! Finish! Gone dead! So, sink boat. Put our dead mans in water. No can carry home to put in place where other dead—with bows, arrows, rifles, grubs, paddles by side on top logs. No can do. So put in water. Mebbe find way to Great Spirit without all that, ummh? What think?”
He seemed for the moment more absorbed in this spiritual question of his superstitious savagery than in any remorse for his actions. Inasmuch as I couldn't very well with diplomacy tell him that I regarded him as a callous old murderer of the very first class, I confined myself to the statement that probably the Great Spirit would understand and overlook the fact of their unseemly burial. Also that the Great Spirit could probably find them if he wanted them very badly. The shaman roused himself as from a reverie and lifted both hands with an air of benevolence and religious reverence.
“Yes,” he said in the tone of a fine old missionary addressing a flock of hopeful converts. “Great Spirit see all things. Very good. Love ail mans and mebbe some squaws. Make all mans love all other mans.”
For that old ruffian with his oiled, musical voice to assume a sanctimonious air and dilate upon universal love and benevolence within three minutes of having blandly confessed to deliberate and rather wholesale murder, was a trifle more than I could endure. I gently put my boy friend on the floor, arose and buttoned my Mackinaw, and made for the door. When I left Peluk he was humming, with all the fervor of a zealot, an air that I presume must have been a sort of rude chant to his deity, and chipping, industriously, at his new button.
CHAPTER VII
Madame was out on her rounds when I returned, and Jack, having endured a restless night, had not arisen. With hands in pockets I loitered restlessly about the big living room until I came to one of the bookcases which were merely painted boards in series of shelves. By chance my gaze fell upon an oilcloth-bound notebook that I had previously noticed, but had not examined. I took it from its place and opened it. Instantly it held my attention; for it was nothing less than a grammar and pronouncing dictionary of the native tongue. I proved this because I had picked up, inadvertently, several words of common and frequent-use. The book was written in a minute, compact handwriting, with here and there corrections as if its compiler had sought exactitude with increasing knowledge.
It was an admirable work, the best I had ever seen on any tribal language. Through out a considerable portion of my life native languages have fascinated me, and knowledge of them has sometimes been of imperative necessity. The distinct excellence and notable simplicity of this work, and its unusual method, interested me. I reflected that it was a quick method that could be applied to almost any tribal language on earth, and enthused with the thought I carried the book to my own room where I had an ordinary field notebook, and became engrossed in copying it.
Jack, in the meantime, had arisen and groped his way to the living room. Although the grammar was limited in scope due to the smallness of the native vocabulary, I had not completed it when Madame Malitka returned and the midday meal was announced. The thought of any secrecy did not enter my mind, but I put the book and my unfinished work into a drawer lest they be disturbed, or the book itself accidentally injured. I do not remember why I did not refer to it in our idle table conversation, unless it was that I was still thinking of it. Moreover, conversation between us three white residents of the great house had imperceptibly drifted until it was mostly confined to madame and my friend—perhaps out of respect to my habitual reticence and the fact that I am but a poor and unentertaining conversationalist.
Our meal was not a slow one on this day. A child was to be born in the village, and madame, in her combined capacity of village dictator and village doctor, did not long delay her departure. Nor was her absence unwelcome to me, although Jack now and then growled at his loneliness and objurgated his misfortune. Long before madame had returned from her mission I had completed my copy and restored the book to its original place on the shelf.
Thereafter, for days on end, I amused myself when alone by mumblingly memorizing the vocabulary, and by listening whenever possible to the native speech. There was but one feature that prevented me from putting my new knowledge to the test, and that was the fear that if it came to madame's or Peluk, the shaman's ears, they might believe me guilty of prying into that greater secret of theirs—a suspicion that to Jack and me might prove dangerous!
This listening reticence led to a most peculiar discovery, which was that the natives among themselves never referred to the secret mine, although totally unaware that I had mastered their tongue sufficiently to understand practically all they said. It was as if they were bound by some secret understanding and pledge; as if the subject were taboo even among themselves in their vast isolation and enforced security. This secret accomplishment I had so casually gained did, however, speedily inform me of Jack's and my status in the village. It was not reassuring; for I soon perceived that we were there on sufferance, and remained there unmolested merely through madame's will and orders. On one occasion I had most ample proof of this. It was when I ventured into a house where there were some Indian curios that interested me, learned that its owner, one of those who spoke some English, was absent and overheard a querulous conversation.
The house itself was one of the best in the settlement. The homes of the chosen few who had been instructed in the English tongue always were—as if they were of the elect, superior to their fellow townsmen, selected for strange missions, envoys in great affairs, mighty travelers into the unknown and formidable beyond, men who were repositories for preserved secrets, and—men who could brave foreign dangers and remorselessly kill those who sought to intrude therein!
A gnarled and malevolent old crone, veteran of vicissitudes, of hard game trails and past starvations, disdaining the innovation of chairs and squatted morosely in the corner of the room upon the floor, addressed the woman who was evidently her son's wife.
“Why come these two white men?” she demanded, peering at me with rheumy eyes that doubtless had suffered in the smokes of many barrabaras and many camp fires. “Why did they reach here? Why are they still alive—the one who is with us and that other who is blind in the great house? Has the arm of Peluk weakened and grown fat and slow? Have we no longer a tyune?”
“Hush, mother! Hush! It is by the will of the great lady that they be left as they are. Peluk is still chief. But the wisdom of the great one bids us be friends with this and that other who is blind.”
For a little time the figure in the corner was silent and thoughtful, while I, pretending to have understood nothing, inspected a carved walrus tusk hung upon the wall. And then with an indescribable wail like a lament for the lost, the old hag began rocking to and fro, mumbling dolorously, rebelliously:
“Ayia! Ayia! Ayia!”
To me it sounded akin to the cry of the jungle dwellers of far eastern India, or the cry of bewailment of South Sea Islanders from which latter, perhaps, this tribe had sprung.
“You know not as I, who am so old!” she muttered. “White their skins—black their hearts! Do I not know? Many sleeps, many moons northward, they came and took from us furs, giving much that, not knowing thereof, we had never wished nor prized. They took the furs that kept us warm. They gave therefor strange goods and foolish things, and a drink that made our people mad. We died, up there, we of the broad and happy lands, because they came. Furs they wanted. Then came gold. For that they, too, went mad. Comes to us one who knows all this—the great lady—whose brain is cunning as the fox, who shows us the way. Do we live as we did, dying when there was no game, abiding in the earth in winter, fishing in rivers when the sun shone? And now this great one goes mad! Peluk has gone mad. He should slay. The dead tongue never speaks. It is good that I who am old must soon die! Ayia! Ayia! Ayia!”
The wail died away. The younger woman continued her household affairs. I passed outward through the door. I was profoundly disturbed by the indications that at least some of the natives clamored for our lives; for surely the old crone could not be the sole one who was rampant with hatred. There might be many others more physically capable of carrying desire to execution. Thus ruminating, I was convinced that our sole chance to escape lay in promptitude.
For some days Jack's eyes had been strengthening, and now he had discarded his bandages and protected his weakened sight with nothing more than an eye shade. Ordinarily conversation in the living room lagged or flowed with a languid tranquillity. When on this day I returned, perplexed and apprehensive, I found the outer door not ajar, but unlatched, and I suppose I entered noiselessly. I was brought up short by a sound that I had never heard before during our entire residence in that great house. It was the sound of madame's laughter. It came freely, as if she were amused by some utterance of my friend.
Since when, thought I, had he recovered or exerted his ability to amuse? How long had it been since last this quiet, austere woman had laughed? Standing there, pondering, I heard Jack's drawling tones, and again another outburst of her laughter, musical, caressing, free. I turned and closed the outer door sharply, stamped the light snow powder from the soles of my moccasins, hung my cap on the great antlers of a moose that served as hall rack, and entered.
It was as if my advent induced restraint and brought an end to congenial and oft-repeated conversations. Madame was seated in a great chair on one side of the fireplace, Jack on the other. He had discarded his eye shade and looked slowly around as I entered and his time-tried and time-proven affection was in his voice as he welcomed me.
“Hello, old sobersides! Where have you been? Out glaring at the Indians or staring at the tops of the hills and wondering whatever's behind 'em? Pack itch again, I suppose! Want to be off somewhere.”
He turned toward Malitka and said whimsically, “Madame, this sober, untalkative, unsmiling friend of mine might be the original Wandering Jew.”
Uttering some commonplace, politely banal reply to his banter, I dropped into the most convenient chair. That unexpected sound of unrestrained laughter had aroused me from a state of placid—no!—of disturbed lethargy. I studied our situation as I had not theretofore while those two others in the room fell into a most casual conversation. I don't to this time recall anything of what they said. I think it was something pertaining to the breeding and handling of dogs. Think of it! Dogs!
It is possible that my anxieties, suspicions, and surreptitious knowledge combined to make me unreasonably secretive and hesitant to act. I didn't know what to do. That is bald truth! Knowing my partner's impetuosity, his method of daring everything and going direct to confront any crisis or danger, I doubted if I could trust him with my entire confidence. Once, in Tibet, where the exercise of nothing more than tact, diplomacy, and the preservation of an undisturbed demeanor might have rendered our pathway smooth, he had proven unequal to the task of concealment and betrayed us by sheer inability to play for a very little while his part. That failure cost us much suffering. He was candor itself, in everything he undertook or did. I concluded that I must study the conditions betrayed by that laugh, that cessation of conversation when I entered the room.
My opportunity did not come for some days, because I dared not discuss the matter with him. I suspected at least two servants in the house of understanding some English, and of keeping a silent and perhaps listening watch over us. I was not even certain but that this espionage extended to actual eavesdropping. And so, being cautious, it was not until the day that Jack could venture out into the open for the first time, and we were well away from the great house and the possibility of being overheard, that I broached the matters uppermost in my mind.
“Madame Malitka is a remarkable woman,” I remarked casually.
“By Jove! She is!” he answered with enthusiasm. “And I want to tell you something else. I think her about the finest woman I have ever known in all my life. Marvelous! Don't you think her the most beautiful woman you have ever seen?”
“Yes,” I admitted slowly and without looking at him, “she is—well—at least good looking.”
“Lord! She's more than that!” And then he laughed as though at my lack of discernment. “You old misogynist. I might have known that you have probably never so much as taken the trouble to look at her—or any other woman, for that matter. It makes me think of the time you and I saw the woman accidentally unveiled in Cashmere and I stopped and gasped and you went”
“But—we're not in Cashmere just now!” I interrupted. “Madame Malitka—I wonder if she could be entirely trusted. I wonder if”
“I'd trust her with my life!” he exclaimed quite as if defending her from an aspersion. “Look here, old man, if you've got any bees in your bonnet about her, shoot them out. I don't know how she got here, or why. A gentleman can't ask his hostess questions of that sort, can he? He must let her volunteer them, if they are to be mentioned at all, mustn't he? If you care to know how I regard her—and here let me remark that I have talked with her, and been alone with her, and studied her a lot more frequently than you have!—I'll tell you frankly that I'm for her.”
He had halted in the very middle of the street and faced me, bending his handsome head a trifle to adjust that difference in stature between us.
“What have you got up your sleeve?” he demanded at last, in our old familiar vernacular. “You don't like her, do you?” And then when I did not immediately answer, laughed as if at an absurdity and thumped my shoulder with, one of his big, fur-protected hands. “Come on! Don't be a damned fool!” he exclaimed, turning away and resuming his stride, while I, a little in the rear, trudged after him.
But I wasn't walking carefree, for now I was positive that I dared not tell him what I knew, what I suspected, what I feared.
“In any case, what I think of Madame Malitka, or the others, doesn't count,” I said. “But what to me is important is that we get away from here as soon as we can. We came up here into this country to learn what we could of Harris Barnes. That's what we are paid for. Here nobody knows anything about him, and of him we can learn nothing. We've got to go on—out into the northwest. We are rested. Our dogs are rested. You will soon be able to travel. And so—all I can say is that we must begin to think of a start.”
I saw reluctance and disinclination in his face. His aversion was voiced in a single and indicative phrase.
“There's no rush about it,” he said, “because the snow holds for months to come.”
“Not for us,” I objected stubbornly. “We don't know how far we have to go. All we know is that Barnes must have gone on into the northwest. Off there, a long way off, lies the Bering Sea. He may have crossed the narrow straits and plunged into Siberia. We can travel only when the snow is hard and deep enough to cover the undergrowth. We must go.”
I saw that he recognized my logic. He breathed deeply, as if in resignation, hesitated as though to find an alternative reason for delay and, finding none, was slow to reply.
“Yes,” he soberly admitted, “we came up here to do a certain thing. We took money for it. We're obligated to do our best. Well—we will do it. But—by heavens!—I wish it were different!” He stopped as if to better regard me, and demanded, “When do you think we should go?”
“Not later than day after to-morrow,” I said. “Provided, of course, that the weather holds. And, if I can, I wish to get Peluk, the shaman, to go with us for at least a day or two as a guide.”
“He'd be a good one,” Jack muttered; “but why particularly him?”
“Because, if I can, I'd like to induce him to show me—something that he told me of—some days since.”
I couldn't very well explain that I hoped to induce Peluk to lead me to the place where, in my belief, he or his followers had murdered a white man whose name, if my conjecture was justified, was none other than Harris Barnes.
“All right,” he said. “I'll be ready when you are. But I'll tell you this, Jim, I'm lazy. I hate to go. And—Jim—I understand Malitka better than you do. And I like her! ”
His familiarity of designation did not escape me. To him she was neither “our lady” nor “madame.” She was Malitka.
To tell him all I knew would clearly be disastrous to our mission. He had become subject to her through the least logical and sane of all human influences, that of affection. Noble ideals, empires, wealth, the welfare of nations, and so on downward to merely individual aspirations, have been squandered, wasted, lost, or defeated at the foot of that fallacious, alluring, conquering shrine.
CHAPTER VIII.
Peluk proved anything but difficult to engage.
“Mebbe better I go show first pass in mountains. Very hard pass to find if not know how. But—mus' ask lady. No can go if lady say 'No.'”
And madame, after a moment's thought, gave her consent.
“What Peluk says is quite true,” she admitted. “The first passage to the northwest is difficult. Once through that you will find a stream which you must follow. I will give and explain to you a trail map.”
I was somewhat perplexed by her readiness of consent, her evident intent to make our departure easier, her apparent desire to so direct us that we might avoid mishap. I was further astonished when from her desk she selected a map and handed it to me with the suggestion that I make a copy of it. I took it to my room where I might work undisturbed, and spread it upon the table. It did not present the appearance of having been used in trail work. It was too white, clean, unsoiled; but there could be no doubt that whoever had produced it was a skilled cartographer; and, furthermore, its copious explanatory notes were in English and in that same precise, small handwriting that I had observed in the grammar I had surreptitiously copied. It was while working on it that the thought came that perhaps I could lead the shaman to indicate on the map the place where was buried that white man who might be none other than Barnes. And then, if he could not be induced to conduct us to the spot, or if it was too far away, there was the chance that we could find it ourselves.
Peluk was at his everlasting task of carving when I visited him on the following morning. The day was a trifle brighter than usual. The light of the window against which he sat made of him an almost solid silhouette—no—more like one of the old Dutch paintings wherein the artist has permitted the light to flow vaguely around the outlines of head and face, to so disperse itself as to show a fold of a garment here and there, to suggest indistinct, almost elusive shapes. The shaman appeared like a monstrous idol, as he sat there against the light.
“Ummh!” he said. “Lady say can go? Very good. Think mebbe good you take four more good dogs from village. What you trade forum? Ummh? Think mebbe you got something I like. Ummh?”
This acquisition had been in my mind for days; but knowing the enormous value a native of Alaska places upon his dogs, I had deemed it beyond fulfillment. I offered him my watch. He grinned and produced one of his own, cumbersome, heavily incased in silver. In vain I tried to get him to accept a tiny camera, a gold match box well wrought and engraved. Always he inspected the proffered article, studied it for a moment, grinned, handed it back, and with a chuckle shook his head.
“Nossing more?” he queried, reaching for his unfinished button and carving steel, as if our attempt at trade had failed.
“Nothing I can think of. You don't care for money. You have a watch.”
He glanced at me from the corners of his eyes without movement of his head, reverted to the button, held it up to the light as if to inspect it more closely, and said, “Mebbe got gun—what you callum—'volver? Shootum mebbe five, six, mebbe more times. Mebbe I like that for dogs, ummmh?”
Why on earth should this man covet my revolver? It was useless to me in that land where shotgun and rifle are the only firearms which can slay for food. I thought it but fair to enlighten him of its possibilities.
“A Colt's pistol doesn't shoot as far as a rifle,” I explained. “Shoots good, but not like rifle. Understand. Shoots true. Kills. But—not a long distance. Did you ever shoot one?”
“Nope,” he responded promptly. “But me shaman. Nobody got what you callum? Peestol! Yes that it! Peestol! Make me big mans here, ummh? Good! For peestol and cartlidges me give four dog. Very good dog. We trade?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “I've got a pistol up at the great house.”
“Other white mans got one, too? Mebbe more trade, ummh?”
“No,” I said, “he has none. But I'll trade. I'd like to see the dogs.”
“Good!” he said, arising with the startling quickness that seemed impossible to such a bulky form. “You go fetchum peestol. I go ketchum dog.” He stopped, rubbed his chin with his fingers, grinned, and added, “Mebbe best say nossings anybody, ummh? Me like make quiet—see? Like make other Injuns think me big man when showum what got.”
He put his hands to hips that were lean, despite his great shoulders and chest, and bent forward with an explosion of laughter. “Foolum some time mebbe, ummh?”
When I returned with the pistol he coveted, he held in leash four magnificent dogs with the great breasts and shoulders, the broad heads and powerful jaws of the cross breed of timber wolf and Malemute. They strained at restraint, moved restlessly and gracefully about his legs, and one of them, deep-throated, yelped as though eager for the work and adventure of the trail.
“These good, ummh?” he asked.
“It's a trade,” I replied. “Let them go and come inside. I'll show you how to work the gun.”
He slipped the leashes and the dogs scampered away. In his house I laid upon the table a full box of cartridges, saw that the chambers of the revolver were empty, lifted and repeatedly snapped it at an imaginary mark. With that same slow grin he took it from my hand and stared into the muzzle. I warned him against that time-proven folly. I was surprised by his clumsiness and recklessness with even an unaccustomed weapon. I took pains to caution him, for which he evidenced gratitude. He put the revolver and the cartridges on a shelf, seemed to dismiss the bargain, and then started toward the window ledge on which his work of artistry and tools still lay.
“See here, Peluk,” I said. “I have a map. You understand? Map! Paper that shows trails, villages, mountains, rivers, Understand?”
He turned toward me abruptly as if perplexed but eager to learn. I took from my pocket the copy which I had made through the kindness of Madame Malitka, and spread it upon the floor, kneeling over it, and endeavoring to instruct him as to its symbols.
“See, sun over there in summer. Down here in winter,” pointing with my hand. “These marks mountains. These rivers. These trees.”
“Ummh! Where get?” he inquired, standing stolidly above me as I knelt.
“Madame gave it to me. To show how to go. Understand?”
“Yes. Lady give. Make show how way go, ummh? Good! Can see. Here mountain pass,” and he pointed with his stubby finger. “Here water, here woods. Heap remember woods. Make good camp for you, first sleep. You go mebbe—what you callum?—'leven 'clock forenoon. Be in edge woods five 'clock. Very good start. You like me go that far, sleep your tent, come home next day?”
I accepted with alacrity. If all went well and I could gain more of his confidence on the trail it was possible he would mark the map for me so that I could find what I sought. He volunteered to send our sled around in the morning to be at our disposal for packing. He entered into the adventure as if he were glad to take a winter's trail once more, after long inertia.
I was eager to escape, and was yet loath to pass from creature comforts, the last, I was well aware, that we might expect for many weary, toilsome days. The rigors of an Alaskan winter trail were anything but pleasant. We were more than usually silent that night. All of Jack's lightness of spirit seemed to have left him. He was restless and thoughtful. Madame, while at ease, had but little to say, now and then staring somberly into the fire with an unusual frown upon her brow, and I sometimes wondered if she repented of her original leniency that had spared our lives, and still more so of her permitting us to depart bound by nothing more than our pledge of silence. I wondered if she knew that there were those in her village who grumbled because we had been permitted to survive, and were held in check only because she was the law and its rigid executive.
Finally I went to our room and did what simple packing was possible to lessen the labors of the following morning. I do not think I was gone more than half an hour; but as I returned to the living room I heard her say, just as I opened the door, “No, no! Impossible. There is nothing you can do for me, my friend, save to forget everything regarding me and mine. That is final! ”
Again, as on previous occasions, I felt that my entrance into their presence ended an intimate conversation.
The morning came, clear, cold, and with the lifeless stillness of that latitude in winter. We were packing our sled when to our surprise the shaman arrived with another, surveyed our outfit that was scattered on the snow preparatory to laying in, and abruptly and cheerfully took command. He was almost boisterously important. He ordered the curious villagers to stand back. He selected two or three stalwart young men and instructed them to divide the load between our sled and his own, explaining to us in English, “Dogs go easier when loads this way. If all load on one sled other dogs go too fast. Makeum all work.”
He was so solicitous for our future that he unwrapped and inspected the great store of delicious, birch-smoked salmon, objected to some of it, and brusquely commanded one of his henchmen to go immediately and select something better. He saw that the dog fish was tightly packed, and well placed, the bundle taking up the forward end of his own sled. Our “grub box” he opened, and inspected to make certain that it was well filled. Even the battered and worn sheet-metal stove with which as well as a trail tent, madame had provided us, underwent his scrutiny before he would pass it on to be packed, the last of all our impedimenta on the nose of our sled. He personally saw to each lashing and then bade his men bring the dog teams, and declared everything in readiness.
When our dog team, augmented by the four magnificent animals he had sold me appeared, he supervised their harnessing and I saw that even our equipment had not been neglected and that there was not a band of leather, or rawhide, a knot or a stitch, that had not been repaired and made perfect.
“Feedum your dogs all time myself,” he said, with his gentle grin that exposed his white, strong and perfect teeth. “When trade other dogs, putum all together so be friends in team. Now all go very good. No fight. Work good. This beeg one not very nice with mans don't know. Mus' make friends with him. Mebbe liT too much wolf, ummh? But strong! Go fast! Phwew! Like that!” And he gave a shrill indicative whistle through his teeth.
His own dogs were already “put in” to his sled. Great powerful brutes that wagged bushy tails and strained and whined and barked in their eagerness to be off. A slim, tall, but sinewy man stood quietly holding the leader of our dog team by its collar. I did not remember to have seen him before, but could not avoid noting his high cheek bones, aquiline nose, thin lips, lean face, and unwinking black eyes.
Holding the shaman's lead dog was another man, broad of shoulder, lean of hip, and suggesting an athlete fit to run a Marathon. We were ready to start. The shaman turned to Madame Malitka, who stood quietly observant in the entrance of the great house, with a great loose mantle, magnificently barbaric, priceless in value, made of the rare sea otter's fur, thrown across her shoulders, its voluminous folds held like a drapery about her by her hands, and its high collar turned up to protect her ears, neck, and cheeks from the cold. Her blue-black hair, massed and beautiful, was carefully coifed as usual. Her fine eyes, dark, impassive, directed themselves from one objective to another, as if to observe all. Her delicately but firmly molded lips remained immobile, until she spoke to us her farewell.
It was as if she dismissed us, forever, from her life, she to whom, it seemed to me, our advent and visit should have been epochal. We, the first men of her own white race with whom she had conversed for years, bringing, like strange argosies from the outer world that she must have known, rare freights of intelligence and communion. Her firm, white, and competent hand slipped from beneath a fold of that rarest of fur and was extended to Jack. He took it, held it for an instant, bent over it, and sought her eyes as if at the last he were beseeching her to relent and abrogate some decision.
“Peluk will start you well,” she said quietly. “After that—you can find your way. I wish you a safe return to those places from which you came.”
As if finally and irrevocably rebuffed, Jack's hand released hers. His eyes lowered after one direct look. He turned away and drew on his fur mittens, carefully adjusting the long gauntlets that protected his wrists from the cold. He did not look up until she said “Good-by,” in that same restrained, calm voice, and then whirled impulsively and said, “It isn't really farewell, then, is it?”
“That is the better word,” she said, and held her hand toward me.
I had already donned my mittens, but now pulled one off, remembering the courtesies of that civilization which she had cast behind. I took her hand in mine, and would have instantly removed it but that her fingers held mine for a moment as she stared at me thoughtfully. I thought the grasp was one of friendship and frank trust.
“Hathaway,” she said, “you are gray and old and experienced. A block of ice! A peak of hardened snow—but—wise! I think—had you let me—I might have talked with you more than I have. But you did not. You will keep your word in good faith. I ask you to hold our friend—yes, my friend as well as yours!—to his pledge that once you have left here neither he nor you are ever to mention me, this place, your visit, or anything that you have seen, to any living being. Nor are either of you ever to come back. You are to forget. That is understood, is it not?”
“One can't forget at will,” I replied with exactitude. “But of this, Madame Malitka, you may be sure, that in all other things our promise holds. Is that sufficient?”
It seemed to me that we held each other's hands for an unnecessarily long time before she said, “Yes. That is sufficient. Good-by.”
She did not wait to see our start. I looked at the group of natives standing obediently and respectfully aloof, with a white band of snow between us, our dogs and loaded sleds, and when I turned for a final glance at Madame Malitka, she had gone. The door of the great house was closed, as if we had been suddenly and permanently barred from its warmth and shelter.
The shaman gave a loud shout as of one starting upon great emprise. The Indians who had been restraining the leaders released their grips. The quivering, expectant animals abruptly strained into their harness, with lolling or baying tongues outhung between white fangs; the sled shoes after the last clutch as if reluctant to lose their holds upon the snow suddenly moved with tiny complaints and creaks of parting, and we were off. The natives of the village, children, squaws, klootches, and bucks, young and old, together hastened beside us through the street until Peluk threw up his hand and with one harsh, vibrant word sent them back. We slipped across the downward swale into the ravine that cut from sight the village and all who dwelt therein, ruler or subject, and all the noise died away save that which was of our own movement.
CHAPTER IX.
We were somewhat surprised by Peluk's generosity in bringing two native runners with him, for we had expected that they would leave us and return after a run of perhaps a few miles; but they did not, and took turns in tirelessly leading the way. It is one of the characteristics of even first-class dog teams that they will travel faster when a runner is ahead, exactly as if this human pacemaker stimulates them to greater effort. The shaman for the greater part of the time rode in princely state, lolling back in the rear end of his sled upon our tent and wrapped in a great red fox robe, blanket lined. Now and then when the “going was good,” it was possible for Jack or I to ride while the others ran behind clinging to the handlebars.
We had not expected to halt, due to the late hour of our starting, until we reached our proposed camping site; but promptly at one o'clock the shaman uttered a loud shout that brought us to a standstill, and tumbled out of his sled. It was in a small clump of timber where fuel was easily obtainable and his two followers immediately began making preparations to start a file.
“No good hurry go fast,” Peluk explained. “Make camp early. Very good rest hour. Have tea. Good smoke. Good eat.”
And so we contented ourselves as best we could, although the shaman prolonged our stop to nearly an hour and a half, gossiping in fragmentary English sentences, but never addressing the two natives who throughout the halt spoke scarcely a word to him or each other, preserving a stony silence. And yet, when we resumed our march and traveled through the afternoon, we were not sorry when we came to our camping place at an early hour, for our muscles had not come back to long endurance. We were glad to halt in the shadow of the great trees.
Here again the shaman's foresight was proven by the fact that it was scarcely necessary to unpack all our sled to make the camp complete. With that celerity and order that is learned only through the making of many camps, in less than twenty minutes the tent was pitched, fragrant pine boughs deeply laid over the snow for a carpet, the stove up and roaring, and the shaman cooking our supper. One of his men fell to cutting dead wood outside and the other to caring for the two dog teams that swarmed round his legs as he opened the dog salmon and partitioned it out, watchful that each animal got its share.
The shaman was in his most jovial, kindly mood as he squatted over the stove watchful of kettle, frying pan and coffeepot.
“Sometimes,” he said reminiscently, as he poked the fire, “think like take long game trail again. When li'l boy go many trails, many sleeps. But now—mebbe too fat, ummh?” he laughed and looked up at us with his sharp black eyes full of amusement. “Pant all same old fat dog! No can run fast. Much better like ride.” He regarded me appraisingly and flattered me with, “You heap strong. Run good. No get too tired. Old man, too. Got gray head. Wise head. Same as old fox, ummh?”
I sat thinking hopefully of the possibilities of inducing him to either continue with us farther or letting me know how I could reach the place where the white man with the scarred face had met his end; but my calculated, careful efforts to lead the conversation in that direction were futile. Patiently I recurred to the subject of the long trails again and again, even while we ate supper with keen appetites, and the shaman's two followers squatted in the corners of the crowded little tent silently stowing away their food; but I gained nothing. I persevered after the meal was over and we lounged on the outspread blankets and furs and smoked. I tried to exercise diplomacy.
“Peluk,” I suggested, “maybe if you went with us a day or two more, you could find game of some sort—perhaps caribou, maybe moose. Why not come farther?”
“Me like go. But” he began, and then stopped and fell to staring at the candle burning in its cleft stick, at the ridge pole of the tent, at the vent hole of the stove that blazed like a huge round eye full upon his massive, rugged face.
I fell to persuasion, and Jack did his best to assist my argument.
“We like your company, old sport,” he said, and the shaman smiled at him as if appreciating his friendliness.
“No,” he said at last. “No can always do what mebbe like to do. Lady Malitka speak, and—must do what lady say do. She say can come one sleep. No can come two or many more sleeps.”
As if the mention of her name recalled other thoughts to Jack, he said no more, his eyes took on the vacant stare of abstraction, and he in turn stared at the glowing vent of the stove. I think that on me also her name had an effect, the effect of an unwelcome intrusion. I had been so secretly rejoiced at the ease of our escape, in the hope of being again freed from her menace and domination, that all day I had traveled in a state of relief. Probably the silence was longer than I appreciated, as we sat there, each absorbed in thought, Jack resting at length on a sleeping bag with his hands pillowing his head, the shaman squatted like an inanimate shapeless object, I sitting cross-legged on a fur robe, and, always in the dim corners of the tent nearest the fly those two mute and still figures of Peluk's followers. I recall that Peluk's voice aroused me with the shock of something unexpected.
“But think mebbe we can travel one day more together—that right word? Ummh? Together? Speak very good English, but—that word mean so; like this—ummh?”
He held his stubby powerful fingers out in a bunch, and when I agreed that this was the meaning of the word that to him was foreign, he complacently gestured with both hands and said, “Me speak very good English, ummh? Big word—that—together. So, mebbe can take trail one day more—together!”
He gloated over that simple word with an almost childish vanity; prodigiously proud of his accomplishment in our tongue. He rambled off his subject and asserted that many white men had told him that no other Indian in Juneau and Kadiak could speak so well. “Here!” he cried. “Know more as that. Lissun! Ah, bay, cay, day, eeah, ef, djhay, haitch, and” he hesitated, perplexed and studious, and then gradually waved to one side the entire alphabet that he had threatened to inflict on us with a boast—“Can do all. All! Almos' can read white man's talk signs! Ummh? Me very big shaman. Very wise. One, two, free, four, faive, seex, seben”
He threatened to count numerals perhaps up into the hundreds, but I interrupted him with, “Good! Very good! And so you will go with us to-morrow?”
“Yes,” he said, somewhat crestfallen at my lack of appreciation. “Go to-morrow. That, too, good word. To-morrow!” slurring his R's until they sounded like lame L's.
I had gained one step, at least, I thought as I spread the blankets out and prepared for sleep. I was secretly exultant over that slight gain, and—I was tired. The shaman yawned, crept on hands and knees to the opposite corner of the tent where his great fur robe was thrown, stretched himself out upon it, and rolled over and over until it was wrapped about him like a mummy case. His two men lifted themselves slightly, took from beneath them long parkas of the thin, flexible and not overly warm squirrel skins, pulled them over their heads like nightshirts, drew the “Sunburst” hoods, fox tail broidered, around their faces, sat down inside them, and resumed that josslike attitude of repose in their corners. The shaman's arm disengaged itself from his wrappings, stretched upward, and his practical fingers with a single deft grasp seized and extinguished the candle's flame. The round, staring, flickering blaze from the stove made a great shadow upon the grimy white wall of the tent.
Soundless the forest, the outer and frozen world. So soundless that the slipping of a handful of snow from the overburdened and overcome branch of a pine tree was distinctly, sharply audible. The faint and final crack of an ember in the sheet-metal stove was magnified to explosiveness. Jack breathed deeply. The shaman snored. I felt for the fold of a blanket, and wished that I had chosen my sleeping bag instead, and fell asleep dreaming that I was once again in the blackness of a Berber tent in the Sahara Desert and gravely considering the condition of camels' worn and spongy pads.
I don't know exactly how long I slept, but it was certainly several hours, when, as if pounced upon by nightmare, I awoke terrified, struggling, fighting, and clutching two relentless hands that encircled my throat. I could not release them. I twisted legs and arms and body fiercely. Powerful hands held my feet; sinewy hands caught my arms. Not a human whisper could be heard. I might have been in the depths of the deepest seas and grasped relentlessly by an octopus. My arms were deftly pinioned to my sides. My feet were bound together, my knees tied, and I was so cunningly bandaged round my mouth that I was as dumb as if I had never uttered a sound. I was neither battered nor physically harmed, simply rendered helpless. Silence continued after my long-drawn sigh of surrender. I was left alone.
Straining my eyes I glared in the gloom. I could finally, though dimly, descry three shapes that, breathing heavily, rested and stared down upon me to make certain of my defeat. They moved, appeared to confer by signs, took positions and suddenly bent to their work over my friend who had slept serenely throughout that noiseless preceding struggle. I could even discern their method of attack—the figure that bent above the heedless and unprotected throat, his signal to the other two who had stationed themselves at head and feet—the swift pouncing of the hands to throat, and the equally darting clutch upon feet and hands at either end. I tried to roll over sufficiently to intrude my body between them and their victim, to so hamper their movements or distract their attention that Jack might have at least a fighting chance. They paid no more heed to my efforts than they might have bestowed upon the wild and impotent writhing of a fish thrown out of water upon the banks of a stream.
My partner was a far more powerful man physically than I. By some prodigious effort he tore loose the fingers that strove to throttle him, cast aside the hands that endeavored to bind his arms, kicked loose those that strove to encircle his feet. Once he got to his knees and elbows crying to me an alarm, shouting to me to help him and struggling desperately. The shadows melted into one confused blur. Jack lifted himself upward to his knees, and then, as a weight lifter might heave, gained his feet. Striving to throw off his assailants, he hove backward and forward, shouting, cursing, and swinging them around.
They clung to him like bear hounds. He shifted them, tried to strike, and they trampled over me as I lay. They tripped and fell as a single swirling mass came in contact with the edge of the tent, ripped through its frail canvas side while it rocked and tottered from ridge pole to peg, rolled outward, still struggling, and then the disturbed canvas fell cutting off my sight.
I rolled toward it, bruised by their feet and weight, intent on passing through after them and doing all that lay in my power to assist my enraged and desperate partner. The fallen folds of canvas impeded me. They would not give way. I heard a shrill voice exclaim in the native tongue, “He will have it! I'll make him quiet!” And then there was the sound of dull impact of delivered blow and for an instant all was still. Sled dogs aroused from their snowy nests barked and growled, surging forward as if to a fray and a kill with the instinct of the wolf uppermost. There could be no mistaking the voice that sharply drove them back. It was the shaman's; the voice that had languidly replied to mine so many times, but now pitched in a different and troublous key, and speaking his own language.
“Bind his hands and feet. He will soon be all right,” he said. “Come! Take down the tent. Pack the sleds. We have far to go!”
An instant later I was seized by shoulders and feet, thrust into a sleeping bag, lifted, and deposited on the snow. Jack lay quiet and inert and they straightway thrust him also into his sleeping bag, one of the men commenting that if we had only retired in them that night instead of lying on top of them covered by blankets, we should have saved them considerable trouble.
In but a few minutes the tent was down, everything—including Jack and me—packed aboard the two sleds, the dogs harnessed in, and we swung back over what I surmised was the homeward trail; but now we no longer lagged. Our previous day's travel had been orderly, leisurely, with no attempt at haste; but now men and dogs urged forward as if speed were a consideration. The shaman ran behind my sled clinging to the handlebars, panting but running lightly for one who pretended that he was all fat and too old for the trails.
Most of the time he ran voicelessly, save when now and then he cried to the runner ahead to speed up. This continued for nearly an hour, when I heard the native behind Jack's sled shout that the latter had regained consciousness and was trying to lift himself to a sitting posture. The shaman called a halt and went back to where Jack was struggling. The dogs, glad for a breathing spell, threw themselves on the snow, panting. I could hear the shaman's voice very distinctly.
“You be good! If not keep quiet, mus' tie you down. No like do that. You be good, no get hurt. You be not good, get hurt heap more.”
“You old scoundrel! Where's my partner?” Jack demanded.
“He in other sled. Very nice. No hurt.”
“Well, if you'll prove that to me I'll keep quiet. Let me talk to him,” Jack insisted.
“Good!” said the shaman, and I heard him returning to my sled. He bent over and removed the bandages that rendered me mute. “Mos' forgetum,” he apologized. “Very sorry. Now can talk.”
My jaws were uncomfortably stiff from the long restraint, but I shouted lustily. “Are you all right, Jack? Are you badly hurt?”
“No,” he replied; “but that old Judas hit me a jolt that was a knock-out and I'm as sore as a boil. Are you unhurt?”
“Except for a bruise or two where you all trampled my ribs when you put up your fight. They already had me fast. I tried to help, but it was no good.”
“Nope. No good!” the shaman interjected with a chuckle.
Knowing more of the shaman's remorselessness where human life was concerned than did Jack, I thought it wise to advise the latter.
“See here,” I called to him. “We're in no shape to put up a fight. I think it best to submit. Even if we were free, we've got no firearms.”
“Yes, me catchum very nice peestol some sleeps ago,” I heard the shaman chuckle, and now I understood his cunning in possessing himself of the only small weapon we had, and of which he stood in fear. The grinning old devil must have had our subjugation in view when he made that liberal trade. His chuckle suddenly stopped and his oily voice had a new quality when he said sharply, “You white mans—lissen! You be good, no hurt. But you be bad, and me kill you both, sure! No like killum you two mans, but mus' killum if no other way, unnerstan', ummh? Now what say?”
I did not give Jack a chance to refuse or anger the shaman by impotent curses. I knew the latter too well to take such risks. Moreover I knew that it would pay better to take matters philosophically and do our utmost to conciliate our captor.
“Jack,” I called, “I'm sure Peluk talks with a straight tongue, and that he doesn't want to hurt either of us if he can avoid it. He and I are pretty good friends, I hope, or at least were until to-night.”
“Very good friends! Very good!” the shaman asserted standing midway between the two sleds, and I could not be certain whether he spoke candidly or sarcastically. “Me like Hathaway good. No like have killum. So, we go now, all very nice, ummh? Me sorry white mans no can walk. If get cold, me findum more blankets. Bimeby grub.”
“All right, old sport. Go to it!” Jack called, and with a grunt of approval the shaman turned to his men and told them to get under way again, and we were off.
CHAPTER X.
Daylight came and, lying there in the sled, not at all uncomfortable save for my bonds, I watched for familiar landmarks. For a time I saw shapes of mountains that I remembered, and then these lost semblance of familiarity and I wondered if we were still going backward over our own trail. At last we halted, a quick camp fire was made, and after but a few minutes the shaman came to my sled, put those gorillalike arms of his under me, and lifted me to a sitting posture.
“You give word not fight, friend,” he said, grinning, “and I make arms loose, ummh?”
I grinned back at him as if it were all a joke and gave my promise. He immediately took off all my lashings save those round my knees and feet and called to one of his men, who brought me a steaming cup of tea and a huge slab of smoked salmon that had been skin-grilled and was hot from the fire. I started to eat with prodigious relish, and then thought of poor Jack. I interceded for him with the shaman who was reluctant to extend favors to one who had put up such a fight and was endowed with such great strength.
“He'll promise and will keep his word,” I insisted. “Peluk, I give you my word this is so. You'll take mine, won't you?”
“Me not know other mans so well as know you,” the shaman hesitated, and then finally said, “You askum give you word be good.”
“Of course I promise! Anything to get these cursed thongs off my hands and elbows! I'm cramped stiff!” Jack called. “You've got the best of it, you damned old savage! I'd be a fool not to see that.”
“Yes, that, so,” the shaman said; but he did not grin when he released Jack's upper bindings. In fact he scowled at him with sullen eyes. I made up my mind that if I ever got a chance to speak to Jack alone I would advise him to discretion, and warn him that our situation was far more dangerous and menacing than he deemed. I very much regretted that I had not confided in him all that I had learned, if not while in Malitka's house, at least after we had made our departure therefrom. I accused myself of having been an overly cautious fool and of having at the same time reposed overconfidence in the simplicity of the shaman.
It was quite evident that we had turned off our own trail somewhere, probably miles back, and were heading in a direction that could not return us to the village. We were bound for an unknown destination. Whatever Madame Malitka's intentions, for I was convinced that she was the author of our capture, she did not propose to have us again brought into her presence. And what was more, she quite certainly had never even thought of letting us escape. I wondered what we had done to incur her displeasure or fear after her first decision to save our lives and eventually to grant us liberty. But had she ever so intended? I gave it up; nor could I come to a conclusion as I brooded over the subject throughout that interminable, trying day.
As the forenoon advanced Peluk began to show signs of disappointment at our speed, although to me it was a very rapid progress. He finally stopped and walked slowly past the dogs of both teams, as they lay steaming and panting on the ground. He shook his head and then turned thoughtfully and stared at the sleds.
“We must go faster than we have been,” he growled in his own tongue to his men. “We must lighten the sleds down to the bone.”
He turned to me and spoke in English.
'Mus' get you out for li'l time. No fight?”
“Of course not,” I assented, and his men lifted me from my very comfortable bed in the body of the sled and laid me on the snow.
Immediately they seized our tent, stove, grub box and all hampers and carried them to the foot of a blasted tree. I took the opportunity to advise Jack to submit, adding a hint to the effect that I knew more about it than he did and would explain if we ever had an opportunity. And so, when it came his turn to be ousted, he accepted with good grace and even offered to assist if the shaman would but free him entirely. Peluk's face was wooden and he made no reply nor concession. Within a few minutes more Jack's sled was also emptied.
The three Indians conferred quietly beneath the dead tree and then I saw that they were going to travel light to the utmost; for they discarded even a portion of the food. They gave each dog a whole salmon, brought one of the choice smoked king salmon to both Jack and me, and devoured one themselves, eating with great hurried gulps and tearing the flesh away from the skin with fingers and teeth. They counted out enough more for but barely one or two additional meals for man and beast, made them into a bundle, took from the grub box the tea and sugar, and rolled the remainder of the food into a rubber ground sheet. With the sled lashings they tied this into a bundle and one of the natives, with the loose end of the rope in his teeth, climbed the dead tree until he came to a branch well above the ground, after which he hoisted the bundle upward and lashed it into a crotch. It was evident that they were making a cache, for now they put all our belongings, save a few blankets and our sleeping bags, at the foot of the tree and spread over all the tent, weighting it down as best they could. I sat there striving to conjecture whether this could be to us a hopeful or inimical indication. One of the Indians, whose hunger was not satisfied, started to eat another of the edible salmon. He was harshly ordered to desist.
“Put that back!” Peluk growled at him. “Your belly may be lean before we reach other food. Fool! Can't you see that an accident of any kind might mean starvation? Put it back, I tell you!”
It wasn't a reassuring remark, and I was thankful that he was so engrossed in his projects that he did not chance to look at my face which might, at that moment, have betrayed my understanding of his tongue. I surmise that I must have looked crestfallen. He might have read that I feared starvation camps ahead on that unknown trail. And I have known famine, an experience that one never cares to repeat, that blanches the souls and bodies of those who have survived.
I was sitting staring at my feet when he returned to my side.
“Peluk,” I said placidly, “maybe you'd be good enough to give my partner and me a smoke—a pipe; or even a cigarette would be”
“Humph! Forgetum smoke!” he exclaimed. “One time, yes, mebbe ten time—you give me smoke.”
His eyes twinkled in their folds of flesh that swept outward to his high cheek bones, and from his pocket he produced a packet of cigarette papers I had given him and some of my own tobacco. He even provided me with one of my own matches from a block of sulphurs he took from his own pocket. He did a like service for Jack but with a stolid, disinterested air. And then, his time of relaxation expired, he resumed action. We were lifted into the denuded and far less comfortable beds of the sleds, the harnesses of the dogs were disentangled and we swept out toward our unknown goal.
Urged on by the shaman, our speed was faster than I had ever believed it possible for dogs to maintain. With loads so light that they offered scarcely any resistance, they fell to the long wolf trot over level trails and into the long wolf lope down declivities. Their drivers took turns in lounging on the rails of the sleds, recovering breath, or in running ahead, The lean hips of the runner always worked rhythmically as with long forward fling of narrow snowshoe, arms bent to sides, and backward-thrown head he lunged forward.
At intervals the shaman himself took his turn in that headlong pace, his great shoulders swinging, the skirts of his blue denim parka fluttering about his sturdy legs, his head bared, exposing the cropped, grizzled hair. Then when panting he would signal for one of his followers to relieve him, leap to one side with that agility that had astonished me, take a few running strides as the sled came abreast, and throw himself over upon the birch rail that creaked and groaned beneath his weight.
Perched there, sidewise, with one moccasined foot patting the snow and always forcing the sled forward with his stroke, and the temporarily abandoned snowshoe thrown over my legs in the sled, he became a living thing of savagery, an animal of the chase, of speed, of determination. He had a goal in mind. He would spare nothing—not even his own body—to reach it. We did not pause until the dusk of the afternoon waned to the pallor of a night lightened solely by early stars and unbroken snows. For a long time high and rough mountains had been in sight which we constantly approached. We climbed over the low and gently rolling foot-hills to a place where the ascent must inevitably be more steep, and the shaman called another halt.
“Make fire,” he brusquely commanded his men. “The dogs must rest,” and then sat on the edge of my sled with his arms folded and stared upward at the dimming southern mountaintops whose peaks were still out lined against the horizon. He muttered to himself inaudible words, as if perplexed or dissatisfied. He then removed his long, narrow snowshoes and stuck them in the snow, toes upward.
“Legs tired?” he asked turning his inscrutable face toward me.
“Tired? They are dead!” I exclaimed. “Are you going to camp here?”
He ignored my question, regarded me for a moment more as if deciding something, and then leaned forward and grinned.
“Me sorry keep you so,” he said gently. “You call me friend. Other man call me savage. I unnerstan' that word. Me no like. But you say—friend. Ugh!”
He came closer, bending his bulky shoulders over and planting both huge mittened hands on the sled rail by my side and peering at me, as if to read my eyes.
“Me, Peluk, mus' do many things no like do; but—me, Peluk, shaman, and tyune—what you call chief—of my people, mus' do what think bes' for my people. Unnerstan'—ummh?”
“Yes, I understand,” I replied, wondering what he had in his mind.
“Very good!” he said, still regarding me. “My young mans—free, four, faive dozen—say mus' kill. No like killum you, who been my friend; but kill other man quick—all same caribou, moose, dog. No matter. But you—nope! Lady think you gone—never come back! But—but”
He stopped while the horrible suggestion came to my mind that she had actually condemned us to death; bade us farewell with a quiet face knowing that we were doomed!
“Nope,” he went on. “No can do. My papoose climb on your knee. You pat him, make very good friends, bring him li'l look'-glass and call him 'my boy.' Very fine thing say, that, 'my boy!' Show you like li'l' feller. So, very big sad—me—Peluk. No can think what bes' do. Mus' do bes' can. Mebbe you help, ummh?”
He was actually appealing to me to advise him, to assist him from difficulties that to him were so pregnant, so overwhelming.
“Peluk,” I said, laying one of my hands over his, “I don't know what you are up against. I can't even guess. But neither my friend nor I will do anything to hurt you if we can help it. We'll try to play your game if we can.”
I must have spoken too rapidly for his comprehension, or used expressions beyond his knowledge of English, for he appeared puzzled. The only thing he understood was that my hand was laid over his in friendship and in pledge.
“Um-m-m-h!” he rumbled. “Me no catchum all speak, but—but—think if legs loose you no run away. Think if you say you no run away, me makum legs loose so you walk—ummh?”
“Yes,” I declared, eagerly seizing the proffer of physical liberty. “If you make my feet and legs loose, I will come with you. No run. No fight. Go where you say. My friend the same. I speak for him. I give my word for both.”
For answer he slipped from beneath his parka a long, keen blade and with one quick stroke carved through the tough rawhide that bound my knees. Another swift, skillful and strong flick and my tired feet could move at will. He put a hand beneath my armpit and lifted me to my feet. One of his runners saw me standing erect and rushed toward us whipping from a concealed sheath a hunting knife. Peluk threw up a hand and uttered an angry, imperative shout.
“Stop!” he commanded in his own tongue. “Stop! Am I the chief or not? Do you want to feel my knife in your heart? No? Then go back to the fire. Cook. Put the kettle in the edge. Tell Karslu to cut meat from the white man's stuff. I know what I do. You obey!”
As if terrified the man hastily replaced his knife and with exaggerated obedience did as he was bid. He threw fresh fagots onto the blaze and seized the remnant of bacon that had been confiscated from our stores.
Exulting in my freedom, but cramped and stiff, and moving stodgily, I walked across to Jack and bent over him.
“Leave it to me,” I muttered rapidly. “It's our only chance. I've given my word that we will not try to run or fight; that we will go with them wherever they take us. When the time comes that we can talk alone I'll tell you a lot of things you don't know.” And then I turned to the shaman and said, “I speak for my friend. Let him loose.”
For quite an appreciable time Peluk hesitated, and then, almost unwillingly, crossed over and cut Jack's bonds.
“Thanks!” Jack growled as he moved his cramped limbs; but the shaman ignored him and turning to me said, “Me take your word. But if he try run away mus' shoot.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “if he tries to run you can shoot.”
When, after the brief halt, we prepared to start, the shaman recklessly abandoned our sled and much of its contents and hitched our dogs in with his own team. He and each of his men strapped our and their rifles across their backs, and we tore along at a trying pace. The shaman's two runners seemed tireless, and the shaman himself displayed a marvelous endurance, but both Jack and I were compelled to cling to the sled handles and occasionally to throw ourselves on the sled rails for rest.
Off in the north a great tongue of flame leaped across the sky where the aurora borealis initiated its marvelously beautiful exhibition. Fold on fold of colors so mysterious and graduated as to be bewildering spread out and then began a slow shifting and swirling that could be likened to nothing so much as the graceful undulations of a fire dancer's skirts. It was so brilliant that for a time it lent a cold, ethereal beauty to the mountains through which we were traveling. We twisted this way and that so frequently that nothing but the immovable stars enabled us to retain any sense of direction. The heavenly fireworks died away, and left us in the starlit dimness of night. The moon arose and again all that frozen world was beautified and softened.
For more than two hours our dogs, poor tired beasts, had been lagging ever more slowly, but either because he was himself too weary to protest or because we had journeyed fast enough to relieve whatever suspense the shaman may have previously felt, he traveled silently. Only once was there even a momentary halt, and that was when the shaman and his fellows appeared to be in some slight doubt about the advisability of taking a right or left gulch that appeared to lead upward through the mountains. We adopted the one to the right that brought us to the crest of a divide, and one of the runners called back to the shaman exultantly, “This has proved the best. I had not forgotten. We are all right.”
Trudging behind the sled I wondered what this meant, but I had not long to wait. We descended a long gully so steep that we were compelled to hold the sled to keep it from sliding down on the “wheel dogs'” heels, passed between two cliffs, dropped with a downward rush for another twenty yards, and reached the bottom. I stared about me as the dogs' harnesses were readjusted and then gave a gasp of knowledge.
We were on the trail to the gold camp and but a few miles from the last and final climb, the prodigiously steep, narrow gut between rocky walls that would bring the mines of the valley into view.
CHAPTER XI.
As I stood there turning my head this way and that and frowning at the recognized shapes a voice behind me said quietly, “Yes. You know. That's why I had to bring you back, ummh?”
I shifted around and met the shaman's steady eyes that seemed glitteringly malevolent in the light of the waning moon. I did not know what reply to make, and he took a step closer until his face was not far from mine and added, “One other white man see this place. That white man with scar on face. That man the one what we follow nine sleeps on trail and—kill! Unnerstan' now why mus' bring you back?”
I was not only alarmed as a man may be when confronted with deadly peril, but also angry. His enormous duplicity and cold blooded cunning were suddenly revealed to me.
“So you found out I had been up here, did you, Peluk?” I asked.
“Find out nex' day after you make shoot pine hens and wolf nearly catchum you. Sorry. Mebbe better wolves catchum that time. Save me heap trouble, because me like you. But no white mans ever see place where catchum gold and live. No can do. Sorry!”
“Then why in the devil didn't you kill us there in our camp instead of bringing us here?” I demanded, gathering hope from this point.
“That what my young men say. Me say no. Have very hard time keep young men from killum you; but think mebbe can keep live by bringum you here. No can tell. Mus' try. Me friend you. No like osser white man. Me very sad. Very sad man, me. No can see'what mus' do!”
There was no doubting his sincerity.
I pulled off a mitten, saw that no one was watching us, and held out my hand to him. For a moment I thought he wasn't going to accept it.
“Thanks, Peluk!” I said. “And listen. No harm shall ever come to you through us if I can help it—no matter what happens.”
“Very good you to say that,” he muttered, and his hand met mine. “Very sorry no can do more. Do my best. Me very sad man.”
“But anyhow, friend, we're still alive,” I said. “That is something.”
I should have liked to question him more but he checked me with a slight hiss of warning, and I discovered that one of his runners had finished his task and was watching us. I wasn't certain that he had seen us cross hands, but decided that inasmuch as my back had been turned to him, somewhat screening the shaman from view, he had not. Fortunately that proved to be true, for we were treading close to the edge where the slightest thing might topple us over, the shaman perhaps, as well as Jack and myself. It flashed through my mind that I could best assist our sole friend by a pretense of enmity.
With my back to the watching native I winked and grinned at the stolid shaman, and then burst into loud expostulations, shaking my fists and stamping the ground. Peluk instantly replied with a storm of invective and threats and shook his fists at me. He did it so well that for an instant I was terrified by the fear that he had misunderstood my move and had accepted it as earnest. He put my momentary alarm to rest by shouting to the other natives, one of whom had unslung a rifle and was moving hurriedly in our direction.
“This white man wants to camp!” he cried. “Ugh! They have no guts for a long trail. They are weaklings without strong hearts like we have. But I will make him go on if he dies. If he does not, with my own hands I will kill him here. Keep back, you two. Leave him to me.”
“I make pretend you no want to go any more,” he muttered rapidly to me in English. “Wise old fox, you. See bes' makeum Injun think me and you not friends at all. That help me.”
And all the time while he was explaining what I already knew, he kept up a most ferocious shaking of one fist, and with the other fumbled under his parka as if seeking his hunting knife. Jack was starting to close in but I shouted to him, “For God's sake, keep back! It's all right!”
Bewildered and nonplused, he hesitated for a moment and obeyed. It saved his life, for the native at the head of the dog team had suddenly shifted his rifle into his hands, ready and eager to fire.
I walked over and seized the sled handles indicating that I was willing to proceed.
“He will go now,” cried the shaman in his own tongue. “His heart is water. He knows that I, your chief, am his master. The same as if he were my dog. Move!”
The great dog team, rested, stretched itself out, its leader straining wearily into the collar and bringing taut the sled rope like a rigid line extending between each pair of dogs. The sled started again, and we were once more on our way—but upon a trail that I knew. I wished that I could find some pretext to talk to Jack, but the situation was too dangerous to dare such risk. Once he called to me, “I say, Jim! Where's this thing going to end? I'm about all in. Can't you get the old sport to tell you?”
“Quiet, you!” roared the shaman with an anger that I feared was not entirely assumed.
“Yes, say nothing, Jack,” I called, and the shaman volleyed native invective upon me in turn, whereupon I, too, fell to silence and the trail. It was morning when we began what I knew was the most difficult and final ascent, up which men and dogs, all panting alike and all straining, clutching, clawing, fought their way. Slipping, seizing handholds, struggling ever upward, we came to the great natural gateway through which so short a time before, to our eventual undoing, I had first beheld the secret gold camp. The smoke of the newly started fires crept lazily upward from the chimneys. Jack's exclamation of astonishment came roaring backward between the walls.
“We're coming to a village,” he cried. “Looks a biggish place—away down below us.”
The spent dogs, scenting smoke and rejoicing in the probability of rest, broke into a wild chorus of ululation and surged recklessly forward. The two runners got to their heads and thrust them back, restraining them. At a shout of warning from Peluk both Jack and I sprang to his assistance and, digging our heels into the snow, held the sled back with all our strength. Even then we tobogganed down a mere mountain shelf winding along the edge of a sheer precipice, to fall over which would have meant death hundreds of feet below. We swung around spurs of rock that, needle like, reared themselves upward above the perilous trail, and had no time for anything but our task, seeing nothing of the beauties of that enormous mountain cup beneath. Our descent was rapid and, to me, confused.
Dogs of the village that we were approaching took up the cry, rushed to meet us, and came to us as we slipped out into the bottom of that terrifying declivity. Doors of cabins swung open and men emerged, followed by women and children. Undoubtedly they had been forewarned, were expectant, and, the most menacing feature of all, were silent, save for the mumbled mutterings of the squaws.
In an atmosphere of deadly hatred we passed between them to the first and near-by cabin. Once more I could observe an excellence of architecture, Russian in its form, indicating that this, too, was no mere native hovel. The camp might have been a section torn from Madame Malitka's orderly town, but dropped heedlessly, hit-or-miss, with no regularity, in this hole bordered by impregnable mountain peaks. I know of no similar place on earth; but had the Jungfrau, Monk, and Eiger of the Wengen Alps in Switzerland been completed in a solid round by the juxtaposition of similar mountain giants, and a village erected in their guarded hollow, a similarity might have been established. No other place could have been more isolated, more guarded from an outside world.
“Stop here,” the shaman's voice announced in English, and then to his subjects he cried, in their own tongue, “Unharness the dogs and feed them well. We have traveled far. We have brought those for whom we went. Leave them to me. Go you about your work. I, your chief, can guard them, for from here they cannot escape. You know that.”
He turned to Jack and me and beckoned us to follow him. We passed through the door of the Russianlike house, and when we had entered, he shut it behind us. An old woman stood to one side and glared at us as we passed. He did not speak to her but with a single gesture sent her away. She walked to a doorway and stopped.
“Bring food,” he demanded. “We are tired. We would eat, and then sleep. All night we have traveled fast. Hasten!”
She disappeared, mumbling as she went, and the door closed leaving us three alone, while Peluk began stripping his parka up ward over his head.
“Some place—what?” Jack remarked, staring at our surroundings.
And it was “some place.” I have entered homes in Moscow and Nijni Novgorod that were no better. Its log walls were closely joined, well smoothed with deft adzmanship such as a ship's carpenter might use in constructing a well-made hull. It had a great fireplace of country rock, a solid and smooth timber floor and substantial furniture. Here, as in every house I had ever visited in Malitka's village, were valuable skins thrown upon the floor to serve as rugs, and pelts thrown across the backs and over the arms of heavily constructed chairs in lieu of other upholstery. Undoubtedly effort, knowledge, and care had been bestowed upon this dwelling.
Standing there in the center of the room beneath its well-hewn and darkened beams, I sensed a touch with one who had come from that great and distant outer world, of one who sought for his own comfort to reproduce and surround himself with makeshift ease. This might have been the hunting lodge of a king. Above the stone fireplace hung the most magnificent antlers of a moose that I have ever seen—wide-spreading, perfectly webbed, gracefully mushrooming into broad fans. Polished tusks, ungraven, hung beneath. The ultimate impression, in general, was one of bodily ease, means, and well being.
Peluk shouted for the squaw and she came obediently inward.
“Bring dry moccasins for all three of us,” he ordered, and she disappeared for but a moment to return with dry footgear. It was a great relief to pull them on over our tired feet. The shaman stood up, glanced at us, said, “Bimeby grub. Stay here,” and trudged out of the room, closing the door behind him. I seized the opportunity to whisper rapidly to Jack.
“Whatever you do, don't ask any questions or talk in front of him about any thing connected with this or Madame Malitka's camp. I can explain most of it when we are alone; but to talk now is dangerous! Mighty dangerous—as you will know when I find a chance to tell you everything. Take everything good-humoredly and try to make friends with the shaman. He is our sole hope!”
“He hit me an awful crack, just the same!” said Jack. “And I'd like to have as good a chance at him. I'd knock his head-”
The shaman opened the door and called to us.
“Come! Show place wash up.”
We followed him across the hallway and into a room comfortably equipped as a sleeping chamber, and here again were evidences that it had been fitted by some one who esteemed his personal comfort. It had but one bed, but this was amply large for two and well equipped. On a washstand at the side stood an enameled hand basin, a copper kettle filled with steaming water, and two clean towels were thrown across a rack. We lost no time in putting them to use.
That there was no intention of inflicting any unnecessary hardship upon us was further evidenced by the quality and plenitude of the meal to which we shortly after sat down with the shaman. This remarkable man acted as if he was neither tired nor perplexed, or as if there was anything at all peculiar in our situation. He even smiled and discussed anything except ourselves. He called attention to the fossil ivory of a long extinct mammoth and declared wistfully that if he could but get one such he would carve figures on it. I thought to myself that there was something of the artist, after all, in this heartless old barbarian!
“Like to carve big hunt; plenty dogs; plenty hunting mans and some sleds;” he ruminated. “Make picture of kill on big end so have heap room for trees, ummh? You think good?”
And then before I could answer, for he invariably ignored Jack and addressed himself to me, he suddenly lifted his head, dropped his knife and fork, and glared at the window. Glancing in that direction I saw that three or four squaws and children's faces were flattened against it, peering in upon us. The shaman was on his feet and at the door with a single bound. He wrenched open the outer door and poured forth a stream of invective in his own tongue, so rapidly, so harshly that despite the loud booming of his voice I could catch but a few words here and there. Through the window I had a glimpse of squaws and children scampering away like a flock of frightened partridges.
When he returned he was entirely unruffled, and resumed his sculptorial theme as if he had suffered no interruption. He was urbanity itself when, our meal and smoke finished, he suggested that perhaps if we slept for an hour or two we might feel rested.
“You going to sleep too, Peluk?” I asked.
A shade of anxiety flitted across his eyes as he answered, “Nope. Me no sleep. Mus' do—osser things. Mus' talk my people. Bes' you no go out until me say can go out. Unnerstan'? Bimeby mebbe can walk out. Me no can tell yet!”
“All right,” I assented for both Jack and myself. “We'll not go out of this cabin until you say we can. Is that good enough, friend?”
A single gleam of his eyes, kindly but suggesting pity, responded to my use of the final word.
“Yes. That good. You unnerstan' that to go out no good. If me said, 'Go! Run fas'!'—that no good. In mebbe one minute, mebbe one hour, young men catchum, killum you! If you get away one, two, t'ree, four, mebbe ten whole days, ten whole sleeps—catchum you jus' same. Run away no good. No can do. Me do bes' can.”
I watched him through the window after he had left us, and as he trudged away over the snow toward the other cabins I saw that he was directing his steps toward the largest cabin—no—house—in the village. Also I observed, with some growing disquietude, that other men, but neither squaws nor children, were proceeding in that direction as if to a meeting place.
“Well, Jack,” I said, “I may as well tell you—and I wish I had taken a chance and told you long ago—that I've seen this place before. Do you remember that day I was chased by wolves?”
“Yes,” he said, staring at me incredulously.
And then, reserving nothing, and explaining the reasons why I had not disturbed him by imparting what I had learned, I told him the whole story. He received it with better grace than I had anticipated. For some minutes after I had ceased talking he pondered.
“Then you think that all these natives are of a somewhat superior and clever class; that they know the value of gold; that they are aware that if white men knew of its existence, these, the natives, would succumb, go to pot—be wiped out. And—Malitka? What part do you think she has in all this?”
“I think,” I declared deliberately, “that it. is she who has brought these natives up to this standard; that for some private reason of her own she has no ambitions outside of those involved in this gold camp, no desire to leave it—and, what is more, doesn't intend to suffer any interruption. And—Jack—I'm more afraid of her than all the others! She has ordered the death of every one who purposely or accidentally intruded into this kingdom of hers. I don't know why we were spared in the first place. The shaman doesn't know, I am certain.”
“Good heavens!” he gasped. “You don't mean to say you think it was Malitka who set the shaman after us, who condemned us either to death or—whatever's coming to us?”
“I'm afraid that's about the only conclusion I can make," I replied. “I studied her pretty closely from my viewpoint, and I'm afraid that if she considered it necessary to wipe out merely two men, to guard what she considers to be the happiness and welfare of several hundreds of natives that she has brought into something like a state of civilization, it would be done. I don't say that I believe she would make such a decision callously, or mercilessly, but that—she'd see it through without flinching. She's got that quality which many historically known personages have possessed, and if she had by chance been an empress in a greater sphere, would have acted as she now acts toward us. Yes, I'm afraid that it was madame who sent the shaman out with us to destroy.”
“But,” he protested, “if she decided that we must die, that there was no other course, why didn't she have us made away with right there in the village?”
“Old man,” I said, surmising something of what was in his mind, “one time a pet horse of mine broke its leg. I loved that horse. It trusted me. But I knew that it must die. I couldn't do the job myself. I hadn't the heart! I hired a man to do it, and asked him to wait fifteen minutes. In that fifteen minutes I ran out into the edge of a desert and sat down with my hands over my ears. I couldn't bear to hear the shot that must kill. I think—Madame Malitka liked you, but to hear the shot was too much.”
He suddenly bent forward and groaned and rested one elbow on his knee, supporting his bent head with a hand tightly clutched across his brow.
I watched him, not as a doctor studies a tormented patient, but as one watches, pitying, a stricken friend whom he cannot succor. For a long time he sat thus, voiceless, and then dropped his hands and lifted hurt eyes to seek mine as if appealing for sympathy.
“Jim,” he said, stopped, hesitated, repeated that nickname of long familiarity, and then flung out both hands toward me, palms upward, in a pathetic admission of helplessness. “Jim, I loved her!” And then, as if he had heaved aside barriers, he got to his feet and walked to and fro in that quaint, inexplicable room, with his head nearly touching the beams above, his hands now and then uplifted in fierce protest and despair, and poured forth his heart. “I couldn't see her for so long! While I was blind I got to listening to the music of her voice, to the soft, warm, smooth rippling of her garments when she moved; to the steady fall of her feet. Then, after so long waiting and eager craving, I first saw her. I lifted the bandages from my eyes when she wasn't looking.
“She was sitting there by the big fireplace. It was dusk, but the light shone on the side of her face—on her hair—on her hands. I hadn't thought she could be so beautiful! I forgot to put back the bandages until my eyes hurt with the leap of the firelight. I—I couldn't be the same after that! I haven't been! You told me many things, but—I haven't told you all this before—that I wanted her to love me. That I dared not tell her so, because I was afraid of her reply; that on the night before we left I begged her to let me communicate with her after we had gone on this mission of ours.”
He stopped in front of the window for a time and did not look round when, in a dull voice, he resumed.
“I think she hesitated. I think she wanted to. And then, as if she had thrown up a wall between us, a thing to completely cut us off, she said, 'Impossible!' and hurried out of the big room. It seems incredible that she should”
“I wish it were incredible,” I interrupted, “but it is exactly the opposite. You haven't seen as I have how completely, how inflexibly she dominates not only the lives but the minds of those natives of hers. I believe she is their religion, a sort of Mohammed in female form! She may have expected the shaman to do the job at once, but the old chap hates to finish, and puts it off, because he struck up a friendship with me. All we can do is to hang on to that and trust to luck to find some way to finally escape—if we can survive until the snow is gone. There's one thing in our favor—I have learned their tongue until I can understand practically everything that is said.”
Jack was still brooding over his disillusionment when the shaman returned.
The latter, as if his affairs also had gone awry, sat down in gloomy silence and stared at the fire. I wondered what had upset him, for I could not doubt that it had something to do with us, and perhaps our final disposition.
CHAPTER XII.
All the following day we were left alone, the shaman appearing for but short intervals, and always with an air of restless preoccupation and grim annoyance. Once when he was out and I stood staring through the window I saw him in the center of a group of natives, his hands gesturing now and then as if he were vehemently addressing them, and once he shook his fist under one tall buck's nose as if threatening him. The man turned and walked away as if angry and disappeared into a cabin.
For a while some of the men at the mines worked, and I could see several windlasses going where stalwart squat forms labored like automatons, first laying broad shoulders and powerful arms to the hoisting of the great buckets filled with what I surmised was pay dirt, then skidding them out to the end of the dumps, emptying them, skidding them back to the shafts and lowering them for another burden of earth, gravel, and gold. Later, however, as if a general air of infectious restlessness pervaded the camp, these men stopped work and joined the idlers, who stood in knots or finally disappeared in some of the houses. There could be no mistaking a universal excitement nor doubt that it was due to our presence.
“Jack,” I commented, “something is boiling here in this camp. I don't know what's up. Wish I did.”
“If you're wishing for things, why don't you wish we had never come to Madame Malitka's camp?” he replied despondently.
“I might wish that, too, but for the fact that if we hadn't blundered into it we should have been dead before this, and as it is—well—we are still alive. We've had that much luck.”
“I don't know whether we can call it luck or not,” he declared moodily. “Somehow everything seems to have turned to bad luck. First I get snow blindness. Then we nearly die of starvation, find a place where we're not wanted, and you blunder—I'm not blaming you, old man!—into a secret of all these people so they don't dare let us go, and”—he stopped and walked across the room and threw himself into a chair by the fireplace from which place he muttered—“and I met her! I thought her so womanly; so fine!”
There came a loud bark and a snarl in the rear of the house, and then shrill expostulations. I stepped to the door, wondering at the noise, and was almost knocked down by the frantic lunge of my own pet dog, my own leader, who whined and whimpered in delight at finding me, and twisted his great body around my legs, finally turning and raising an angry ruff and growling with savagely bared fangs at the old woman who cared for the house. She drew back, uttering shrill and unheeded commands. Then suddenly the shaman appeared behind her and called to me, “Make quiet! Make dog still. Bring here.”
I caught the animal by its sturdy neck, soothed it, and led it outward. I had never been to the rear of the house. It was now exposed. Behind it was a fence of saplings and two large outhouses. Peluk led me to one of these, and I saw therein several dogs of our own team and some of his.
He turned to the woman and gave an order, “Keep them well fed so they will be quiet. There are three missing. I will bring them also as soon as I can find them. And—be sure to feed them so well that they make no noise. Tell no one that they are being kept here. Is that plain?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then see that you obey,” he commanded and, advancing toward me, indicated we were to return to the main room of the house.
Once we were inside and he had removed the huge, shapeless, vividly colored Mackinaw coat from his shoulders and stood in front of the fire, he made a little clucking noise with his tongue, as if audibly punctuating a mental exclamation. His great chest rose and fell as if in anger. The heavy muscles of his throat, exposed and bared by the opening of his collar, moved as he twisted his head from side to side, as if restless.
“Peluk,” I asked, “what's up? Trouble?”
“Heap!” he replied regarding me.
“On our account?”
He nodded emphatically, started to speak, seemed to consider the advisability of confiding in us, and then said affably, “One young man here makeum trouble many time before you come. That very bad young man, what you call savage, ummh? Him say must killum you quick! Me say, 'No, not so much hurry.' Say can killum mebbe next week, mebbe nex' mont', jus' as good as killum now. Think mebbe young man talk other young mans, makeum think his way, ummh? Me speak to one old man, say, 'One white man my friend. Osser white man no matter. Killum and be damned; but no like my friend be kill so quick.' So, when get ugly say, 'To-night big talk in big house. Say then what do.' Young mans go way. No like talk. Say all palaver, ummh? Unnerstan' palaver, ummh?”
“Yes,” I said, “I understand that word. But—what happened then?”
“Nossings! Palaver to-night.”
'Then—then—why did you collect our dogs and your own and fasten them up in the shed out back?” I asked.
He grinned, turned his back on me, poked the fire and squatted down beside it before answering, with a childlike blandness, “Me got very fine dogs, ummh? You got very good dogs, ummh? Think bes' keep good dogs where can see get plenty grub. If killum you, think mebbe keep your dogs.”
It was a most cheerful explanation. The old rascal was keeping an eye open for future eventualities. We were of far less importance than the possession of so many first-class animals. It was useless trying to get anything more out of him. I repeatedly attempted and failed, as the afternoon wore away. He would talk of anything but subjects vital to us, craftily avoiding any reference to our extremity. It was not until we had eaten our supper and he donned his Mackinaw again that he even referred to it. Then in a tone of the utmost gravity he said, “Me go now. Big meeting. Make talk. But—lissen! You mans stay here! No go out—unnerstan'? No go out! Not even if hear noise. Stay here. Me come back, you bet! Me do—do my bes', unnerstan'?”
I jumped to the window and pulled the shade aside to watch him depart. In the light of stars and snow I could see him leisurely trudging along, ambling like a great bear toward the other end of the village where the lights from the big council house, or whatever it was, threw dim, yellow reflections into the night. Our situation was anything but reassuring.
“Hang it all! If he thinks so much of you, why doesn't he at least give us back our rifles and turn us loose so we can make a fight for it, if nothing more?” Jack cried.
“Because that would mean that some of his own people would get wiped out before we did,” I retorted. “Any fool can see that! If you ask me, I believe the old ruffian, bad as he is, wishes to do the best he can for us. I don't think he wants us to precipitate a fight that, after all, could be nothing but hopeless and predecided.”
Jack moved around the room like a caged animal two or three times before throwing himself into a chair and saying, “Well, I suppose you are right. But, anyhow, we shan't have long to wait. That's one consolation.”
But his prediction proved slightly amiss. We did have a long wait; or, at least, it seemed long to men in our position and jeopardy. It was nearly ten o'clock, a late hour in those latitudes, when we heard, faintly through the thick walls, the crunching of feet on crisp snow. The hall door was jerked open, then closed impetuously, the strides advanced and our door opened to disclose the shaman. He shut it, then stood with his back against it and his eyes swept over us and finally fixed themselves on the floor at his feet. He removed neither Mackinaw nor fur cap, and his arms hung listlessly by his sides. He scowled as if not only angry, but thoughtful. His whole attitude was one of a man at bay and uncertain. And then, as if coming to some swift determination, he moved quickly from the door and advanced to where I was standing, facing me with his black eyes sparkling in the firelight.
“Go get trail parka, trail mukluk, make ready run fas'!” he said. “No can tell what come. But no run till me say 'go!' Mebbe not have to run. Lissen! Down in kashime many mans talk. Think mebbe do what me say but for one young man!” He characterized him with the worst invectives in his tongue. “This savage say mus' killum you, and if me no quiet, mus' killum me. But me makeum afraid! Then me come away. Some young mans stay there palaver. No can tell what they do. Hope do nossings. But if do—well—mus' do bes' can. Me! Still shaman, tyune. Mus' wait see. You do what me say, ummh? If young mans come no let see you, ummh?”
“Nothing else for us to do,” I replied; and then, sensing that perhaps through his friendship for me he had jeopardized himself, I added, “But, Peluk, it's not fair to you. You've done all you could. You are my friend. That's so, isn't it?” He appeared to understand and to be grateful for my declaration, and nodded his head in emphatic assent. “Then why don't you give us rifles and open the back door and let us go?” I demanded.
He lifted his hands and shoulders in a shrug.
“Go? Where go? Lissen! If you get away and go ten—yes, more as twenty sleeps—no good. Catchum you. Bang! Bang! Dead! No, mus' let me, Peluk, say what bes' do. Mus' wait! Mebbe young mans do nossings. Heap young mans talk big but do nossing. Mebbe cool off same as bad dog in water, ummh? Mebbe soon see, No wait long.”
He turned and hastily moved out into the hallway where he muttered orders to the old squaw who was our housekeeper. I heard a door open, and, alert to learn what was afoot, stepped cautiously out into the hall. Jack fallowed me. A muffled yelping of dogs and the sharp commands quieting them reached our ears. We slipped farther along the hall until we could look through the rear door that had been left ajar. In the outhouse the shaman and the squaw were putting the harnesses on the animals, harnesses that had been unsnapped from the long sled rope that lay stretched out on the snow in front of the empty birch sled.
The moon was lifting itself clear and white above the high peaks making of each snowy incrustation a phantom shape of jewels, beautiful, motionless, chill. Save for the movement of dogs and the sharp mutterings of the shaman and his helper all was still. We stood and watched until, after all the animals had been harnessed, the shaman shut the door upon them, leaving them in the warmth of their outhouse kennel. He inspected the sled, and the rope, bending over like some grotesque shape in the moonlight. Once he struck a match to inspect a lashing of a stay that was loose, seemed to regard it as unimportant, and then moved toward us. Jack and I stole swiftly back to the living room and awaited him.
When he came he was apologetic, as if he had been a suave host detained from guests. He mumbled something about the necessity for food, and then, observing that we had not laid out garments suitable for the trail and the frigid night, said gently, “Think bes' get warm things. Mebbe go nowhere. Mebbe run fas'. If clock go so far”—and he stepped to the nickel-plated clock on the mantelpiece and indicated a round of the hour hand—“can sleep.” He turned to me with his wide grin, and the wrinkles netted themselves at the corners of his eyes as he added, “Hope so!”
It would have been difficult to conceive after a glance at his smiling, half-humorous, half-thoughtful face, that any of us were in stress and this a portentous hour. As if all his doubts were dissipated after he had once made a decision, he calmly walked to the crude mantelpiece, found thereon tobacco and papers and with a hand that did not in the least falter made himself a cigarette, lighted it with a pine spill from the fireplace and blew a cloud of smoke upward before he said, “Jus' same thing mebbe bes' you get parka, trail boot, cap, ummh?”
He had not for a moment forgotten details. He was insistent upon obedience to his orders. We brought them into the room and after changing the moose-hide moccasins for hair-seal mukluks we looked to him for further instructions.
He did not seem to notice us. His eyes were fixed on the slow movements of the hands of the clock, as if he were measuring time itself. Two or three times he crossed to the window, cautiously pulled the denim shade aside and peered outward. Each time he dropped the folds and returned to glance at the clock and then to succumb to abstraction. A full hour passed. He took another peep through an aperture of the curtains, returned, and with a sigh of relief said, “Well, think all go good. Think can sleep. But—to-morrow think mus' make sure young man what speak of not talk too much. Mus' get that young man a klootch. Nothin' like good squaw make young mans quiet, ummh? You think same? Squaw and babee make mans go quiet. Ummh? Makeum heap think.”
He relaxed, dropped into a chair with his feet sprawled in front of him to toast their soles in the heat of the fire, and with his hands clasped over his lap, began to philosophize. And then with his acute, half-savage sense of hearing, he suddenly stopped, lifted his head and listened intently. His nostrils dilated, his heavy black eyebrow's settled into a frown and his parted lips closed. He jumped to his feet and blew out the lamp.
“Somebody come,” he whispered. “Bes' you keep very still. Lissen!”
And in the ensuing silence we could hear the trampling of feet on snow, becoming ever more audible, the muttering of voices, a cough, and a sharp exclamation. A sense of danger invaded the room. In the dim blaze from the fire we saw the shaman move to the door. He opened it cautiously and stepped into the darkness of the hallway. Then, sharply, there came a harsh, imperative rap on the front door. We heard the shaman open it, and Jack and I stepped to the window and peered out.
The moon, now at the full, had arisen so that in its clear light we could observe every thing distinctly, the faces of men, even the expressions of those nearest us. A score of them were standing there, with one tall native some paces in front, as if he had been duly chosen as their spokesman. In the stillness every word that passed was wafted back through the open doors, fittingly accompanied by the chill air, and so distinctly spoken that even I, alien to that tongue, could understand. The shaman had advanced to meet them, for after rapping upon the door they had fallen back several yards. He stood where the moonlight shone upon his face, upon his broad shoulders, and with his hands tucked in their habitually careless attitude under the folds of his flannel shirt.
“Well,” he asked silkily and, smiling, “What have you come to say?”
The group behind the spokesman shifted uneasily, but the latter had no hesitancy and spoke belligerently.
“We have come to get the two white men.”
“You have, ummh?” said the shaman, as unperturbed as if the errand were a casual one of good will. “And what do you propose to do with them?”
“They must be killed,” the tall native asserted. And then as if to bolster up his followers' courage, he fell into loud declamation, bending his head forward to scowl at Peluk and gesturing with his hands. “Hark you, Peluk! Always before now, when strangers came and the Great Lady sent you out upon their trails to slay lest the secret that has made our people richer and happier than any other people in this land be loosened, you obeyed. You slew. You told us then that it was her will that none might ever come and go away to carry the tale. She told you to follow these and slay! But you did not. Your heart has turned to water, because one of these white men you made a friend and because you are old. Peluk, you are no longer fit to be chief. Shaman, yes—to sit by your fireside and tell legends; but to rule and carry out the Great Lady's orders never more. From to-night I am chief of our people. We have so decided in council.”
He stopped as if to give the shaman a chance to resign himself to their will; but Peluk stood there in that careless attitude and the moon shining on his swarthy face was reflected from his white teeth as if his grin had merely broadened. He took his own time to answer, and I observed that the men in the group behind their new leader moved restlessly as if the suspense was telling upon them. When the shaman spoke it was in that same placid voice, save that in it was contempt.
“Bah! Big words! So you are named tyune, are you, Tzitka? By all the people, ummh? You mean by yourself and the few men here in the gold camp, without giving the hundreds in the village of the Great Lady, or even herself, a chance to speak. You are chief? Fool! Go back home. Be glad that you are still head man in the mines. You have no other wisdom. Yours is not the brain to understand or to lead anything more than a few miners and a team of dogs! You shall not have the white men!”
The tall man seemed to sense the doubts of his followers, who were whispering and muttering together, and he put his new authority to the test. He was palpably angry and excited. He shook his fist at the shaman and shouted, “I say we shall. If you try to object we shall move you out of the way, even if it is necessary to kill you. I, who am now tyune, say so. Are you going to submit or not?”
His followers seemed to gather a trifle more courage and all became motionless once more, watching the shaman, who still stood there, smiling, motionless, squarely planted on his feet.
“And I ask you, Tzitka, who are no more chief than one of my dogs, if you are going to obey my orders and go back to your cabin? Take heed how you answer. One should keep cool on such a nice night, such a beautiful night, so moonlit as is this.”
His deep voice was as musical, unconcerned, indolent as if he were merely there to discuss the weather.
“We have talked enough! Out of the way!” shouted Tzitka, starting toward him.
With an almost incredible rapidity the shaman's right hand leaped from cover, the moon glinted on the blue steel of the pistol he had adroitly gained from me, and with the flip of his wrist showing that all his pretended ignorance of the use of the firearm had been for my illusionment, he fired. Fired as only an expert gunman can! Tzitka, charging, falling dead in mid-air, was by his own impetus carried forward so far that the shaman had to step aside as the body of his would be assailant lunged headlong, face downward, to the snow. The dogs of the camp, alarmed, set up a turmoil of howls and barks, that came faintly to our ears.
Tzitka's followers jumped back in confusion, shocked as was I by the swiftness and unexpectedness of the tragedy. The shaman stood almost as quietly and indolently as he had before inflicting death, with his left hand still comfortably thrust under his belt and the other holding the pistol. He was still smiling, but now he shook his head slowly, as if amused by the action of a child. There was something appalling in his very immobility and disregard of the dead man at his feet. There was something terrifying in the very quality of his voice, still calm and musical, when he inquired, “Have you any more chiefs among you—'duly chosen,' I think was said—who wish to take my place? If so, I hope his modesty in his new honors will not prevent him stepping forward. No? No one to take Tzitka's place? What a pity! And on such a nice night, too, with the moon so bright, ummh? When one can see so plainly!”
It is impossible for me to convey the sneer of contempt that was in that silky voice of his; but now, of a sudden, after a moment's awed wait in which he derived no answer, it changed, as did his attitude. His other hand swept upward, clenched, his broad shoulders hunched themselves, his massive head thrust itself forward and his eyes seemed to flare and catch sparkling glints of light from the white moon. Without apparent effort or preparatory gathering of leg muscles he leaped forward to confront the rebellious natives. One of them started to run, and he shouted angrily:
“Stop! One step more and you shall join Tzitka, that vain, brawling dog who wished to be chief!”
The man who had started flight hastened to obey, lifting his hands upward in quick gesture of submission, and it is my candid conviction that he was not a fraction of a second too soon; for already the shaman's hand was lifting itself skyward for that deadly, dexterous, downward flick that would have meant death.
“So you elected Tzitka chief, did you?” he roared. “You”—and one after another he snarled out their names, as if to emphasize his brand upon them individually and mark them for his displeasure—“you let the ambitious vaporings of this foolish Tzitka cloud your heads and dazzle you as the sun upon glittering snow! I am tyune, shaman. I, Peluk! None other! Pick up that carrion and take it with you. Get back to your homes while you may yet walk. To-morrow I will decide what your punishment shall be! Whether it suits me best to have you alive, or send you to join this wonderful chieftain of yours that may have gone to a hunting ground where he has no followers until you come. It would be a pity to have so great a tyune arrive there with none to do him honor and explain his greatness. Pick him up and be gone, I say!”
The dogs of the camp had intensified their chorus to a wild crescendo. Lights were appearing in the windows of the cabins. Men and women were starting in our direction; but so fierce and so far-reaching was that great bellow of Peluk's that it carried above all other sounds; even some of those who had been disturbed by the gun's report must have heard, for glancing that way I saw the foremost hesitate and stand still, shadowy movements disclosing their agitation and fear.
Terrified by his deadliness and his consummate air of command, some of the men of the insurgent group rushed forward and picked the body of Tzitka from the snow. A dark blotch was exposed where it had rested. From where Jack and I stood, tense and breathless, we could see how certain had been the marksmanship of the man who had pretended that he could not use a pistol, for the exact center of Tzitka's forehead bore death's seal.
“To his cabin with Tzitka's body!” the shaman cried. “To your own cabins for yourselves, and there to stay until to-morrow! Heed! Until to-morrow! For to night I, Peluk, shall walk, and woe shall come to the house of him whom I meet!”
The bearers of the corpse became a tiny, slowly moving group in the center of those who had accompanied Tzitka upon his rash venture. As if the shaman's far-reaching threat had terrified them, the perturbed in habitants of the village no longer advanced, but shifted irresolute, appearing in the distance like black shadows restlessly moving over a field of glittering white. The one compact shadow was that in the midst of which was carried the dead Tzitka. It diminished, joined the others; there was a momentary halt, and then disintegration as if scattered by some invisible terror. Individual shadows were absorbed and lost in the darker shadows of houses and cabins. Every human form disappeared. Nothing suggesting life was left save the flitting shapes of wolf dogs, disturbed, scenting blood and reverting to type. Disappointed, they lifted their heads and bayed the brilliance of the arctic stars and moon before returning to their beds. Everything was again still—still as if forever locked and frozen by the chill gods of the utter North.
Probably but a few minutes intervened between the boisterous moment of death and the culminating silence; but to me they measured as a prolonged lapse of years. I blinked my eyes to convince myself that I had witnessed realities, stared at the white mountain peaks, at the cabins, and thence backward to the spot of tragedy where my gaze was arrested by a solitary figure. It was Peluk, the shaman, motionless, massive, standing there in the moonlight with both hands thrust under his belt beneath the overflowing folds of his shirt. His face was turned toward the village as if in steadfast inspection to assure himself that his commands had been respected and obeyed. His feet were spread astride a dark spot on the snow.
CHAPTER XIII.
Throughout all that swiftly passing time in which our lives had been in jeopardy neither Jack nor I had spoken a word. But now he murmured excitedly, “By God! He's got away with it! He's master of 'em all! The way he killed that chap was as cold-blooded as anything I've ever seen. What were they saying when it happened? What's he told 'em to do now? What's up with us?”
I dropped the curtain and faced him. I began to speak rapidly, explaining what I had overheard when the banging of the front door cautioned me to stop. The sound of a few rapid strides of moccasined feet intervened, and the shaman stood in the doorway—smiling! Actually smiling!
“Finish that, mebbe,” he said. “Nice here, ummh? Warm. But—sorry!—think bes' go quick. Think bes' get ready take trail. Quick!”
He dropped all his indolence and leaped across the room to where his parka was thrown across the back of a chair, jerked it over his body, and clapped his fur cap on his head. “Come!” he ordered, and we gathered our own outer garments and, donning them, followed him. He shouted something to the old woman that I did not catch; but she ran after him and we came together outside where he had opened the door of the outhouse he had used as a kennel and had begun pulling harnessed dogs from the darkness, dragging them to their places alongside the sled rope and snapping them to the rings fastened thereon.
He shouted an order to the old woman to go inside and bring the rifles which he had evidently left in her care. She returned laden with cartridge belts, rifles, and a robe or two. One of the dogs lifted its muzzle and wailed. Peluk silenced it with a savage kick, spoke soothingly to the others and commanded Jack and me to “make hard hold on sled. Mus' run quick.”
He stood at the leader's head restraining it with a hand on its collar and in his native tongue gave the old squaw her final instructions.
“If any one comes to-night you say we are asleep and not to be awakened. If no one comes until to-morrow, you say you know not when we left. Say that over for me!”
Obediently she repeated his words.
“Good,” he said and, releasing the lead dog, sprang to action, and with long, agile strides ran ahead of the team on the outward trail. The sled leaped so impetuously that both Jack and I were compelled to spring quickly to gain a handhold on it. We were jerked forward as empty, light, almost weightless, it responded to the surge and pull of the leaping animals.
I saw as we approached the eastern side of the tiny valley that we were beginning to ascend and were following an old trail. Then we began to climb stiffly up the narrow shelf that could lead to but one pass—that through which we had first entered. The village lay below us, with some of its lights still burning, and I esteemed it fortunate that the camp dogs had not yet settled to rest, but were still howling and yapping; for if silence had prevailed they would have heard our departure and aroused the village with their alarm, We climbed so steadily and at such speed that I, for one, was glad to rest when we reached the narrow gates through which we must pass. Despite the fact that in all that long and strenuous upward journey he had led the way, and had therefore nothing to cling to that might assist him forward, Peluk was far less winded than either Jack or I.
“Wait,” he ordered and went back down the side of the mountain for some distance, where I saw that he assumed an attitude of intent listening as if to learn whether any sounds from below might indicate an alarm. Apparently satisfied he returned to us and said, almost genially, “Very nice. Think mebbe not find out till morning we gone.”
We slid and scrambled down that woeful declivity, landing in a confused bunch of snarling dogs at the bottom, and the shaman straightened the team out and prepared to start. Then as if thinking of something essential, he came back to the sled and unlashed the three rifles that lay in the bottom. He inspected each in turn, made certain that the chambers were full, and, much to my surprise, handed one each to Jack and me, together with cartridge belts that he advised us to buckle on.
“No can tell if chase; but if do—by damn, when me say shootum, you shootum to kill! Unnerstan'? You my friend, see?” he said addressing me. “Me do bes' can for you. No more can do. Me give gun, now, but if me say giveum gun back, no can do more for you, and you giveum back, ummh?”
We instantly caught his meaning, which was that if worst came to worst in the final end, and he himself were overborne, we must for his sake submit. I had found it possible on our way up the long slope to explain to Jack that in the mining camp the shaman's authority as chief had been disputed and rejected. Evidently Peluk feared that if we ever reached the main village it might occur again, leaving him bereft of authority and impotent.
When we resumed our flight I fell to speculating on all that I had heard, and the outlook was not reassuring. I had not told Jack, through lack of opportunity, that I had distinctly understood that it was Madame Malitka who had ordered the shaman to destroy all those others who had encroached upon her domain—and who had probably commanded our destruction as well. The inhumanity and deceit of that extraordinary woman seemed nothing less than monstrous, when I recalled how she had bidden us farewell and sent us forth to death. The callous indifference toward human life displayed by the shaman seemed honorable by comparison. He had at least the condonement of being nothing more than a savage by breeding and instinct, and a hunter and slayer of living things; but he had not thus far actually betrayed us. True he had exercised a cunning entirely his own in accompanying us as guide and then over powering us, but had later defended us with merciless loyalty at the risk of his own life. Furthermore, he had not deigned to mention to us the fact that he had that night killed a man in our defense.
This thought led me to another question, which was whether he had slain Tzitka in our behalf or merely to preserve his own authority; whether he might not have surrendered us for execution, after all, had that delegation refrained from supplanting him as chief of the tribe. I could not comprehend his motives nor come to a decision. I had seen him smile with an almost childlike candor when showing me a carved button; smile when he lied to me about his knowledge of firearms; smile to me when telling how for nine days he had trailed over winter snows to kill a white man and native traitors who had accompanied him in that last flight; smile with the same bland visage while standing almost astride the still quivering body of Tzitka, whom he had slain.
And now he had voluntarily handed us rifles and ammunition with the request that if he recalled them we were to surrender without protest, and had called me “friend!”
His actions were too contradictory for me to follow. He had captured us ruthlessly and then preserved our lives. He had lied to rob me of a pistol and then equipped us with firearms.
I had been running like an automaton, clinging to the side bar of the sled that carried no burden other than a single, small bundle lashed amidships. Lifting my eyes to scan our surroundings, everything for a moment seemed unreal, impossible. Yet the moon shone steadfast and serene, illuminating everything, the distant patches of forest, the high glittering mountain peaks, the white expanse of snow over which we fled. A weird picture it must have been to any who could have watched our flight. Yards ahead and with arms bent to his sides ran the huge but tirelessly nimble shape of the shaman; behind him strung out for more yards the steadily leaping forms of great dogs, silver-gray with frost upon fur where they had perpetually galloped through the vapors of their own breaths; and, last of all, came the bounding, careening sled, to which clung two other running shapes, my partner and I. From the lips of men and the panting mouths of dogs came regularly an almost impalpable tiny, ephemeral cloud of steam that speedily froze and fell in snow dust. It did not seem possible that we were fleeing for life—or at least respite—or that we ran from menace behind to meet other and perhaps more inexorable dangers ahead.
I half expected that the shaman would leave the gold trail when he came to the place where we had entered it on our in ward journey; but he did not. Instead we passed it and its scars, flashing by in haste. We ran for perhaps two miles more before he suddenly shouted to the dogs, threw up a hand to us, halted, and came lunging back to speak to us. He was breathing heavily when he stopped and, as usual, ignoring Jack, addressed himself to me.
“Think bes' you keep dogs quiet, ummh? No noise, unnerstan'? Mus' go back small way and lissen, ummh? We come fas' but—mebbe others come more fas'. Mus' make sure, ummh? Wait you, here. Me come back bimeby.”
He slid backward along the moonlit trail, rounded a bend of intervening cliffs, and was lost to sight.
“That old devil is as tireless as a locomotive!” Jack muttered, and threw himself into the sled to rest. “If he's taking us back to Malitka, I think we've got a chance. What did you make out of all that row back there—that you haven't told me?”
I hastened to fill in with hurried sentences all that I had not imparted, reserving until the very last what Tzitka had indicated of Malitka's guilt. I voiced that part carefully, slowly, punctiliously precise in repetition of Tzitka's words. Jack sat up in the body of the sled where he had stretched himself, leaned both elbows on the side rails, and then climbed out.
“Old man,” he said, “I can't believe it! You've not understood everything, or”
“I understood every word they spoke.”
“Then,” he said, after a pause, “why is he taking us back to her village?”
“Taking us back to the village doesn't mean that he's taking us back to her,” I retorted. “Maybe he's taking us through the village. Going on beyond. That this is the best and only way out. Anyhow”
I had no time to say more, for the shaman came tearing down upon us, running as if for life, bawling orders as he came. He did not pause as he came abreast us, but hurried up to the dog team and stirred the animals to action.
“Run! Mus' run!” he shouted back. “Men in camp know we gone. Come fas' with dogs. Hearum plain! Injun run more fas' as white man. Bimeby catch us. Run!”
And then, as never before, we ran!
It was a long time before I caught any sound other than that produced by our own flight. And then I heard the faint bay of a wolf dog. I pictured a man clinging to a thong of harness, taking great, sweeping strides as the loping animal tugged and assisted him forward.
Peluk's acute ears must have noted that warning, for now he shouted to me, “Come quick. Take lead. Mus' drop back.”
I ran forward, slowly gaining over the dog team until I was by his side.
“You know trail. Follow it,” he shouted. “I go back to holdum. You keep on till bimeby me catchum you. If no catchum you, run! Go Lady's house. Mebbe she help, mebbe no help. You no stop, but run! Always run!”
He jumped to one side and speedily I was left alone, running as he had instructed, with the lead dog's nose close at my heels.
For some minutes I heard nothing more disturbing than the sounds of our own flight. After a while I shouted over my shoulder to Jack to relieve me of the pacemaking, and he surged forward while I fell behind until the sled came abreast and then lurched over on its side bar and caught my breath. I had barely gained it when from behind I heard the sharp explosion of a rifle shot, followed instantly by two others, then by the faint, wailing scream of a man's voice in agony and the wild yelping of a dog in pain. A moment later I heard five shots in rapid succession, as if some one had fired a volley at random. They sounded as if fired from the same rifle. Jack, too, heard them, and suddenly halted the dog team and came running bade to me.
“The shaman's a damned old murderer,” he panted. “But—he's fighting for us, after all—back there on his own—and I don't like it! You go on with the dogs and see if you can't get Malitka to send us help. I'm going back to join Peluk!”
“Go yourself,” I retorted. “If any one can get Malitka to help, it's you—not me! And, what's more, I doubt if she'd do anything for either of us, but she might for the shaman. He's her right hand.”
“Nonsense! Don't be a fool!” he cried, reaching for the rifle that he had laid in the sled when taking his turn in leading the dogs. But mine was already in my hand and I was running from him, shouting that whatever happened one of us must keep the dogs from escaping, as they might prove our last salvation.
When last I saw him he was evidently trying to anchor the sled so that it could not be pulled away by the animals, and was having much difficulty in his task. I ran forward and, as I did so, heard four or five more shots, each sounding nearer, and warning me that I was approaching the point of conflict. Suddenly the unmistakable humming of a bullet sped past my ear, followed immediately by a report, and I threw myself to one side on my belly, bringing my rifle to bear on the trail which was open for perhaps a hundred and fifty yards ahead.
Almost instantly I heard a voice not far distant, that of the shaman, in its usual pleasant drawl, “Ugh! So my friend come back to help me, ummh?”
“Of course, Peluk,” I called back, still keeping my eyes fixed on the white moonlit strip. “Did you think I'd leave you here alone to fight for us?”
“Ummh! Much bes' you run fas' what I told you do; but—me unnerstan'. Friends, we—sure!” He paused a minute and then added carelessly, “Think mebbe me shootum two mans. Sure one. Mebbe when see you come help me they got 'fraid and”
A swift spurt of flame from behind a tree exposed to me his position and from up in front came a scream that could have been nothing other than a death wail. His eyes, keener than mine, had discovered movement, a target, and he had fired. A volley of aimless shots ripped and scarred the tree trunks about us, a dog off in the distance howled as if impatient to be unleashed, and there was a moment's silence. Then the same calm, placid voice went on, as if there had been no interruption at all.
“And they think mebbe bes' not come too close, ummh? Me think mebbe they try come behind. So bes' we run fas', then stop again, ummh?”
It was my turn to interrupt. A dark figure had lifted itself to its feet and started to bound across the trail as if seeking to join companions on the opposite side. When I fired it seemed to be caught in mid-air, bounded convulsively upward and fell in a black heap. The echoes had not died away when the shaman was on his feet and dodging rapidly between the trees and shadows shouting, “That good! Come on!” But to my astonishment he was running toward our enemies instead of from them. Furthermore he bellowed a loud, defiant war cry as he charged, a lone man intent upon coming to close quarters with many men.
I am neither a coward nor a brave man; but for an instant his uncompromising valor jarred me! My own judgment bade me lie still. I don't know what obsessed me in that instant, unless it was a weird and foolish intoxication of fray, but I found myself running as he ran, dodging trees, keeping in shadows, charging forward and shouting like a madman.
Evidently our attack was so unexpected, so fiercely pushed, so recklessly pursued, that our enemies were bewildered. Six or eight targets suddenly presented themselves there in the moonlight. I dropped to my knee and began firing, long practice with the rifle directing my aim. As if the same targets had presented themselves to the shaman, he too was firing. I don't know which one of us proved the most efficient. I do know that at least three dark shapes lay in the open trail, one of which writhed and rolled in an agony of wounds. I had leaped forward again, and again dropped to my knee to get steady aim at another leaping shadow, when my rifle was seized and twisted upward and the shaman stood over me.
“Me think that enough,” he observed in about the same tone of voice that he might have used if discussing the completion of a carved button. “Think mebbe bes' we run fas' now and find sled. Takeum some time help other Injuns who got what you callum—hit, ummh? By time they get brave again, we gone. Long way down trail, ummh? Come!”
His placidity had its effect upon me. My fighting ardor cooled. When his hand had caught me by an arm and bodily lifted me to my feet as if I were of no weight, he started and ran, still avoiding the open trail, dodging trees, and keeping in shadows, and I ran after him. We encountered a running figure in the open trail and heard Jack's challenge.
“Had a devil of a time fastening up that pack of dogs,” he panted. “Was afraid I'd be too late. Hello, Peluk! You're a game old sport! But—for God's sake, man!—you're hit!”
We sprang together to catch the shaman as he sagged to his knees. We jerked his Mackinaw open, ripped his prized blue flannel shirt down the front and found his undershirt soaked with blood from a nasty wound in the shoulder. By the time we had cleansed it with handfuls of snow he revived and sat up.
“Peluk,” I demanded, “when did you get that?”
“That first shot fired,” he remarked.
“Then why didn't you say something to me sooner?”
“What use. Got heap business when you come.” He struggled to get up despite the fact that we had not yet finished bandaging him with strips of his shirt. “Got more business now. Me no squaw. Man—me! Peluk! Tyune still!”
Between us we supported him—no easy task considering his great bulk—until we reached the sled into which we laid him. He was too weak to do more than protest, but his voice was the same—drawling, pleasant, resonant. It took us five minutes of frantic energy to release dogs and sled, and all the time we momentarily expected to be interrupted by a rifle bullet. None came. When Jack ran ahead to lead the dogs and I fell to the handlebars to steady the sled with its-burden, the shaman was sitting up with his back resting against the incline of the frame and his sturdy legs crossed.
“Been lissenin',” he rumbled. “No can hear nossings. Mus' be native mans got enough. Gone back me think. Give me rifles. Me load 'em up again, so if fools come can shoot more, ummh? Me very sorry no can run. Go more fas'. But good dogs, ummh? Very nice dogs. Go quick. Go strong.”
As we slid away over the trail with the shaman fighting his weakness, weaving from side to side and determinedly forcing fresh cartridges into the rifles, I strove to hear what sounds might come from behind. It was perhaps five minutes before I heard one that I was not likely to forget. It was the high ululation of a timber wolf that had caught a scent. The shaman, too, caught that savage note of-the wild and turned his head sidewise and cupped a hand over an ear. We heard it repeated. From still more distance came an answering wail and then another. Then, faintly, it arose to a scattered choral and sharply there cut in the staccato stabs of rifle shots. The shaman shouted to Jack to stop, and in that waiting pause listened intently. We heard two more shots and savage animal calls, but they were fainter, dying away. The shaman turned his head, settled himself comfortably in the sled and laughed.
“That good joke, ummh? One time wolf chase my white friend, nearly eatum. Now wolf come back chase damn fool Injuns, not us. Sure eat some, mebbe eat all! Very good if do, ummh? Hope so. Me no longer chief, ummh?” And he laughed as cheerfully as if he were unwounded and this one of the most humorous situations in which he had ever found himself. “But bes' we go on now. If wolf no get bellyful, mebbe come finish feed on us, ummh? Go now!”
The old rascal laid there in the sled chuckling for a long time as we fled down the moonlit trail. In time forebodings of pursuit by either wolves or human beings were dissipated and all sounds died away. We entered the final stretch leading through the forest outskirts of Malitka's village before I shouted to Jack to relieve me.
When I fell back to my turn at such rest as was afforded by the sled, the shaman was sound asleep with his great head lolling this way or that when the sled struck a bunch of hardened snow and bounced.
CHAPTER XIV.
It was morning when our tired dogs scented madame's village and began to run more eagerly and to give tongue. The noise awoke the shaman, who clutched the sides of the sled and pulled himself painfully upward.
“Think bes' go Lady's house,” he said, then mumbled something and shook his head doubtfully. I thought I caught the words in his own tongue, as if he were still bewildered and soliloquizing, “She must decide what is to be done. Must tell her everything. Too bad. She can put all the blame on me.”
His words weren't at all reassuring. If she had sent us out to slaughter, the sole hope we could have would rest in her relenting from her purpose and reprieving us. I believed we should have an advocate in the shaman, but was certain that if it came to a free-for-all battle in the village, his wound would prevent his putting up much of a struggle. I was weighing our complexities when we emerged from the forest trail, swung round through the clearing, and halted in front of the great house. The noise of our arrival had disturbed the whole village, and its population came running toward us just as the door which had so recently closed upon us opened and Malitka hastened forth.
Her whole manner betrayed her astonishment; but before she could speak the shaman turned and looked her full in the face and said, in his tongue, “Lady, I have brought the voyageurs back.” He was climbing weakly from the sled as he spoke, and I assisted him until he stood upon his feet, though bent over as if in pain. He held his uninjured hand toward her and lifted his head with something akin to barbaric nobility as his voice gathered some of its old resonance. “You told me to speed them safely on their way and not to let them return. That I could not do! You told me to protect them, Lady, and I—I—have done my best!”
And then before I could either recover from my astonishment, or reach out a hand to assist him, he pitched forward in the snow.
“Done his best?” I blurted, forgetful that I was not supposed to understand his tongue. “My God! He's fought to the death for us! This is a man!” And as I spoke I sprang to lift him, and Jack, too, plunged forward to his assistance.
“He is wounded?” I heard madame cry.
“Yes, Maiitka, badly, we fear,” Jack answered, as we gathered the big, inert form up.
Instantly she was cool again and took command.
“Carry him inside to the room next the one you occupied,” she said, “and put him in the bed.” Then, reverting to the native tongue, she called a man by name and said, “Take the dogs to your place and care for them. The others of you people go back to your homes. See to it that you talk not too much among yourselves until I learn what all this means. Go back, I say. If I need the help of any of you I shall send.”
“Madame,” I shouted over my shoulder, for by now we were entering her door, “be sure to bring the rifles with you. Don't let the natives have them!”
I caught her sharp exclamation. My words had further warned her that there might be danger afoot. Yet one swift, backward look showed me that she was outwardly calm and self-possessed as she deliberately gathered the weapons from the sled. Already some of the natives were hastening homeward in obedience to her commands and others were standing sullenly in groups and staring at us with anything but friendly eyes.
We carried the shaman into the room she had indicated, laid him upon the bed and stripped him of his clothing. Not until then had I fully appreciated his splendid physique, his great muscular development, the full size of his torso. And not until then did Jack or I know that he had admitted only the most serious wound, the one we had so crudely bandaged, for he had refrained from mentioning that three other bullets had found marks. Those others that he had disdained to mention lest we lose time in bandaging them, had done the most damage. Although none of them was more than a flesh wound, loss of blood had sapped his strength. One bullet had torn through the great muscles of his back indicating that he had been on hands and knees when struck, another had ripped through the fleshy part of his thigh, as if he had been running forward when it came, and the third had grazed his arm with a savage slash. We had to cut most of his clothing from him to remove it.
“You said it,” Jack muttered, while we ministered to him as best we could, “Peluk's all man!”
With what skill we possessed, aided by our crude knowledge of surgery, after satisfying ourselves that all the bullets had passed through, we cleansed his hurts with hot water Jack obtained from the kitchen, before Malitka entered.
“He's not a very pleasant sight,” Jack protested, but almost scornfully she waved him aside.
“Don't be a fool!” she exclaimed, and without mock modesty examined him herself. “Leave him as he is,” she said, and fastened from the room to return with a surgical chest from which she took antiseptics, bandages, and surgeon's tape. “I have seen more wounded than either of you could have dreamed of in your worst nightmares,” she said grimly. “I have held the heads of women disemboweled by Turkish swords; bandaged the feet of human beings whose naked soles had been shod with horseshoes by Turkish officers; heard the dying whispers of mangled Russian peasants who had suffered ruthless steel! For the love of pity! Let us not be foolish!”
Her cold vehemence appalled me. It was as if in that moment she had burst forth into long-suppressed expression, heedless of what she might reveal.
“Lift him up!” she ordered, and with white probing fingers estimated the wound in the shaman's shoulder.
“He is now blessedly unconscious,” she said as she applied burning antiseptics to the wounds. “It is well. I have neither ether nor chloroform. But this work is thorough. His enormous vitality should do the rest. He will live.”
She had skillfully and deftly bandaged him and turned away before she asked a question.
“Where did this happen?”
“Up on the trail from the mining camp,” I answered.
She whirled and eyed me.
“What do you know about the mining camp?” she demanded.
Jack spared me the embarrassment of answering by moving toward her and saying, “The shaman took us there. There is no occasion for anger, Malitka. He took us there to save our lives, and there he fought for us, and from there he brought us, fighting on the way here.”
The steadiness and readiness of his reply caused her to hesitate.
“We can talk about all that later, can't we?” he asked gently.
She glanced at the shaman, then at me, and then her eyes rested upon Jack the longest time of all. “Yes, I suppose that is best,” she assented. And then suddenly she became all woman again, sympathetic, solicitous, and hastened to him. “And you are tired? You must be. I take it that you have been traveling all night.”
“We have,” he replied.
“Come to the living room, have something to eat, and rest before telling me what has taken place,” she said.
“We could eat,” said Jack, with his irrepressible smile.
“Then, if you two will go to the room you occupied before, and make whatever change you wish, I'll see that you are—fed!” she remarked, and for the first time since our return I saw her face relax into a faint smile.
“Changes such as we can make, Malitka,” said Jack whimsically, “are few. Everything we had when we left here, save our rifles and that in which we stand, are—scattered over some hundred or more miles of trail.”
For a moment she stood in the doorway staring absently at the floor and then with a slight shrug, said, as if answering some self-debated question of delicacy, “After all, one must bow to common sense. Necessity breaks all barriers. Wait here a minute.”
She was gone but a few minutes in which time I gravely inspected the shaman. He seemed to have passed from the unconsciousness of wounds to the response of quiet sleep. His breathing had become regular and deep.
“For you,” said Malitka to me when she returned, “I can provide garments that will more or less fit. But for you”—addressing Jack—“it's more difficult. I have sent to Peluk's house for a change of underwear and his spare clothing, because he is nearer your stature, although perhaps somewhat larger. He is a big man. However, until those arrive, you will find some few toilet necessities in your old room.”
She turned and left us, and we trudged back to the room that had so recently been ours. I saw, laid out upon the bed, pressed but with undoubted indications that they had been recently removed from box, trunk, or storage, a neat and well-tailored suit of clothes. It was such as a prosperous business man might have worn in a style of perhaps ten to fifteen years previous. Also, undergarments to fit a man of my stature were there. A hip bath had been deposited in the center of the room into which a native servant poured pails of steaming water before I had time to examine my new garb.
“This is what I call luxury!” I heard Jack exclaim, and saw that he was lifting, piece by piece, a case of razors, silver military brushes, and a man's manicure set. “Where on earth do you suppose she got these?” he exclaimed. “Monogram on 'em, but I can't make it out. Anyhow, we can clean up a bit. You to the bath, me for a shave.”
With his usual insistence upon taking every vicissitude as a joke, he made useless, irrelevant remarks while I took advantage of the tin tub and the clean undergarments. I had pulled on trousers when the native woman entered, without knocking, and proceeded to empty the tub and refill it for Jack, who, clean shaven, and humming a tune, sat on the edge of a chair. He had started to cast off his outer clothing when she reappeared with ordinary red flannel undergarments, woolen socks, and—strangest of all, a suit of clothes such as are called “hand-me-downs” in the outer world, which she threw upon the bed.
“Great Scott! Peluk must have been a swell when he wore these,” Jack commented as he held the coat up to inspect it. “He's broader than I am, but—old man, this looks like New York, London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, or any other old town.”
He plunged into the bath gratefully, while I wondered whether my coat might suit my requirements. It did. Not fitting perhaps as if tailored to my form but serviceable, I scrutinized it more closely. Surely this garment was tailor made. I threw back a coat lapel and turned outward the inner pocket, looking for a tailor's tab. It was there. It read: “Harris Barnes. No, F. 2167. Bretherton Bros., Fashionable Tailors, Fifth Avenue, New York.”
I sat down on the nearest chair holding the garment in my hands and reread that startling scrawl. Harris Barnes, the man whom, or of whose fate, we sought! For a moment it seemed incredible. She had handed me a murdered man's garments to relieve my distress! And then I recalled other things, tried to correlate, but reasoned that at any rate, whether the man concerning whose existence or death it was my duty to learn were dead or alive, the garments must minister to my needs, and slipped into the coat. It fitted fairly well. My common sense told me that nothing less than dire urgency and utter lack of substitutes could have induced her to such an offering. Speechless, I threw it and the waistcoat off again, and utilized a razor. Clean once more, I picked up the silver brushes and inspected them. To me the ornate monogram was plain. It was decipherable as nothing other than “H. B.”
“I'm an ax-handle's width across the shoulders, but I'll be hanged if the shaman's store clothes don't hang on me like a bag! You're going to be dressed like an Oxford Street model, and I've got to look like a cannibal in the clothes of a missionary off whom I've just dined,” growled Jack.
His voice disturbed my thoughts. A man who could jest after all that we had so recently passed through, and in the midst of such a situation as we then were, impressed me as either irresponsible or a freak. The full light of the arctic day was breaking through the windows. Doubled as they were the frost had coated with lavish or delicate pattern nearly all the outer panes; but through one clear space of glass I could see the frowning darkness of forest beyond the clearing, the trail over which so short a time before we had struggled. Far away, climbing up as if to attack the very sky itself, towered the sharp white peaks that guarded that place of gold from which, through the valiance of but one man, we had escaped. In that moment, recognizing his great worth, my heart warmed to the shaman, my anxiety and compassion for him stabbed.
I walked to the door, flung it open, and slipped to the adjoining room. The door was ajar. Malitka was there, half kneeling above the shaman and listening intently to his breathing. She heard me enter, turned, arose, laid a finger upon her lips to impress silence and gestured me to withdraw. She was all woman in that moment. Yes, in that moment she was exquisitely and beautifully human.
With an exaggerated caution we passed through the door before she whispered, “He sleeps well. He will recover soon. I have seen so many thus, or worse, that—I tell you I know! It's not so much the wounds as exhaustion from the loss of blood and overfatigue that have beaten him. When he wakens he will be all right.”
And then, as if for the first time she had discerned my garb, she started back, put her hands before her eyes, removed them, faltered, recovered, and laid a hand upon my coat. Her white fingers slipped across my sleeve as if in a caress of memory.
“I have honored you,” she whispered. “There can be no nobility of man finer, cleaner than that of the one who last wore this.”
I did not deliberately take advantage of a momentary emotion. It was nothing less than sheer stupidity, I think, a temporary confusion, that made me blurt out, in that same whisper lest we disturb the rest of the man behind the door, “Barnes. Harris Barnes.”
“Yes. It was his,” she replied, and then, turning from all that was dead to present reality, she started back, caught her breath, came closer and with staring eyes fixed upon mine cried, “How did you know?”
I was so startled that I did not immediately answer, and now her hands caught the lapels of my coat not in caress but in demand, and she repeated her question. I had not time to answer before a door opened and through it came my partner, who, seeing us in that position, straightened, stopped, and then said, “Hello! What's up?”
Instantly she withdrew her hands, fell back a pace or two as if confused, and then said, “Nothing! I think your breakfast is waiting. If you gentlemen will come in and”
She quietly walked to and through the door of the living room, beckoned us to seats and seated herself as imperturbably aloof as ever she had been. “Well,” she said, “perhaps you can now explain what has happened. Why is it that you are again my guests? Why is it that you return as you do, in haste, with a wounded man who means very much to me, and whom I admire and respect, as your burden?”
Jack looked at me. I waited for him to act as spokesman.
“What is the mystery about it that makes both of you so slow to answer?” she asked, looking from one to the other of us.
“As far as I'm concerned, there's no mystery, Malitka,” said Jack softly, continuing to use that Indian name as if he loved it and had used it with her before. “My partner can explain better than I can; first, because until last night when he heard the shaman's last talk before he collapsed, he mistrusted you; and second, because he understands this native lingo as well as if it were his own.”
She turned indignant eyes upon me. I fancied that there was, furthermore, an expression of hurt and astonishment.
“You—you—mistrusted me? And—and you understand the native tongue? Then why”
Her face set into colder expression and her eyes betrayed rising anger. I don't think it affected me much. I was not in love with her, though I admired her. And yet I felt that I had done her a mental injustice for which I must make apologies.
“Come!” she insisted. “You are a blunt man. One who I am certain has neither fear nor could be restrained by the thought that your words might hurt the feelings of either man or woman. You are not a parlor puppet who invents graceful speeches. You are one who deals in hard truths. So I ask you, what is the meaning of all this mystery?”
“You wish and shall have it all, cold, naked,” I said, exasperated by her insistence.
“Truth is always—just that,” she said.
“You shall have it,” I replied. “When we came here—blundered here—in the plight you saw and appreciated, your manner did not indicate any particular welcome; your questions even before succoring us, spent as we were, could scarcely hasten trust and liking; your reluctance to”
“You didn't understand! You don't understand yet!” she cried, in self-defense, as if denying imputations of inhumanity. “Do you think that I would turn half-dying men—one of whom was blind!—from my door?”
I paid no heed to her indignation. I had anticipated it.
“What we thought then or what were then your reasons for action, are of no importance now—save as they bear upon my explanation,” I checked her. “It's sufficient that after the strange superstition in which your name was held, the hints of mystery and of fear and the warnings to avoid you and yours uttered by a well-meaning Indian some hundreds of miles from here, the manner of your reception was anything but encouraging. It was a confirmation of mystery and of doubt. For hundreds of miles around your village the natives dread you and yours, speak of you in whispers, or—speak not at all! ”
“Incredible! Impossible!” she exclaimed.
“Malitka—Malitka—it's so.” Jack's soothing voice interjected.
She turned upon him angrily, but his calm eyes, carrying his unabashed devotion, softened her as swiftly as do June rains the arctic snows.
“Jim can't explain it all, can he, if you get angry and interrupt him?”
With a gesture indicating that she was partially mollified, or at least ready for a truce, she turned to me and said, “I am sorry. Pardon me. Please tell me the whole of it.”
“Well, Peluk and I struck up a friendship. I found out the secret of the gold camp back there in the hills. Peluk doubtless told you that he learned that I knew of it, and”
“I had no idea of that. He never told me!” she again interrupted.
It was my turn for surprise.
“If you had known of my knowledge, what would you have done?” I asked.
“Just exactly as I did. Pledged you to secrecy and pledged him to send you safely on your way.”
“We are coming to an understanding,” I said, looking at her with frank apology in my stare. “I thought you knew. I wonder if you know that natives who have ventured too close to this place have been ruthlessly driven away; that a white man and two natives were once followed for long, hard days and nights over the trail from here and killed; that”
“My God!” she exclaimed in distraction. “You believed me capable of ordering tragedies like those?”
“I did!”
“I swear to you that until this moment I never knew of them! That I have never taken nor ordered life to be taken! That—who told you this?”
“Peluk, the shaman,” I replied. “Can you then blame me for distrusting you at the moment when, in the nighttime, in our tent, we were fallen upon, fought, overpowered, and carried back to the very gold camp I had stumbled upon?”
She stared at me for a moment as if tearing from me the conviction of truth, and then, as if convinced, fell back into her chair with an air of bewildered resignation and surrender. Her face, white with the winter pallor of the North that through a protracted period of sunless days brands its mark, became even whiter with horror. In that instant I was convinced of her innocence and of the ugliness of my delusions and misconceptions.
“I am sorry,” I said. “Very sorry! But that is what I thought. That is how I misjudged you. Malitka, I am mentally upon my knees at your feet. I think I can say no more. But I must tell you what happened after we left here.”
She lifted her eyes and glanced at me, and I thought I read in them forgiveness. So with no further interruption I told her all that had taken place. No, not all, for I was ashamed to confess how, surreptitiously, I had learned the native tongue and practiced my ears to its understanding. Strangely enough, she did not then, or even after, question me as to that accomplishment.
I had but completed my confession and recountal when we were interrupted by the entrance of the klootch—a young unmarried woman—who came expecting to clear away the table. The food upon it had cooled, was untouched, so great had been our stress. Malitka awoke to immediate physical requirements and suggested that we breakfast before further conversation. We did so. I had not appreciated my hunger nor weariness. We ate silently, and grateful to me was the strong, hot coffee that ended our meal. But I could not avoid observing that Malitka was too distressed to indulge appetite. She appeared relieved when Jack and I, replete, waited for her to summon the native maid.
It was not until the latter had gone and we were again alone that she reverted to our subject. And then it was as if in that silent interim she had weighed all that had been told, correlated it as far as possible, and reached a conclusion. She resumed our conversation, as if there had been no pause.
“So, the conditions are now these: Peluk has, without orders or knowledge of mine, killed any or every one who jeopardized this place. He has fought for and protected you at his own expense. He promised me to send you upon your way, did his best, protected you in the end at the cost of other lives and his own wounds, and, unable to do more, returned you here—to me. I can no more weigh the situation than can you; but this I tell you—because I know these natives better than you—is not the finish. Those men back up there in the gold camp will not be content to let matters rest. They will cry for blood. The savage instinct in them will overcome all they have been taught. If you think they will submit easily, you are mistaken. These are fighting men. We have much to face, myself as well as you. And Peluk sleeps.”
There was something of tragedy in her final words, “Peluk sleeps!” The swift, tragic news on the eve of Waterloo that Napoleon Bonaparte was desperately ill and incapacitated when nations trembled in the balance, could have conveyed no more import than did the shaman's incapacitation to us three human beings of the white race in a village of mere hundreds—all of whom, however, might become enemies while the man who mastered all our future was inert.
“Madame Malitka,” I said, after she had reverted to silence as if having nothing more to say, “have I now your forgiveness for having mistrusted you? Is there other amend I can make?”
Even then she weighed my confession for a moment before committing herself.
“Yes,” she said with a perturbed but frank smile, “I can't blame you. And—yes—we are quits. I think—I think we are destined to become friends—fast friends.”
Time proved it so. Of all women I have known in this world, through which I so much alone have adventured, I have known none who might take her place in my affection and esteem.
“Then,” said I gently, “can you not tell me of Harris Barnes, the quest of whom brought us here? If there is anything you would conceal I give you my word of honor your wish shall be respected. And, what is more, I shouldn't ask you of him, were it not that this is our mission. For its accomplishment I have accepted money, and am bounden. If we escape from this predicament, my search must go on—to the end. Can you not assist me?”
Both Jack and I watched her as she sat there hesitant and distressed. Her agitation was manifested by the way in which her white fingers, resting in her lap, intertwined themselves and twisted together. She looked at me questioningly, seemed satisfied, and then stared at Jack. There was a vast difference in her regard of him. I was aware that she was more concerned in what effect any admission she might make would have in that quarter than upon me. Somehow I had sympathy with her then, feeling that to her this was a prodigiously vital moment, in which she must cast precious and valued emprises upon the scales of fate. I knew, too, that she was brave enough and honest enough to dare. Finally she looked away, deliberately disengaging herself from us, and fixed her eyes on the frosty window.
“Yes, I can assist you,” she said very quietly. “Harris Barnes was my husband. He brought me here. Here he died. Here he is buried. His grave is up there on a high hill, wind swept, facing summer suns because he loved them, fearless of winter's snows because he braved them. That is my answer. You may make use of it. It may cost me my life.”
“Cost you your life?” both Jack and I exclaimed.
Many years have passed since that hour, but clear and vivid it and its emotion return to me—Malitka sitting there, white-faced and as if at bay—my comrade half risen from his chair as though about to spring toward her, his lean face with its resolute chin thrust forward, his eyes fixed upon her with the unmistakable light of a great affection—and I, grizzled, with a skin seamed, wrinkled and hardened by years of desert suns, jungle sweats, and mountain winds, nearly old enough to be father to both, absorbed in what she had admitted as much as in what she might further say—the picture all comes back to me. The room had become so still that its tiny intimate sounds became loudly audible; the crackling of the flames when a half-consumed log sagged, threw upward a cloud of sparks, and burst into broader blaze; the ticking of the clock that stood on top of the library shelf; the monotonous droning song of some native servant sweeping the hallway; a faint clash of crockery from the far end of the house and the barking of dogs playing somewhere out in the still, cold forenoon whose clear light made of the windows great spots of brilliance.
For a confused instant it seemed incredible that all the long hardships of our quest, the dangers, the neck-to-neck races with death, the subsequent tragedies, had been answered in such few sentences from Malitka's lips and the object of our mission so unexpectedly accomplished in full.
No longer mistrusting or fearing this extraordinary woman, but pitying her for what she must so bravely have endured and overcome, I sat quietly waiting for her to speak what I surmised must be nothing less than a confession to the man who loved her and whom she loved. I appreciated somewhat the agony of her position and, could I have done so, would have spared her the humiliation which might be involved in the full candor of words. I don't think she rebelled against it. She was too brave to evade an issue. But I do believe that her long hesitancy was due to her great desire to formulate what she must say into an appeal. Portia, fighting for her love, did that. It was but natural.
Both women and men have, through all time, battled for an ideal; both have gathered and fought as tribes, as countries, as nations; but the sternest fight ever waged is, after all, that of man for woman, or woman for man. The fight for love! And it is only we who have lost, and must forever dwell in the despair of irrevocable loneliness and defeat who can comprehend the meaning of such an issue.
CHAPTER XV.
I said that Malitka hesitated long to reply to our startled exclamations; but I suppose that it really measured less than half a minute. Human emotions work with such terrific rapidity.
“I am Russian,” she said, as if it were necessary to explain her beginnings. “Once called Krasta, princess of a once royal house.”
The statement further aroused both my comrade and myself; for both of us had lived in that enormous domain whose internal strivings and dissensions, luxuries and destitutions, kindnesses and cruelties have been perpetual mysteries to those dwelling outside its borders. My comrade had passed his youth in Moscow, that distant, glamorous, ever somber heart of the Russian race. In St. Petersburg I, as a youth had But—of me nothing matters—nothing is important or even noteworthy, save this—that I knew Russia, thought or spoke with equal facility in its tongue, knew its traditions, and much of its events. “Princess Krasta!” The name leaped up through years of forgetfulness, recalling contradictory tales, sometimes of blood and ruin, of merciless death and callous murder, or again as an unsullied synonym for humanity, justice, liberty. It was with something akin to amazement that I recalled that long-forgotten name, wondering why and when it had ceased to be one of the compelling ones in the world's interest.
To me it was preposterous that here, in this isolation surpassed only by the majesty of the unknown and unconquered poles, we should listen to the words of one who had once been a meteor flaming across the skies of dispute. So this had been Krasta's end—to be ruler in an unknown Indian village in the very heart of an unknown land! This was the explanation of her disappearance. It was because she had reached this vast, solitude and therein encompassed herself that she was no longer sought and so little remembered. Ten years, remorseless, insidious, relentless, had conquered all memories of both friendships and animosities.
“Yes,” she went on, “it was I who escaped from Siberia, and was—somewhat sought for by the men of the great white czar. But I wasn't what some of them said I was. I did not betray my caste. I fought against an autocracy, because I believed it was unfair. In folly I joined an anarchistic society because I believed it the last hope—until I discovered that futile murder was its highest aim. Fools! No system dies with the death of one—no, or bf a hundred men! They accused me of betraying them, but—by my faith in God—I never did! They wouldn't leave me alone—they threatened death. Perhaps you recall the time when it became a question whether or not the United States would enter into an agreement with Russia permitting the latter to extradite escaped Siberian prisoners?”
I nodded.
“Of course nothing could be more certain than my death if I were returned to Russia. Indeed I would not have gone. The perdition of one's soul by suicide, it seemed to me, could be no worse. I was in despair and in hiding—when I first met Harris Barnes. He was a very brave and very noble man. He sympathized with me, loved me, asked me to marry him. I liked him, admired him, but did not love him. He laughed in that big hearty way of his and—overpersuaded me. I do not think he ever regretted it. I never did, for he was a rock to lean upon, an unselfish guardian and a consider ate husband. That my affection never reached the heights of love was through no fault of his nor of mine; but it did contain the content of perfect friendship, comradeship, partnership.
“Partly because he had loved adventure and the wilds, partly because we had but small capital and he hoped that we might find fortune in the unknown interior of this country, and partly because we were both convinced that here I could be secure until time led my enemies to forgetfulness, we put all our funds into a trading outfit and, covering our tracks as best we could, made our way to Alaska.”
She gave a tiny shrug of her shoulders as if throwing off unpleasant memories and looked at us. We had rested ourselves back in our chairs, absorbed in not only her words but the music of her voice, so well modulated, so distinct, and yet with that softness that is found only in the cultured Italian or cultured Russian tone and inflection.
“You two men know what it is to suffer! Well, so do I! Harris Barnes and I lost more than half of that small trading outfit, the lives of four natives and, worse still, many sled dogs in that trail through which you came. I remember, when we finally came to a place where we could find fuel, shelter, and camp, and took stock of our depleted resources, how it appealed to me as absurd that one of the heaviest weights of the outfit, and seemingly the most useless, was a chest of carpenter's tools and a bundle of enormous whipsaws! Almost as worthless seemed a chest of medicines and surgical instruments that I had insisted on bringing because Well, I haven't explained, perhaps, that at one time I had an ambition to become a woman physician, thinking I might give my services to the poor—and could have easily taken my degree. At any rate, such is the fact.
“Food-on which our lives must depend was lost in that catastrophe, but medicaments and tools, upon which we could not live, were saved. It was—ironical! I sat down in that debris of salvage, and despaired. I wept, for I am but woman, after all, with all the weaknesses of my sex. Harris came to me, I can still remember, and lifted me up with his strong, kindly hands, and words of comfort. 'Girl, it's pretty rough luck,' he said; 'but never mind. You've known worse. We've still got each other!'
“I think I came nearer to loving him then than ever before. He had the exquisite and marvelous ability to accept even the worst with a smile. We took stock of our resources. We had scarcely anything but heavy material left. We had scarcely any food supplies. It was as if a malevolent fate had denuded us of all our most vital possessions and jeeringly spared us everything that could not save our lives.”
For a moment or so she pondered, frowning as if the terrors of a past vicissitude and peril were still keenly felt.
“But that wasn't the worst,” she resumed, still staring abstractedly into the fire. “In the night, after the winds had died and the clouds cleared and the stars shone, our surviving half dozen natives, presumably after consultation and filled with superstitious dread of ill omens, took most of our dogs, all of our firearms, half of our food, and slipped away over the back trail. We were left alone. Marooned in a white isolation! Helpless! Hopeless!
“Even that did not break the spirit of the man whom I trusted above any other I had ever met. The faint moans of the pine trees around our camp to me sounded dirgelike. To him they whispered encouragement. Once he said to me, 'They talk. They say that they have survived, though rooted fast, and that we who still have the ability to move and escape the blasts must not despair.”
“We passed three days there, while he opened every parcel of our possessions, deliberated, and threw aside everything unessential to our survival. He was repairing our broken sled in the noontime of the third day when we heard the yelping of dogs. A solitary man guided and restrained them. It was Peluk.
“You two were in desperate straits when first I saw you. Your dogs were dying on their feet. One of you was snow-blind. But I tell you now that your plight was less pitiable than his when he staggered into our camp. His hands and face were blackened with camp smoke and frost. His feet were frostbitten. He moved upon stumps of half dead members. His eyes were bloodshot with cold and fatigue. His bones protruded outward until they seemed stretching to the utmost their covering of skin. But there glared from his indomitable eyes an unquenched and invincible resolution. He could not speak. He could but stagger, and yet he tried to smile.
“You've seen his smile when the end was very near. Well, that is the way he came to us—Peluk, the shaman! One of his starved dogs fell upon the snow and was dead before we could give it food. He fainted, as if his determination had been overstrained and had suddenly lost its last spark of power in a momentary relaxation. Pitying such horrifying distress, we ministered to him from our scant stores, and when he recovered consciousness, while my husband and I were holding him up and pouring warm liquid foods between his teeth, he opened his eyes and peered at us and smiled again. There was something ghastly in it—quite as if a man long dead had opened his eyes and then grinned.
“His first words were those of bewilderment, inconsequential—but in my Russian native tongue!
“And so it was but natural that when he had recovered sufficiently to speak it was in that tongue that I asked him who and what he was.”
She paused, shifted her chair, and faced us.
“I tell you that Peluk is a remarkable man. You don't know him as well as I do. I am qualified to speak. He is the half-breed son of a Russian trader and a native woman. The trader was an outcast, but all that was great in him, and intelligent, was inherited by his offspring. When the trader prospered and gained riches he deserted, willingly or reluctantly, that native woman and the son that, I think, he loved. In any event he went back to Russia, intending to be gone for but a few months, and—he never returned. The native woman died. The boy, Peluk, left alone, resolved to seek his father.
“He went to Russia, and in Moscow, after long search, learned that his father was dead. I don't know what happened to him after that. I presume that it was a bitter lesson; that it led him to hate those who scorned him because of his mixture of blood and indefinite origin. That seems to be the way of human beings. Any specimen that is not well defined, or physically whole, or cannot account for its breeding is—somehow—aloof. In the end this half-breed hungered for the people from whom his mother sprang and came back to what had become nothing more than a squalid native village.”
I could not refrain from thinking how completely he had fooled me into believing that all he knew of the outside world was Juneau and Kadiak, this crafty, determined man who had traveled over so much of the globe, and how little I had surmised the character that was masked by his ever-ready and disarming grin.
“Well,” Malitka continued. “Peluk forced himself upon his mother's people until through fear, and perhaps superstition, they were fairly well subjugated. He claimed that he had, while away, studied the black art—if one could call it that in native language. But there could be no doubt that his aim and ambition was their betterment. Possibly, too, he had in view his own prosperity. If so, however, I never heard him admit it. Then, in the second season after his return, came a plague that is similar to influenza—then called la grippe—and his people were dying like flies despite his crude efforts to save them. He was desperate, and made up his mind that if they were to be saved he must go to the nearest white settlement and secure medical remedies. He started with two companions. In three days both were dead. But he kept on, relentlessly forcing himself and dogs to make haste. And it was thus he found us, when probably another day would have found him also dead upon the trail.”
She emphasized her words with a gesture of her hands, but did not pause.
“You never saw greater determination than his! When he learned by my speech that I was Russian, and after a time sat up, his eyes fell upon the medicine stores. He actually babbled in the haste with which he explained his needs; but when I told him that I knew something of the physician's and surgeon's arts, he became almost incoherent. He kept repeating over and over one phrase in his own tongue whose sound I remembered and later understood. It was to the effect that his gods had sent me to succor him and his people. That as Mohammed had come to another race so now I had come to his. His gratitude was stupendous, childlike, absurd!
“We could not induce him to rest until he had regained strength. He insisted that we must start at once, lest his people die. He demanded that we throw away everything but the drugs, a small supply of food and our sleeping bags, and swore to me that we should lose not so much as a single article and that he himself would return for them in due time. On the next day we decided to take the risks and accede to his appeals. And it is the truth that, despite all he had suffered, that ragged, scarecrow skeleton of a man taxed us and our dogs to the limit of endurance, ever urging us and our dogs on as if he were half mad, or we fleeing from rather than into a pestilence. The journey was terrible! But it was nothing compared to the ghastliness that was to come when three days later we reached this village.
“There were so many dead that the survivors had not troubled to bury them. In some of the barrabaras whole families lay on the earthen floors, in corners, anywhere—as death had overcome them.
“Despite the fatigue of our forced journey, the shaman had regained some strength, buoyed up by hope as well as food, and now he took command in a way that was as stern and inflexible as one could possibly conceive.
“'You tell me what they must do to save themselves,' he declared to me, 'and by the gods of the icons of your own land, I swear they shall do it! If they do not, with my own hand I will slay those who disobey!'
“What could one do with such a man? Such a phenomenal mixture of ruthless savage, enwisdomed wanderer, and benevolent despot! Willing to kill those he would save! Intent on forcing succor upon those who had not, the intelligence to be succored and fought against it! He issued my orders and saw that they were scrupulously carried out. He saw to it that the dead were carried to temporary scaffolds, outside the village, scorned the native rites of placing the dead man's possessions by his side in those elevated tombs, and when any one complained fell upon him with fists, feet, and the threat of a knife that was ready to cut a throat. A benevolent murderer, this Peluk, in that time of distress!
“I never knew until long afterward that he had asserted that I had come down to him in a cloud of snow and that my husband had appeared with me carrying my chest of medicines and surgical tools together with all my personal possessions, strapped upon his back. Another miracle, for the weight would have been some hundreds of pounds! But what convinced them more than any other proof, was the fact that between us we saved their lives. My credit for being heaven-sent was secure, and his—the shaman's—for being my discoverer and agent—was established. Moses had no more authority over the children of Israel than was ours over these natives.
“Within a few days more our lost possessions were returned. Not even the tiniest and most useless thing was missing. And it was on the following night that the shaman came to us in the barrabara that had been placed at our disposal, and after making certain that we were alone, disclosed some of his ambitions. He wished, first of all, to assist his mother's people. He declared that to do so he must have an autocratic power.
“He laid out a plan whereby he was to be subordinate to us—my husband and me. And then he took from a wrapping and unrolled from a strip of tanned moosehide two great nuggets of gold. 'That,' he said, 'is the key to the white man's ambition or power. I found it. My people know not what it is. I do. I cannot tell how much more may be found in that distant place from which this came; but if you will assist me to do what I wish we shall learn. You will do so, because it must be that which you seek. Otherwise, you shall go your way, whither you list, assisted by me and my people, and I must try alone.'
“Of course our agreement was immediate. We had come to this country in the hope of enriching ourselves as well as in quest of refuge.”
Malitka dropped back into her chair with an attitude of finality amounting to relaxation.
“There's not much more to tell,” she said. “Harris Barnes was at first infatuated with the prospect of gold and latterly with the creative impulse. The barrabaras gave way to well-built houses. The natives appreciated the values of thrift and better living. They starved no more in seasons when there was no game. I don't know by what method of selection Peluk admitted others; but slowly they came until we now have some hundreds. Peluk and my husband opened up the big placer deposits back in the mountains, worked them, and Peluk has made several hard trips out to buy supplies and manufactured articles for the comfort of ourselves and the villagers. Has he ever mentioned these trips to you?”
“Yes,” I answered; but I did not tell her that on at least one of those trips he had ruthlessly destroyed those who endeavored to follow him and learn whence he came. She was troubled enough without that additional burden. And, furthermore, trying to be just and consider the shaman's actions from his personal viewpoint I was not certain that I blamed him much. He was, in a small way, a Kosciusko fighting for the welfare of his own people, and if he had to adopt merciless measures when his people's welfare—yes, their very existence—was endangered
Malitka's voice disturbed my thoughts.
“The results you have seen. Our people are comfortable, better disciplined, and, I like to think, nearer civilized than any other natives of which I know.”
“But,” I asked, still bearing my mission in mind, “of Harris Barnes” and paused, not wishing to bluntly ask her for proofs of his death.
She moved quietly to her desk in the corner of the room, took from a drawer a metal safety box and returned with some papers in her hands.
“There,” she said, opening one and handing it to me, “is our marriage certificate. And there two photographs, one of him alone, one of us together. Here is a photograph of his grave that I took but last summer. Those, with my solemn statement of his death, should be sufficient for your purpose. He died nearly five years ago of pneumonia.”
So, whoever the scar-faced man killed by Peluk had been, it evidently was not Barnes after all.
“As far as I personally am involved in this estate,” she went on, “I want nothing of it. Furthermore, I should prefer that those interested know as little of me as possible—or be permitted to think that I, too, am dead.”
“But—surely,” I protested, “the widow's share of that inheritance is worth consideration.”
She made a tiny gesture of contempt with her hands.
“Worthy of consideration? Harris Barnes took precautions to provide for me,” she said. “He made two trying trips into the outside world to insure that point. He took gold from the mine to make certain. If I were ever to leave here and again live in the outer world all my needs would be adequately provided for.”
“But, Malitka, why not go out? Why bury yourself here any longer?” Jack demanded, leaning toward her.
“Your government might turn me over to the tender mercies of Russia,” she said. “And—I have not been unhappy here—until you men came. When you are gone I shall be”
Her hands clenched as if miserably fighting against loneliness and despair. I read all that she concealed in that instant. My heart ached for her. I looked at Jack to see him bending forward, his whole attitude one of love, sympathy, and the desire to shield and protect. I jumped to my feet, stepped across, and for the first time laid a familiar hand on her half-drooping shouder. She did not resent it. She looked up at me gratefully as if comprehending my attitude.
“Malitka,” I said, “Don't be a fool! Life can't give us all we have perhaps craved. Nearly all our ambitions, attained or unattained, eventually prove themselves to have been follies. That which is above all else is love. I know because—I failed!”
I turned from her and moved toward the door.
“Stay! I have yet to tell you that I appreciate you and your great heart, and that”
Her voice was broken, but I paid no heed. For at least once in my life I knew what to do. I reached the door and my foot awkwardly caught the corner of a rug so that I had to straighten it to close the door behind me. I had a glimpse of my friend rushing forward as if to throw himself down by her side, of Malitka suddenly collapsed and bending over an arm of her chair, and then I succeeded in closing the door and leaving them alone.
CHAPTER XVI.
Troubled and fatigued I went to our old room and went to sleep. When I awoke the room was in darkness. I climbed out, lighted the lamp and looked at my watch. It was six o'clock in the evening. I had slept the day through. Looking at Jack's bed I discovered him there, sleeping soundly. I made a quick toilet and tiptoed from the room. In the hallway another door opened and from its shaft of light stepped Malitka.
“Ah,” she said, “you have rested. I have just returned from the village.”
“Have they learned about—about what happened up there on the mountain trail?” I asked, keenly alert again.
“Not yet,” she replied; “but—I am worried in view of what may take place when they do.”
She moved ahead of me to the big living room, where the fire blazed in the grate, throwing its quivering shadows over all. I started to light the lamp, but she laid a hand upon my arm and detained me.
“No, not yet,” she said. “I want to talk to you and—I'd rather have the room as it is.”
I tossed the match I had lighted into the grate. She put both hands on my shoulders, looking up at me from the shadows.
“It is about—about your friend,” she said. “I can ask you for the truth. You will neither lie nor evade with me. You are not that kind of a man. I trust you and your honesty, for you are older, wiser than either he or I. You are one who knows much of the world.”
“What is it you want to ask?” I questioned.
We moved nearer the grate and seated ourselves. She did not speak for a moment or two, and when she did looked at the flames rather than at me.
“Come, Malitka,” I said gently, “you want to ask about John—and I can answer. He is clean, brave, loyal, and without guile. He is my dearest friend despite disparity of years.”
“I had no intent to question you as to his character,” she said quietly, “but—but to speak—of mine!”
“Of yours!”
“Oh, Hathaway, I love him!” she cried in distress. “He loves me. He told me so after you left the room to-day. And—I am still young. I have known no great love like this. But—is it fair to him—the man I love—to give way and go with him? Is it better that I send him away and—live and die here alone—knowing that I did not break his career, his possibilities? I can do it! I learned suffering and self-sacrifice long, long ago. He asked me to leave all this—to marry him—to begin life with him anew! He held happiness before my eyes that have known so much of sorrow! He made me forget all that I have been and all that I am! But—is it fair to him? What can I do? What should I do?”
There was a lament of agony and indecision in her voice. It was not easy for me to answer. I was very fond of John Braith and I pitied her. His life, very full of promise, was ahead of him, and hers seemed wrecked, finished. I wondered if it were possible for one who had been such a rebellious soul, such a stormy petrel swirling above the muddy, bloodstained maelstrom of Russian waters, to become helpmate to any man. And then came the recollection that even the stormy petrel when its wings are worn and tired, is eventually driven to rest.
“You have not answered,” she said.
“How can I?” I replied. “How can I know whether, if you desert this solitude, which is after all a secure haven, and venture into the complexities of the world outside, you may not again be involved in futile plots and conspiracies?”
“No, that is impossible,” she declared. “My experience was too bitter, my disillusionment too profound. I still think that some of my ideals were brave ones and clean; but sometimes the potter finds that the clay beneath his thumb will not work. And it is the one who abandons an irrevocable failure and profits by his mistake who is worth while. I see now that it was but a silly conceit to hope that I, insignificant, could alter conditions that have arisen through centuries of growth. One cannot obliterate a pyramid, created by tens of thousands, with his naked hands. No, I could not and would not make any further attempt. As an outcast princess I have no desire to return to a court life, and as an outcast communist I have no desire for that association. All I wish is peace, quietude, and love. And so, knowing all this, can you answer, my friend?”
She arose with the infinite grace of her bodily perfection and dropped upon her knees beside my chair, resting her arms thereon and looking up into my weather-beaten face as if I were a judge about to issue a decree. I put one of my hands over her clasped ones, and, looking into her eyes said, “Malitka, will you promise to abide by that decision?”
“Yes,” she said with an almost childish faith, “I will.”
“Then,” said I, “there can be but one way. You must leave here with us. You and my friend must follow the call of the heart. In that way alone lies content.”
To my considerable embarrassment and before I could prevent, she bent forward and kissed my hand, rested her forehead upon it and wept, not as most women weep, with sobs, but quietly, as if through some immense relief and happiness. After a moment and very gently I lifted her up and, with an arm about her shoulders, directed her back to her chair.
Unaccustomed to emotional situations of this character I could only talk to her with the intent of diverting her mind. I fell to discussing projects for our escape and was relieved when, after a time, she was soothed and practical again. But I was to have one more clear glimpse of the directness of her methods when we were unexpectedly interrupted by Jack, who, refreshed, clean, and youthful, entered the room.
“Hello,” he said, pausing inside the door, “afraid to have the lamps lighted?”
Before I could offer any reply she had arisen and walked swiftly across to meet him.
“Jack,” she said scarcely above a whisper, “I have decided. I don't care to live without you. I—I am going with you!”
He caught her in his arms and held her unresisting, and looked down into her face for a very long time; at least it seemed long to me, until, suddenly aware of the indelicacy of my scrutiny, I turned away and stared down into the depths of the fire blaze. Their murmured, almost inaudible words came to me as from a great distance, as if already they had stepped forever from my life, had forgotten me, or in their new compact of love and faith were heedless of my presence. I suppose there are moments in the emotional lives of men and women when, though they might be surrounded by a multitude, they would still be alone. Like Sydney Carton and the frail little seamstress in that marvelous “A Tale of Two Cities,” who interchanged a tender, pitiful farewell at the foot of the guillotine and were heedless of their appallingly murderous surroundings.
I was thinking of this when they came to me, one on each side, and each caught me by an arm and then by a hand. And so, standing there, I looked from one to the other, gravely considering my share of responsibility in perhaps piloting them together for what might be a fair or disastrous voyage. And yet, studying them as we stood there together, I felt that my advice had been sound.
That is a long time ago! I am old and have gained such wisdom as comes from age. But to this hour I have no regret for throwing my weight in the scales that so nicely balanced their fate. I flatter myself that this tiny weight of mine was thrust on the right side.
It was not until after supper that we returned to the hard realities and to planning how best we could escape from this semibarbarous environment to the open trails. We would have given much then for the sage counsel of the shaman who lay fast asleep. We could arrive at no decision without him. And so, in suspense, we at last retired.
Long companionship with vicissitude is a stern teacher. It cultivates and renders acute many senses that are, I presume, dormant and never stimulated in those who lead placid, humdrum lives. Either because of that or because I am no light sleeper, any way, I awakened at an early hour upon hearing through log walls the alarm of village dogs. I was on my feet and at the window wiping away a tiny coating of frost before fully alert; and then, peering through, I saw two men coming down the gold trail. In the wan light of arctic morning they appeared as black spots of evil sliding wearily across the pallor of the snow. They advanced abreast and disappeared from sight around the corner of the Great House like ghosts of ill omen. The clamor of the dogs increased in crescendo to full cry, and then died away. I went back to my bed, pictured to myself for a time their advent in the native houses which must be their destination, the excitement aroused by their recountal of a tragic tale, and the slow spreading, as morning advanced, of native agitation and discussion to determine our fate. I had neither further desire nor ability to sleep, but lay awake for a long time. From the interior of the house came sounds of movement in a habitual routine, but from the outland of the village nothing loud enough to be audible. At last I awakened Jack.
“I'm getting up, old man,” I said, “and perhaps it might be wise for you to do the same. I saw two runners from the gold camp an hour or so ago.”
He sat up in his bed and gained the floor.
“Well, whatever is coming will come, then, and we haven't long to wait,” he said.
I was the first one out and with a fur parka thrown over my shoulders unbarred the front door and stepped upon the veranda. From the village below me smoke climbed upward from each chimney. Off in the distance, far beyond the end of the street, the white gates of the hills stood clear against the cold blue of the morning skies. A star or two was still visible as if proud of final resistance against advancing daylight. Here and there a fur-clad figure moved from house to house. There was nothing to indicate either physical or human storm. Malitka, with a newly found confidence of camaraderie, joined me and put a trusting arm through mine before I was aware of her presence.
“Why up so early? Has anything happened?” she asked.
I told her what I had seen and of my fears. She stared thoughtfully at the village.
“One can never know. But—I don't think we can do more than wait to see how the news will affect them. They are so like children, after all. Children with great physical strength and immature minds. I hope—no—I think!—that I can control them. We shall see.”
We breakfasted undisturbed, talking as only those in suspense can talk, and still there was no sign of excitement in the village beyond a visible movement of more visitations than were customary. Malitka went to the shaman, returned to say that he was much improved and wished to see me, and I immediately went to his room. He had propped himself up on his pillows, and his black eyes twinkled as he looked at me.
“So,” he said in the native tongue, “you have learned to speak this language or at least to understand it?”
I nodded and grinned back at him with as much cheerfulness as his own.
“Also thou speakest, friend, my other native tongue of Russian?” he went on, using the Russian tongue and the friendly diminutive. “Ah, Grayhead, there lurks much beneath that old thatch of thine! Thou hast the wisdom of the silent tongue and the swift ear. What talks thou and I might have had could I have known this sooner. Strange tales of many lands; stories that I cannot speak in my halting English; news for which I hunger of cities that thou hast visited since I strode through their streets.”
I was astonished by his manner of speech, indicating that his was no mean education in that difficult tongue of the white czar's land. I blurted something to this effect, and he lifted deprecating hands.
“My father was a well-educated man. He did not neglect me in my childhood. For two years I earned my way in a Moscow university by humble service, despite the contumely of my classmates for one of my birth. There I was a despised menial. Here I have been, if not a king, at least a prime minister to a queen.”
He chuckled derisively, and then abruptly his face became grave and his eyes searching.
“What do you and your friend propose to do?” he asked.
I hesitated momentarily, wondering if it were wise in his condition to run the risk of exciting him. He appeared to read my thought and added, “Speak then, friend—for thou art that, I have proof. Be not afraid that these scratches can cause fever to one of my physical constitution. Tell me all. Decisions must be made.”
Requiring no further assurance I told him bluntly that our sole desire was to escape back to the coast, our mission having been performed. Of that mission also I told him, while he rested quietly, now and then asking a terse question, now and then uttering a comment. But I reserved until the very last that information that I feared might arouse him to an angry refusal.
“Madame Malitka intends to accompany us,” I said. “She is betrothed to my friend.”
Somewhat to my astonishment he betrayed nothing more than a thoughtful consideration of this phase of our affairs, and for a time shifted his eyes from mine and looked absently at the window's light. He seemed pondering like some wise old philosopher before passing judgment.
“Well,” he said at last with a sigh, “whether I like it or not, it cannot be helped. I guessed their affection or at least hers from the very solicitude with which she bade me care for him when you started away from the village; from the evasion in her eyes when she mentioned his name; from her distress when I brought you back. Compared with us, Old Grayhead, they are young. It is the way of youth to love, to mate, to have great and mutual visions. I have played a good hand, but fate has re-dealt the cards. The time comes when I must play alone. I must think how best to serve. The way may be difficult. I must think!”
He turned his head away and I took it as a dismissal. I left him there brooding over his new problem, and returned to the living room. I entered just in time to hear Jack, who was standing at the window, exclaim, “Malitka, they're coming!”
Both she and I hastened to the window and looked out to see, suddenly emerging from nearly every house as if belched out in response to some signal, a mob of men, while squaws stood in the doorways restraining their children as if it had been previously agreed that whatever was afoot was too serious for their participation. A tall native with a bandage about his head was haranguing them and shaking his fists in our direction. And then, taking the lead, he moved rapidly toward the Great House followed by his crowd of adherents. The menace was upon us.
CHAPTER XVII.
Jack and I ran to the hall and seized our rifles from the antlers, but Malitka hastily restrained us.
“No! No!” she cried. “You must not appear with firearms! You must not. It might precipitate matters. Let me speak to them. I can control them, I am certain.”
She threw the door open and stepped out, and Jack muttered, “Well, she shan't go alone. We must be close at hand.”
We followed her outside, and at sight of us the leader of the mob shouted in a great bellowing voice that could be heard above the chorus of angry murmurs, “There they are! The white dogs who brought trouble!”
In but a few strides more they halted in front of us, some visibly angry, others merely sullen, and some few on the outskirts who stood doubtfully as if questioning the wisdom of their action.
“You, Barseek! What is the meaning of this?” Malitka cried out in her clear voice.
“You know as well as we!” the man replied without any sign of respect. “Your heart has softened for these white men of your race. You would have sent them away alive to return here with an army of miners, seeking gold of which these brought news! You and Peluk would have betrayed us. He tried to blind every one and get them away until he found that more than twoscore of us were following on his trail to make an end of these white men; and then he fooled us again, and when that would no longer serve, killed the man we had chosen as chief. Peluk shall die! These white men shall die! If you give them over to us, your life shall be spared. We waste no time!”
His voice had arisen as he spoke until it reached a shrill scream. Malitka never proved her metal more than then; for she laughed in a way that could only exasperate him more. She lifted a hand and pointed to the mob of natives behind him.
“And you?” she demanded. “You whom I have made what you are, what have you to say for yourselves? Whence came this Barseek? He is not of your tribe. He is an outlander from the Koyukuk whom Peluk found starving on a game trail. And Peluk saved his life. Now he would murder Peluk and my friends. What have you to say for yourselves?”
Some of the foremost Indians shifted uneasily on their feet and averted their eyes, and she scanned them one by one; but a voice in the midst of the crowd shouted, “Don't let her blind you with palaver! We can talk to her after we have finished what we came to do.”
An angry growl of approval convinced me that the situation was far more desperate than Malitka reckoned, and I edged a little farther forward to be in position to defend her if there came a rush. It was too late to possess ourselves of the rifles that by her request we had left behind, and I regretted our acquiescence to her wish.
“Blind you with my palaver?” she answered readily enough and in the same calm voice. “When have I ever tried to blind you? What were you before I came? What are you now? Does that look as if I would betray you? Answer that, you men who have known me since first I came and you others who were taken in after this was no longer a hungry tribe, living in igloos, starving when the game trailed northward, and dying when the Great Spirit scourged.” Her words had a palpable effect. She waited for a moment to give them time to consider, and then spoke again in a voice that, to me at least, had a note of sorrowful appeal. “Oh, my people, that it should have come to this!” she cried. “That you whom I have cured when ill and taught to live should lose faith in me because you have been led astray by false counsels!”
I thought for an instant that her words were having favorable effect. I have no doubt that with a few sentences more she would have calmed the majority of her hearers and won them to reason; but the man Barseek, savage that he was, was no fool. Sensing that the swing of the pendulum was against him he abruptly turned and lifting both arms above his head, cried:
“Hold! Be not bewitched! Listen to wisdom. The reason why ye have all these comforts is not because of her or Peluk, but because ye worked with your own hands and slew those who came from the far lands outside. Let but one white man know that gold is in the earth up there in our hills and woe shall fall upon you even as twilight in winter! Let but one white man go from here and”
He got no further in what promised to be a persuasive speech, for a deep, booming voice cried:
“Barseek! Turn this way!”
Barseek whirled on his feet as did we. There in the doorway stood the shaman with his blue shirt opened beneath his massive throat and exposing the white bandages across his chest, his bare head thrown back, his eyes aflame. He appeared to fill the doorway with his great bulk, as he stood there with arms folded across his great breast and his pillarlike legs widely planted.
With an incredible rapidity and confusion the scene changed. I was aware that with a single swift movement Barseek brought from beneath his denim parka a pistol and fired even before I could spring forward to check him. And so quickly afterward that the reverberations sounded almost as one there was another shot. Barseek at that moment had my gaze, and he lunged forward and fell so close to my feet that one of his outthrown hands rested on my moccasin, where it twitched and clawed as if to the last he sought to pull me down. Shocked by the unexpected I leaped back and turned around.
The shaman stood in the doorway, as if planted there, but his arms were no longer folded. One hand held close to his hip clutched my revolver, and a faint wreath of dissipating blue smoke told its tale. A white splinter of torn wood in the weather-beaten frame of the door alongside his head proved how narrow had been his escape. In the momentary paralysis of awe that inevitably succeeds that of unexpected tragedy there was something horrifying and terrible in his sudden loud rumble of laughter.
“Barseek whose life I saved in sentimental folly,” he called out, “seems to be but carrion! He has gone to his fathers. Are—are there others who wish to cut the thongs of life? Come. Be not slow to speak. The sled dogs that carry the souls of the dead to the beyond are harnessed—waiting! Surely those hunters who seek the chase in the land of the spirit steppes could ask no better opportunity than this! I, Peluk, stand here ready and waiting to unlock one or many doors. You hesitate? Or have you decided it best to remain here a while longer and endure the life you have so comfortably led?”
He moved painfully out until he reached the veranda post and clung to it as if for support. He lifted the hand holding the pistol and gestured with it, and men shrank back as it was directed toward them.
“Your heads are those of children,” he said. “You know nothing of that outside world or the men who dwell therein. In the wolf pack is always one which leads. When the caribou herd beats a deep white trail there is one which always breaks the way. When the white geese fly there is but one that heads the wide-flung wedge that cleaves the sky. There is never more than one to show the way. If that one be right those who follow survive. If that one be wrong they perish.”
Standing there on the edge of the elevated veranda he looked down upon their upturned faces and, with a single contemptuous movement threw the pistol out into their midst.
“If I am wrong,” he said as the tiny swirl of those who had eluded the missile closed in again, “then it is yours to say so and to slay. If I am no longer worthy to lead then let me have a speedy end. Death is very quick and but a pang. Life is but a struggle over a long, obscure trail. We sweep constantly falling snows away in the hope of finding beneath them older and guiding sled tracks to guide us on our way. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we fail. And so, if you think I have failed to guide you well, I submit myself unresisting. I am well tired of the need of killing others that the things which I believe good for them may survive!”
Before we could assist or prevent him he staggered weakly downward into their midst with outstretched arms, weaving to and fro as if he could no longer see. Stumbling across a corpse of his own slaying, helpless, unarmed, he cast himself into their hands.
They, like us, stood spellbound by his barbaric magnificence, his gallant disregard of results. And then they, as we, surged forward to support him. Our animosities, our partisanships, our fears and hopes, were all swept aside. Our hundred hands stretched out, pityingly, to lift him from the snow upon which he had pitched inert in his last and heroic effort. Our hundred feet, some of which had never before crossed the thresh old of the austere house, pattered and slipped and crowded as we carried him and laid him upon the bed from which, fighting to the last, he had arisen. From the confusion I caught one bitter cry in my own tongue, and recognized Jack's voice.
“By God! They've killed him as surely as if they had shot!”
I don't know who forced them out or how they went. But I do know that it was I who, breathless, stood with my back against the door that had closed upon them, and saw Jack panting by my side, and the running figure of Malitka. We followed her to where the shaman had been laid. Already she had pulled open his shirt and was twisting broken bandages back into position. Some of their borders were stained with vivid red. A curious silence fell.
Malitka bent above him and, heedless of his blood, pressed an ear to his brawny chest. He lay very quiet, very still. I suffered a great fear that he was dead until Malitka lifted her head, motioned to us and fell to chafing his listless hands and feet. We worked with her and did not cease our efforts when she began removing the bandages from over his most serious wound.
“He has lost enough blood in the last few days to kill an ordinary man,” she said. “But his heart beats feebly.”
It was not until Malitka had done all she could and we had trickled stimulants down the shaman's throat that we thought of anything other than the invisible but threatening shadow of death that seemed watching our puny efforts.
“Great heavens! Do you suppose he anticipated what effect throwing that pistol and then himself into their midst was going to have on that mob of Indians?” Jack asked in an awed voice.
“Of course,” I answered. “Moreover I'm positive that he thought that this was his last chance to save us. He may even have thought that if they killed him they would be satisfied—for a time at least.”
“He must have known that his wounds were opened again,” Malitka said, “and that it was suicidal to make that final exertion. I'm afraid it was his last.”
I stood there at the foot of his bed for a long time alone, a little later, looking down upon him watchful for a change and thinking of his rough greatness, of his prodigious sense of the dramatic, of his gift for swaying the minds of his own people and of his inexorable and terrifying ruthlessness when aroused. Surely the spirit of some ancient conqueror and leader of men, some unchristianized Charlemagne or less ferocious Tamerlane had returned after ages to dwell again for a brief span in this extraordinary mart. I could not help thinking of what this man might have become under more fortunate conditions of breeding and opportunity. Studying him more closely than I had ever done before I could see but little of the Indian in his cranial formation or features. Save for his complexion and the color of his eyes he could have passed readily enough for a full-blooded Russian of the great rugged De Witte type. I have often wondered since who and what his father was. Unanswerable questions these. But—I wonder!
It was two hours later when Jack came tiptoeing into the room and relieved my watch. He whispered to me “Is there any change?”
“No,” I said. “He has not moved but seems breathing more strongly. Malitka's instructions were that he was not to be disturbed for the purpose of giving more of the stimulant. If he wakens he is to have more but not otherwise. I can't tell whether he's asleep or unconscious.”
When I reached the living room Malitka was not there. I walked across to the window and looked down upon the village. Its streets were untenanted, peaceful, the smoke was still spiraling straight upward from its chimneys and it was difficult to believe that so short a time before it had been murderously seething. No visible evidence of the latter phase was left save the solidly trampled and beaten snow in front of the Great House.
Suddenly the door of one of the larger houses opened and more than a dozen men appeared and tramped stolidly away toward the east. A dull flash of metal showed that the foremost carried an ax and then flash after flash disclosed that each of the pedestrians was similarly equipped. The village cemetery lay out there to the eastward. I had often loitered there scanning the strange scaffoldings upon each of which rested the remains of the dead, surrounded by their weapons of chase or war and equipment for the trail into the shadowy beyond. I was puzzled by the fact that so many men went to prepare but one resting place in the borders of a forest so profuse, where the few requisite timbers were so easily accessible. Could it be possible that they were going to prepare resting places for us? The thought was not soothing. I went to the hallway and took therefrom all the rifles, brought them into the living room and was carefully cleaning, oiling and loading them when Malitka unexpectedly returned. She smiled sadly as she saw what I was doing.
“No, my friend,” she said as she divested herself of fur parka and cap and bent over to unlace her out-of-door moccasins; “weapons will not be needed. The rebellion is over. And yet I wish—I wish—it could have ended otherwise. When I reached the council house it was too late. A pity! Horrible!”
“What has happened?” I demanded, resting a rifle that I had been oiling across my knee.
She picked up the discarded parka and cap and stood with them across her arm close beside the door as she answered, “The rebellion is ended.” She stood still for a moment more, moved to the door and out into the hall and I heard her sigh as she hung her garments upon the antlers that served as a hall rack. When she returned she said, “Wait here a moment. I must first see the shaman,” and again was gone.
“There is one ray of light in all our gloom,” she remarked when she reëntered the room, closed the door, and stood beside the center table. “The shaman is not unconscious but asleep. What a marvelous vitality! Sleep has more virtues than ever the master of your English tongue, Shakespeare, could express. It cures where all else fails. It's a ministration of a greater physician than the sorry world has ever produced—God's healing. I have hopes, now, that Peluk will survive.”
She appeared to have forgotten in this new satisfaction my eagerness to learn of the morning's events, and then recalled them.
“Oh! About—other things,” she said as she sought and found a chair, “after we had done all we could for the shaman, I decided that the best thing I could do would be to go into the village and talk to the natives and try to bring them back to reason. I can't blame myself for the delay because Peluk demanded first attention, but—I am sorry I could not have been there sooner. It was a great pity! One cannot teach these natives deliberation. They act so swiftly, so impetuously, so surely.”
She stared out of the window for a moment with troubled eyes and then again at me. For the first time I saw in her the hurt child, the shocked woman.
“After they had helped us carry the shaman in they picked up the body of Barseek and went to the Council House. There they heard all that Barseek's followers had to say in self-defense. One of his men admitted that Barseek was behind all—everything—that has gone wrong. He was a savage. Nothing more! It was Barseek who inflamed against you and Peluk the ones who followed you out on the trail—which of course was why Peluk turned back with you so suddenly to escape them. And then, with native craftiness, it was Barseek who, in the gold camp, insisted upon your and Peluk's death. Evidently some of his followers distrusted him, for when he wished to be elected chief, they chose a man of their own. The shaman killed that man—back up there in the gold camp. Barseek made one more effort when he had some of his men follow you after you escaped. You know how that ended.
“Then he made his last attempt. And you know how that, too, ended—in Barseek's death. The natives tried the dead man and his two principal supporters. And they” she twisted her fingers together, and looked sorrowfully away, then concluded in a hushed voice—“condemned those two followers, fell upon them with knives and killed them there in the Council House. They were there, dead upon the earthen floor, when I arrived. I was too late. But I told them all that was in mind! They listened. I think some of them were sorry. I think that possibly I said harsher words to them than I might have used under less stress. But that is neither here nor there. At once they pledged themselves to future obedience to Peluk and to me. They named a burial party. And—I came away! That was all. But I cannot forget the three dead men on the floor.”
She sat with drooping head and moist eyes; I cannot admit that I joined in her sympathy or her mourning. I suppose that she looked upon them all as foster children of hers, whom she must protect and elevate from a state of savagery or barbarism to something more worthy. Candidly, I was glad that they were dead and beyond power to inflict death or injury upon us or others. I foresaw victory for us.
CHAPTER XVIII.
There are many memories of those long-gone days standing out clear and distinct; of the time when the shaman first spoke; of the time when he was first able to leave his bed and the day when, leaning heavily on my arm, he was first conducted to a chair in the living room. And there, for many days, he would sit, quiet, brooding, sometimes silent for long intervals in which his eyes regarded Malitka with warmth and Jack with appraisement. He seemed absorbed in consideration of the possibilities of their future. Once when both were absent he said to me in his rolling Russian, “Your friend is a fine young man; but neither he nor any other could possibly be worthy of the Lady Malitka.”
“Nonsense,” I replied. “You question him because you have never liked him.”
“Never so much as you, Old Grayhead,” he answered noncommittally. And then he abruptly changed the subject by saying, “Tell me more of thy life, friends—what thou hast done and what wouldst do in the future.”
He seemed to take an almost boyish delight in anything I might tell him, forever insistent on drawing me out and insatiably curious regarding my career. He asked me questions concerning myself, my ancestry, my family, my private affairs that in any other would have been intolerably impertinent. And, on the other hand, I could get but little from him concerning himself, save when, now and then, almost as if by accident, he let something slip concerning his wanderings or the dog's life he had led in Russia. Once I touched him on the raw and learned more of the Russian side of his ancestry than at all other times put together. It was when I questioned him how certain peculiar scars had been inflicted on his forehead and cheeks. I thought for an instant, when I saw a scowl of anger flash over his face, that I had asked one question too many, but after a slight hesitation he gave me a reply.
“When first I went to Moscow,” he said, glowering at the floor, “I had in my pocket a letter found in my father's effects. It was from his brother whose name was—no matter!—and written years before. I cared nothing for this uncle of mine, but sought news of my father. I went to a palace where they drove me away. I waited outside for many days. It was in winter. I got my reward. One night a magnificent troika came slowly through the great gates, the grooms clinging to the horses' heads on the sides to restrain them, and seated inside was a man who I recognized, from his resemblance to my father, must be he whom I had so long sought.
“I sprang forward with a foot on a runner of the troika and appealed to him. He fell back at first as if terrified, then bent forward, stared in my face, and cried to the driver, 'Throw this vermin off!' The driver lashed me over the head with his thonged whip, but I clung there, braving the blows and screaming my appeal to this uncle of mine until, blinded by blood, I loosened my hold and fell to the snow. The last thing I heard was a man's laughter. I was violently bitter then, but later I, too, laughed. I hadn't until then understood the gulf that divides the legitimate ones of a noble house from its bastard spawn—spawn rendered all the more unadmissible if it happens to be from a careless marriage with one of the lowest origin. If I had not at that time been so wildly intent on finding the father whom I loved, and who, considering the tolerant if amused pains he took to teach me reading, writing—many things—must have loved me in his way, I should have endured other patient vigils outside those palace gates until I could cut my uncle's throat.”
He laughed as if at a reminiscence and, although I tried many times thereafter to lead him into further confessions, he was too adroit to ever gratify my inquisitiveness.
One day when all of us thought him quietly resting in his bed of convalescence, he disappeared. When he did not respond to the luncheon button, I went to his room to find it empty. Within it was not a tiny single possession of his, nor so much as an indication that he had ever occupied it. It was neatly in order. He had taken the trouble with infinite attention to details, somewhat clumsily executed, to restore the room to an unoccupied condition. After we had eaten our lunch I insisted on being the agent of inquiry.
I found him, as I anticipated, in his own home. He sat there in the window where I had so often seen him with his carving tools engrossed in the creation of another button! Not a light, not a shadow, appeared different than on many days when I had invaded his seclusion.
“You're a good one, Peluk!” I exclaimed in its Russian equivalent, and not without some indignation. “What is the meaning of this desertion? Have any of us done anything to offend you? Why leave the Great House without a word of parting or of thanks?”
He threw his tools and chunk of ivory upon the window sill and came, almost impulsively, and with outstretched hands to meet me.
“I hadn't thought you would regard it in this way,” he said. “Me? I am of no moment! To be succored in distress, to survive scratches, and then to pass away from an unearned hospitality seemed fitting. Besides”—he stopped, attempted to turn his inconsequence into a joke and chuckled—“I-need one button more and it must be made!”
“Damn your button!” I exclaimed in annoyance. “What about Malitka? What about Jack? What about me? Isn't there something due us?”
I suppose there must have been something of personal hurt betrayed by my voice, for with a swift change from badinage to gravity he advanced and laid both hands on my shoulders and stared at me with warmth in his eyes.
“How could I tell you and those other two that I had decided to leave?” he demanded. “Partings are so unpleasant! And—I knew that you, Grayhead, would seek me wherever I went. I am happy in that knowledge. We understand each other, you and I. And so—you can agree that my way was best.”
“Well,” I said, relenting, “you might have whispered to me at least if not to the others, that you were coming back here. You might have known that I should be worried until I found you again.”
He laughed, gave me a loving thrust with one of his quick hands, and then, as if embarrassed by his own impetuous familiarity, turned away and sought a chair.
“You can find me here after this,” he said. “This, such as it is, is my place. And,” he added almost shyly, “yours! Anything that I am or own is yours—Grayhead!”
And then with the abrupt change that characterized him, he became intensely serious, once again the planner, the masterful. Of the two personalities that dwelt within him the most dominant resumed its sway.
“I am again physically strong. Snows do not last. Traveling in summertime in this country, as you know, is impossible. You must finish your work. The Lady Malitka and your comrade wish to return to the outside. To-day, and perhaps for a little time longer, I hold the natives of my tribe in my hand. To-morrow or in a few days—I do not know.”
His coupling of himself with the Indians of his mother's race did not escape me. He did so without apology, pride, or shame, as if it were an accepted allotment.
“The Lady Malitka, assisted by the man who was her husband but never by nature a mate,” he went on, “has done much for my people and for me. It is not fair or fitting that she should pass from here without a kopeck, leaving millions of rubles behind in gold. I shall see to that while I have the power. Although this is a land where gold has small worth, it is of inordinate value in the places where you go. You and I know that, Grayhead, for you and I have learned.”
I started to protest but he silenced me with an upraised hand.
“You, yourself, I cannot see go without anything that I could give. And so for that, too, I will provide.”
He arose from his chair and walked to the window and stared out for a time, as if either measuring the climate, the weather, the seasons, or wishing to avoid my regard when uttering a decision.
“Day after to-morrow you and the others must be prepared for the trails. Day after to-morrow you start outward. I promise that you shall depart in safety. And”
Still looking away from me, not meeting my eyes, speaking across his shoulders, not turning head or body, he uttered a fatalistic Russian word, “Nitchevo!” “It doesn't matter.” And he added, “Go now. Tell them. I can say no more! Day after to morrow at seven o'clock of the morning you start. Outward bound!”
I rose to my feet and waited for him to say something more. In a way I was nettled by his peremptoriness.
“All right,” I declared. “If that is the way you are going to handle our affairs there's nothing more for me to say.” I waited a moment longer, hoping that he would at least meet me halfway in my wish to be friendly, but he stood immovable. “I'll see to it that they are ready, if you will send the sleds up to be packed.”
“I'll send the sleds,” he said, still without turning from the window.
And, resolved not to make further conciliatory speech I turned, walked out, and banged the door behind me.
When I broke the news to Malitka and Jack in the Great House, they appeared relieved, jubilant. They left me alone that afternoon, and I learned afterward that he accompanied her up to the edge of- the forest where he waited while she paid a last visit to the grave of the man for whom she had conceived a lasting affection if not natural love. It didn't strike me for a long time that she must have suffered somewhat in that hour when she paid reverence to a friendly memory and at the same time farewell to a dead, a turbulent past. It must have been the cleavage line. The kindly but trying hour when old mistakes were sponged from the records of life and the new and unmarked slates were grasped by her hands.
God knows there are but few of us who do not sorrow for the old, dead things, and seek hope in the new.
In the starlit morning of the allotted day we bade farewell to the Great House. A half dozen dog teams strained and yelped, eager for the adventure of the trail. Silent, heavy, aloof, the shaman stood outside waiting for us to declare our readiness. Malitka came last, as if she had wished to be alone in the rooms wherein so many years of her life had found security. They were not denuded. The priceless skins of the white polar bear, of red fox, of caribou, were left upon the floors. The fire in the huge fireplace crackled and glowed. The spreading moose antlers were still nailed in the hall. Some of her garments were still hanging thereon. The bookshelves that Harris Barnes had made with his hands, his and her books thereon, stood as they had been created in the corner of the living room.
Malitka did not come forth alone. My comrade returned to hasten her when time drew on and brought her out and seated her on a sled. He arranged the fur wrappings around her for her comfort. She seemed unaware of his solicitude, for her head was. bent and her body quivering with sobs. The shaman stepped up to the veranda, muttered some words of command to the weeping native servants, thrust them back with his hands, and pulled the doors shut.
“Go ahead!” he cried in the guttural native language. “We can't stop here forever. Go on!”
The men by the dog teams leaped aside. One cracked a whip. The released leaders sprang into the collars with resounding yelps. The sleds broke loose from the clinging snow and came to motion. In a long procession we ran down the village street. Our running feet beside or behind the sleds stirred our blood.
At the entrance to the defile, bordered by the white gates, I looked backward. There lay the village, the solemn, forest-clad hills behind, the white peaks dimly upreared against the stars of the morning sky and, last view of all, the somber shape of the Great House, with its windows alight with morning lamps, but obscured as if by parting tears.
A crowd of natives ran with us until the shaman ordered them back. The sleds streamed through the natural gateway and swerved in an abrupt turn. The entire familiar view was cut off and, so far as sight was involved, we might have been thousands of miles from a human habitation.
CHAPTER XIX.
With such perfect sled dogs, skilled runners, and complete equipment, our journey outward was made with surprising ease. I have not much knowledge of the route beyond its general direction; but I am certain that it was chosen by the shaman so that we might avoid the sparse native villages. For from the time we started until we reached the seacoast we never encountered a human being. I do not recall more than one confidential warning uttered by Peluk in that smooth succession of days.
“Explain to your friend if he does not understand Russian,” he said on the first night's camp, “that he must guard his tongue. Some of these with us understand as much English as I, and—might overhear. I have told them that the Lady Malitka returns again after a time. It was necessary to lie to them! It was a lie, I know, for she returns no more!”
Our evenings were usually passed in Malitka's tent that was rendered almost luxurious through the shaman's forethought and care. It was but rarely that we could induce him to join us, and then he sat, cross-legged, in the most remote corner he could find, saying little, smoking much, and thoughtful. Not even I could arouse him to his former friendliness. It was as if he had erected a barrier between him and us.
We finally came within sight of the cold arctic seas. We dropped down across unbroken snows to a village and a trading post. The trader, a half-breed Russian, old and fat, welcomed us, and Peluk spoke to him in Russian and called him aside. A moment later they returned together, with the information that the trading company's steam schooner was more than twenty days overdue on its annual voyage. It was satisfying news. We took possession of such accommodation as could be put at our disposal, and prepared to wait in patient resignation; but luck favored us in that at noon the next day a bellowing siren apprised us of the steamer's approach.
“Stim-bo-oat! Stim-bo-oat!” the natives shouted in great excitement while dogs of the camp, and ours that had held proudly aloof for once, joined in long-drawn wails. The quiet native village awoke as if from an annual sleep when the master's boat came ashore, and the first white man we had seen for many months rolled upward from the beach and entered the trader's doors. A whaleboat landed with its huge pile of stores, its rowers cursing the surf that compelled them to come in stern first. Natives swarmed to the long, inhospitable beach to seize and carry to the trading post the precious bales, boxes, and bundles. The trader, in a frenzy of excitement and importance, waddled to Peluk, and said, “This is the end of her voyage this way. Her captain is willing to take your people back, but they cannot land until they are in Seattle.”
I think that up to then he had not been aware that I used his tongue, for he seemed surprised when I said, “That is "Satisfactory to us.”
“It will take two hours to put our trade of furs and pelts aboard,” he said; “and after that we will send yours. Is that all right?”
“It is all right,” I said, and he hastened away.
I gave the news to Malitka and my comrade. They were standing together on the beach staring at the steamer.
There was some hitch in the trader's arrangements after the first boatload of pelts had been put aboard, and the captain of the schooner approached us, gave us each friendly greeting, then said, “These traders always lose their heads in times like this. We might get your outfit aboard while he is getting his next lot ready.”
I turned and shouted to the shaman who was standing in the midst of his men quietly talking, and whatever lack of discipline was shown by the trader's men there was nothing wanting in his. He uttered short commands, and his men sprang to the sleds and began crossing the narrow strip of beach to the waiting boat. Each, although carrying burdens of small compass, trudged heavily with heels biting deeply into the sand.
“What—what's this? What are those men carrying?” the captain shouted.
“They carry gold,” Peluk answered as imperturbably as if giving the news that their burdens were merely sand. Not only the master of the schooner and his men, but Malitka, Jack, and I were astounded. I remembered now that he had declared his intent to provide us with some funds; also that throughout our journey to the coast I had speculated on why Peluk required such a retinue of dogs and men. Now it was explained. He was enriching us!
We stood speechless in the midst of a great excitement while the boat sank lower into the water and the skipper himself, anxious for its safety, and troubled by such an unexpected responsibility, demanded that one of us accompany it aboard and remain to guard it and to receive the remainder. Jack walked to Peluk and extended his hand. They talked quietly, and Jack was the only one of the two to show any emotion. The boat pulled out with him, passed alongside the black hull of the schooner to the leeward side and was lost to view.
“You, Lady Malitka,” said the shaman, “must go with the next boatload. To you I have written a letter voicing many words my tongue cannot speak; for in it goes my heart.”
Tears suddenly filled her eyes and she cried, “Peluk! Dear Peluk!” and would have said more had he not given her hand a harsh grip, and then, as if he could not speak, bent suddenly over and kissed it. He turned brusquely away, calling over his shoulder, “Grayhead, after you have put the lady in the boat return to me. To you I have not written but would talk.”
I stood there trying, somewhat awkwardly, to comfort Malitka, and when at last her sobs had ceased and we looked around the shaman was nowhere to be seen. The boat with its excited men was backing for its run up the surf, with some of its rowers standing in readiness to plunge into the icy water and seize and force her stern up on the sand. The last of the gold and our few personal belongings were speedily loaded. I picked Malitka up and carried her to the stern to spare her feet from the running surf, and again the boat left for the ship.
“How long can I have now?” I shouted to the captain.
“At least an hour and a half before we can get the last of the trade aboard,” he called in reply.
I looked for Peluk. He was standing well behind his men, with his hands in his pockets, giving them orders. Now and then they glared at the villagers, some of whom were staring at them when not bestowing attention on the ship or the string of carriers who were coming from the warehouse behind the dunes, bending under great bales of pelts and furs.
“You are to go back there to the edge of that timber and make camp,” he told his men. “You are to speak to no one, not even the trader. You are to answer no questions. You are to wait until I have bought the trade we are going to take back with us and send for you to bring it. Be ready, for to-night we must be far from here. I have spoken.”
Obediently they turned and straightened out the dog teams and without so much as a glance at me ran lightly away toward the fringe of timber a mile or two distant. For a moment the shaman watched them, and then turned toward me and beckoned. I followed him as he trudged away, wondering whither he was taking me. There was a cliff a little farther along that bleak and desolate shore against whose base the surf, comparatively light as it was for those waters, hurled itself in uprearing waves that broke and fell in a smother of foam. A gradual ascent led to the cliff's summit that stood at least two hundred feet sheer above the sea. As I plodded after Peluk I wondered why he was taking me to such a spot for our final conversation. Once I asked him, but he did not reply nor so much as hesitate, but climbed upward, his great legs moving as steadily as the pistons of an engine, his hands still in his pockets, his head bent forward.
Somewhat out of breath myself, I finally came abreast of him as he stood on the top and looked around—first in the direction of the timber line as if to assure himself that his men were obeying his commands, then at the little village as if to make certain that his men had not been followed, then out at the schooner. My eyes followed his, took it all in at a glance. I saw the string of Peluk's natives, dog teams and sleds, running lightly, looking now like strings of soldier ants crossing a barren field of unbroken white, and noted the cluster of barrabaras huddled about the log-trading post as if for protection, and the schooner that was to carry us away. From that height she appeared absurdly small, frail, inadequate, and the slow plume of smoke from her funnel made a black smirch ill befitting the cleanliness of the pure atmosphere. It was as if she intruded on something that belonged to God alone. The far-distant horizon where sea and sky faded into union did not at that moment hold for me any glamour. I knew what lay beyond. It is inevitable that nothing other than the unknown can bring visions or sway our hopes.
“Grayhead, thou dost dream! I brought thee here to talk,” said the shaman in Russian.
I can't tell now why I turned to him and gave way to impulse. But I'm candid enough to confess what I said.
“Peluk, why be such a fool? Why stay here in this land? Why not come with us? Why not with me? I've lost my partner. I shall be alone. Think of the places neither of us have ever been—places we could seek—adventures big enough to satisfy!”
The stolidity of his face broke as does sunburst through clouds of storm. There was something of an incredulous happiness in his giving way.
“I want you!” I added. “We understand each other now, you and I. Come! Let's go together.”
He came forward and put both hands on my shoulders, and his fingers gripped hard. His dark eyes widened and probed and were warm with a great light as he stared at me.
“Thou art brother of mine!” he cried in that big resonant voice that I had heard in so many crucial times. Then his lips moved and he tried to speak and could not, clutched me a little harder, and at last, as if incapable of other action, released and thrust me staggering away with a single movement. I did not resent. I knew that he could do nothing else. I appreciated his mental maelstrom. He turned to a wind-swept ledge of granite near by and sat thereon—as if like had sought like and, finding it, was thereafter safe.
We forgot the ship far below, the village, everything. We were engrossed in ourselves and an issue.
“No,” he said at last, “I'd like to go. It tempts me, Grayhead, because we should be together, in quest of many and strange adventures; finding some; failing in many; perhaps victoriously satisfied in a few. But—you don't understand! You can't! You haven't suffered as I have. Because yours, Grayhead, is a just mind and open heart, you forget wounds that might come to one such as I am—out there!”
He swept his hand aimlessly over the waiting sea, in indication of the thousands of leagues beyond.
“Come! Think of it! Look at these!” he exclaimed, sweeping the fur cap from his head and lifting his face toward me as if courting scrutiny of his scars. “These,” he said, touching them with his fingers, “are ineradicable marks of the esteem in which such as I are held by those with whom you must hereafter associate. My father's brother put them there. Isn't that enough?”
I could not find words to temper such great injustice. I sat dumb and without answer, indignant and impotent.
“But we needn't go to Russia,” I said, grasping at an evasion. “There are other places on earth. You sent gold to the ship. Some of it, I presume, is for me. But Peluk, you and I can take that and outside we can”
“Nichevo!” he interrupted me with his Russian word of fatalism. “Don't speak nonsense!” He stopped so long that I lifted my eyes- to look at him and saw that he was staring at the snow between his feet.
“The Lady Malitka is gone forever,” he said. “The partner you had is gone with her forever. And that is well and as it should be. The inevitable. So, why not come back with me, brother? There is more gold in the hills—more than any man might wish; but to me that is nothing. What I must do is to care for my people”
“Your mother's! Not your father's! Not all yours!” I exclaimed.
“True,” he admitted. “But I am not for the stronger side. It can protect itself. The weaker cannot. No, ridiculous as it may seem, I'm for that weaker and more helpless side. Moscow taught me what it is to suffer, to endure, to hope, to seek justice. I'd like to go with you—Grayhead, but—I can't! I can't!”
He got to his feet and strode backward and forward in front of me, beating a path in the snow, never looking at me, with bared hands behind his back, heedless of the winter's chill, and spoke as if thrashing out a prodigious problem alone.
“I can truthfully say that in all my life I have loved but two men—my father and you! I have liked some—hated many—and loved but two, my father and yourself.”
He stood for a time stern, aloof, and then with a swift gesture faced me with appeal. He stretched out his hands, as if to spread life before me.
“Come back with me, Grayhead! Come back! The others desert us. Let them go. They will be happy and secure. Neither of us need worry about their future content. Perhaps in a few years' time, when I can have found a man of my mother's race strong enough and wise enough to justly rule and protect his people, you and I will then go outside together. We could go as men of very great wealth. Be sure of that.”
He stared at me awaiting my answer, but I slowly shook my head.
“Ah, I forgot that you are not as so many men of your race for whom gold is a god!” he said. “It means but little to you. You are a wanderer who would be free. No, you are right to go. When the wings of the great migratory birds are clipped they die with broken hearts. Also I am selfish, for the day may come when those others, so much younger, will lean upon your wisdom—will need your advice. You also have duties that must be fulfilled. But know this!”
He had halted in front of me and now stood looking at me with eyes in which was unabashedly, gladly shown, a great affection.
“Know this!” he repeated as if to impress it upon my memory. “Even the stanchest, most gallant ship must some day run from the blasts of the tempest and seek port of refuge. If that sad day comes upon thee, brother—which may all my gods forbid!—seek thou me! In that hour all I have to share or to give, even to my life if it serve, is thine! Go now! And—farewell!”
Before I could move, so unexpected was his action, he threw both his great arms about me, fervently clasped me in the fashion of Russian brothers upon parting, and then, as if overcome by emotion, turned his back and waved me away, climbing slowly upward to a still higher point of rock as if he would be alone.
“Peluk, is this good-by?” I called after him, and without stopping his march he gestured affirmation.
“Will you not write to me?” I cried. “Will you not wait until I can give you an address?” And then when he did not answer I added, “Then I shall leave it with the trader. Will you not write some time?”
He paused, as if considering, and then without looking back replied, “Perhaps, brother of my heart! Perhaps!” and then more hurriedly moved away.
A blast from the steamer's siren, impatient, insistent, warned me that I must hasten. I plunged down the hill and in a few minutes climbed into the waiting boat. It thrust out in the froth of foam and my eyes sought the cliff. I was disappointed that from that position its peak could not be seen. When I climbed to the deck of the schooner both Jack and Malitka were waiting for me. They asked a question or two that I could not answer, while the small boat came swinging up from sea to davits. The steamer's parting bellow roared out drowning all sounds, her screw seized the water as if impatient to be off, her bow swung to the south-southeast, and with Jack and Malitka following me I walked to the stern rail.
“There he stands,” I cried, pointing to the great cliff on whose very top stood a lone and unmistakable figure rendered sharply visible against the sky above and the snow beneath. His very size seemed magnified and exaggerated into gigantic proportions there against the sky line, like some barbaric Colossus of the North. He stood there for a long time with folded arms, not responding to the waving of our caps and Malitka's handkerchief in farewell. He must have been watching us, for at last he raised both hands high above his head, clutched them together, and then threw them widely apart with a gesture of whose significance I have never been certain. I have never been able to decide whether it was of resignation or despair or whether, having resolutely chosen his path, he was brushing away as hopelessly futile all grief for our memories. We could not evoke from him another sign, and at last ceased our efforts.
My companions had each other for diversion, with great dreams of happiness, splendid hopes for the future. Time has but made those dreams come true. But then they seemed to me fantastic. They paced back and forth across the open space of the after deck that was for the time being deserted, she with an arm confidingly in his, and he gravely bending his head toward her as if to lose no inflection of a loved voice. For some time they seemed to have forgotten my presence as I stood there resting both elbows on the rail, not losing sight of the diminishing cliff.
I was somewhat disturbed by Jack's voice when he halted behind me and he called, “I say, old man! Did I tell you that the shaman's letter to Malitka says that, inasmuch as he knows that she is already amply provided for by government bonds deposited in a Seattle savings vault, all the gold aboard this ship is yours? Do you know you are now worth about a quarter of a million dollars?”
“No,” I replied, “you didn't tell me,” and went on thinking.
“Humph! You don't seem particularly elated over it. That's just like you!”
“Yes, just like me,” I agreed.
“What's the use!” I heard him exclaim in disgust. “He's always been a grumpy, surly, unimaginative old cuss. Come on, Malitka, let's go forward and see if they've got this ship headed right for some place where there's sunshine and warmth and”
He must have lowered his voice to whisper the remainder of his speech, for I heard her soft, happy laughter.
“By the way, Jim, look after those binoculars I left lying there on a grating—they're the skipper's!” he called back.
I looked around. With Malitka he had disappeared behind the corner of a deck house. I aroused myself to seize the glasses and focus them to my sight. I turned them backward across the constantly widening sweep of chill waters that intervened between the ship and her last anchorage. I caught the dimming outline of the landmark—the high cliff upon which the shaman and I had made our farewells. They were good, powerful glasses.
They brought, leaping to my view, the figure of one whom I esteem as a very great man. But now, it appeared, as if shorn of strengthened power, for the time being, at least, despondent, conquered, with his back turned to us, the shaman was on his knees beside a gray rock and his head was pillowed upon his outflung arms.
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