Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police Part 11

He sat up on his sledge as DeBar left his bird to thrust sticks into the snow, on the ends of which he hung Philip's frozen garments close to the fire. From the man Philip's eyes traveled to the dog. The hound yawned in the heat and he saw that one of his fangs was gone.

"If you're starving, why don't you kill the dog?" he asked.

DeBar turned quickly, his white teeth gleaming through his beard.

"Because he's the best friend I've got on earth, or next to the best,"

he said warmly. "He's stuck to me through thick and thin for ten years.

He starved with me, and fought with me, and half died with me, and he's going to live with me as long as I live. Would you eat the flesh of your brother, Steele? He's my brother--the last that your glorious law has left to me. Would you kill him if you were me?"

Something stuck hard and fast in Philip's throat, and he made no reply.

DeBar came toward him with the hot bird on the end of his stick. With his knife the outlaw cut the bird into two equal parts, and one of these parts he cut into quarters. One of the smaller pieces he tossed to the hound, who devoured it at a gulp. The half he stuck on the end of his knife and offered to his companion.

"No," said Philip. "I can't."

The eyes of the two men met, and DeBar, on his knees, slowly settled back, still gazing at the bird, said DeBar, after a moment, "don't be a fool, Steele. Let's forget, for a little while. G.o.d knows what's going to happen to both of us to-morrow or next day, and it'll be easier to die with company than alone, won't it? Let's forget that you're the Law and I'm the Man, and that I've killed one or two. We're both in the same boat, and we might as well be a little bit friendly for a few hours, and shake hands, and be at peace when the last minute comes. If we get out of this, and find grub, we'll fight fair and square, and the best man wins. Be square with me, old man, and I'll be square with you, s'elp me G.o.d!"

He reached out a hand, gnarled, knotted, covered with callouses and scars, and with a strange sound in his throat Philip caught it tightly in his own.

"I'll be square. Bill!" he cried. "I swear that I'll be square--on those conditions. If we find grub, and live, we'll fight it out--alone--and the best man wins. But I've had food today, and you're starving. Eat that and I'll still be in better condition than you. Eat it, and we'll smoke. Praise G.o.d I've got my pipe and tobacco!"

They settled back close in the lee of the drift, and the wind swirled white clouds of snow-mist over their heads, while DeBar ate his bird and Philip smoked. The food that went down DeBar's throat was only a morsel, but it put new life into him, and he gathered fresh armfuls of sticks and sapling boughs until the fire burned Philip's face and his drying clothes sent up clouds of steam. Once, a hundred yards out in the plain, Philip heard the outlaw burst into a s.n.a.t.c.h of wild forest song as he pulled down a dead stub.

"Seems good to have comp'ny," he said, when he came back with his load.

"My G.o.d, do you know I've never felt quite like this--so easy and happy like, since years and years? I wonder if it is because I know the end is near?"

"There's still hope," replied Philip.

"Hope!" cried DeBar. "It's more than hope, man. It's a certainty for me--the end, I mean. Don't you see, Phil--" He came and sat down close to the other on the sledge, and spoke as if he had known him for years. "It's got to be the end for me, and I guess that's what makes me cheerful like. I'm going to tell you about it, if you don't mind."

"I don't mind; I want to hear," said Philip, and he edged a little nearer, until they sat shoulder to shoulder.

"It's got to be the end," repeated DeBar, in a low voice. "If we get out of this, and fight, and you win, it'll be because I'm dead, Phil. D'ye understand? I'll be dead when the fight ends, if you win. That'll be one end."

"But if you win, Bill."

A flash of joy shot into DeBar's eyes.

"Then that'll be the other end," he said more softly still. He pointed to the big Mackenzie hound. "I said he was next to my best friend an earth, Phil. The other--is a girl--who lived back there--when it happened, years and years ago. She's thirty now, and she's stuck to me, and prayed for me, and believed in me for--a'most since we were kids together, an' she's written to me--'Frank Symmonds'--once a month for ten years. G.o.d bless her heart! That is what's kept me alive, and in every letter she's begged me to let her come to me, wherever I was.

But--I guess the devil didn't get quite all of me, for I couldn't, 'n'

wouldn't. But I've give in now, and we've fixed it up between us. By this time she's on her way to my brothers in South America, and if I win--when we fight--I'm going where she is. And that's the other end, Phil, so you see why I'm happy. There's sure to be an end of it for me--soon."

He bowed his wild, unshorn head in his mittened hands, and for a time there was silence between them.

Philip broke it, almost in a whisper.

"Why don't you kill me--here--now-while I'm sitting helpless beside you, and you've a knife in your belt?"

DeBar lifted his head slowly and looked with astonishment into his companion's face.

"I'm not a murderer!" he said.

"But you've killed other men," persisted Philip.

"Three, besides those we hung," replied DeBar calmly. "One at Moose Factory, when I tried to help John, and the other two up here. They were like you--hunting me down, and I killed 'em in fair fight. Was that murder? Should I stand by and be shot like an animal just because it's the law that's doing it? Would you?"

He rose without waiting for an answer and felt of the clothes beside the fire.

"Dry enough," he said. "Put 'em on and we'll be hiking."

Philip dressed, and looked at his compa.s.s.

"Still north?" he asked. "Chippewayan is south and west."

"North," said DeBar. "I know of a breed who lives on Red Porcupine Creek, which runs into the Slave. If we can find him we'll get grub, and if we don't--"

He laughed openly into the other's face.

"We won't fight," said Philip, understanding him.

"No, we won't fight, but we'll wrap up in the same blankets, and die, with Woonga, there, keeping our backs warm until the last. Eh, Woonga, will you do that?"

He turned cheerily to the dog, and Woonga rose slowly and with unmistakable stiffness of limb, and was fastened in the sledge traces.

They went on through the desolate gloom of afternoon, which in late winter is, above the sixtieth, all but night. Ahead of them there seemed to rise billow upon billow of snow-mountains, which dwarfed themselves into drifted dunes when they approached, and the heaven above them, and the horizon on all sides of them were shut out from their vision by a white mist which was intangible and without substance and yet which rose like a wall before their eyes. It was one chaos of white mingling with another chaos of white, a chaos of white earth smothered and torn by the Arctic wind under a chaos of white sky; and through it all, saplings that one might have twisted and broken over his knee were magnified into giants at a distance of half a hundred paces, and men and dog looked like huge specters moving with bowed heads through a world that was no longer a world of life, but of dead and silent things. And up out of this, after a time, rose DeBar's voice, chanting in tones filled with the savagery of the North, a wild song that was half breed and half French, which the forest men sing in their joy when coming very near to home.

They went on, hour after hour, until day gloom thickened into night, and night drifted upward to give place to gray dawn, plodding steadily north, resting now and then, fighting each mile of the way to the Red Porcupine against the stinging lashes of the Arctic wind. And through it all it was DeBar's voice that rose in encouragement to the dog limping behind him and to the man limping behind the dog--now in song, now in the wild shouting of the sledge-driver, his face thin and gaunt in its starved whiteness, but his eyes alive with a strange fire. And it was DeBar who lifted his mittened hands to the leaden chaos of sky when they came to the frozen streak that was the Red Porcupine, and said, in a voice through which there ran a strange thrill of something deep and mighty, "G.o.d in Heaven be praised, this is the end!"

He started into a trot now, and the dog trotted behind him, and behind the dog trotted Philip, wondering, as he had wondered a dozen times before that night, if DeBar were going mad. Five hundred yards down the stream DeBar stopped in his tracks, stared for a moment into the breaking gloom of the sh.o.r.e, and turned to Philip. He spoke in a voice low and trembling, as if overcome for the moment by some strong emotion.

"See--see there!" he whispered. "I've hit it, Philip Steele, and what does it mean? I've come over seventy miles of barren, through night an'

storm, an' I've hit Pierre Th.o.r.eau's cabin as fair as a shot! Oh, man, man, I couldn't do it once in ten thousand times!" He gripped Philip's arm, and his voice rose in excited triumph. "I tell 'ee, it means that--that G.o.d--'r something--must be with me!"

"With us," said Philip, staring hard.

"With me," replied DeBar so fiercely that the other started involuntarily. "It's a miracle, an omen, and it means that I'm going to win!" His fingers gripped deeper, and he said more gently, "Phil, I've grown to like you, and if you believe in G.o.d as we believe in Him up here--if you believe He tells things in the stars, the winds and things like this, if you're afraid of death--take some grub and go back! I mean it, Phil, for if you stay, an' fight, there is going to be but one end.

I will kill you!"

Chapter XII. The Fight--And A Strange Visitor

At DeBar's words the blood leaped swiftly through Philip's veins, and he laughed as he flung the outlaw's hand from his arm.

"I'm not afraid of death," he cried angrily. "Don't take me for a child, William DeBar. How long since you found this G.o.d of yours?"

He spoke the words half tauntingly, and as soon regretted them, for in a voice that betrayed no anger at the slur DeBar said: "Ever since my mother taught me the first prayer, Phil. I've killed three men and I've helped to hang three others, and still I believe in a G.o.d, and I've halt a notion He believes a little bit in me, in spite of the laws made down in Ottawa."

The cabin loomed up amid a shelter of spruce like a black shadow, and when they climbed up the bank to it they found the snow drifted high under the window and against the door.