The Honor of the Big Snows Part 11

"It's not the plague. Go back and tell your wife so."

"And get shot for my pains!" groaned Croisset, digging into meat and biscuit. "I'm bound for Lac Bain, if you'll give me a dozen matches.

That whisky-jack will remain with me until I die, for when I ate him I forgot to take out his insides!"

"You're a lucky man, Croisset. It's good proof that she loves you."

"If bullets and hot water and an empty belly are proofs, she loves me a great deal, Jan Th.o.r.eau! Though I don't believe she meant to hit me. It was a woman's bad aim."

Jan left him beside a good fire, and turned into the southwest to burn Langlois and his cabin. The red flag still floated where he had seen it weeks before. The windows were thicker with frost. He shouted, beat upon the door with the b.u.t.t of his rifle and broke in the windows. The silence of death quickened the beating of his heart when he stopped to listen. There was no doubt that Langlois lay dead in his little home.

Jan brought dry brushwood from the forest, and piled it high against the logs. Upon his sledge he sat and watched the fire until the cabin was a furnace of leaping flame.

He continued westward. At the head of the Porcupine he found the remains of three burned wigwams, and from one of them he dug out charred bones. Down the Porcupine he went slowly, doubling to the east and west, until, at its junction with Gray Otter Creek, he met a Cree, who told him that twenty miles farther on there was an abandoned village of six teepees. Toward these he boldly set forth, praying as he went that the angels were guarding Melisse at Post Lac Bain.

Croisset reached the post forty-eight hours after he had encountered Jan.

"The red flag is everywhere!" he cried, catching sight of the signal over Mukee's cabin. "It is to the east and west of the Hasabala as thick as jays in springtime!"

The Cree from the Gray Otter drove in on his way north.

"Six wigwams with dead in them," he reported in his own language to Williams. "A company man, with a one-eyed leader and four trailers, left the Gray Otter to burn them."

Williams took down his birch-bark moose-horn and bellowed a weird signal to c.u.mmins, who opened a crack of his door to listen, with Melisse close beside him.

"Th.o.r.eau is in the thick of it to the south," he called. "There's too much of it for him, and I'm going down with the dogs. Croisset will stay in the store for a few days."

Melisse heard the words, and her eyes were big with fear when her father turned from closing and bolting the door. In more than a childish way, she knew that Jan had gone forth to face a great danger.

The grim laws of the savage world in which she lived had already begun to fix their influence upon her, quickening her instinct and reason, just as they hastened the lives of Indian children into the responsibilities of men and women before they had reached fifteen.

She knew what the red flag over Mukee's cabin meant. She knew that the air of this world of hers had become filled with peril to those who breathed it, and that people were dying out in the forests; that all about them there was a terrible, unseen thing which her father called the plague, and that Jan had gone forth to fight it, to breathe it, and, perhaps, to die in it. Their own door was locked and bolted against it. She dared not even thrust her head from the window which was opened for a short time each day; and until c.u.mmins a.s.sured her that there was no danger in the suns.h.i.+ne, she shunned the few pale rays that shot through the cabin-window at midday.

Unconsciously, c.u.mmins added to her fears in more ways than one, and as he answered her questions truthfully, her knowledge increased day by day. She thought more and more of Jan. She watched for him through the two windows of her home. Every sound from outside brought her to them with eager hope; and always, her heart sank with disappointment, and the tears would come very near to her eyes, when she saw nothing but the terrible red flag clinging to the pole over Mukee's cabin.

In the little Bible which her mother had left there was written, on the ragged fly-leaf, a simple prayer. Each night, as she knelt beside her cot and repeated this prayer, she paused at the end, and added:

"Dear Father in Heaven, please take care of Jan!"

The days brought quick changes now. One morning the moose-horn called c.u.mmins to the door. It was the fifth day after Williams had gone south.

"There was no smoke this morning, and I looked through the window,"

shouted Croisset. "Mukee and the old man are both dead. I'm going to burn the cabin."

A stifled groan of anguish fell from c.u.mmins' lips as he went like a dazed man to his cot and flung himself face downward upon it. Melisse could see his strong frame shaking, as if he were crying like a child; and twining her arms tightly about his neck, she sobbed out her pa.s.sionate grief against his rough cheek. She did not know the part that Mukee had played in the life of the sweet woman who had once lived in this same little cabin; she knew only that he was dead; that the terrible thing had killed him and that, next to her father and Jan, she had loved him more than any one else in the world.

Soon she heard a strange sound, and ran to the window. Mukee's cabin was in flames. Wild-eyed and tearless with horror, she watched the fire as it burst through the broken windows and leaped high up among the black spruce. In those flames was Mukee! She screamed, and her father sprang to her with a strange cry, running with her from the window into the little room where she slept.

The next morning, when c.u.mmins went to awaken her, his face went as white as death. Melisse was not asleep. Her eyes were wide open and staring at him, and her soft cheeks burned with the hot glow of fire.

"You are sick, Melisse," he whispered hoa.r.s.ely. "You are sick!"

He fell upon his knees beside her, and lifted her face in his hands.

The touch of it sent a chill to his heart--such as he had not felt since many years ago, in that other room a few steps away.

"I want Jan," she pleaded. "I want Jan to come back to me!"

"I will send for him, dear. He will come back soon. I will go out and send Croisset."

He hid his face from her as he dragged himself away. Croisset saw him coming, and came out of the store to meet him. A hundred yards away c.u.mmins stopped.

"Croisset, for the love of G.o.d, take a team and go after Jan Th.o.r.eau,"

he called "Tell him that Melisse is dying of the plague. Hurry, hurry!"

"Night and day!" shouted Croisset.

Twenty minutes later, from the cabin window, c.u.mmins saw him start.

"Jan will be here very soon, Melisse," he said, running his fingers gently through her hair.

It fell out upon the pillow in thick brown waves, and the sight of it choked him with the memory of another vision which would remain with him until the end of time. It was her mother's hair, s.h.i.+ning softly in the dim light; her mother's eyes looked up at him as he sat beside her through all this long day.

Toward evening there came a change. The fever left the child's cheeks.

Her eyes closed, and she fell asleep. Through the night c.u.mmins sat near the door, but in the gray dawn, overcome by his long vigil, his head dropped upon his breast, and he slumbered.

When he awoke the cabin was filled with light He heard a sound, and, startled, sprang to his feet. Melisse was at the stove building a fire!

"I'm better this morning, father. Why didn't you sleep until breakfast was ready?"

c.u.mmins stared. Then he gave a shout, made a rush for her, and catching her up in his arms, danced about the cabin like a great bear, overturning the chairs, and allowing the room to fill with smoke in his wild joy.

"It's what you saw through the window that made you sick, Melisse," he cried, putting her down at last. "I thought--" He paused, and added, his voice trembling: "I thought you were going to be sick for more than one day, my sweet little woman!"

He opened one of the windows to let in the fresh air of the morning.

When Croisset returned, he did not find a red flag over c.u.mmins' cabin; nor did he bring word of Jan. For three days he had followed the trails to the south without finding the boy. But he brought back other news.

Williams was sick with the plague in a Cree wigwam on the lower Porcupine. It was the last they ever heard of the factor, except that he died some time in March, and was burned by the Crees.

Croisset went back over the Churchill trail, and found his wife ready to greet him with open arms. After that he joined Per-ee, who came in from the north, in another search for Jan. They found neither trace nor word of him after pa.s.sing the Gray Otter, and c.u.mmins gave up hope.

It was not for long that their fears could be kept from Melisse. This first bitter grief that had come into her life fell upon her with a force which alarmed c.u.mmins, and cast him into deep gloom. She no longer loved to play with her things in the cabin. For days at a time she would not touch the books which Jan had brought from Churchill, and which he had taught her to read. She found little to interest her in the things which had been her life a few weeks before.

With growing despair, c.u.mmins saw his own efforts fail. As the days pa.s.sed Melisse mingled more and more with the Indian and half-breed children, and spent much of her time at the company's store, listening to the talk of the men, silent, attentive, unresponsive to any efforts they might make to engage her smiles. From her own heart she looked out upon a world that had become a void for her. Jan had been mother, brother, and everything that was tender and sweet to her--and he was gone. Mukee, whom she had loved, was gone. Williams was gone. The world was changed, terribly and suddenly, and it added years to her perspective of things.

Each day, as the weeks went on, and the spring sun began to soften the snow, she became a little more like the wild children at Lac Bain and in the forest. For Jan, she had kept her hair soft and bright, because he praised her for it and told her it was pretty. Now it hung in tangles down her back.

There came a night when she forgot her prayer, and c.u.mmins did not notice it. He failed to notice it the next night, and the next. Plunged deep in his own gloom, he was un.o.bservant of many other things, so that, in place of laughter and joy and merry rompings, only gloomy and oppressive shadows of things that had come and gone filled the life of the little cabin.

They were eating dinner, one day in the early spring, with the suns.h.i.+ne flooding in upon them, when a quick, low footfall caused Melisse to lift her eyes in the direction of the open door. A strange figure stood there, with bloodless face, staring eyes, and garments hanging in tatters--but its arms were stretched out, as those same arms had been held out to her a thousand times before, and, with the old glad cry, Melisse darted with the swiftness of a sun-shadow beyond c.u.mmins, crying: