Part 42 (1/2)

She told him. The Scotchman took what she had to say with no outward sign of excitement. None the less his blood moved faster. He wanted no change in the relations between them that would interfere with the love she felt for him. To him it did not matter whether she was of the pure blood or of the metis. He had always ignored the Indian in her.

She was a precious wildling of beauty and delight. By nature she was of the ruling race. There was in her nothing servile or dependent, none of the inertia that was so marked a mental characteristic of the Blackfoot and the Cree. Her slender body was compact of fire and spirit. She was alive to her finger-tips.

None the less he was glad on her account. Since it mattered to her that she was a half-blood, he would rejoice, too, if she could prove the contrary. Or, if she could trace her own father's family, he would try to be glad for her.

With his rough forefinger he touched gently the tender curve of the girl's cheek. ”I'm thinkin' that gin ye find relatives across the line, auld Angus McRae will be losin' his dawtie.”

She flew into his arms, her warm, young face pressed against his seamed cheek.

”Never--never! You're my father--always that no matter what I find.

You taught me to read and nursed me when I was sick. Always you've cared for me and been good to me. I'll never have any real father but you,” she cried pa.s.sionately.

He stroked her dark, abundant hair fondly. ”My la.s.s, I've gi'en ye all the love any yin could gi'e his ain bairn. I doot I've been hard on ye at times, but I'm a dour auld man an' fine ye ken my heart was woe for ye when I was the strictest.”

She could count on the fingers of one hand the times when he had said as much. Of nature he was a bit of Scotch granite externally. He was sentimental. Most of his race are. But he guarded the expression of it as though it were a vice.

”Maybe Onistah has heard his mother say something about it,” Jessie suggested.

”Like enough. There'll be nae harm in askin' the lad.”

But the Blackfoot had little to tell. He had been told by Stokimatis that Sleeping Dawn was his cousin, but he had never quite believed it.

Once, when he had pressed his mother with questions, she had smiled deeply and changed the subject. His feeling was, and had always been, that there was some mystery about the girl's birth. Stokimatis either knew what it was or had some hint of it.

His testimony at least tended to support the wild hopes flaming in the girl's heart.

Lemoine started south for Whoop-Up at break of day.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

INTO THE LONE LAND

Into Northern Lights the pursuers drove after a four-day traverse.

Manders, of the Mounted, welcomed them with the best he had. No news had come to him from the outside for more than two months, and after his visitors were fed and warmed, they lounged in front of a roaring log fire while he flung questions at them of what the world and its neighbor were doing.

Manders was a dark-bearded man, big for the North-West Police. He had two hobbies. One was trouble in the Balkans, which he was always prophesying. The other was a pa.s.sion for Sophocles, which he read in the original from a pocket edition. Start him on the chariot race in ”Elektra” and he would spout it while he paced the cabin and gestured with flas.h.i.+ng eyes. For he was a Rugby and an Oxford man, though born with the wanderl.u.s.t in his heart. Some day he would fall heir to a great estate in England, an old baronetcy which carried with it manors and deer parks and shaven lawns that had taken a hundred years to grow. Meanwhile he lived on pemmican and sour bannocks. Sometimes he grumbled, but his grumbling was a fraud. He was here of choice, because he was a wild a.s.s of the desert and his ears heard only the call of adventure. Of such was the North-West Mounted.

Presently, when the stream of his curiosity as to the outside began to dry, Beresford put a few questions of his own. Manders could give him no information. He was in touch with the trappers for a radius of a hundred miles of which Northern Lights was the center, but no word had come to him of a lone traveler with a dog-train pa.s.sing north.

”Probably striking west of here,” the big black Englishman suggested.

Beresford's face twisted to a wry, humorous grimace. East, west, or north, they would have to find the fellow and bring him back.

The man-hunters spent a day at Northern Lights to rest the dogs and restock their supplies. They overhauled their dunnage carefully, mended the broken moose-skin harness, and looked after one of the animals that had gone a little lame from a sore pad. From a French half-breed they bought additional equipment much needed for the trail.

He was a gay, good-looking youth in new fringed leather hunting-s.h.i.+rt, blue Saskatchewan cap trimmed with ribbons, and cross belt of scarlet cloth. His stock in trade was dog-shoes, made of caribou-skin by his wife, and while in process of tanning soaked in some kind of liquid that would prevent the canines from eating them off their feet.

The temperature was thirty-five below zero when they left the post and there were sun dogs in the sky. Manders had suggested that they had better wait a day or two, but the man-hunters were anxious to be on the trail. They had a dangerous, unpleasant job on hand. Both of them wanted it over with as soon as possible.

They headed into the wilds. The road they made was a crooked path through the white, unbroken forest. They saw many traces of fur-bearing animals, but did not stop to do any hunting. The intense cold and the appearance of the sky were whips to drive them fast. In the next two or three days they pa.s.sed fifteen or twenty lakes. Over these they traveled rapidly, but in the portages and the woods they had to pack the snow, sometimes cut out obstructing brush, and again help the dogs over rough or heavy places.

The blizzard caught them the third day. They fought their way through the gathering storm across a rather large lake to the timber's edge. Here they cleared away a s.p.a.ce about nine feet square and cut evergreen boughs from the trees to cover it. At one side of this, Morse built the fire while Beresford unharnessed the dogs and thawed out a mess of frozen fish for them. Presently the kettles were bubbling on the fire. The men ate supper and drew the sled up as a barricade against the wind.