Part 23 (1/2)

She only drew him up, her grip like a man's upon his wrists, and turned to the making of the fire.

Dupre drew up his canoe and took a snared wild hen from the bow.

”I think, Ma'amselle,” said the youth when Maren awaked some hours later from a heavy sleep, during which Dupre had killed the little smoke of the fire and kept silent watch from the sh.o.r.e, ”that we had best leave your canoe here and take mine. It is much the better craft.”

”So I see. Mine was but the first I could put my hands upon in the darkness.”

”'Tis that of old Corlier, and sadly lacking in repair. If you will steer, Ma'amselle?”

Thus set forth as forlorn a hope as ever lost itself in that vast region of hard living and daily tragedy, with the strength of the man set behind the woman's wisdom in as delicate a compliment as ever breathed itself in silken halls, and the blind courage of the dreamer urged it on..

At the forks of Red River they pa.s.sed the signs of a landing.

Here had the Indians summarily sent ash.o.r.e all of the Nor'westers who had been with De Courtenay and who had followed in the uncertainty of fear, not daring to desert lest they be overtaken and ma.s.sacred.

All, that is, save Bois DesCaut and the lean, hawk-faced Runners of the Burnt Woods.

Thanking their G.o.ds, the North-west servants had lost no time in taking advantage of the fact that they were not wanted, leaving their Montreal master to whatever fate might befall him.

Dupre went ash.o.r.e and examined the reach of land, the trampled gra.s.s, a broken bush or two.

”Ten men, I think,” he said, returning, ”and all in tremendous haste.

The Nor'westers escaping, I have no doubt. Would our captives were among them.”

”No such fortune, M'sieu,” said Maren calmly, ”Heard you not the cry before the gate in that unhallowed scramble what time they took the factor and the venturer? 'Twas 'a skin for a skin.' There are many guards.”

The summer day dreamed by in drowsy beauty, like a woman or a rose full-blown, and Maren, who would at another time have seen each smallest detail of its perfection through the eye of love, saw only the rus.h.i.+ng water ahead and counted time and distance.

Dupre, kneeling in the bow, his lithe brown arms bare to the shoulder, where the muscles lifted and fell like waves, was silent. Sadness sat upon him like a garment, yet lightened by a holy joy.

Odd servers of Love, these two, who knew only its pain without its pleasure, yet who were standing on the threshold of its Holy of Holies.

Of nights they sat together at the tiny fire of a few laid sticks and talked at intervals in a strange companions.h.i.+p.

Never again did they speak of love, nor even so much as skirt its fringes, though the young trapper read with wistful eyes its working in the woman's face. Out of her eyes had gone a certain light to be replaced by another, as if a star had pa.s.sed near a smouldering world and gone on, changed by the contact, its radiance darkened by a deeper glow.

The firm cheeks, dusky as sunset, had lost something of their contour.

Like comrades, too, they shared the work and the watches, the girl standing guard with rifle and ball while Dupre s.n.a.t.c.hed heavy sleep, herself dropping down like the veriest old wolf of the North on mossy bank or green gra.s.s for the rest they sternly shortened.

”'Tis near the time of the Hudson's Bay brigade, is it not, M'sieu?” she would ask sometimes. ”Think you we shall meet them surely if we skirt the eastern sh.o.r.e of Winnipeg?”

And Dupre would always answer, ”a.s.suredly. By the third week in July they will be at the upper bend where the river comes down from York. The Nakonkirhirinons will hold to the west, going up Nelson River and west through the chain of little lakes that lie to the south of Winnipeg, thence gaining Deer River and that Reindeer Lake which sends them forth into their unknown region beyond the Oujuragatchousibi. We, then, will make straight for the eastern sh.o.r.e, skirting upward to the interception of the ways, and we will surely meet the brigade.”

”And they will surely lend help, think you, to a factor of the Company in such grave plight?”

”Surely, Ma'amselle.”

So the hours of day and darkness slipped by with dip of paddle and with portage, with s.n.a.t.c.hed rest and fare of the wild.