Part 28 (1/2)
The girl was pointing excitedly with a tapering white-brown finger to the fork of a great log where, caught on a sharp limb stub, was the striped sleeve of a mackinaw, from the end of which protruded a hand, while after the log, trailing sluggishly in the V of the fork, was the lifeless body of a man.
As she looked a light of exultation gleamed in the sharp old eyes. Here was vengeance! For the life of her son--the life of a white man.
She noted with satisfaction that the body was that of a large man. It was fitting so. For her Pierre had been tall, and broad, and strong--she would have been disappointed in the meaner price of a small man's life.
Suddenly she leaped to her feet and ran swiftly along the bluff seeking a place to descend.
Even among the men of the logs, who are bad, one man stands alone as the archfiend of them all.
And now--it is possible, for he is a big man--she, Wa-ha-ta-na-ta, the mother of Pierre and of Jeanne, maybe is permitted to stoop close and breathe upon the dead face of this man the weird curse of the barren lands--almost forgotten, now, even among her own people--the blighting curse of the ”Yaga Tah!”
In the telling, the _Bois brule_ had mentioned the name of the drunken lumber-jack who had baited her Pierre to his death, and in the old woman's brain the name of Moncrossen was the symbol of all black deviltry.
After the death of Lacombie, Wa-ha-ta-na-ta had stolen Jeanne from the mission that she might forget the ways of the white man, and returned to her people.
Jeanne, whose soft skin, beneath the sun tan, was the white skin of Lacombie, and who was the most beautiful among all the women of the North, with her straight, lithe body, and dark, mysterious eyes--eyes which, in color, were the eyes of the wood folk, but in whose baffling, compelling depths slumbered the secrets of an alien race.
Jacques, she could understand, for in thought and deed and body he was Indian--a whelp of her own breed. But the girl, she did not understand, and her love for her was the idolatrous love with which she had loved Lacombie.
Through many lean years they lived among the tepees of the Indians, but, of late, they had come to the lodge of Jacques, who had become a trapper and guide.
His lodge, of necessity, must be pitched not too far from the lumber camps of the white men, whose laws make killing deer in winter a crime--and pay liberally for fresh venison.
Swiftly she descended a short slope of the bluff, uttering quick, low whines of antic.i.p.ation. For Jacques, Blood River Jack he was called by the white men, had told her that Moncrossen was boss of the camp at the head of the rapid.
All through the winter she had kept the girl continually within her sight, for she remembered the previous winter when this same Moncrossen had accidentally come upon their lodge on the south fork of Broken Knee, and the look in his eyes as he gazed upon the beauty of Jeanne.
She remembered the events that followed when Jacques was paid liberally by the boss to make a midwinter journey to the railroad, and the low sound in the night when she awakened to find the girl struggling in the bear-like grasp of the huge lumberjack, and how she fought him off in the darkness with a hatchet while Jeanne fled shrieking into the timber.
Now she stood upon the brink, and beside her stood the girl in whose dark eyes flashed a primitive tiger-hate--for she, too, remembered the terror of that night on the south fork of Broken Knee.
And, although she knew nothing of the wild death-curse of the Yaga Tah, she could at least stoop and spit upon the dead face of the one worst white man.
Almost touching their feet lapped the brown, bubble-dotted waters of the river, and close in, at a hand's reach from the bank, the logs pa.s.sed sluggishly in the slow swing of the sh.o.r.e eddy.
The eyes of the pair focused in intense eagerness upon the great forked log which poised uncertainly at the outer edge of the whirl.
For a breathless moment they watched while it seemed that the great log with its gruesome freight must be swept out into the main current of the stream. Sluggishly it revolved, as upon an axis, and then, in the grip of a random cross-current, swung heavily sh.o.r.eward.
The form of the old woman bent forward and, as the log drifted slowly past, a talon-like hand shot out and fastened upon the bit of striped cloth, and the next moment the two were tugging and hauling in their efforts to drag the limp body clear of the brown waters.
Seizing upon the heavy calked boots they worked the body inch by inch up the steep slope, and the dry lips of the old squaw curled in a snaggy grin as she noted the shattered leg and the toe of the boot twisted backward--a grin that deepened into a grimace of sardonic cruelty at the feel of the grating rasp of the shattered bone ends.
After frequent pauses they returned to their task, and at each jerk water gushed from the man's wide-sprung jaws.
At last, panting with exertion, they gained the top of the bank. With glittering eyes the old squaw stooped swiftly and turned the body upon its back. The unseeing eyes stared upward, water ceased to gush from the open mouth, and the lolling tongue settled flabbily between the mud-smeared lips.
A cry of savage disappointment escaped her, for the face into which she looked was not the face of Moncrossen!
The curse of the Yaga Tah died upon her lips, for this curse may be breathed but once in a lifetime, and if, as Father Magnus said, ”G.o.d is good,” she might yet live to gaze into the dead face of the one worst white man, and chant the curse of the Yaga Tah.