CHAPTER IV.

‘ALL’S CHEERLESS, DARK, AND DEADLY.’

The stranger, having had their exact circumstances laid before him, took the gloomiest view of the position. The first deep fall of snow had occurred a week after the guide’s departure. If he had not ere that time regained a track, with landmarks familiar to his eye, all hope of his having been able to reach the fort was as foolish as it was vain.

‘For myself,’ said the stranger, ‘I give him up.’

This man, who was henceforth known among them as Matchi, a contraction of the sobriquet bestowed on him by the Indians, fell into his place in that small circle easily enough. They neither liked him nor trusted him. But he had plenty to say for himself, and had a certain originality of thought and language that went some little way towards dispelling the deep gloom that surrounded them. In their wretched position, any one who could bring an element of novelty into their life was welcome. The desperation of his character suited their desperate circumstances. In a civilised country they would have shut their doors in his face. But here, with Death peering in at their threshold, this wild spirit helped them to sustain the horrors of suspense, the dreary foreboding of a fatal end.

But there was one charm in his presence which all felt, even the phlegmatic German. With Lucius Davoren’s violin in his hand, he could beguile them into brief forgetfulness of that grisly spectre watching at the door. That passionate music opened the gates of dreamland. Matchi’s _répertoire_ seemed inexhaustible: but everything he played, even melodies the world knows by heart, bore the stamp of his own genius. Whatever subject of Corelli, or Viotti, or Mozart, or Haydn, formed the groundwork of his theme, the improvisatore sported with the air at pleasure, and interwove his own wild fancies with the original fabric. Much that he played was obviously his own composition, improvised as the bow moved over the strings; wild strains which interpreted the gloom of their surroundings; dismal threnodies in which one heard the soughing of the wind among the snow-laden pine-branches; the howling of wolves at sunrise.

He proved no drone in that little hive, but toiled at such labour as there was to be done with a savage energy which seemed in accord with his half-savage nature. He felled the pine-trunks with his axe, and brought new stores of fuel to the hut. He fetched water from a distant lake, where there was but one corner which the ice had not locked against him. He slept little, and those haggard eyes of his had a strange brightness and vivacity as he sat by the hearth and stared into the fire which his toil had helped to furnish.

Though he talked much at times, but always by fits and starts, it was curious to note how rarely he spoke directly of himself or his past life. Even when Lucius questioned him about his musical education, in what school he had learned, who had been his master, he contrived to evade the question.

‘There are some men who have not the knack of learning from other people, but who must be their own teachers,’ he said. ‘I am one of those. Shut me up in a prison for ten years, with my fiddle for my only companion, and when I come out I shall have discovered a new continent in the world of music.’

‘You play other instruments,’ hazarded Lucius; ‘the cello?’

‘I play most stringed instruments,’ the other answered carelessly.

‘The piano?’

‘Yes, I play the piano. A man has fingers; what is there strange in his using them?’

‘Nothing; only one wonders that you should be content to hide so many accomplishments in the backwoods.’

Matchi shrugged his lean shoulders.

‘There are a thousand various reasons why a man should grow tired of his own particular world,’ he said.

‘To say nothing of the possibility that a man’s own particular world may grow tired of him,’ returned Lucius.

Instead of himself and his own affairs—that subject which exalts the most ungifted speaker into eloquence—the stranger spoke of men and manners, the things he had seen from the outside as a mere spectator; the books he had read, and they were legion. Never was a brain stocked with a more heterogeneous collection of ideas. Queer books, out-of-the-way books, had evidently formed his favourite study. Geoffrey heard, and was amused. Lucius heard, and wondered, and rendered to this man that unwilling respect which we give to intellect unallied with the virtues.

Thus three days and nights went by, somewhat less slowly than the days had gone of late. On the morning of the fourth the stranger grew impatient—paced the narrow bounds of his hut like an imprisoned jaguar.

‘Death lies yonder, I doubt not,’ he said, pointing to the forest, ‘while here there is the possibility—a mere possibility—that we may outlive our troubles; that some luckier band of emigrants may come this way to succour us before we expire. But I tell you frankly, my friends, that I can’t stand this sort of life three days longer—to sit down and wait for death, arms folded, without so much as a pipe of tobacco to lull the fever in one’s brain. _That_ needs a Roman courage which I possess not. I shall not trouble your hospitality much longer.’

‘What will you do?’ asked Geoffrey.

‘Push ahead. I have my chart here,’ touching his forehead. ‘I shall push on towards the Pacific with no better guide than the stars. I can but perish; better to be frozen to death on the march—like a team of sleigh-dogs I saw once by the Saskatchewan, standing stark and stiff in the snow, as their drivers had left them—than to sit and doze by the fire here till Death comes in his slowest and most hideous shape—death by famine.’

‘You had better stay with us and share our chances,’ said Lucius; ‘our guide may even yet return.’

‘Yes,’ answered Matchi, ‘at the general muster roll, with the rank and file of the dead.’

His words were strangely belied ere that brief day darkened into night. The four men were sitting huddled round the fire, smoking their final pipe—for Matchi had now shared among them the last remnant of his tobacco—when a curious hollow cry, like the plaintive note of a distressed bird, was heard in the distance.

Lucius was the first to divine its meaning.

‘Kekek-ooarsis!’ he cried, starting to his feet. ‘He has come back at last. Thank God! thank God!’

The call was repeated, this time distinctly human.

‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey, ‘that’s the identical flute.’

He ran to the door of the hut. Lucius snatched up one of the blazing pine-branches from the hearth, and went out, waving this fiery brand aloft, and shouting in answer to the Indian’s cry. In this moment of glad surprise and hope the man’s return meant succour, comfort, plenty. Too soon were they to be undeceived. He emerged from among the shadowy branches, half limping, half crawling towards them across the snow, which was solid enough to bear that light burden without the faintest impression on its frozen surface. He came into the glare of the pine-branch, a wasted ghastly figure, more spectral than their own—the very image and type of famine.

He came back to them empty-handed. No dogs or horses followed him. He came, not to bring them the means of life, but to die with them.

The faithful creature crawled about them like a dog, hugged their knees, laid his wasted body at their feet, looked up at them with supplicating eyes, too feeble for words. They carried him into the hut, put him by the fire, and gave him food, which he devoured like a famished wolf.

Restored by that welcome heat and food, he told them his adventures; how he had striven in vain to regain the track and make his way back to the fort; how, after weary wanderings, he had found himself at last among a little band of Indians, whose camp lay northward of the Englishmen’s hut, and who were as near famine as they. Here he had fallen ill with frostbite and rheumatism, but had been kindly succoured by the Indians, not of his tribe. He had lain in one of their shelters—not worthy to be dignified even by the name of hut—for a long time, how long he knew not, having lost consciousness during the period, and thus missed his reckoning. With recovery came the ardent desire to return to them, to show them that he had not betrayed his trust. The bank-notes sewn into his garments had escaped observation and pillage, supposing the Indians inclined to plunder their guest. He asked them to sell him provisions that he might take to his masters, tried to tempt them with liberal offers of payment, but they had unhappily nothing to sell. Buffalo had vanished from that district, the lakes and rivers were frozen. The Indians themselves were living from hand to mouth, and hardly living at all, so meagre was their fare. Convinced at last that the case was hopeless, Kekek-ooarsis had left them to return to the hut—a long and difficult journey, since in his efforts to regain the road, to the fort he had made a wide circuit. Only fidelity—the dog’s faithful allegiance to the master he loves—had brought him back to that hunger-haunted dwelling.

‘I cannot help you,’ he said piteously in his native language; ‘I have come back to die with you.’

‘One more or less to die makes little difference,’ answered the stranger, speaking the man’s exact dialect with perfect fluency. ‘Let us see if we cannot contrive to live. You have failed once in your endeavour to find your way back to the fort. That is no reason you should fail a second time. Few great things have been done at the first attempt. Get your strength back, my friend, and you and I will set out together as soon as you are fit for the journey. I know something of the country; and with your native eyes and ears to help me, we could hardly fail.’

Kekek-ooarsis looked up at him wonderingly. He was not altogether favourably impressed by the stranger’s appearance, if one might judge by his own countenance, which expressed doubt and perplexity.

‘I will do whatever my masters bid me,’ he said submissively.

His masters let him rest, and eat, and bask in the warmth of the pine-logs for two days; after which he declared himself ready to set out upon any quest they might order.

The stranger had talked them into a belief in his intelligence being superior to that of the guide; and they consented to the two setting out together to make a second attempt to find the way to the fort. In a condition so hopeless it seemed to matter very little what they did. Anything was better than sitting, arms folded, as the stranger had said, face to face with death.

But Lucius was now chained to the hut by a new tie. The day after the Indian’s return, Geoffrey, the light-hearted, the fearless, had been struck down with fever. Lucius had henceforward no care so absorbing as that which bound him to the side of his friend. The German looked on, phlegmatic but not unsympathising, and made no moan.

‘I shall gatch ze fefer aftervarts, no tout,’ he said, ‘and you vill have dwo do nurse. Hart ubon you.’