CHAPTER XV

THE NIGHT HARRIERS

It was too late to stop the Esquimau’s talking. Kit stood dumbfounded, staring at him. Oogly either had gone stark crazy, or else he was a man devoid of fear. He had forced himself into public notice, and judging by his wide, incorrigible grin he was enjoying his unique position immensely.

From the demeanor of the Yellow Knives, a person unfamiliar with the Indian temperament might have imagined that they either had failed to hear or understand. Not a man moved nor spoke, not a muscle quivered. They waited for the outlander to go on, watching him in a dead, flinty silence, like wolves watching a swimming caribou.

Oogly was more than willing to oblige. He not only admitted killing the Yellow-Knife brave, but he told all about it in picturesque detail. He seemed to think it was a piece of work that his modesty ought not to keep hidden.

“The man him praying against my fish,” he explained genially. “So drowning him had to be.”

Kit no longer tried to interfere. What was the use? The mischief was accomplished. Oogly could swear himself blue in the face with denials, but nothing that could be said after this could ever sway or stay the purpose of the savages who had come to get him.

“What do you mean,” demanded Kitchener--“praying against your fish?”

“So nobody of the fish would eat at my fishing hook,” declared Oogly.

The Esquimau had come a step beyond the open doorway, so everybody could look at him while he told his outrageous tale. In his queerly chosen words of English, helped out by vivid pantomime, he showed them exactly how and why the killing was done.

Oogly, it seemed, was fishing through a hole in the ice on Long Lake, which emptied its chilly waters into Great Owl Run. He had been catching plenty of fish--innumerable fish--if his hearers could believe the number of times he jerked his pretended line out of the imaginary hole in the ice. Then along came the Yellow-Knife fisherman.

The newcomer chopped himself a hole not far from Oogly’s splendid spot for fish. He dropped a line of his own in the water and knelt down on the ice.

The kneeling posture was the man’s undoing. The Esquimau could tell that he was praying. When the fish stopped biting on Oogly’s hook he knew that the Indian was praying against his fish. When the fish started to come wriggling and flapping out of the water at the other hole then he knew that the Indian was praying the fish onto his own hook. Oogly now was catching none, and the other man was hauling them out as fast as he could pray.

This, to the Esquimau’s simple method of thought, was a justifiable cause for homicide. He walked over to the other fisherman, upended him by the heels and pushed him down headfirst through the hole in the ice. By making little explosive sounds with his puffed-out lips, Oogly showed them how the bubbles came to the surface for a minute or two, and then stopped coming.

“Awright now,” said the Esquimau, winding up his tale. “Finean’ dandy! Oogly go back and fishing lucky once again.”

That was the story, and after its cheerful recounting Oogly leaned his squat bulk against the doorframe as he waited placidly to find out what the dead man’s friends were going to do about it.

Kitchener was aghast. He had never heard a tale so bloodthirsty and at the same time so naïve and childlike in its telling.

He looked obliquely at the Yellow Knives, and nudged Diane’s arm. “Inside!” he said under his breath.

“You come along now,” Tom Salmonfish said to Oogly.

The Indian did not raise his voice, but the glitter of his eyes was like a baneful flame. He said something to his companions, and with that soundless, gliding motion that is peculiar to all forest-born creatures, the bunched group of men spread out right and left in a line that flanked the front of the cabin.

Kitchener backed into the doorway, shoving Diane and Oogly into the cabin behind him. He reached around with the toe of his foot and pulled the door towards him, so he would be able to slam it shut with the least possible delay.

There could be no doubt about the intentions of the Yellow Knives. They had made up their minds to seize their man, drag him away, and somewhere in the dark woods mete out their own cruel, remorseless justice, which demanded an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.

Kit was not deluding himself. These men wore store shirts and refused to labor on Sundays, but under the veneer of the missionary teachings they were still the same savages as their fierce and brutal forefathers. If he tried to save Oogly it meant a fight to the death. They were a sinister-looking crowd at this moment, and they had made it clear that they neither respected nor feared the police uniform. He could hear the click of rifle hammers up and down the line, and he knew they were all set to rush the cabin the instant their leader gave the word.

Off on the other side of the clearing Giffard, the Runt, was seated on a stump, like an ominous specter watching events. No help could be expected from him. He had met with a rebuff that morning that his shriveled and spiteful nature could never forget. So he sat tensely now and waited, and Kit knew by the look of him that anything that happened to the occupants of the cabin would be all right with Giffard. He even might have egged the Indians on, had there been any need for that.

In the middle of the clearing, moving in the heavy snow between two stumps, Kit caught sight of a tiny, gray-furred animal which was struggling through the drifts, apparently trying to gain the shelter of the nearer thickets. It was an old, whiskered house-rat. Kit recalled that there had been rats in the cabin roof, and apparently this one had been gassed out of his home by the smoking chimney.

The human mind is subject to the queerest aberrations. It was strange that at this moment when Kit should have been terribly concerned with his own troubles he could find time to think about a rat. But this little creature was in a bad plight. It would starve or freeze to death surely if it tried to live in the woods, and if it were caught in the open by the predatory monsters that dwelt in the neighborhood--

Even at that moment Kit was conscious of a shadowy flutter in the air above him, and he lifted his head in time to see one of the great, snowy owls floating across the murky sky. The sharp senses of the Indians also had caught the impalpable whisking of sound, and, without exception, they too forgot their own affairs long enough to look up into the morning dusk.

The huge, pallid night-bird flew softly above the roof of the cabin and hovered for a moment to peer downward with his stupid, golden-tinged eyes. Kit heard the Yellow Knives begin to mutter among themselves in their own, ancient speech, and he saw them stir uneasily and crowd closer towards the wall of the cabin. It was not a move of hostility, but of fear, the impulse to hunt shelter. The savage faces were suddenly stricken with awe and superstitious dread. This bird, as all Yellow Knives knew, belonged to _Wetikoo_, the Devil’s regions, and they did not wish him to fly above them.

The great owl was a weird apparition in the ghostly morning light. A soft, downy body, poised graciously on soundless wings, at first glance he seemed gentle and dovelike in his white-plumaged innocence. And then, at closer range, might be seen his frightful head, the diabolically hooked beak, the beautiful snowy floss of his cheeks and throat dabbled in fresh blood. He had killed and dined gluttonously many times through the night, and on his way back to the dark pits of the forest he could pause in the quiet of dawn for one more killing.

The owl saw the gray rat wallowing in the snow, and by an imperceptible movement of his expanded pinions he changed his course, slackened his silent flight. Some clairvoyance of instinct at that instant warned the rat of the stealthy form that had just skimmed the tree-tops. His sharp, twitching nose twisted upward, he spotted the monstrous thing drifting like a fog-wraith above him, and he tried to run, shrieking in terror.

For those few seconds the men in the clearing, white and Indian, lost sight of their own grim business to watch tensely this lesser drama of the wilderness.

The rat was doomed. Its tiny feet and legs sank deep in the loose packed snow and it piled a drift in front of itself as it tried to drag its body forward. The nearest thicket was a dozen yards away, and there wasn’t a chance of its gaining cover.

The feathered legs of the owl reached down stiffly and the terrible talons opened for their clutching stroke. Unhurried, unexcited the big bird swerved and dipped earthward as lightly as a wafted ball of fluff. Backed against a stump the rat turned at bay, squealing insanely.

The owl had turned his staring eyes towards the men for a moment, and then he went about his butcher’s work, as indifferent to the human spectators as though he were the unearthly spirit that the Indians believed him to be. The men of the forest were mortally afraid of the devils that owned these birds, and never dared to molest them. There was no beast of the wilderness able to cope with the giant owls. So they grew up without the instinct of fear.

Like a fleshless, disembodied thing, as aloof from the world, as quiet as death, the great owl swooped.

What prompted Kitchener’s act, he could not have said. But somehow he found his pistol butt set comfortably in the arch of his hand. His sights notched themselves in line, and his finger squeezed the trigger.

He fired--not at the swift-moving owl, which was mostly invulnerable feathers--but at the crouching rat. Nothing could have saved the little animal, and it is better to die instantaneously than to be plucked to bits alive. Kit might have missed the rushing bird, but the rat was standing still. As the report slammed across the clearing the small, gray body flopped headless in the snow, twitched once or twice, and settled quietly at rest.

The great owl, almost scooping the ground, braked his descent as his victim crumpled beneath him. The connoisseur of death recognized death at sight. He was no vulturous feeder. He took his meat alive. With a throaty, hissing sound that was not like any earthly sound, he lifted himself on his shadows of wings, and vanished between here and there like a smoke-puff dissipating in twilight.

Kitchener straightened his back and eased out a breath that was threatening to burst his lungs. He looked at the beheaded rat lying so still under its stump, he looked across the clearing at the gaping-mouthed Giffard, and then he turned to look at the Indians.

Something had happened to the Yellow Knives in that astonishing moment. Kit felt the change in their manner, he saw it in their gawking faces and in their awed, incredulous eyes. They were huddled in an irresolute group not far from the cabin door, watching him askance.

In an intuitive flash he realized that a miracle had intervened in his behalf. These were no longer the fierce, rash men who would have shot him down and burned the cabin above him. They knew nothing about the law, but they knew much about shooting. They had seen him snip off a rat’s head with his short-barreled gun at twenty paces. That sight somehow had spoiled their stomachs for fighting. That same, quick-firing gun might as readily pop off a half-dozen Yellow-Knife heads before they could stop its spitting.

It might be impossible even to down a man who dared to cheat one of the devil-birds of its prey. Such a one, who stood unsmitten afterwards and mocked at fate with one high-cocked eyebrow--it was more than possible that he also might be under the diabolical protection.

Kit read all of this in the guileless, bewildered faces, and he made the most of his advantages. He moved nonchalantly outside the doorway, keeping his pistol in his hand.

“You, Tom Salmonfish!” he said so sharply that the Indian jumped. “What do you mean by bringing your friends here? It’s a bad place. None of you may get out again.”

Salmonfish raised his anxious, squinting eyes, moistened his lips and started to say something. Then he ducked his head with a spasmodic movement and almost seemed to shrink within himself as another huge, blood-smeared owl sailed in from the barrens to cross low over the cabin roof.

Before the great, lazy-drifting bird had passed across the clearing a second and a third and a fourth hove in sight above the whited line of trees. One of them wheeled for an instant in his course, peered around below him with solemn, glaring eyes. It might have seemed for those few seconds as though he were trying to stare the watching men out of countenance, twisting his gory head from side to side while he circled and singled out individuals for his somber scrutiny.

The Yellow Knives refused to face the evil eyes looking down upon them. Their shoulders hunched up, their heads bowed, and they huddled together, looking absurdly like people who had been caught out unprotected in bad weather. Kit, who was watching them narrowly, suddenly raised his voice in a wild, singing shout:

“The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat. They took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five-pound note.”

He howled the refrain after the owls and beat the time in the air with the muzzle of his pistol.

For a few seconds the Indians seemed to stop breathing, and they looked at Kit like so many petrified men. They could not have understood the words. It might have been an infernal chant for all they knew. In that hushed nook of the forest the profane outburst of noise was nerve-shattering. Two or three of the Indians on the outskirts began to edge away from the cabin, and those in front heard the uneasy shuffling behind them and were quick to catch the infection.

Before Tom Salmonfish could have realized what was happening he found himself alone, confronting the mad white man who dared to taunt the fearsome owls, who could shoot like a fiend, whether he really was one or not, and who was waving his deadly pistol with a crazy disregard for those in front of it.

Tom Salmonfish might have stuck, in spite of the owls and the loony policeman, if anybody had stood behind him. But his braves had thought of something to do somewhere else. Some of them were already half way across the clearing, peering furtively over their shoulders as the owls disappeared in the black timber below the creek. The remaining two or three lingered momentarily, and then they shambled in an aimless fashion behind their comrades.

“I’d beat it,” said Kit.

Tom Salmonfish scowled after his departing friends, and then his morbid glance came back for an instant to the doorway. “We comin’ back an’ get um soon,” he threatened. “Plenty time to-morrow. Plenty more of us.”

He stalked away with dignity to overtake the last man of the file, who felt himself being crowded from behind, and stepped on the heels of the man in front of him. It was like a push given to a line of ten-pins. Those up ahead moved faster to keep out of the way of those in the rear, who moved faster to keep up. By the time the retreat began to lose itself in the underbrush on the farther side of the clearing it had begun to look like a contest to see who could go at the best walking clip, without running.

Kit closed the door and dropped the heavy draw-bar. He looked around the smoky interior, and laughed. Mrs. Mayauk Oogly stood beside him, smiling up at him, a friendly, cheerful smile. With a sudden surging of good spirits he leaned forward and kissed the Esquimau woman first on one roly-poly cheek, and then on the other.

This done, he thought there ought to be no partiality, so he turned and caught Diane Durand in his arms and firmly kissed her startled, open mouth. As the girl gasped and lithely struggled free he looked around at the man who had caused all the trouble.

“We’ve got a reprieve for you, Oogly,” he said. “You lucky stiff! Now you can be hanged decently, as you should be, by the police.”