CHAPTER II

AFTER MANY YEARS

When Kitchener Tearl left New York the city was basking in a spell of sultry, Indian Summer weather that had lingered into late October. As his Pullman traveled up the length of the Hudson Valley he saw robins in the orchards and flocks of belated blackbirds hovering about the meadows and fields. The hills and mountains still loomed green against the line of a soft and sunny sky.

Farther north he found notable changes in the climate and the scenery. On the other side of the border the air tingled with a frosty crispness, and the fringes of the forest were blazoned with the colors of the dying season. The people of Ottawa were wearing overcoats and keeping their hands in their pockets. On the way across Ontario the harvested acres reached sere and bleak to the chilly horizon. At Winnipeg the edges of the forked rivers were rimed in the morning with a first film of ice. Traveling from Saskatchewan into Alberta he saw long chains of wild geese, swans, and ducks in clouds, fleeing ahead of winter. Near Edmonton he caught sight of a man walking alongside a pond with a string of muskrat traps slung from his shoulder. The train going north on the branch line ran through snow flurries that increased in frequency and severity all the way to Fort McMurray.

Here he threw away his timetable and opened up his maps. From this point on his life would be regulated, not by the hours of a clock, but by the changing seasons.

He dug out of his baggage a pair of scarlet “four-point” Hudson’s Bay blankets--heirlooms that had been in his family for more than half a century--and he went to bed warmly in the unheated inn and dreamed gratefully of Grandfather Jake Tearl who for twenty years had defied the cold of Keewatin in these same red, imperishable blankets.

The trip down the river afforded him three weeks of complete idleness. The boat ran aground on all the charted shallows, and the crew of Indian stevedores would lighten ship by lightening the cargo: afloat once more, they would re-load and go hopefully northward for a few more miles, until they stuck on another bar. Kitchener had traveled up this same river on this same scraped-bottom steamer with his mother and his brother and his little sister Jane, when they undertook their fateful journey to the city, twelve years ago. He spent the short, gray days on deck, facing sleet and swirling snow, trying to pick out old landmarks as he watched the endless marching of the great spruce forest along the white streaked hills.

They cracked ice the last hundred miles, before they reached the long, black lake that is the geographical key to all the wild watercourses to the north and the west and the east. The captain of the boat hoped to go on down Mackenzie River, but his solitary passenger never learned how far he got. Kitchener had his baggage dumped on the shore near a Chippewyan encampment, and although sheet ice enclosed a part of the lake, he hired two Indians with a canoe, and crossed in a headwind and a heavy sea to his destination at the farthest lonesome harbor. So his sister Jane’s dismal prediction came to nothing. He reached Port-o’-Prayer and had not walked a step of the way.

Kitchener left his belongings on the beach and strolled up the hill towards the group of white-painted buildings that huddled at the edge of the vast forest. There was a sort of inn near the landing, a story and a half log building, with battened doors and windows and an unsmoking chimney. Nobody lived there at this season. Farther on were the company’s store houses and the residency of the store-keeper. The buildings were shuttered and silent, not even a dog was visible in the snowy compound.

In the spring and early summer, when the trappers had come in from the forests, Port-o’-Prayer looked like a populous village. Now the store-keeper was the sole remaining inhabitant. He had sent out his furs long since and had hibernated for the winter.

Kitchener routed the man out of his quarters and found him to be an untalkative, sad-featured Scotsman. He was so lacking in curiosity that he did not even show wonderment at the sight of a tenderfoot who had journeyed into the back-country while winter was beginning to close up all the routes of retreat.

He answered the newcomer’s questions with an air of pained but patient politeness. Yes--a Sergeant Buck Tearl had stopped here at the post. But he went away again, after a couple of days. This was nearly a month ago.

Where had he gone? North somewhere, into the Vermilion River country. There was a police look-out station there at _Saut Sauvage_, on the ground that vaguely divided the Esquimaux from the forest tribes of the Cree and Yellow Knives. The sergeant was making an Arctic patrol, presumably on the trail of evil-doers.

What was he like, this Sergeant Tearl? He was a big man, who spoke softly, and yet had a hard and dangerous-looking mouth. While he was at Port-o’-Prayer he had kept on his lynxskin capote and the store-keeper had seen only his mouth and nose and his disconcerting eyes.

Even this meager description set Kitchener’s pulses tingling. Having come this far he had no thought except to go on, as far as _Saut Sauvage_, if need be. This man surely was his brother Jerry.

Had Sergeant Tearl picked up a radio message sent to him on the twenty-fifth of last month? The store-keeper didn’t know. He himself had no interest in hearing things out of the air. The company had given him a receiver last year, but it was too much trouble to buy new batteries for it. If he wanted to hear voices and songs he could go sit in the Chippewyan camp up the river.

Kitchener decided to go on at once. He would need a sledge and a train of huskies. It was snowing steadily and drearily now, and the trails would lie under shrouds to-morrow. What about dogs? The store-keeper had a couple he could sell. One of them would do all right for a king-pin. The Indians probably could spare two or three others. But they would come high--a hundred dollars a dog at least. Men were feeding their draught animals again, and weren’t kicking and clubbing them away from the camps as they did in the summer. This was dog-time.

Fortunately Kitchener had no need to stint himself in money. He acquired the store-keeper’s two spare huskies, a serviceable sledge, a pair of snowshoes and a load of Hudson’s Bay company staple groceries. At daybreak next morning he hitched in the two dogs, set his face to the snow-laden wind, and was off on the river route.

Years ago young Kit Tearl had followed his brother or his father through another spruce forest on such white, blustery days as this, sturdily planting a pair of toy-sized snowshoes in the tracks of the bigger raquettes ahead. He hadn’t thought of that boy in a long while. But when he shoved his toes into the _babiche_ thongs and started out through the powdery drifts he was surprised to discover that snowshoeing was a logical and familiar method of locomotion.

It was the same with the “gee” pole and the dog traces and the dogs. As he coursed through the thickets at the edge of the freezing river, he found himself trudging along effortlessly, managing his sledge and the tandem of trotting dogs with a subconscious facility, as though a long-forgotten part of himself had breathed the tang of the wilderness and suddenly awakened to take charge of his affairs.

The lessons of childhood may be buried deep by passing time and quite forgotten. But things well learned are never really lost. He strode forward with an easy swing of the hips, his toes pointed straight ahead, as a woodsman walks. Eyes accustomed to look placidly and rather humorously upon the world, somehow had grown sober and restlessly alert. It did not seem like a recollection of ancient teaching, but an instinct, rather, that prompted him to keep a lookout twenty paces ahead for trail signs and to pass invariably on the windward side of the denser thickets.

He would have said yesterday that he did not know a word of any Indian language. But when he pulled into the Chippewyan encampment he was amazed to discover his tongue twisting into strange clicking and grunting sounds of speech. He understood the talk of the sooty-skinned men who emerged from the huts and teepees, and it was evident that they understood him.

Yes, the tribe had a few very good, excellent sledge dogs for sale. After long dickering Kit purchased a couple of undersized, slinking starvelings, which he had to accept because his sharp-dealing hosts would not part with any others. But when he tried to obtain a guide for his northward trip, business relations promptly ceased.

The tribesmen could think up a hundred reasons why nobody wanted a job. The whitefishing at this moment was too good to be neglected. One man had promised his squaw not to leave Port-o’-Prayer, another’s moccasins hurt his feet if he walked too far, a third felt his rheumatism coming on, a fourth would have to go down to church on Christmas. Besides, the proposed journey would reach the country of the Dog-Ribs and Yellow-Knife Indians. Nobody was afraid of these bad men, the Chippewyans wanted it to be known: they simply weren’t going, that was all.

While Kitchener was engaged in his most persuasive efforts the flap of one of the teepees was jerked back and a voice spoke to him in English. He turned to face a white man who had come out to join the group by the sledge.

The newcomer fixed Kitchener with a long, measuring stare. He was a gaunt, big-boned man, slouchy and loose-knit of body, with lengthy, dangling arms hinged powerfully to the knotted muscles of his stooping shoulders. The temperature was approaching zero, but he stood unshivering in a sleeveless athletic undershirt and without any hat. There was a swipe of lather across the bulge of his hard, bluish jaw. Evidently he had been interrupted in the act of shaving. His lean, dark face was marked here and there with glaring white lines that might have been scars of knife cuts, and his close-cropped scalp likewise showed the seams of old wounds. Although Kitchener himself stood an even six feet without his pacs and snowshoes, this stranger overtopped him by a full two inches.

“North myself,” said the man. “Shoving off two hours before to-morrow’s daylight. You can come with me.”

He spoke with a sharp-clipt brevity and without any trace of accent. Kitchener should have been glad to find a man of his own language and race for a companion. But somehow he was taken aback by the abruptness of the proposal. The stranger’s deep-set eyes looked cold and calculating in the winter twilight.

Kitchener had a feeling that he would have preferred an Indian. “Where are you going?” he temporized.

“Not as far as _Saut Sauvage_. But I can put you on the track when you turn off.”

“What’s your name?” asked Tearl.

“Jim,” said the other. “What’s yours?”

“Kit,” answered Kitchener, and checked a smile. He could be reserved too if there was any reason for it.

“All right. You have your muts fed and ready to leave by six.”

Kitchener nodded. There was nothing further to be said. The man had overheard him appealing to the Chippewyans for a guide. He could think up no excuse for refusing the services that perhaps were offered with honest intent.

He swept the man with a speculating glance, wondering who he might be. If he were an ordinary bushman he would have been out on his trapping grounds before now, circling his lines. His high boot-pacs and his Mackinaw trousers were new and obviously of city manufacture. Nevertheless he must be a forest man or he would not be pushing off with such quiet confidence into a country that was barely known to the outer world.

Although he had removed his upper garments to shave, he had kept on a cartridge belt and a holster, from which frankly jutted the ivory handle of a heavy revolver. Outside of the police, men of the wilderness carried rifles habitually, but seldom burdened themselves with pistols.

It was a very fine weapon this stranger carried. Kitchener’s eyelashes blinked as there came to him from out of the obscurity of memory or imagination one of those dim and tantalizing flashes that try to bring back a sound or a sight or an experience, once familiar, and afterwards faded to dreamy inconsequence. The butt of the revolver was made of two pieces of old, yellow ivory, handsomely carved and scribed. Kitchener had a queer, startled feeling that he had seen it somewhere before.

He found the stranger’s formidable eyes upon him, and he looked up and said anything to cover his momentary lapse of mind. “I’ll be glad to make a deal with you.”

“Deal?” echoed the other coldly. “What do you think I am--a professional guide? I’ve asked you to go with me. Come or not, it’s all the same.”

“Thank you,” said Kitchener. “I’ll come.”

The Chippewyans gave the two white men a sleeping space in one of their skin teepees, and after taking potluck at the camp kettle, Kit rolled up in his grandfather’s red blankets and went to bed. He tried to sleep, but his thoughts kept going back to the ivory-handled revolver. It belonged somewhere in the past, either this or a gun exactly like it. Time after time the recollection almost came to him, and then escaped behind the curtains of the mind.

Four or five Indians were soddenly asleep on the farther side of the airy teepee. Jim, the stranger, was stretched out in the open space between, a relaxed and quiet shape, breathing slowly and regularly. The faint radiance of the northern night reached through the smoke hole of the lodge poles to outline his sleeping form. He had unstrapped his cartridge belt, and the ivory-handled revolver lay within reach of his right hand.

Kitchener tried to make himself comfortable, first on one side and then on the other. But he remained awake, hearing the cracking of branches and the whisper of snow on the caribou skins. After a long while he flung off his blankets and sat up. He might as well settle this thing that was destroying his night’s rest.

The stranger was obviously asleep. Kit moved forward on his knees, and the man did not budge. He reached the cartridge belt, extracted the revolver from its holster and crept across the teepee to the flapping doorway. None of the sleepers spoke or stirred.

From his shirt pocket Kitchener produced a match. He waited for a moment, and then struck a light, cupping his hands carefully to break the reflection behind him. Peering tensely, he turned the weapon in front of the match. The blued steel of the barrel bore the manufacturer’s trademark, with the patent-rights dates, and on the frame was a small, silver shield, carrying a line of fine engraving. He bent closer and read the inscription:

“W. T., insp., R. N.-W. M. P., ’16.”

Kitchener went back on his hands and knees and replaced the gun in the holster. Then he drew his blankets about his shoulders and sat huddled and shivering--staring into vacancy--

He saw far back through space and time. He remembered a twelve-year-old boy seated on the steps of the barracks of the police. It was a sweet, green afternoon with the spring sun flecking the parade ground between rustling branches, while robins and red-polls and pipits flashed singing among the trees. There was a tall, soldierly figure in a scarlet coat, standing before a group of uniformed men. He recalled that one of these men--a grizzled sergeant of police--had made a sort of awkward, halting speech. In a presentation case of mahogany and velvet lay an ivory-butted revolver.

These men had assembled to say good-by to their commanding officer, who had been assigned to a far-distant post. They wished him to accept this beautiful six-shooter as a memento of their affection and esteem. The sergeant had said: “May it never fire first; may it never fire too late.” And the twelve-year-old boy had listened and swelled with the glory of the moment.

The tall officer was Kit’s father, and on that occasion they had seen each other for almost the last time. Inspector Bill Tearl had buckled on his big, new gun and voyaged away to the north.

To-night, after the long lapse of years, Kitchener had looked again at his father’s revolver, and another man was wearing it.