CHAPTER XIX
THE LONG TRAIL
Each day that passed set its seal deeper into the heart and soul ofDavid Drennen. His eyes grew harder, his mouth sterner. There cameinto his face the lines of his relentless hatred. Sinister and moroseand implacable, biding his time and nursing his purpose, he grew to bemore than ever before the lone wolf. His lips which had long agoforgotten how to smile were constantly set in an ugly snarl. Hispurpose possessed him so completely that it had grown into anobsession. It became little less than maniacal.
He seemed a man whose emotions were gone, swallowed up in a cooldetermination. There came no flush to his face, no quickened beatingof his heart when the trail seemed hot before him, no evidence ofdisappointment when again and again he learned that he had followed afalse scent and that he was no nearer his prey than he had been at thebeginning. He was still unhurrying as when he had ridden out ofMacLeod's Settlement. He would find what he sought to-day or ten yearsfrom to-day. His vengeance would lose nothing through delay. On theother hand, it would fall the heavier. Of late he had become endowedwith an infinite patience.
The last thought in his brain at night was the first thought when hewoke. It was unchanging day after day, week after week, month aftermonth. If he must wait even longer it would remain unaltered yearafter year.
His eyes had grown to be keener than knives, restless, watchful, brightwith suspicion. Nowhere throughout the breadth of the land did he havea friend. What he felt for others was paid back to him in his owncurrency: distrust, dislike, silence.
But, through whatever far distances he went, he was generally known byrepute and inspired interest. Men stood aloof but they watched him andspoke of him among themselves. No longer did they call him No-luckDrennen. He came to be known as Lucky Drennen. Word had gone aboutthat it was indeed true that he had rediscovered the old, lost GoldenGirl and that he had made a fortune from its sale to the Northwesternpeople. The mine was operating already; experts said that it wasgreater than the Duchess which electrified the mining world in 1897when Copworth and Kennely brought it into prominence; and the GoldenGirl was paying a royalty to David Drennen. Drennen himself did notknow how his account at the Lebarge bank took upon itself newimportance every third month when Marshall Sothern deposited the tenthshare of the net receipts.
Seeking Ygerne Bellaire and those with her, Drennen had gone fromFanning into Whirlwind Valley, across the Pass and into the forestsbeyond Neuve Patrie. He had followed rumours of three men and a womanand after six or seven weeks came upon them, trappers and the wife ofone of them. He showed nothing of his emotions as he stared at themwith cold, hard eyes. He went back to Fanning, crossed the MacLeod toBrunswick Towers and to the new village of Qu' Appelle. Spring hadpassed into summer and he had had no clue which was not a lie like thefirst. In all seeming the earth had opened to receive those whom hefollowed.
Since he so seldom spoke, since when he did it was to ask concerningthree men and a woman, those who knew anything of him at all knew thathe was seeking Sefton, Lemarc, Garcia and a girl whom those who hadheard of her from the men of MacLeod's Settlement, called "thePrincess." A figure of interest already, Drennen gained doubleinterest now.
"He'll find them one day, _mes chers_," grunted the big blacksmith atSt. Anne's. "He'll do anything, that man. _Le bon Diable_ is hispapa. _Hein_? _Voyez, mon petit stupide_! Last week, because heneeds no more and because the devil likes him, he finds gold again inthe Nez Casse! _Nom d'un gros porc_! But who has dreamed to find goldin the Nez Casse? Oho! Some day he comes up with three man and _laprincesse_. And then . . ."
He broke off, plunging his hot iron into his tub of water, so that thehissing of the heated metal and the angry puff of steam might concludein fitting eloquence the thing he had in mind.
Once, just after Drennen had for the second time in six months foundgold, he heard the new epithet which had been given him: Lucky Drennen.He turned and stared at the man who had spoken the name so that thefellow fell back, flushing and paling under the terrible eyes. Then,with his snarling laugh, Drennen passed on.
Until the winter came to lock the gateways into the mountains he waseverywhere the adventurous were pushing in the land of the North Woods.He was the last man to take the trail from Gabrielle to the open.
But though winter lifted a frozen hand to drive him back he did not fora single day give over his search. He went then down to the railroads.Banff knew him and came to know just as much of his story as it couldguess from the eternal question in his heart and now and then on hislips, and from the fact that he had money. Vancouver knew him, comingand going where a man might search such quarry as his, in gamblinghalls, high and low, in cafes, at hotels. For he had had a hint thatperhaps Ygerne and the men with her had gone on to Vancouver.
In January he drew heavily against his account in the bank of Lebarge.The money, or at least a great part of it, went to a detective agencyin Vancouver, another in Victoria, another even as far east as Quebec.Money went also to New Orleans and brought him no little information ofthe earlier lives of Ygerne Bellaire and Marc Lemarc, together with theassurance that neither of them had returned to the South.
Thus he learned the story which he had refused to hear from her ownlips, the reason of her flight from New Orleans. Having no parentsliving, she had lived in the household of her guardian, a merchantnamed Jules Bondaine. She had had trouble with Bondaine, the cause ofthe affair not being clearly understood except by Bondaine himself, thegirl and, perhaps, Marc Lemarc, her cousin. The confidential agency inthe southern city to which Drennen had turned apprised him of thesefacts and let him draw his own deductions: It was known that Lemarc wasa suitor for the girl's hand; that Bondaine had seemed very strongly tofavour Lemarc; that Bondaine was high-handed, Ygerne Bellairehigh-tempered; that, at a time when Mme. Bondaine and her two daughterswere away from home over night, Bondaine and the girl had a hotdispute; that that night, while in the library, Ygerne Bellaire shother guardian; that he would in all probability have died had it notbeen for the opportune presence of Marc Lemarc, even the householdservants being out; that that night Ygerne Bellaire left New Orleansand had not been heard of since by Bondaine or the authorities.
"Appearances would indicate," ran a little initialled note at the endof the report, "that Bondaine and Lemarc had been in some way trying tocoerce Miss Bellaire and that she had shot her way out of thediscussion. It is to be inferred, however, that she made up with hercousin, as he disappeared the same night and (merely rumoured) was seenwith her upon the night train out of Baton Rouge."
Throughout the winter Drennen pressed the search as his instinct orsome chance hint directed. No small part of his plan was to keep intouch with the movements of Lieutenant Max of the Northwest Mounted.He knew that the young officer was almost as single purposed anddetermined as himself; he learned that as the winter went by Max hadmet with no success. From Max himself, encountered in February inRevelstoke, he learned why the law wanted Sefton and Lemarc. Therewere in all five complaints lodged against them, four of them being thesame thing, namely, the obtaining of large sums of money under falsepretences. The fourth of these complaints had been lodged by no less aperson than big Kootanie George.
"They came to George with a cock and bull story about buried treasure,"grunted Max. "A gag as old as the moon and as easy to see on a clearnight! It's rather strange," and he set his keen eyes searchingly uponDrennen's impassive face, "that they didn't take a chance on you."
"I'm called Lucky Drennen nowadays," answered Drennen coolly. "Maybemy luck was just beginning then."
The fifth charge lay against Sefton. He had brought an unsavoryreputation with him from the States, and there would be other chargesagainst him from that quarter. He had mixed with a bad crowd inVancouver, had gotten into a gambling concern, "on the right side ofthe table," and had "slit his own pardner's throat, both figurativelyand literally, making away with the boodle."
"Ten years ago the
y might have got away with this sort of thing," saidMax. "It's too late now. The law's come and come to stay. I'm goingto get them, and I'm going to do it before snow flies again."
Drennen shrugged. Max wouldn't get them at all; he, David Drennen, wasgoing to see to that. This was just a part of Max's duty; it was thesupreme desire of Drennen's life.
Although, during the cold, white months, Drennen was much back andforth along the railroad, he avoided Fort Wayland which was now theheadquarters of the western division of the Northwestern MiningCompany. Since the late spring day when he had left Lebarge to returnto MacLeod's Settlement, he had not seen Marshall Sothern. Once, inthe late autumn, he had found a letter from Sothern waiting for him atthe bank In Lebarge. He left a brief answer to be forwarded, sayingsimply:
"I want to see you, but not now. After I have finished the work whichI have to do, perhaps when next spring comes, we can take our huntingtrip."
When the spring came it brought Drennen with it into the North Woods.He knew that the three whom he sought, the four counting Garcia whom hehad not forgotten, might have slipped down across the border and intothe States. But he did not believe that they had done so. The law waslooking for them there, too, and they would stay here until the law hadhad time to forget them a little.
Again came long, monotonous months of seeking which were to end as theyhad begun. He pushed further north than he had been before, takinglong trails stubbornly, his muscles grown like iron as he drove them tonew tasks. He skirted the Bad Water country, made his way through Ste.Marie, St. Stephen, Bois du Lac, Haut Verre, Louise la Reine, anddipped into the unknown region of Sasnokee-keewan. He caught a falserumour and turned back, threading the Forest d'Enfer, coming againthrough Bois du Lac and into Sasnokee-keewan late in August.Disappointment again, and again he turned toward the Nine Lakes. AtBelle Fortune, the first stop, the last village he would see for manydays, he met Marshall Sothern.
Sothern was standing in front of the village inn, his hand upon thelead-rope of a sturdy pack mule. The two men looked at each otherintently, Drennen showing no surprise, Sothern experiencing none. Itwas the older man who first put out his hand.
"I've been looking for you, Dave," he said quietly. "I'm taking myvacation, the first in seven years. I've followed you from therailroad. We're going to take our trip together now."
Drennen nodded.
"I'm glad to see you, sir," he answered quietly.
"Which way are you headed now?" asked Sothern.
"It doesn't matter. I am in no hurry. I was going toward the NineLakes, but . . ."
"You think that they have gone that way?"
Again Drennen nodded; again he failed to manifest any surprise.
"I am not sure," he said. "But the only way to be sure is to go andfind out."
So together father and son packed out of Belle Fortune, headed towardthe Nine Lakes in the heart of the unknown land of Sasnokee-keewan.Unknown because it is a land of short summers and long, hard winters;because no man had ever found the precious metals here; because thereis little game such as trappers venture into the far out places to get;because it is broken, rough, inhospitable. But, for a thousandth time,a vague rumour had come to Drennen that those whom he sought had pushedon here ahead of him and methodically he was running down each rumour.
Perhaps not a hundred men in a hundred years had come here before them.The forests, tall and black and filled with gloom, were about themeverywhere. Their trail they made, and there were days when fromsunrise to sunset they did not progress five miles. Their two packanimals found insecure footing; death awaited them hourly upon many aday at the bottom of some sheer walled cliff. They climbed with thesharp slopes on the mountains, they dropped down into the narrow,flinty canons, they heard only the swish of tree tops and thequarrelling of streams lost to their eyes in the depths below them.And they came in two weeks to Blue Lake having seen no other man orother trail than their own.
They were silent days. Neither man asked a question of the other andneither referred to what lay deepest in his own breast. There wassympathy between them, and it grew stronger day by day, but it was asympathy akin to that of the solitudes, none the less eloquent becauseit was wordless. Sothern informed Drennen once, out of the customarysilence about the evening camp fire, that he was taking an indefinitevacation; that there was a man in his place with the Northwestern whowas amply qualified to remain there permanently if Sothern did not comeback at all.
They sought to water at Blue Lake, so little known then and now alreadyone of the curiosities of the North and found its waters both luke warmand salty. Although the lake is less than a quarter of a mile longthey were two hours in reaching the head. The mountains come downsteeply on all sides, the timber stands thick, boulders are scatteredeverywhere, and it was already dark.
This is the first of the Nine Lakes when one approaches from the south.Less than a hundred yards further north, its surface a third of thatdistance above the level of Blue Lake, is Lake Wachong. It has novisible connection with Blue Lake except when, with the heavy springthaw, there is a thin trickle of water down the boulders. Here theycamped for the night.
"We would have seen a trail if they had gone ahead of us this year,Dave," Sothern remarked, referring for the first time in many days tothe matter which was always in Drennen's mind.
"There's another way in," Drennen told him. "They'd have gone thatway. It's north of here and easier. But we save forty or fifty milesthis way."
There had been a recent discovery of gold at a little place calledRuminoff Shanty, newly named Gold River. This, lying still eightymiles to the north, was Drennen's objective point. The old rumour hadcome to him a shade more definite this time. In the crowd pushingnorthward had been three men and a woman, one of the men looked like aMexican and the woman was young and of rare beauty. But that had notbeen all. A man named Kootanie George with another man wearing theuniform of the Royal Northwest Mounted had followed them. These hadall gone by the beaten trail; Drennen saw that if he came beforeKootanie George and Max to the four he sought he must take his chanceswith the short cut.
The next night they camped at the upper end of the fourth of the stringof little lakes. And that evening they saw, far off to the westward,the faint hint of smoke against the early stars, the up-flying sparks,which spoke of another campfire upon the crest of the ridge.
The old man bent his penetrating gaze upon his son. Drennen's face, asusual, was impassive.
"My boy," said Sothern very gently, "you are sure that you have made nomistake? The girl is no better than her companions?"
"They merely kill a man for his gold," returned Drennen steadily. "Sheplays with a man's soul and kills it when she has done."
There were deep lines of sadness about Sothern's mouth; the eyes whichforsook Drennen's face and turned to the glitter of the stars wereunutterably sad.
"The sins of the father . . ." he muttered. Then suddenly, an electricchange in the man, he flung himself to his feet, his hands thrown outtoward his son.
"By God! Dave," he cried harshly; "they're not worth it! Let them go!We can turn off here where the world is good because men haven't comeinto it. The mountains can draw the poison out of a man's heart, Dave.There is room for the two of us, boy, for you and me on a trail of ourown. Leave them for Max and Kootanie George. . . . Come with me. Doyou hear me, Dave, boy? We don't need the world now we've . . . we'vegot each other!"
Drennen shook his head.
"I've got my work to do," he said quietly. "I think it'll be done soonnow. And then . . . then we'll go away together, Dad. Just the two ofus."
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