The Fourth Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  Pete did not hear her. He was thinking about Jules. Until the next morning, when he was ready to start, he would have sworn that Janet could not and would not go. He’d said he’d make her stay home.

  But he didn’t. She went along. After all, Pete Shields was human.

  They went up the river. It was unconventional. Highly unconventional. But this was winter, when cheechakos are rare and men and women are judged by their friends instead of public opinion. Pete and Janet had gone to school together. He felt no more impulse to politeness or romance with her than he would have with his sister. Probably less, which may have pleased Janet. Maybe! Pete thought exclusively of Jules Farmier, who had killed Pete’s best friend. He drove hard. He talked little. He paid no more attention to Janet than he would have to another man. In fact, if she’d been another man he probably would not have traveled so hard. The other man would have protested. Janet didn’t.

  They camped. They camped again. And again. And again. The strain told on Pete Shields.

  JANET grew thinner too. Her eyes began to look bigger. When night came and they camped, she slept the sleep of utter exhaustion. Once, she tried to go without food because every muscle in her body cried out for rest. But Pete raged at her. She would go without food? Grow weak? And he’d have to wait for her to grow strong again? After all, he was traveling to get the man she was going to marry, to save him from a danger growing out of his own folly!

  Janet looked queerly at him when he said that. She looked as if she wanted to correct him, somehow. But she did not.

  She looked truculently at him. And the fire cast a ruddy, flickering glow upon her face. Pete growled to himself as he looked at her. But he gave her his entire attention for the first time, probably, in his life. He saw her with her face framed in the dark wolverine fur which lined the hood of her parka. Firelight beat upon her, and showed her as slim and lissome even in the heavy garments of the trail. Her mittens were tiny. Her feet were ridiculously small.

  “You make me mad, Pete,” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “You shouldn’t have come.”

  “I’m not Grace,” said Janet shortly. Grace was her sister and very beautiful and very, very helpless. Therefore many men wanted to marry Grace and have her keep house for them—at which she would also be helpless. “I’ve kept up, haven’t I?”

  Pete nodded impatiently.

  “And you’re in a tremendous hurry, if you don’t think Tom is in danger,” added Janet. “That’s more reason for me to be here. Jules Farmier is dangerous. And you’re brave and strong and all that, Pete Shields, but women have fought for their men before now when they were needed. And I can shoot!”

  After a moment she added again:

  “And Tom isn’t clever. He might believe whatever Jules has told him. He might not believe you. He might be—silly when you try to arrest Jules. And I can handle him.”

  “He’s a damned fool!” said Pete savagely. “Wanting you to think for him when—”

  He stopped and knocked out his pipe. Janet said quickly:

  “Wanting me instead of Grace? But you’re wrong. She is pretty. But she wouldn’t have the nerve to go up with you. She’d sit around home and cry. Tom’d be in a bad fix if he had to depend on Grace to get him out of this mess he’s in.”

  “Perhaps,” said Pete Shields. “But I’m going to keep on traveling hard.”

  But he didn’t. He eased up. It was really necessary for himself as well as Janet. And because he had come really to look at Janet, he thought about her, of which his easing-up was proof. And because he thought about her and liked her, he began to form a very high ideal for the man she married to live up to. And because he knew Tom Holmes, he doubted greatly that Tom Holmes equaled it.

  Pete Shields was human.

  THEY stopped in midmorning, twelve days out from Fairbanks. The dogs waited, panting, while the leader turned and cocked inquiring eyes at Pete.

  Pete went forward and looked at the regularly spaced, irregularly shaped depressions in the snow ahead. Then he turned his head.

  “This is Tom’s trap line. We’re near his cabin.”

  Janet drew a deep breath.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Go ahead and arrest Jules. Tell Tom you’re here. Then out with Jules. Take you and Tom too, I suppose, to a preacher, if he needs looking after so much.”

  His voice was professional, dry. Janet swallowed.

  “Pete—how’ll I know everything is all right’”

  “Old woods signal. Three shots.”

  He strode away. Janet stood motionless, watching his broad back swinging out of sight. Her face was very white despite the cold …

  Pete followed the line of irregular depressions in the snow, searching warily for the cabin of Tom and Jules. Presently he saw it.

  Pete stalked it. Slipping from one clump of thicker tree trunks to another, he edged toward it in a fashion that took him almost completely around it as he drew closer. In the circling he came upon a relatively fresh trail. He studied it intently. Snowshoes. The wide, short kind that a woodsman uses because he can weave in and out of thick timber without jamming them, while the long slim Creek shoes are faster, but unhandy in brush. Pete nodded to himself. Jules Farmier was a hunted man. He was, moreover, a predatory animal. He would inevitably think in terms of speed. So this broad snowshoe track leading away from the cabin was the track of Tom. He was away. And smoke came from the cabin chimney. So Jules was within.

  The problem became simple. Pete continued his cautious advance.

  At last he stopped, no more than thirty feet from the drifted-up wall of the cabin. He got out his revolver. He wriggled out half a dozen cartridges from his belt, under his parka. He tossed the first of them.

  The world was quiet. There was no wind nor any sound anywhere. The little clatter of the bullet on the split-log roof was extraordinarily loud. It would be louder yet within. But it would not be alarming, because it was on the roof.

  He tossed a second. A third. He waited and tossed two more in quick succession. To Jules they would sound not quite like small animals scampering, but also not quite like anything else. Pete heard stampings inside the cabin. A heavy bar came away from inside the door. Snow crunched as someone went to look.

  Pete tossed the sixth shell and ran swiftly forward. Before the cabin, he abandoned his snowshoes to run on the hard-packed surface there. His last bullet had been accurately timed. It kept the cabin’s occupant staring upward just long enough to let Pete get into position.

  JULES FARMIER saw nothing to account for the queer noises. He scratched his head and started back to go within. He rounded the corner of the cabin and saw Pete Shields, crouched and ready. And Jules clawed at his hip even as Pete jumped him. He was snarling when a constellation of stars burst in his head. And he went down in a sprawling heap.

  The cut on Jules’ head was trivial, but Pete bandaged it conscientiously before Jules opened his eyes. He had him safely tied up by now.

  Jules stirred, and Pete looked down at him.

  “It’s a pinch, Jules.” he said grimly. “I’m taking you back to jail.”

  Jules’ dazed eyes cleared. He snarled at Pete. But he was not unhandsome. Nearly a giant in stature, he would seem good-humored simply because he did not look malevolent. An average man or woman might be flattered if so huge and upstanding a mortal offered a seeming friendship. It was evidently the case with Tom. But Tom was not in the cabin, just now. He was away, and he might be gone for two or three days, or he might be back within five minutes. Actually, he came back in ten.

  That ten minutes Pete spent in an examination of the cabin.

  HE WAS interrupted by snarls from Jules, whose eyes now flamed, and who began to swear furiously at him for a fool who had mistaken him for someone else. He raised his voice to a shout.

  “That means,” said Pete crisply, “that you heat Tom, eh?”

  He faced the door as Jules’ cursing took on new depth
and sincerity. And he was wholly alert when the door crashed open and Tom Holmes came in, blinking in the sudden change from out of doors. He looked around belligerently until he saw Pete. Then he grinned sheepishly.

  “H’llo, Pete. I heard a riot goin’ on. What’s the matter?”

  Jules Farmier’s face was savage in disappointment.

  “Your partner.” said Pete Shields grimly, “is Jules Farmier. I came up to get him. You’ve heard of Jules.”

  “Sure,” said Tom. “But he ain’t Jules Farmier. He’s my partner. He looks like Jules, sure. He’s had a lot of trouble on account of it. We been partners for” “—he lied loyally—“for a coupla years!”

  “All right.” said Pete sourly. “Go outside the door and shoot three times. You’ll find out he’s Jules, all right. There’s somebody who’ll convince you.”

  He handed Tom the revolver he had taken from Jules. And Jules Farmier spoke cajolingly for the first time since he had recovered consciousness.

  “Tom! You promeesed! Nomme de—”

  “Yeah,” said Tom resolutely. He straightened up and the weapon Pete had just given him now bored suddenly into Pete’s body. “Stick ’em up, Pete! I promised my partner I wouldn’t ever let anybody pinch him for lookin’ like Jules. Because there’s guys that got a grudge against him an they’d swear his life away. Jules’ friends, they are. So—”

  The gun was thrust back as Pete surged forward, choking with wrath.

  “You damned fool!” raged Pete. He thrust his face close to Tom’s, and Tom moved back half a pace, still holding the weapon. “You fool! Jules would let you work for him all winter and murder you in the spring for the furs you’ve taken! You’d turn that damned killer loose—”

  Tom gave ground to Pete’s seeming fury. And he stumbled and went over backward, Pete having forced him against a clumsy stool. Pete snatched the gun away as Tom went down. He flung it furiously to one side. Then, seething, he stripped off his parka.

  “Get up,” he raged, “so I can knock you down again!”

  Tom got up, protesting as he rose: “But he ain’t Jules! He’s—”

  Thud! Pete knocked him down again. He was quivering with rage, with a wrath out of all proportion to Tom’s muddle-headed interference. Tom scrambled to his feet a second time.

  “You’d plug me, eh?” (Thud!) “To give Jules a—” (Thud!) “chance to murder you! And there’s Janet—”(Thud! Thud!) “come to marry you—” (Thud!) “and damn you—” (Thud!) “you’d let him find her—”

  Tom suddenly stepped back and dropped his arms. His face was bruised and already swollen. His lip was split. One eye was badly battered and the other looked suspiciously unwell. But he dropped his arms and panted helplessly:

  “For God’s sake! What are you talkin’ about? I just want to let my partner go.”

  “There’s a gun!” snarled Pete, pointing. “I told you to go outside and shoot three times. Now do it! And if you try to plug me I’ll kill you!”

  TOM blinked. But Pete was deadwhite with an inexplicable rage. Tom picked up the gun, his face bewildered.

  “S-shoot heem!” snarled Jules. “Queeck!”

  Tom blinked again. Pete regarded him with so baleful a glare that he went docilely to the door. He opened it and fired three shots outside. He turned bewilderedly back to Pete.

  There was silence. Stillness. An illimitable quietude all about. Then the crack of a dog whip.

  Far, far away through the open door, dark specks showed upon the snow. They came near. They were dogs. There was a sled. Janet drove it. They came closer yet. Pete Shields regarded Tom with a bitter satisfaction. He did not look like a romantic figure prepared to welcome a fiancée. He wasn’t.

  Janet halted the dog team. Tom’s mouth dropped open. She turned and looked at the two men in the cabin door.

  “Janet!” said Tom Holmes blankly. “Where’s Grace?”

  “Home,” said Janet. “She worried about you. So I came up.”

  Pete Shields stiffened. His eyes opened very wide. He stalked forward. Janet faced him defiantly.

  “Confound you!” he growled. “You said—”

  “I never said I was engaged to him,” she insisted defensively. “You took it that way, but I didn’t say it. Grace is, and—”

  “And she’s a ninny who sits back home crying while you see about things for her. God bless her!” said Pete Shields grimly. “But you’re going to get married just the same !”

  “I won’t!” she cried fiercely. “I won’t.”

  “To me,” growled Pete. “And try and get out of it!”

  “I—won’t,” said Janet. But her voice was only shaky. “I—I w-won’t ….”

  So Pete kissed her. He could have taken her words to mean a refusal. But he didn’t. Pete Shields was human.

  Vixen

  GAME was hard to find that year. Rabbits were rare. Pheasants were scarce. Woodcock and partridges and even squirrels seemed to have migrated suddenly to some unknown destination. A dog or a man or a vixen fox with pups to feed could go a long way through the mountain woodland without finding any game more promising than butterflies and swallows. And the woods were dusty and dry, so that grass rustled sibilantly at the least movement, and silence was nearly impossible. Because of their scarcity, too, the few creatures that remained were more than usually alert. They were more than doubly hunted.

  To the dog, the lack of good hunting was bad. At first she ranged far and wide with her master, scurrying anxiously here and there, sniffing this place and that. When she returned to the cabin at nightfall she was footsore and draggled and dusty, and her throat was dry and parched. Worse, though, was the feeling of failure. She moped and fretted. It was not until her puppies arrived that she ceased to seem to beg him to let her try again to find the game that had so mysteriously vanished. Then, of course, she was very busy, with no time even for hunting.

  To the man, the scarcity of game was annoying. Hunting was his only pleasure, and he had heard but vaguely of closed and open seasons. He was whiskery and red-faced, and the breeze down-wind from him always carried the scent of chewed tobacco. Sometimes other scents also. He lived alone in his small cabin and did various unimportant things and exchanged the products at a village store for things he did not raise and could not bring back from the woods.

  Ordinarily he spent much time on the mountain flanks with his dog and gun. The bagging of a rabbit pleased him greatly. Pheasants were delicacies, superior to the beans and bacon he bartered for at the store, and better than the chickens that scratched and squawked about his cabin. Hunting was not necessary for his livelihood, but he waited almost impatiently for the puppies to be old enough to be disposed of. They should be good hunting dogs. Their mother was. With the money they would bring, he expected to buy a new gun. Meanwhile he was merely annoyed by the scarcity of game.

  BUT the vixen was made desperate by it. She had her little fox pups to feed. They were small, furry bundles with tiny sharp noses and insatiable appetites. They came tumbling toward her with little whimpering sounds when she returned to her den. They were avid for the nourishment that would feed their growth. The vixen, herself, was always ravenous. With game mysteriously almost nonexistent, it would have been a narrow thing to feed herself alone. Her mate had drifted away long since, and she was better off for it. One less hunter in her hunting ground made a vast difference, but still there was not enough food for herself and for her pups. She grew leaner and more desperate day by day, and day by day the fox pups grew and with them their appetites.

  They tumbled and scuffled together in the den. Later, they played games in the sunlit space before it. They were marvelous games; thrilling games; and they strengthened growing muscles, and trained uncertain small eyes, and prepared baby foxes for adulthood. But very hungry small animals greeted the vixen when she came home after hours of hopeless hunting where no game was. Often and often her own hunger had been made but the more acute by a scanty meal of wood mice, and sometimes she
found nothing more nourishing than locusts and grubs, which the fox tribe normally despises. Maternity, to the vixen, was a time of sheer desperation.

  But to the dog, maternity was a time of comfortable fussiness. The man had prepared a box for her and her family. It was lined with rags and there was a pan of water near by and there was never any lack of food.

  BECAUSE of the puppies, and also because of the scarcity of anything to hunt, the man stayed about the cabin more than usual. He read comfortably in a gun catalogue while the puppies sprawled clumsily over the porch of his cabin, or slept in utterly abandoned attitudes with their small round bellies distended.

  Only the vixen found the matter of parenthood neither comfortable nor amusing nor profitable. Her pups grew fast. The time came when they should taste of meat. The vixen knew that she should bring home game to them, that their sharp little puppy teeth might learn the task that was to be theirs through life. The vixen might have been driven to untold depths of desperation but for a windfall of a pheasant’s nest with all its eggs. The vixen ate the eggs, saving the hen pheasant for her young. Then the fates were more generous still and she captured the cock pheasant, too. He was larger than the hen. When she trotted joyously back to her den with this windfall, tiny figures came running and tumbling out to meet her.

  Those two meals—not overfull ones, heartened the vixen. They strengthened her. But they did not put back flesh upon her already distinct ribs, nor lessen the plain signs of long-continued hunger that marked her. They were merely two gifts from the gods.

  Game grew steadily harder to find. The woods grew ever dryer and more parched. The fox pups grew larger, needing more food. As babies, they had consumed a large part of the substance of the vixen’s body. Now that they needed meat and it was essential that she provide meat for them as they were yet too young to hunt for themselves, the vixen grew more than half-starved, but remained utterly unresting. It is the custom of the fox tribe to hunt mostly by night. This the vixen did. But it did not produce enough food.

  She hunted in the daytime also. Her feet were worn and sore. Her ribs showed with a stark clarity beneath her skin. She was hollow-flanked. Her eyes burned. Her muscles ached. Her body was one vast hunger. But she was a vixen, and her pups had to be fed, and she drove herself more desperately than ever over an ever-widening hunting ground.