by Zane Grey
During the rest of that day Philip saw but little of Josephine, and he made no effort to intrude himself upon her. Late in the afternoon Jean asked him if he had made friends with the dogs, and Philip told him of his experience with them. Not until nine o’clock that night did he know why the half-breed had asked.
At that hour Adare House had sunk into quiet. Miriam and her husband had gone to bed, the lights were low. For an hour Philip had listened for the footsteps which he knew he would hear to-night. At last he knew that Josephine had come out into the hall. He heard Jean’s low voice, their retreating steps, and then the opening and closing of the door that let them out into the night. There was a short silence. Then the door reopened, and some one returned through the hall. The steps stopped at his own door—a knock—and a moment later he was standing face to face with Croisset.
“Throw on your coat and cap and come with me, M’sieur,” he cried in a low voice. “And bring your pistol!”
Without a word Philip obeyed. By the time they stood out in the night his blood was racing in a wild anticipation. Josephine had disappeared. Jean gripped his arm.
“To-night something may happen,” he said, in a voice that was as hard and cold as the blue lights of the aurora in the polar sky. “It is—possible. We may need your help. I would have asked Metoosin, but it would have made him suspicious of something—and he knows nothing. You have made friends with the dogs? You know Captain?”
“Yes!”
“Then go to them—go as fast as you can, M’sieur. And if you hear a shot to-night—or a loud cry from out there in the forest, free the dogs swiftly, Captain first, and run with them to our trail, shouting ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ with every breath you take, and don’t stop so long as there is a footprint in the snow ahead of you or a human bone to pick! Do you understand, M’sieur?”
His eyes were points of flame in the gloom.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes,” gasped Philip. “But—Jean—”
“If you understand—that is all,” interrupted Jean, “If there is a peril in what we are doing this night the pack will be worth more to us than a dozen men. If anything happens to us they will be our avengers. Go! There is not one moment for you to lose. Remember—a shot—a single cry!”
His voice, the glitter in his eyes, told Philip this was no time for words. He turned and ran swiftly across the clearing in the direction of the dog pit, Ten minutes later he came into a gloom warm with the smell of beast. Eyes of fire glared at him. The snapping of fangs and the snarling of savage throats greeted him. One by one he called the names of the dogs he remembered—called them over and over again, advancing fearlessly among them, until he dropped upon his knees with his hand on the chain that held Captain. From there he talked to them, and their whines answered him.
Then he fell silent—listening. He could hear his own heart beat. Every fibre in his body was aquiver with excitement and a strange fear. The hand that rested on Captain’s collar trembled. In the distance an owl hooted, and the first note of it sent a red-hot fire through him. Still farther away a wolf howled. Then came a silence in which he thought he could hear the rush of blood through his own throbbing veins.
With his fingers at the steel snap on Captain’s collar he waited.
CHAPTER TWENTY
In the course of nearly every human life there comes an hour which stands out above all others as long as memory lasts. Such was the one in which Philip crouched in the dog pit, his hand at Captain’s collar, waiting for the sound of cry or shot. So long as he lived he knew this scene could not be wiped out of his brain. As he listened, he stared about him and the drama of it burning into his soul. Some intuitive spirit seemed to have whispered to the dogs that these tense moments were heavy with tragic possibilities for them as well as the man. Out of the surrounding darkness they stared at him without a movement or a sound, every head turned toward him, forty pairs of eyes upon him like green and opal fires. They, too, were waiting and listening. They knew there was some meaning in the attitude of this man crouching at Captain’s side. Their heads were up. Their ears were alert. Philip could hear them breathing. And he could feel that the muscles of Captain’s splendid body were tense and rigid.
Minutes passed. The owl hooted nearer; the wolf howled again, farther away. Slowly the tremendous strain passed and Philip began to breathe easier. He figured that Josephine and the half-breed had reached last night’s meeting-place. He had given them a margin of at least five minutes—and nothing had happened. His knees were cramped, and he rose to his feet, still holding Captain’s chain. The tension was broken among the beasts. They moved; whimpering sounds came to him; eyes shifted uneasily in the gloom. Fully half an hour had passed when there was a sudden movement among them. The points of green and opal fire were turned from Philip, and to his ears came the clink of chains, the movement of bodies, a subdued and menacing rumble from a score of throats. Captain growled. Philip stared out into the darkness and listened.
And then a voice came, quite near:
“Ho, M’sieur Philip!”
It was Jean! Philip’s hand relaxed its clutch at Captain’s collar, and almost a groan of relief fell from his lips. Not until Jean’s voice came to him, quiet and unexcited, did he realize under what a strain he had been.
“I am here,” he said, moving slowly out of the pit.
On the edge of it, where the light shone down through an opening in the spruce tops, he found Jean. Josephine was not with him. Eagerly Philip caught the other’s arm, and looked beyond him.
“Where is she?”
“Safe,” replied Jean. “I left her at Adare House, and came to you. I came quickly, for I was afraid that some one might shout in the night, or fire a shot. Our business was done quickly to-night, M’sieur!”
He was looking straight into Philip’s eyes, a cold, steady look that told Philip what he meant before he had spoken the words.
“Our business was done quickly!” he repeated. “And it is coming!”
“The fight?”
“Yes.”
“And Josephine knows? She understands?”
“No, M’sieur. Only you and I know. Listen: To-night I kneeled down in darkness in my room, and prayed that the soul of my Iowaka might come to me. I felt her near, M’sieur! It is strange—you may not believe—but some day you may understand. And we were there together for an hour, and I pleaded for her forgiveness, for the time had come when I must break my oath to save our Josephine. And I could hear her speak to me, M’sieur, as plainly as you hear that breath of wind in the tree-tops yonder. Praise the Holy Father, I heard her! And so we are going to fight the great fight, M’sieur.”
Philip waited. After a moment Jean said, as quietly as if he were asking the time of day:
“Do you know whom we went out to see last night—and met again to-night?” he asked.
“I have guessed,” replied Philip. His face was white and hard.
Jean nodded.
“I think you have guessed correctly, M’sieur. It was the baby’s father!”
And then, in amazement, he stared at Philip. For the other had flung off his arm, and his eyes were blazing in the starlight.
“And you have had all this trouble, all this mystery, all this fear because of him?” he demanded. His voice rang out in a harsh laugh. “You met him last night, and again to-night, and let him go? You, Jean Croisset? The one man in the whole world I would give my life to meet—and you afraid of him? My God, if that is all—”
Jean interrupted him, laying a firm, quiet hand on his arm.
“What would you do, M’sieur?”
“Kill him,” breathed Philip. “Kill him by inches, slowly, torturingly. And to-night, Jean. He is near. I will follow him, and do what you have been afraid to do.”
“Yes, that is it, I have b
een afraid to kill him,” replied Jean. Philip saw the starlight on the half-breed’s face. And he knew, as he looked, that he had called Jean Jacques Croisset the one thing in the world that he could not be: a coward.
“I am wrong,” he apologized quickly. “Jean, it is not that. I am excited, and I take back my words. It is not fear. It is something else. Why have you not killed him?”
“M’sieur, do you believe in an oath that you make to your God?”
“Yes. But not when it means the crushing of human souls. Then it is a crime.”
“Ah!” Jean was facing him now, his eyes aflame. “I am a Catholic, M’sieur—one of those of the far North, who are different from the Catholics of the south, of Montreal and Quebec. Listen! To-night I have broken a part of my oath; I am breaking a part of it in telling you what I am about to say. But I am not a coward, unless it is a coward who lives too much in fear of the Great God. What is my soul compared to that in the gentle breast of our Josephine? I would sacrifice it to-night—give it to Wetikoo—lend it forever to hell if I could undo what has been done. And you ask me why I have not killed, why I have not taken the life of a beast who is unfit to breathe God’s air for an hour! Does it not occur to you, M’sieur, that there must be a reason?”
“Besides the oath, yes!”
“And now, I will tell you of the game I played, and lost, M’sieur. In me alone Josephine knew that she could trust, and so it was to me that she bared her sorrow. Later word came to me that this man, the father of the baby, was following her into the North, That was after I had given my oath to Josephine. I thought he would come by the other waterway, where we met you. And so we went there, alone. I made a camp for her, and went on to meet him. My mind was made up, M’sieur. I had determined upon the sacrifice: my soul for hers. I was going to kill him. But I made a mistake. A friend I had sent around by the other waterway met me, and told me that I had missed my game. Then I returned to the camp—and you were there. You understand this far, M’sieur?”
“Yes. Go on.”
“The friend I had sent brought a letter for Josephine,” resumed Jean. “A runner on his way north gave it to him. It was from Le M’sieur Adare, and said they were not starting north. But they did start soon after the letter, and this same friend brought me the news that the master had passed along the westward waterway a few days behind the man I had planned to kill. Then we returned to Adare House, and you came with us. And after that—the face at the window, and the shot!”
Philip felt the half-breed’s arm quiver.
“I must tell you about him or you will not understand,” he went on, and there was effort in his voice now. “The man whose face you saw was my brother. Ah, you start! You understand now why I was glad you failed to kill him. He was bad, all that could be bad, M’sieur, but blood is thicker than water, and up here one does not forget those early days when childhood knows no sin. And my brother came up from the south as canoe-man for the man I wanted to kill! A few hours before you saw his face at the window I met him in the forest. He promised to leave. Then came the shot—and I understood. The man I was going to kill had sent him to assassinate the master of Adare. That is why I followed his trail that night. I knew that I would find the man I wanted not far away.”
“And you found him?”
“Yes. I came upon my brother first. And I lied. I told him he had made a mistake, and killed you, that his life was not worth the quill from a porcupine’s back if he remained in the country. I made him believe it was another who fought him in the forest. He fled. I am glad of that. He will never come back. Then I followed over the trail he had made to Adare House, and far back in the swamp I came upon them, waiting for him. I passed myself off as my brother, and I tricked the man I was after. We went a distance from the camp—alone—and I was choking the life from him, when the two others that were with him came upon us. He was dying, M’sieur! He was black in the face, and his tongue was out. Another second—two or three at the most—and I would have brought ruin upon every soul at Adare House. For he was dying. And if I had killed him all would have been lost!”
“That is impossible!” gasped Philip, as the half-breed paused. “If you had killed him—”
“All would have been lost,” repeated Jean, in a strange, hard voice. “Listen, M’sieur. The two others leaped upon me. I fought. And then I was struck on the head, and when I came to my senses I was in the light of the campfire, and the man I had come to kill was over me. One of the other men was Thoreau, the Free Trader. He had told who I was. It was useless to lie. I told the truth—that I had come to kill him, and why. And then—in the light of that campfire, M’sieur—he proved to me what it would have meant if I had succeeded. Thoreau carried the paper. It was in an envelope, addressed to the master of Adare. They tore this open, that I might read. And in that paper, written by the man I had come to kill, was the whole terrible story, every detail—and it made me cold and sick. Perhaps you begin to understand, M’sieur. Perhaps you will see more clearly when I tell you—”
“Yes, yes,” urged Philip.
“—that this man, the father of the baby, is the Lang who owns Thoreau, who owns that freebooters’ hell, who owns the string of them from here to the Athabasca, and who lives in Montreal!”
Philip could only stare at Jean, who went on, his face the colour of gray ash in the starlight.
“I must tell you the rest. You must understand before the great fight comes. You know—the terrible thing happened in Montreal. And this man Lang—all the passion of hell is in his soul! He is rich. He has power up here, for he owns Thoreau and all his cutthroats. And he is not satisfied with the ruin he worked down there. He has followed Josephine. He is mad with passion—with the desire—”
“Good God, don’t tell me more of that!” cried Philip. “I understand. He has followed. And Josephine is to be the price of his silence!”
“Yes, just that. He knows what it means up here for such a thing to happen. His love for her is not love. It is the passion that fills hell with its worst. He laid his plans before he came. That letter, the paper I read, M’sieur! He meant to see Josephine at once, and show it to her. There are two of those papers: one at Thoreau’s place and one in Thoreau’s pocket. If anything happens to Lang, one of them is to be delivered to the master of Adare by Thoreau. If I had killed him it would have gone to Le M’sieur. It is his safeguard. And there are two copies—to make the thing sure. So we cannot kill him.
“Josephine listened to all this to-night, from Lang’s own lips. And she pleaded with him, M’sieur. She called upon him to think of the little child, letting him believe that it was still alive; and he laughed at her. And then, almost as I was ready to plunge my knife into his heart, she threw up her head like an angel and told him to do his worst—that she refused to pay the price. I never saw her stronger than in that moment, M’sieur—in that moment when there was no hope! I would have killed him then for the paper he had, but the other is at Thoreau’s. He has gone back there. He says that unless he receives word of Josephine’s surrender within a week—the crash will come, the paper will be given to the master of Adare. And now, M’sieur Philip, what do you have to say?”
“That there never was a game lost until it was played to the end,” replied Philip, and he drew nearer to look straight and steadily into the half-breed’s eyes. “Go on, Jean. There is something more which you have not told me. And that is the biggest thing of all. Go on!”
For a space there was a startled look in Jean’s eyes. Then he shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
“Of course there is more,” he said. “You have known that, M’sieur. There is one thing which you will never know—that which Josephine said you would not guess if you lived a thousand years. You must forget that there is more than I have told you, for it will do you no good to remember.”
Expectancy died out of Philip’s eyes.
&nb
sp; “And yet I believe that what you are holding back from me is the key to everything.”
“I have told you enough, M’sieur—enough to make you see why we must fight.”
“But not how.”
“That will come soon,” replied Jean, a little troubled.
The men were silent. Behind them they heard the restless movement of the dogs. Out of the gloom came a wailing whine. Again Philip looked at Jean.
“Do you know, your story seems weak in places, Jean,” he said. “I believe every word you have said. And yet, when you come to think of it all, the situation doesn’t seem to be so terribly alarming to me after all. Why, for instance, do you fear those letters—this scoundrel Lang’s confession? Kill him. Let the letter come to Adare. Cannot Josephine swear that she is innocent? Can she not have a story of her own showing how foully Lang tried to blackmail her into a crime? Would not Adare believe her word before that of a freebooter? And am I not here to swear—that the child—was mine?”
There was almost a pitying look in the half-breed’s eyes.
“M’sieur, what if in that letter were named people and places: the hospital itself, the doctors, the record of birth? What if it contained all those many things by which the master of Adare might trail back easily to the truth? With those things in the letter would he not investigate? And then—” He made a despairing gesture.
“I see,” said Philip. Then he added, quickly “But could we not keep the papers from Adare, Jean? Could we not watch for the messenger?”
