The Third Western Megapack

by Barker, S. Omar

“I had not thought it till I saw him passing by,” Blaise replied gravely. “I believed it might be another enemy. Now I know not what to think. I cannot believe the traders have brought Ohrante back to hunt and trap for them. And my heart is troubled for my mother. Once when she was a girl she was a captive among the Sioux. To be captured by Ohrante would be even worse, and now there is no Jean Beaupré to take her away.”

  “Do you mean that father rescued her from the Sioux?” Hugh asked in surprise.

  “He found her among the Sioux far south of here on the great river. She was sad because she had been taken from her own people. So he bought her from the chief who wished to make her his squaw. Then our father brought her to the Grand Portage. There the priest married them. She was very young then, young and beautiful. She is not old even now, and she is still beautiful,” Blaise added proudly.

  Hugh had listened to this story with amazement. Had he misjudged his own father? Was it to be wondered at that the warm-hearted young Frenchman should have taken the only possible way to save the sad Ojibwa girl from captivity among the cruel Sioux? The elder son felt ashamed of his bitter thoughts. Blaise loved his mother and was anxious about her. Hugh tried to comfort his younger brother as well as he could.

  “The willow wand showed that your mother had gone up the shore,” he hastened to say. “Ohrante is not coming from that way, but from the opposite direction, and there are no women in his canoes. Surely your mother is among friends by this time, and Ohrante, the outlaw, will never dare attack them.”

  “That is true,” Blaise replied. “She cannot have fallen into his hands, and he, with so few followers, will not dare make open war.” He was silent for a moment. Then he said earnestly, “There is but one thing for us to do. We must first find the wreck and the cache, as our father bade us. Then we must track down his murderer.”

  Hugh nodded in perfect agreement. “Let us get our breakfast and be away then.”

  Blaise was untying the package of maple sugar. He took out a piece and handed it to Hugh. “We make no fire here,” he said abruptly. “The Iroquois is not yet far away. He might see the smoke. We will go now. When the wind rises again we can eat.”

  Hugh was hungry, but he had no wish to attract the attention of the huge Mohawk and his band. So he made no objection, but nibbled his lump of sugar as he helped to load the canoe and launch it. Before the sun peeped over the far-away line where lake and sky met, the two lads were well on their way again.

  CHAPTER X

  THE LOOMING SAILBOAT

  Though favored by the weather most of the time for several days in succession, the brothers went ahead but slowly. The discovery of the worn moccasin and the stained tunic had raised their hopes of finding the wrecked bateau soon. At any moment they might come upon it. Accordingly they were even more vigilant than before, anxiously scanning every foot of open shore, bay, cove, stream mouth and island.

  One evening before sunset, they reached a beautiful bay with small islands and wooded shores, where they caught sight of a group of bark lodges. Blaise proposed that they land and bargain for provisions. There proved to be about a dozen Indians in the encampment, men, squaws and children. Luckily two deer and a yearling moose had been killed the day before, and Blaise, after some discussion in Ojibwa, succeeded in obtaining a piece of fresh venison and another of moose meat. The Indians refused Hugh’s offer of payment in money, preferring to exchange the meat for ammunition for their old, flint-lock muskets. They were from the deep woods of the interior, unused to frequenting trading posts, and with no idea of money, but they understood the value of powder and shot.

  To one of the men Blaise spoke of having seen the outlaw Ohrante. The Ojibwa replied that he had heard Ohrante had come from his hiding place seeking vengeance on those who had captured him. He had never seen the giant Iroquois, the man said, but he had heard that it was through his great powers as a medicine man that he had escaped from his captors. Without divulging that he was the son of the man who had led the expedition against Ohrante, Blaise asked the Indian if he knew when and where the outlaw had first been seen since his exile.

  “I was told he was here at this Bay of the Beaver late in the Moon of the Snow Crust,” the Ojibwa replied, and the boy’s hazel eyes gleamed.

  Not until they had made camp did Blaise tell Hugh of the information he had received.

  “In the Moon of the Snow Crust!” the latter cried. “That is February or March, isn’t it? And it was late in March that father died!”

  The younger boy nodded. “Ohrante killed him, that I believe. Some day, some day——” Blaise left the sentence unfinished, but his elder brother had no doubt of the meaning. Hugh’s heart, like the younger lad’s, was hot against his father’s murderer, but he remembered the powerful figure of the Iroquois standing out dark against the dawn. How and when would the day come?

  After thoroughly exploring the Bay of the Beaver that night, the boys were off shortly after dawn the next morning. Just as the sun was coming up, reddening the white mist that lay upon the gently rippling water, they paddled out of the bay. As they rounded the southern point, Blaise uttered a startled exclamation.

  Hugh, in the stern, looked up from his paddle. “A ship!” he cried.

  Coming directly towards them, the light breeze scarce filling her sail, was a ship. So high she loomed through the morning mist Hugh thought she must be at least as large as the Otter, though she seemed to have but one square sail. What was a ship doing here, so far south of the Kaministikwia and even of the Grand Portage? Did she belong to some of the Yankee traders who were now invading the Superior region? Hugh knew he had been in United States waters ever since passing the mouth of the Pigeon River.

  And then, as the canoe and the ship approached one another, a curious thing happened. The ship shrank. She was no longer as large as the Otter. She was much smaller. She was not a ship at all, only a wooden boat with a sail. There was something about the light and the atmospheric conditions, the rising sun shining through the morning mist, that had deceived the eye and caused the approaching craft to appear far taller than it really was.

  The sailboat was coming slowly in the light wind. As the boys paddled past, they saw it was a small, flat-sided, wooden boat pointed at both ends. It was well loaded and carried three men. Hugh shouted a greeting and an inquiry. A tall fellow in blanket coat and scarlet cap, who was steering, replied in a big, roaring voice and bad French, that they were from the Fond du Lac bound for the Kaministikwia.

  Blaise had been even more amazed than Hugh at the deceptive appearance of the sailboat. When they landed later to inspect a stream mouth, the half-breed said seriously that some spirit of the lake must have been playing tricks with them. He wondered if one of the men aboard that bateau was using magic.

  “I doubt that,” Hugh answered promptly. “I think the queer light, the sunrise through the mist, deceived our eyes and made the boat look taller. Once on the way from Michilimackinac to the Sault, we saw something like that. A small, bare rock ahead of us stretched up like a high island. The Captain said he had seen the same thing before in that very same spot. He called it ‘looming,’ but he did not think there was anything magical about it.”

  Blaise made no reply, but Hugh doubted if the lad had been convinced.

  Several times during the rest of the trip down shore, the boys met canoes loaded with trappers and traders or with families of Indians journeying to the Grand Portage or to the New Fort. The two avoided conversation with the strangers, as they did not care to answer questions about themselves or their destination.

  The journey was becoming wearisome indeed. The minuteness of the search and the delays from bad weather prolonged the time. Moreover the store of food was scant. The lads fished and hunted whenever possible without too greatly delaying progress, but their luck was poor. Seldom were they able to satisfy their hearty appetites
. They lay down hungry under the stars and took up their paddles at chilly dawn with no breakfast but a bit of maple sugar. Hugh grew lean and brown and hard muscled. Except for the redder hue of his tan, the light color of his hair and his gray eyes, he might almost have been whole brother to Blaise. The older boy had become expert with the paddle and could hold his own for any length of time and at any pace the half-breed set. As a camper he was nearly the Indian lad’s equal and he prided himself on being a better cook. It would take several years of experience and wilderness living, however, before he could hope to compete with his younger brother in woodcraft, weather wisdom or the handling of a canoe in rough water.

  As mile after mile of carefully searched shore line passed, without sign of the wrecked bateau or trace of Jean Beaupré’s having come that way, the boys grew more and more puzzled and anxious. Nevertheless they persisted in their quest until they came at last to the Fond du Lac.

  Fond du Lac means literally the “bottom of the lake,” but the name was used by the early French explorers to designate the end or head of Lake Superior, where the River St. Louis discharges and where the city of Duluth now stands. To-day the name is no longer applied to the head of the lake itself, but is restricted to the railway junction and town of Fond du Lac several miles up the river. There was no town of Fond du Lac or of Duluth in the days of this story. Wild, untamed, uninhabited, rose the steep rock hills and terraces where part of the city now stands.

  As they skirted the shore, the boys could see ahead of them a narrow line stretching across the water to the southeast. That line was the long, low point now known as Minnesota Point, a sand-bar that almost closes the river mouth and served then, as it does now, to form a sheltered harbor. Drawing nearer, they discovered that the long, sand point was by no means bare, much of it being covered more or less thickly with bushes, evergreens, aspens and willows. The two lads were weary, discouraged and very hungry. Since their scanty breakfast of wild rice boiled with a little fat, they had eaten nothing but a lump of sugar each, the last remnant of their provisions. Nevertheless they paddled patiently along the bar to the place where the river cut diagonally through it to reach the lake. Entering the narrow channel, they passed through to absolutely still water.

  The sun was setting. Unless they went several miles farther to a trading post or caught some fish, they must go to sleep hungry. They decided to try the fishing. Luck with the lines had been poor throughout most of the trip, but that night fortune favored the lads a little. In the shallower water within the bar, they caught, in less than half an hour, two small, pink-fleshed lake trout, which Hugh estimated at somewhat less than three pounds each.

  On the inner side of the point, the brothers ran their canoe upon the sand beach. Then they kindled a fire and cooked their long delayed supper. When the meal was over, nothing remained of the fish but heads, fins, skin and bones.

  Usually both fell asleep as soon as they were rolled in their blankets. That night, on the low sand-bar, the mosquitoes came in clouds to the attack, but it was not the annoying insects that kept the boys awake. They wanted to talk over their situation.

  “It seems,” Hugh said despondently, “that we have failed. That wrecked boat must have been battered to pieces and washed out into the lake. Our only chance of discovering the cache was to find the boat, and that chance seems to be gone.”

  “There is still one other chance, my brother,” Blaise replied quietly. “Have you forgotten what we found at the River of Devil Tracks? We must go back there and make search again.”

  “You are right,” was Hugh’s quick rejoinder. “We didn’t find any sign of the boat, yet it may once have been there or near by.”

  Blaise nodded. “The bateau was perhaps driven on the bar at the river mouth and afterwards washed out into the lake. We must make speed back there. But, Hugh, if it was Ohrante who killed our father, he may also have found the furs.”

  “And carried them away.” Hugh slapped savagely at a mosquito. “I have thought of that. I believe in my heart that Ohrante killed father. Yet the murderer may not have taken the furs. Father told you he was wrecked in a storm, and, unable to carry the furs with him, he hid them. That much you say he made clear. When and where he was attacked we do not know, but I believe it must have been after he cached the furs. When he told of the wreck and the hiding of the pelts, he said nothing of his wound?”

  “Nothing then or afterwards of the wound or how he got it. He bade me seek you out and find the furs and the packet. When I asked him how he came by the hurt, he was beyond replying.”

  Both boys were silent a moment listening to the howling of a lonely wolf far off in the high hills to the north.

  Then Hugh said emphatically, “We must go back and search every inch of ground about that river. We will not give up while a chance remains of finding the cache,” he added with stubborn determination.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE FIRE-LIT ORGY

  Before starting back the way they had come, the brothers had to have provisions. Early the next morning they went up the St. Louis River. Beyond the bar the river widened to two miles or more. In midstream the current was strong, but Hugh steered into the more sluggish water just outside the lily pads, reeds and grass of the low shore. About three miles above the mouth, a village of bark lodges was passed, where sharp-nosed dogs ran out to yelp and growl at the canoe.

  A short distance beyond the Indian village stood the log fort and trading post of the Old Northwest Company’s Fond du Lac station, one of several posts that were still maintained in United States territory. The two boys landed and attempted to buy provisions. Blaise was not known to the clerk in charge, and Hugh, when asked, gave his middle name of MacNair. Jean Beaupré had passed this post on his way down the river, and the lads did not know what conversation or controversy he might have had with the Old Company’s men. So they thought it wise to say nothing of their relationship to the elder Beaupré. Brought up to be truthful and straightforward, Hugh found it difficult to evade the clerk’s questions. The older boy left most of the talking to the younger, who had his share of the Indian’s wiliness and secretiveness. Blaise saw nothing wrong in deceiving enemies and strangers in any way he found convenient. To Hugh, brother and comrade, Blaise would have scorned to lie, but he did not scruple to let the Northwest Company’s man think that he and Hugh were on their way from the south shore to the Kaministikwia in the hope of taking service with the Old Company.

  The post could spare but little in the way of provisions. Less than a half bushel of hulled corn, a few pounds of wild rice, left from the supply brought the preceding autumn from the south shore, and a very small piece of salt pork were all the clerk could be persuaded to part with. As they were leaving he gave the boys a friendly warning.

  “Watch out,” he said, “for an Iroquois villain and his band. They are reported to be lingering along the north shore and they are a bad lot. He used to be a hunter for the company, but he murdered a white man and is an outcast now, a fugitive from justice. The rascal is called Ohrante. If you catch sight of a huge giant of an Indian, lie low and get out of his way as soon and as fast as you can.”

  On the way back to the river mouth, the lads stopped at the Indian village. After much bargaining in Ojibwa, Blaise secured a strip of dried venison, as hard as a board, and a bark basket of sugar. To these people the lad spoke of the warning the clerk had given him, but they could tell him no more of the movements of Ohrante than he already knew.

  The brothers were glad to get away from the Indian encampment and out on the river again. The village was unkempt, and disgustingly dirty and ill smelling. It was evident that most of the men and some of the squaws were just recovering from a debauch on the liquor they had obtained from the traders.

  “They are ruining the Ojibwa people, those traders,” Blaise said angrily, after the two had paddled a short distance down-stream. “Once a
n Ojibwa gets the habit of strong drink, he will give all he has for it. The rival companies contend for the furs, and each promises more and stronger liquor than the other. So the evil grows worse and worse. In the end, as our father said, it will ruin the Ojibwa altogether.”

  Hugh did not reply for a moment, then he said hesitatingly, “Did father buy pelts with drink?”

  “Not the way most of the others do,” Blaise replied promptly. “Liquor he had to give sometimes, as all traders must, now the custom is started, but our father gave only a little at a time and not strong. Whenever he could he bought his furs with other things. Always he was a friend to the Ojibwa. He became one of us when he married into the nation, and he was a good son, not like some white men who take Ojibwa wives. Many friends he had, and some enemies, but few dared stand against him. He was a strong man and a true one.”

  Blaise spoke proudly. Once again Hugh, though glad to hear so much good of his adventurous father, felt a pang of jealousy that the half-breed boy should have known and loved him so well.

  Departure was delayed by rain and a brisk wind from the lake, that swayed and bent the trees on the exposed bar, drove the waves high on the outer shore and blew the sand into food and cooking fire. Not until late afternoon of the next day did Hugh and Blaise succeed in getting away. They paddled till midnight and, determined to make the greatest possible speed up the shore, took but four hours’ rest. All the following day they travelled steadily, then camped at a stream mouth and were away again at dawn. Bad weather delayed them that day, however, and caused a late start next morning. Eager to get ahead, they did not land to prepare food until mid-afternoon. After the meal and a rest of not more than a half hour, they resumed their paddles.

  Even the going down of the sun did not persuade them to cease their labor. There would be no moon till towards morning, but the brothers paddled on through the darkening twilight. The wind was light, merely rippling the water, and they wanted to get as far on their way as possible.