Chapter IV

When the public-spirited citizens of Foxcroft offered $500 reward for the capture of Skeene, Placide L’Hommedieu scratched his greasy chin, licked his lips, and went out to buy cartridges. Placide had trapped in the Province and thought he could trap as well in Maine.

“Monsieur L’Hommedieu what will you do with $500?” asked the Mayor of Foxcroft.

“Le Hommydoo won’t need it,” observed a grizzled portage guide who had once shot a match with Skeene. And he was right for they found L’Hommedieu a week later peacefully floating down Moose River in his canoe, with a bullet in his brain.

When Skeene paddled away with Lois, there was trouble in Foxcroft. Hale left sluice, drain, and chain, and wired the Sheriff at the Landing to meet him at Moosehead Inn. The Mayor went also, and next morning the reward was doubled for “James Skeene, Murderer, dead or alive.”

Hale had never forgiven the blow at the cut-off, but a busy man would scarcely have left his sluice to hunt another man to death for that alone. No, Hale had other reasons, and they concerned neither Billy Sebato nor Placide L’Hommedieu. They concerned Lois, servant at South Carry; for when she left with Jim Skeene she took Hale’s betrothal ring with her.

After Skeene had set Placide L’Hommedieu afloat, with mud on his face and a bullet in his skull, he shoved the canoe into swift water at Moose River, broke both paddles, splintered the setting-pole, and solemnly watched the canoe out of sight.

Lois, waiting for him when he poled into the Little Misery, looked at his knife in the scolloped leather sheath, then at his rifle, and finally into his sombre eyes.

“I heard,—only one shot. Was it a deer?”

He nodded muttering that he had missed; but that night she caressed him, taking his curly head into her arms, and wept over him till daybreak crimsoned the world.

After that they were almost gay. He notched logs and built a hut and rammed moss into the cracks. Lois brought clay from the sweet water, and cut balsam until her little hands were stained to the palm. Twice he passed the three carrys to the C. P. R. and hung to a freight as far as Sainte Croix. They knew nothing and cared less in the Dominion, and he bought salt and pork and flour and cartridges with the proceeds of Hale’s ring. The third trip he walked on the C. P. fearing the train, and he got his price for ten pelts, including musk-rat.

They knew that happiness that is bred in haunting fear, that fierce, that intense love whose roots are imbedded in terror. Lois had been to school and these were the things she knew;—that two and two make four, that Moose-calves are born in May, that bark peels best in June, that Moose-calves are weaned in September. She knew also how to use Skeene’s knife, and when he found beaver above swift water and told her so in the evening, she cut saplings and whittled trip-sticks and notched chokers while he hewed out the bed-pieces for the traps, and sharpened enough young ash to build the fences for winter traps. Mink traps, too, were no mystery to Lois, and they talked long and wisely concerning standards and cubbies and spindles while the embers died under the simmering tins and the deer whistled on the windy ridge.

Snow came, a phantom flurry through the pale sunshine, and Skeene lugged more deer hides into his hut. A hot week followed, sending the trout to the bottom-sands and the deer to the shallows; then came the ice; at first a brittle, glittering skin, encasing stem and reed, and wrinkling hidden stagnant pools. The wind in the grasses grew harsher, the reeds rattled at evening; vast flocks of little birds circled high in the sky for the winds of the South called them, and the geese were drifting overhead.

One day the snow came again, and at evening it had not ceased falling. A week later the lake froze and Skeene dragged his canoe into the hut and daubed it with white-lead, while Lois crept close to his side and strung snowshoes. At times she sang. He listened, lying beside the canoe. When she had sung the same song until evening he taught her the song he had learned in Quebec;

“Mossieu Meenoose
Mossieu Meenoose
Mon dieu que tu as
Un villain chat la.”

And she sang it and sewed scarlet braid across her moccasins.

During these weeks Hale was busy in Foxcroft. When the smaller lakes froze he leered sideways at the Sheriff and ordered a dozen pairs of snowshoes. Once or twice he went back to his sluice and cursed, but the River Drivers regarded him with evil eyes, and the sluicers drove their props sullenly until he went away leaving a string of oaths in his wake. There were men of the stamp he wanted on the Province side of the C. P. R.; there was Achille Verdier, one-eyed and idle; there was greasy little Armand Fleury, dirtier for his fox-skin cap, dingier for the red braid on the tail. There also resided Wyombo, pigeon-toed, furtive, aboriginal. Much could be done with these gentlemen and $1000. The value of Hale’s ring was $150, therefore the people of Foxcroft gossiped.

Snow fell on the frozen lake; the Little Misery was mantled, the carrys choked. All day long the meat-birds whined in the fir-trees and at night the sleet pelted the frozen snow. The deer yarded on the ridge, the moose on the slope above; the black bear buried his feeble nose in his stomach and dreamed, and the otters frisked over their slide. As for Lois, she was learning things; she learned that the fur on the belly of a young panther is wavy, she learned that men are brutes, and that Skeene was all the world to her; she learned that she also had her value, for she saw him swim the swift water of the Little Misery when she screamed affrighted by an impudent lynx. She learned that he sometimes preferred solitude to company, that he sometimes preferred sleep to caresses. She learned that he went hungry that she might eat, that he shivered while she slept under skin and blanket.

Sometimes they played together, Skeene and this slender girl, like young foxes in the snow. She would often hide, too, in the hollow of a great swamp-oak, and when he came home she would call: “Jim! Jim! find me!”

But God lives, and the world spins, and the hare turns white in winter, and the routine of the beginning and the end never varies.

And so it came about that Skeene, laughing up at Lois in the hollow swamp-oak, glanced over his shoulder and saw six black dots clustered upon the frozen lake to the southward. He said nothing but looked into the north. There were more dots there, more also on the ice in the west. For a moment he thought the east was still open; after a while he heard the scrape of a snow-shoe very near. Lois also heard and her face was like death as she reached down and took the rifle from Skeene’s hand.

When he had climbed up into the hollow tree beside her and looked out from the hole above the great branch, he saw Hale peering at him from a dead-fall.

“Come down,” said Hale.

Skeene clapped his rifle to his cheek and fired.

“Come down,” repeated Hale from behind his dead-fall. Lois, trembling at Skeene’s feet, shrank at the sombre voice from the woods. Skeene bent and kissed her and caressed her, muttering things she could not understand, but she caught his hand in hers and tore off the fur mitten and pressed it to her hot lips, moaning and sobbing.

“Come down for the last time, Jim Skeene,” said Hale slowly. Suddenly a rifle shot rang through the frozen forest. The hand that Lois held tightened against her lips, quivered, relaxed. Something outside fell clinking and clattering to the ground at the foot of the tree. It was Skeene’s rifle; and Skeene sank forward, hanging half out of the hole in the tree, head downward, like a dead squirrel.

And beside him, the other wild thing sobbed and whimpered and moaned among the branches while below the swift axes bit into the tree from which the dead game hung, head downward.

“Look in the hut for the woman!” bawled Hale.

The tree swayed and crackled and fell crashing into the snow.

“Where’s that woman?” shouted Hale from the hut;—“G—d d—n her!”—

But when at last he found her he changed his mind and let her stay with Skeene there in the snow.

ENTER THE QUEEN.

“Votre amour me ferait dieu.
M’aimez-vous, mademoiselle?
Soupirez un mois, dit-elle.
Un mois! C’est la mort! Adieu!”

ENTER THE QUEEN.

Souvenir cher à mes pensées!
Grâce à la fraîcheur qu’il leur rend,
Je souris aux heures passées,
Je m’arrange du jour mourant.

BERANGER.