The Silent Places. Stewart Edward White

what we want. If you don't care to tackle the job, you must know nothing about it. That is distinctly understood?"

      He hitched forward nearer the light, scanning the men carefully. They nodded.

      "Sure!" added Herron.

      "That's all right. Do you men remember Jingoss, the Ojibway, who outfitted here a year ago last summer?"

      "Him they calls th' Weasel?" inquired Sam Bolton.

      "That's the one. Do you remember him well? how he looks?"

      "Yes," nodded Sam and Dick Herron together.

      "We've got to have that Indian."

      "Where is he?" asked Herron. Sam Bolton remained silent.

"That is for you to find out." MacDonald then went on to explain himself, hitching his chair still nearer, and lowering his voice. "A year ago last summer," said he, "he got his 'debt' at the store of two hundred castors[1] which he was to pay off in pelts the following spring. He never came back. I don't think he intends to. The example is bad. It has never happened to us before. Too many Indians get credit at this Post. If this man is allowed to go unpunished, we'll be due for all sorts of trouble with our other creditors. Not only he, but all the rest of them, must be made to feel that an embezzler is going to be caught, every time. They all know he's stolen that debt, and they're waiting to see what we're going to do about it. I tell you this so you'll know that it's important."

[1] One hundred dollars.

      "You want us to catch him?" said Bolton, more as a comment than an inquiry.

      "Catch him, and catch him alive!" corrected MacDonald. "There must be no shooting. We've got to punish him in a way that will make him an example. We've got to allow our Indians 'debt' in order to keep them. If we run too great a risk of loss, we cannot do it. That is a grave problem. In case of success you shall have double pay for the time you are gone, and be raised two ranks in the service. Will you do it?"

      Sam Bolton passed his emaciated, gnarled hand gropingly across his mouth, his usual precursor of speech. But Galen Albret abruptly interposed, speaking directly, with authority, as was his habit.

      "Hold on," said he, "I want no doubt. If you accept this, you must not fail. Either you must come back with that Indian, or you need not come back at all. I won't accept any excuses for failure. I won't accept any failure. It does not matter if it takes ten years. I want that man."

      Abruptly he fell silent. After a moment MacDonald resumed his speech.

      "Think well. Let me know in the morning."

      Bolton again passed his hand gropingly before his mouth.

      "No need to wait for me," said he; "I'll do it."

      Dick Herron suddenly laughed aloud, startling to flight the gravities of the moment.

      "If Sam here's got her figured out, I've no need to worry," he asserted. "I'm with you."

      "Very well," agreed MacDonald. "Remember, this must be kept quiet. Come to me for what you need."

      "I will say good-by to you now," said Galen Albret. "I do not wish to be seen talking to you to-morrow."

      The woodsmen stepped forward, and solemnly shook Galen Albret's hand. He did not arise to greet these men he was sending out into the Silent Places, for he was the Factor, and not to many is it given to rule a country so rich and extended. They nodded in turn to the taciturn smokers, then glided away into the darkness on silent, moccasined feet.

      The night had fallen. Here and there through the gloom shone a lamp. Across the north was a dim glow of phosphorescence, precursor of the aurora, from which occasionally trembled for an instant a single shaft of light. The group by the bronze field-cannon were humming softly the sweet and tender cadences of La Violette dandine.

      Instinctively the two woodsmen paused on the hither side of rejoining their companions. Bolton's eyes were already clouded with the trouble of his speculation. Dick Herron glanced at his comrade quizzically, the strange cast flickering in the wind of his thought.

      "Oh, Sam!" said he.

      "What?" asked the older man, rousing.

      "Strikes me that by the time we get through drawin' that double pay on this job, we'll be rich men—and old!"

CHAPTER TWO

       Table of Contents

      The men stood looking vaguely upward at the stars.

      Dick Herron whipped the grasses with a switch he had broken in passing a willow-bush. His mind was little active. Chiefly he regretted the good time he had promised himself here at the Post after the labour of an early spring march from distant Winnipeg. He appreciated the difficulties of the undertaking, but idly, as something that hardly concerned him. The details, the planning, he dismissed from his mind, confident that his comrade would rise to that. In time Sam Bolton would show him the point at which he was to bend his strength. Then he would stoop his shoulders, shut his eyes, and apply the magnificent brute force and pluck that was in him. So now he puckered his lips to the sibilance of a canoe-song, and waited.

      But the other, Sam Bolton, the veteran woodsman, stood in rapt contemplation, his wide-seeing, gentle eyes of the old man staring with the magnitude of his revery.

      Beyond the black velvet band lay the wilderness. There was the trackless country, large as the United States itself, with its great forests, its unmapped bodies of water, its plains, its barren grounds, its mountains, its water courses wider even than the Hudson River. Moose and bear, true lords of the forest, he might see any summer day. Herds of caribou, sometimes thousands strong, roamed its woodlands and barrens. Wolves, lurking or bold as their prey was strong or weak, clung to the caribou bands in hope of a victim. Wolverines—unchanged in form from another geological period—marten, mink, fisher, otter, ermine, muskrat, lynx, foxes, beaver carried on their varied affairs of murder or of peaceful industry. Woods Indians, scarcely less keen of sense or natural of life than the animals, dwelt in their wigwams of bark or skins, trapped and fished, made their long migrations as the geese turn following their instinct. Sun, shadow, rain, cold, snow, hunger, plenty, labour, or the peaceful gliding of rivers, these had watched by the Long Trail in the years Sam Bolton had followed it. He sensed them now dimly, instinctively, waiting by the Trail he was called upon to follow.

      Sam Bolton had lived many years in the forest, and many years alone. Therefore he had imagination. It might be of a limited quality, but through it he saw things in their essences.

      Now from the safe vantage ground of the camp, from the breathing space before the struggle, he looked out upon the wilderness, and in the wilderness he felt the old, inimical Presence as he had felt it for forty years. The scars of that long combat throbbed through his consciousness. The twisting of his strong hands, the loosening of the elasticity, the humbling of the spirit, the caution that had displaced the carelessness of youth, the keenness of eye, the patience—all these were at once the marks of blows and the spoils of victory received from the Enemy. The wilderness, calm, ruthless, just, terrible, waited in the shadow of the forest, seeking no combat, avoiding none, conquering with a lofty air of predestination, yielding superbly as though the moment's victory for which a man had strained the fibres of his soul were, after all, a little, unimportant thing; never weary, never exultant, dispassionate, inevitable, mighty, whose emotions were silence, whose speech was silence, whose most terrible weapon was the great white silence that smothered men's spirits. Sam Bolton clearly saw the North. He felt against him the steady pressure of her resistance. She might yield, but relentlessly regained her elasticity. Men's efforts against her would tire; the mechanics of her power remained constant. What she lost in the moments of her opponent's might,