Many miles of silver surface Oxford Lake unrolled before them; many long, peaceful, shining miles! An intense calm mirrored it. The fiery, autumn sun glazed the whole. The vivid sh.o.r.es floated double along its sides. The sky lay down in its depths with great fish swimming among the white clouds; while so still swooned the water that the very veining and shading of color in the reflected foliage could be definitely traced.

As over silvered gla.s.s was the pa.s.sing of the brigade. Each blotch of canoe bottom, each bit of overhanging duffle, each quivering sinew straining on the paddle flashed up from below.

Lightening the labor of their stroke, the debonair voyageurs broke into their familiar boating song:

"_En roulant ma boule roulante----_"

And chanting more swiftly, they sang in voices which blended with the artistic charm nature alone can give:

"_Ah fils du roi, tu es mechant, En roulant ma boule, Toutes les plumes s'en vont au vent, Rouli roulant, ma boule roulant._"

By Windy Island they quickened their pace, chorusing loudly:

"_En roulant ma boule roulante, En roulant ma boule; Derriere chez-nous y-a-t-un' etang; En roulant ma boule._"

So the brigade went. And Oxford House crouched low in the distance.

CHAPTER X

THE CAUSE INVINCIBLE

Off Caribou Point Wahbiscaw, the bowsman of Dunvegan's canoe, cried out sharply in his native tongue. The craft turned aside from a jagged reef of rock that poked like a pike's nose almost to the surface. Then they sped on with increasing rapidity. The Cree knew every channel, every fang, every shoal, every bar in the shallows of Oxford Lake. And of every other lake and river in his district there was a map in his mind.

It is the unequalled gift of the true red man to remember country over which he has travelled but once. Not only does he recall the trails or the waterways but the things which go to make those trails or waterways.

He can place the smooth current, the broken, the rapid, the eddy, the rocks, the bends of sh.o.r.e. Even the Indian youth quickly acquires such power of recollection. The retentive faculty is developed to an enormous degree by those who roam in the wilderness.

Ahead of the brigade loomed Wasita Island, a cliff of crag and spruce sunk to its knees in some volcanic crater which had opened under it aeons ago. Its headlands were scarred and seamed, old in time, marked with the brand of chaos that had once rocked the mighty northland as the tornado rocks the balsams.

Dunvegan, mechanically doing his work as steersman, scanned the sh.o.r.es for a glimpse of a canoe. At last he placed it on the island margin drawn up in a little cove called Spirit Bay. It was directly in the course of the brigade. His heart beats quickened.

"Faster," he commanded the paddlers, and steered closer to the island sh.o.r.e.

"Spirit Bay?" questioned the stolid Cree bowsman.

"So!" answered his leader. He made a motion for the rest of the fleet to continue on its way.

The chief trader's canoe slipped over a white sandbar and nosed in against the rock alongside the other empty craft which required no tying in the absence of any lake swell.

"Behold the canoe of _ayume-aookemou_, the praying man," spoke Wahbiscaw, puzzled.

But with a command for him to wait in silence Dunvegan was climbing the rocks. Up on the peak of the boulder-like island he found Desiree and Father Brochet.

"See," she laughed, her beauty increased tenfold by the splendor of sun and sky, "we have come this far to bid you farewell. Are you not grateful? It is far to come to say a sentence or two!"

She gave him her hands, smiling saucily into his eyes. No vision he had ever seen or dreamed of was so entrancing, so tempting, and yet so human!

"Grateful? Ah--yes!" he breathed. "But pray G.o.d you may come this far to meet me on my return! Would you?" He retained the hands that made him quiver.

"Who knows?" Desiree pouted teasingly. "The snows will be lying deep.

You may come in a blizzard! Who knows?"

Like a red ring her lips allured. Father Brochet piously turned his back. If there was a pa.s.sionate kiss, he did not see it. He heard only the heart strain in Dunvegan's voice; saw only the great yearning in his eyes.

"Your vow?" he asked. "Will you hold it till I come?"

"Yes--and after," she plagued.

"Till I come," Dunvegan pleaded.

"Yes," Desiree answered, softening. "I told you I would never marry a Hudson's Bay man."

"Keep it well, then," he adjured--"till I come!"

It took effort to release her warm palms! Dunvegan turned hastily to the priest.

"Good-bye, Brochet." Their hands welded.

"_A Dieu_," murmured his friend.

There was a mist in Dunvegan's eyes as he walked. Father Brochet noted that he stumbled a little in reaching the canoe.

"Wik! Wik!" Wahbiscaw called. The craft slanted through the channel and was gone.

Brochet, watching closely, saw a great void grow in Desiree's eyes.

"Ah," he mused, "if this had been return!"

September smiled between the scarlet curtains of the moose maples upon Dunvegan's arrival in the Katchawan Valley. October glared through the bare lattice work of the branches at the upstanding walls of trading room, store and blockhouse. November swept wrathfully down the open forest lanes, bl.u.s.tering a frosty challenge to the hive of men toiling at the roofing over, the gabling in, the palisading.

But the challenge rang too late. Kamattawa's stockades grinned back undaunted. Behind them crouched the broad-bulked buildings, weather-proof, grim, impregnable alike to destructive elements and predatory foes.

There still remained the finer inside work; the flooring, the store shelving, the compartment shaping, the counter making for the trading room, the stairs of the same and the grill in the supply loft above. But all this could be accomplished with comparative luxury in the warmth of the fireplaces whose birch flames crackled defiance to the cold.

The incidents of the Hudson's Bay men's journey to the Valley and the log of events during the post's building stand in bold orthography upon the daybook of the Fort. One hundred s.p.a.cious pages the story covers.

And because Bruce Dunvegan was not given to write of trifles, the sheets claim a sequence of bold facts which prompt the imagination with the allurement of boundless suggestion.

For instance, there is a line telling that they encountered a squall on Trout Lake. But the yellow paper says nothing of how for hours they bucked the monstrous seas which broke over the canoe bows till each bailer's muscles cramped under the strain of clearing shipped water, or how the craft, sliding meteor-like down the pa.s.sed surge crests, slapped and pounded in the wave troughs till the bottoms broke in rents and the daring crews won the sh.o.r.e race with death by a scant paddle's stroke.

Likewise a brief obituary states that Gabriel Fonderel was killed in a skirmish with some of Running Wolf's tribe at the Channel Du Loup. Yet there is no word of how the now hostile Crees, strong in numbers and led by the fiery Three Feathers held back Dunvegan's men for four days till finally the chief trader ran the rocky pa.s.sage in the dark beneath a vicious fire that wounded a half-dozen voyageurs besides snuffing out Fonderel's breath.

Two burnings of the unfinished palisades by stealthy enemies; three night attacks of combined bodies of Nor'westers and Running Wolf's Crees; the finding of a full powder bag standing among the flour sacks drying before the fire--all these were mildly noted!

But between the brief lines of this daybook which reposed upon Dunvegan's desk in the trading room of Fort Kamattawa could be read the whole round of a virile, courageous existence; could be felt the pulse of danger and hidden menace; could be witnessed the keen drama of the inimical wilderness conflict. Crowded into these northmen's short span of months were years of endeavor. They took cognizance of no restraining limits to this and that undertaking. Theirs were the herculean things, the endless creations, the hot ambitions. Out of the vast resources of the northland they established a well-defined era, a cycle of supremacy, an epoch of undying history which would round their full conquest of the land.