The powerful instruments of their healthy bodies were applied by the shrewdness of their concentrated minds, guarded always by the blessing of sane leadership. Through his wise counsels Bruce Dunvegan conserved the powers of his retainers and turned them along the required channels, directing brain and sinew, blood and spirit, to the profit of the Ancient and Honorable Company.

Over every part of the Fort hung his rigid, progressive discipline. At daybreak all the post Indians, the voyageurs, the H. B. C. servants were engaged upon their various tasks, fashioning, constructing, finishing!

They labored with care, but with the merriest of dispositions. At seven they breakfasted. In an hour the hum of work rose again. Leisure could wait for the deep winter snows!

Outside the trading room a great flagstaff was reared before the ground froze too solidly. Up the pine stick ran the Company's crimson ensign, marking another step of conquest, flinging defiance to the Nor'westers, shutting out the stronghold of Fort La Roche from the Katchawan Valley.

Tumultuous cheering greeted the first flap of the banner. Shouts more sincere than patriotic cries rang out loudly. The Company's adherents but voiced their allegiance.

"_Vive La Compagnie!_" exulted the impetuous Baptiste Verenne, a typical voyageur.

"_Grace a Dieu!_" pealed his comrades, stridently--"_Grace a Dieu!_"

Like some wild orison to an invisible G.o.d--the Company G.o.d it might be--their musical tongues chanted the phrase.

Could the Nor'westers have seen these outland sons thus greet their flag, chests big with the emotional breath of love, cheeks bright with the inspiring blood that comes of proud prestige, eyes burning with the fire of eternal loyalty, they would have stopped to think. Could Black Ferguson have witnessed the scene, he would have understood that he was combating not iron determination alone; not reckless strength, not unswerving pertinacity, but a stern faith in a power so vast as to be almost beyond comprehension; a belief in a precedence dominant and complete, a love of an ideal which even death could not conquer because it extended beyond through that exalted medium of heroism. And where the ideal is raised to the clear eye of faith rests the cause invincible.

CHAPTER XI

TIDINGS OF WAR

As an auspicious omen on Kamattawa Indian summer came down with its fragrant sigh and its transient flash of yellow radiance. Then the winds fell strangely mute. Some unseen magic permeated the calm. Earth and air lay breathless with the prophecy of change.

A little cold caress on his tanned cheek, a tang on his lips, a familiar tingle in his sinews foretold the prophecy's fulfillment to Baptiste Verenne when he sauntered in one night from his trail-blazing. He inspected the sullen sky a moment and shook his head as he strode through the gates to the blockhouse.

"Wintaire!" he announced briefly to Dunvegan. "She be comin' _vite_ on de _nord_ wind, M'sieu'."

The chief trader tilted his browned face skyward and clutched the air tentatively to get the feel of the weather.

"Not far off! Not far off, Baptiste," he calculated. "It may close in any night, and we'll see a white world when we wake of a morning."

Verenne's arm slanted, pointing over the palisades.

"See dat?" he cried.

A circling wind, the first of many days, eddied the leaves lying against the stockade, piled them in a wreath thirty feet high in the air with gentle motion peculiarly distinctive to a close observer, then ruthlessly disintegrated the whole.

"An dat?" Baptiste added.

A whizzing phalanx of wild geese blurred the distant horizon, bored like a rocket from sky to sky, and pierced the invisible distance.

"W'en dey fly dat way," averred Baptiste, "de wintaire right on dere tails! She be come _toute suite_, M'sieu'."

And it did! A greasy wrack of clouds masked the sunset. The north wind blew out of the Arctic circle with a humming like vibrating wires. The wraith of desolation went eerily shrieking round and round. Then out of inky s.p.a.ce the snow came down, driving fiercely on a forty-mile gale to smother the gauntness of the rugged forest in a swirl of white. For thirty-six hours the frozen flakes pelted the stout stockades. The snow lay in foamy levels in the timber, ten feet deep in the hollows, and wind-packed to tremendous hardness on the ice-bound lakes and rivers.

The days became less strenuous now in Fort Kamattawa. The nights grew long. The Hudson's Bay men attended to their winter needs and equipments, while the post Indians fashioned snowshoes with native quickness and skill.

There came a brief, cold, sleety rain which settled the drifts and the subsequent hard frosts formed a crust that made excellent tripping on the raquettes. The first tripper over the trail was Basil Dreaulond carrying Company dispatches on his way to Nelson House. He lurched in one night in the midst of a whistling storm with his dog team and a halfbreed a.s.sistant. The world outside the Fort was a shrieking maelstrom of snow and cutting blasts. Inside the men sat close together about the roaring fireplace.

So blinding was the tempest that Kamattawa's sentinel in the blockhouse tower could see nothing from his frosted windows and did not mark the courier's approach till Basil and the breed were hammering upon the closed gates with their rifle-b.u.t.ts. Eugene Demorel slid back the shutter in the watchtower and leaned out, his gun trained on the entrance.

"De pa.s.sword," he bellowed. "Who comes dere?"

"_Diable_ tak' de pa.s.sword," roared Basil who was half frozen. "I'm Dreaulond. Open dis gate queeck!"

On the inferno of the elements his words puffed up like faint echoes, but Eugene Demorel knew the courier's tone. The stockade opened for a second, a raging snowgap in the draught. Basil stumbled into the log store.

"_Hola, camarade_," they greeted joyously. "How do you like the weather?"

"_Mauvais_," groaned Dreaulond, leaning toward the flames. "_Saprie_, but she be cold!"

Dunvegan took the papers Macleod had sent to him and read them. They concerned ordinary matters of fort routine and gave him no news of the home post.

"How is everything at Oxford House, Basil?" he inquired with ill-concealed eagerness.

"Everyt'ing be quiet," returned the courier. "De Nor'westaires don' move mooch."

His eyes, however, held a hint of private information, and the chief trader did not miss the glance.

"Come to the trading room when you get warmed, Dreaulond," he requested.

"I'd like to see you."

"_Oui_," a.s.sented Basil. "W'en I get dis cold out ma bones."

Dunvegan disappeared. The Hudson's Bay men volleyed their questions at Dreaulond. They were ravenous for word of their kind from whom the busy months had cut them off. Between questions he slowly revolved before the fireplace, warming his chest, scorching his back, sucking the heat into his chilled marrow.

"Any news of the Factor's daughter?" Connear asked him.

"_Non!_" Basil frowned and added: "She's wit' Black Ferguson, I bet on dat. She got de spirit of her _pere_. She'd go to La Roche an' mak' heem geeve her sheltaire."

"And Running Wolf gone over to him, too. We found that out. That whelp Three Feathers made it hot enough for us at Du Loup." Connear spat copiously into the snarling birch logs and grinned at the remembrance of the fight. "How's the English clerk?" he asked after a minute. "Drinkin'

any?"

"Dey don' geeve heem any chance," replied Dreaulond. "Dat's de ordaire from hees parents. An' we don't want drunk mans on de post at dis taim of de great dangaire."

In Basil's tone they discovered an unwonted gravity, as if he had knowledge of new developments which he was keeping from them.

"What's up?" asked Pete, always interested in secrets. "If there's anything on foot, let us have it, for it's got to be bloomin' dull here.

I miss my grog. I'd give a month's pay for a good gla.s.s now."

"I don't know anyt'ing new," the courier returned. "Eef you want to grog, go ovaire to de Nor'westaire. Dey drink her pretty free."

"Yes. Black Ferguson swears by it."

"Dis Black Ferguson wan devil," declared Dreaulond, pa.s.sing into the trading room. "Now he be run after Desiree Lazard, but she not be look at heem!"

From his desk Dunvegan glanced steadily at the courier.