Dunvegan revolved the project mentally, getting each separate point of view.

"We'll do it," he rapped out, smashing a burnt stick-end into the coals with a force that sent fresh flames roaring up. "Maskwa, we'll do it!"

"Good!" exclaimed the Ojibway, without elation. "But first we need the pa.s.sword of the gates. If Strong Father allows, I will get it." He motioned to the p.r.o.ne, blanket-wrapped prisoners alongside the fire.

"Get it," ordered the chief trader. "But no torture, remember!"

"So," promised Maskwa coolly. "I will frighten it from one of them."

He plucked the Worcester pistol out of Dunvegan's belt and went slowly up the line. Presently he singled out the spokesman of the captives lying completely m.u.f.fled up in the sleeping robes. At the touch of Maskwa's toe the Nor'wester sat erect, his black-bearded, swarthy face full of evil glints. He was one of the sc.u.m that the younger fur company had picked up to swell their none too formidable ranks.

The Ojibway squatted opposite this fellow, in whose charge the Niskitowaney fur train had been traveling.

"The pa.s.sword at your fort," he commanded with abruptness and vigor.

A villainous oath was the response, an epithet that would have been a vicious blow had the Nor'wester's arms been loose.

"The pa.s.sword!" Maskwa's voice kept even, but he stabbed the black man through with the needle points of his concentrated gaze.

No response! The Ojibway brought the pistol into view and leveled it with a precision more deadly than visual concentration.

"The pa.s.sword!" he repeated stonily for the third time.

"Shoot and be d.a.m.ned to you!" cried the Nor'wester, the swagger and braggadocio which in his breed is a subst.i.tute for courage breaking out. Swift as light came Maskwa's side-twist of the hand.

Bang! The pistol's scorch stung the Nor'wester's right ear.

Bang! Its red muzzle jet seared his left ear.

Bang! The round, fiendish mouth spat a white furrow through his black hair.

The awakened camp, thinking of an attack, sat up and grasped weapons, then put them furtively back, half ashamed of their mistake, and gazed wonderingly at the strange tableau.

"French Heart, the next one goes through your head," warned the Ojibway.

"The pa.s.sword!"

The Nor'wester, staring into the deadly cylinder of steel, experienced a p.r.i.c.kly, spreading sensation in the nerves of the forehead just between his eyes. He imagined the crashing impact of the leaden missile. He already felt the oozy bullet-hole.

Maskwa's eyes lanced him with b.l.o.o.d.y light which the coals infused. His spirit quivered under that knife. His nerves collapsed. He pitched forward on his face, reiterating the pa.s.sword in choking gasps.

"Ma.r.s.eillaise," he panted. "Ma.r.s.eillaise!"

The Ojibway tossed the man's sleeping robes over his fear-shaken visage.

Abruptly he stalked back and dropped the pistol in Dunvegan's lap.

"You have heard, Strong Father?" he asked. "It is good! He spoke the truth, because he dared not lie. In the night of to-morrow we will enter the gates of the fort of the French Hearts with that pa.s.sword. I have spoken!"

Like a snake Maskwa slid into his fur blankets. Dunvegan followed, and the whole camp was soon still.

Gradually the banked logs of the fire broke in little falling rifts of coals. Uncombated, the frost advanced and screened the red glow with a gray hand. Across the valley of the Blazing Pine came the howling of wolves. Then of a sudden the winter aurora leaped out of the north, sweeping majestically from stars to earth-line. No rustling sound such as is heard within the Arctic Circle accompanied its movement. It came and vanished in mystic silence, only to reappear with twofold brilliance and mult.i.tudinous variations of hue. Up in the zenith a corona of dazzling splendor formed, and the miracle, continuing, left pulsating, nebulous rays walking the far-off, frozen sh.o.r.es.

The immensity of the wilderness reaches gave field for unlimited display. Flooded with resplendent light, the primal wastes of snow reflected every colored bar, every glorious cloud, every celestial flash. As a monstrous mirror to augment the radiance and multiply the lambent gleams, the speckless crust stretched on and on. The very earth seemed to acquire motion and to roll its snows in red and white undulating waves.

Wrapped in the sleep of utter weariness, lost to the hard facts of life, the sleepers lay in a realm of mysticism, of phantasmagoria. Thus all night across the world blazed this carnival of flame.

CHAPTER XVIII

A DOUBLE SURPRISE.

"_Arretez!_" The sentinel's challenge from the gates of Fort Brondel rang out sharply in the near-dawn.

Through the blinding smother of great, soft-falling snowflakes he had heard rather than seen the advance of a dog train toiling up the rising ground upon which the post was situated. It came, he thought, as a Nor'west train would come, making no unnecessary clamor, but without any precautions for secrecy. The storm-laden air choked the first cry of the watchman, preventing it from reaching the clogged ears of the approaching party. Again his hail was lifted up.

"_Hola! Arretez!_" he commanded, the strident tone cutting the snow.

Instantly the leading team pulled up. The others lined behind it.

Brondel's sentinel could discern five bulky sledges, each accompanied by a driver and a guard with rifle on shoulder. Their faces and garments plastered thickly by moist flakes, the men looked like tall, white stumps suddenly moved out of the forest and set before the stockades.

Ident.i.ties were impossibly vague in the storm and in the gray dark which preceded the morning.

"_Qui vive?_" asked the keeper of the post gate doubtfully.

"The Niskitowaney fur train," answered the m.u.f.fled voice of one of the halfbreeds who drove.

"The pa.s.sword?"

"Ma.r.s.eillaise!"

The gate bars rattled with release; a gap yawned in the stockade.

"_Entrez_," came the permission.

Walking with the leading sledge, Maskwa whirled as he pa.s.sed the sentinel and felled him with a quick blow of the rifle b.u.t.t. Quickly he removed the unconscious man's weapons and threw him on the sled.

"Strong Father, the thing is easy, as I told you," the Ojibway muttered to the first snow-coated giant guard, who was in reality Bruce Dunvegan.

"Too easy," was Bruce's answer. "Listen! There is no stir about the buildings, no sound. That puzzles me, Maskwa."

"Men sleep soundest just before the light breaks," explained the fort runner in a tone of satisfaction.

"Perhaps." Dunvegan's tone was doubtful.

As they stood in the palisade entrance, listening keenly for any cry which would mean their discovery, the pulses of the Hudson's Bay men surged faster and faster. The cold chill of the storm-beaten atmosphere changed suddenly to an electric glow. The fever of waiting strain flushed their bodies. They began to breathe hard and shift weapons from left hands to armpits and back again.

But no clamor beat out of the post structures; a ghostly blur they lay, walled round with gigantic drifts. The only vibration which communicated itself to the ear was the velvet brushing of falling snow against the high stockades.