As he sank, he lunged for the pole he had dropped to set the net, but the surface settled under his leap carrying him into the water. Fighting in the mush ice for the pole almost within reach, to his horror he found his right foot trapped. He could not move farther in that direction. The snow-shoe was caught in the net.

Marcel turned back floundering to the edge of firm ice, where he held himself afloat. Fast numbing with cold, as he clung, caught like a beaver in a trap, he knew that it was but a matter of minutes. Fleur, if only Fleur were there! But Fleur was hunting in the "bush."

With a great effort he braced himself on his elbows, got his frozen fingers between his teeth, and blew the signal, once heard, his dog had never failed to answer.

To the joy of the man slowly chilling to the bone, a yelp sounded in the forest. Rallying his ebbing strength, again Marcel whistled. Shortly Fleur appeared on the sh.o.r.e, sighted the master and bounded through the surface slop out to the fishing hole. Reaching Marcel, the husky seized a skin sleeve of his capote and arching her great back, fought the slippery footing in a mad effort to drag him from the water. But the net held him fast.

"De stick, Fleur! De stick dere!" Marcel pointed toward the pole.

Sensing his gesture, the dog brought the pole to the ice edge. Then with the pole bridging the hole, its ends on firm ice, Marcel worked his way to the submerged net, but the sinkers had hopelessly tangled the meshes with his snow-shoe. Under his soggy capote was his knife. His stiff fingers fumbled desperately with the knot of his sash but failed to loose it. Again Fleur seized his sleeve and pulled until she rolled backward with a patch of the tough hide in her teeth.

The situation of the trapped man seemed hopeless. The chill of the water was fast numbing his senses. Already his heart slowed with the torpor of slow freezing. With difficulty now he kept the excited Fleur from plunging beside him into the mush ice.

Then with a final effort he got his free leg with its snow-shoe, over the pole, and seizing the husky's tail with both hands, cried:

"Marche, Fleur! Marche!"

Settling low between wide-spread fore-legs, the dog dug her nails into the soft ice and hurled her weight into a fierce lunge. As her feet slipped, the legs of the husky worked like piston rods showering Marcel's face with water, her nails gouging the ice, while she fought the drag of the net.

At last, something gave way, Marcel felt himself move. Slowly the great dog drew her master over the pole and upon the ice with the net still anch.o.r.ed to his right foot.

Still gripping Fleur's tail in his left hand, with the other he finally reached his knife and groping in the icy water slashed the heel thong of the caught shoe. Free, Marcel limped to his camp, Fleur, now leaping beside him, now marching proudly with his sleeve in her teeth.

The heat of the fire and the hot broth soon started the blood of the half-frozen Frenchman, who lay m.u.f.fled in a blanket. Near him sprawled the husky, who had sensed only too acutely on the ice the danger menacing her master and would not now leave his sight, but with head on paws watched the blanketed figure through eyes which spoke the thoughts she could not express: "Jean may need Fleur again. She will stay with him by the fire."

Once too often, Marcel mused, he had gambled with the rotten spring ice, and now had barely missed paying for his rashness. To drown in a hole like a muskrat, after pulling out of the starvation days with a cache heavy with meat and fish, was unthinkable. But, after all, what did it matter? Life would be of small value now with Julie out of it.

CHAPTER XX

THE DEAD MAN TELLS HIS TALE

When, late in May, the snow had left the open places reached by the sun and the ice cleared the rivers, Marcel was ready to make his first trip to the camp on the Ghost. Poor Antoine would have to lie content in a shallow grave among the boulders of the river sh.o.r.e, for the frost was still in the ground. Before the weather softened Jean had smoked the remainder of his meat and now he faced a ten-mile portage with his outfit. Before the trails went bad he could have freighted on the sled sufficient food for his journey home but had preferred to face the "break-up" in his own camp near a fish-lake and relay his meat over on his back in May. The memories of the winter aroused by the camp on the Ghost were too grim to attract him to the comfortable shack.

One morning at sunrise, after lashing a pack on Fleur's broad back, he threw his tump-line over a bag of smoked meat and swinging it to his shoulders, started over the trail. In the middle of the forenoon he walked into the clearing on the Ghost and pushing off the head strap of his line, dropped his load.

Glancing at the cache where he had left the body of Antoine Beaulieu lashed in canvas with the fur-packs and rifles of the dead men, Marcel muttered in surprise:

"By Gar! Dat ees strange t'ing!"

The scaffold was empty; the body of Antoine had been removed and not a vestige remained of the fur-packs and outfits of Jean's partners.

Neither wolverines, lynxes nor bears, had they been able to overcome the fish-hook barriers guarding the uprights, would have stripped the platform in such fashion. Searching the soft earth, he found the faint tracks of moccasins which the recent rain had not obliterated. But down on the river sh.o.r.e the mud told the story. A canoe had landed there within a week, for in spite of the rain the deep impress of the feet of men carrying heavy loads still marked the beach. Since the ice went out someone who knew that the three men were wintering there, had travelled up the Ghost from the Whale, but why? They could not have been starving, for fish could then be had on the Whale for the setting of a net.

Evidently they had buried Antoine and taken the fur-packs, rifles, and outfits of the two men to Whale River. Marcel searched for a message, in the phonetic writing employed throughout the north, burned into a blazed tree, or on a sc.r.a.p of birch-bark, left in the shack, but found nothing. The cabin was as he had last seen it. They had thought him, also, dead somewhere in the "bush" and had left no word, or----Then the situation opened to him from the angle of view of the Cree visitors.

A camp on the verge of starvation, witnessed by the depleted cache; a dead man stabbed to the heart, with his rifle and outfit beside him; also, the rifle and personal belongings, easily identified by his relatives, of a second man, who, if he were still alive, would have had them in his possession. Of the third man, who was to winter with them, no trace at the camp. Two dead and the third, possibly alive, if he had not starved out. And that third man was Jean Marcel.

That was the grim tale which was travelling down the river ahead of him to the spring trade. Who killed Antoine Beaulieu, and where is Piquet?

This was the question he would have to answer. This the factor and the kinsmen of his partners would demand of the third man, if he survived to reach the post. Yes, Whale River would anxiously await the return of Jean Marcel that spring, but would Whale River believe his story? Of the people of the post he had no doubt. Julie, Pere Breton, the factor, Angus, Jules, he could count on. They knew him--were his friends. But the Crees, and half-breds; would they believe that Joe Piquet had been the evil genius of the tragedy on the Ghost, Joe Piquet, now dead and helpless to speak in his own defense? Would they believe in the innocence of the man who alone of the three partners had fought free of the long famine? Marcel's knowledge of the Indians' mental make-up told him that since the visit of the Crees to the camp his case was hopeless.

They would readily believe that he had killed his partners for the remaining food, and, not antic.i.p.ating the coming of a canoe in the spring to the camp, had gone after caribou, planning to secrete the body of Antoine, with its evidence of violence, on his return.

Of those who had peopled the canoes starting for the up-river summer camps in July, many a face would now be absent when the Crees returned for this year's trade. Famine surely had come to more than one camp of the red hunters that winter; and doubtless, swift death in the night, also, among some of those, who, when caught by the rabbit plague and the absence of wintering caribou, like Piquet, went mad with hunger.

Disease, too, as a hawk strikes a ptarmigan, would have struck down many a helpless child and woman marooned in snow-drifted tepee in the silent places. Old age would have claimed its toll in the bitter January winds.

To the red hunters, starvation and tragic death wore familiar faces. In the wide north they were common enough. So, when in the spring, men loosed from the maw of the pitiless snows returned without comrade, wife or child, seeking succor at the fur-posts, with tales of death by starvation or disease, the absence of witnesses or evidence compelled the acceptance of their stories however suspicious the circ.u.mstances.

There being no proof of guilt, and because, moreover, their tales were often true, there could be no punishment, except the covert condemnation of their fellows or the secret vengeance of kinsman or friend in the guise of a shot from the "bush" or knife thrust in the dark. He recalled the cases he knew or which he had heard discussed over many a camp-fire, of men on the East Coast, sole survivors of starvation camps, who would go to their graves privately branded as murderers by their fellows.

Grim tales of his father returned to him; of the half-breed from Nichicun who, it was commonly believed, had eaten his partner; of Crees who had appeared in the spring at the posts without parents, or wives and children, to tell conflicting stories of death through disease or starvation; of the Frenchman at Mista.s.sini--still a valued servant of the Company--who was known from Fort Albany to Whale River and from Rupert to the Peribonka, as the squaw-man who saved himself on the Fading Waters by deserting his Montagnais girl wife. These and many more, through lack of any proof of guilt, had escaped the long arm of the government which, through the fur-posts, reached to the uttermost valleys of the north.

And so it must have been with Jean Marcel, however suspicious his story, had he buried Antoine somewhere in the snow, as he had Piquet, instead of lashing the body on the cache with its telltale death wound. As it was he already saw himself, though innocent, condemned in the court of Cree opinion as the slayer of his friend.

As he came to a realization of how his case would look, even to the whites at Whale River, he cursed the dead man Piquet for bringing all this upon a guiltless man--for leaving him this black legacy of suspicion.

Well, he swore to himself, they should believe his story at the post, for it was the truth; and if any man, white or red, openly doubted his innocence, he would have to answer to Jean Marcel. To be branded on the East Coast as the a.s.sa.s.sin of his partners was a bitter draught for the palate of the proud Frenchman. For generations the Marcels had borne an honored name in the Company's service and now for the last of them to be suspected of foul murder, was disgrace unthinkable.

So ran his thoughts as he hurried back over the trail to his camp. Of one thing he felt sure. The situation brought about by the visit of the Crees demanded his presence at the post as soon after their arrival as his paddle could drive his canoe. From the appearance of the tracks on the beach they already had a good start and it would take two days for him to pack to the Ghost what meat and outfit he needed for the trip, besides his furs. The rest he could cache.

CHAPTER XXI

THE BLIND CLUTCH OF CIRc.u.mSTANCE

Three days later, he had run the strong-water of the Ghost to Conjuror's Falls, where he exchanged Beaulieu's canoe for his own, cached the previous fall, and continued on to the Whale until the moon set, when he camped.

Then next morning, long before the rising sun, reaching the smoking surface in his path, rolled the river mists back to fade on the ridges, Marcel, with Fleur in the bow, was well started on his three-hundred-mile journey. Travel as he might, he could not hope to overtake the canoe bearing the tale of the tragedy to Whale River; but each day when once the news had reached the post, the story, pa.s.sed from mouth to mouth among the Crees, would gather size and distortion with Marcel not present to refute it. There was great need for speed, so he drove his canoe to the limit of his strength, running all rapids which skill and daring could outwit.

Different, far, from the home-coming he had pictured through the last weeks, would be his return to Whale River. True, there would have been no long June days with Julie Breton, as in previous summers, no walks up the river sh.o.r.e when the low sun turned the Bay to burnished copper, and later, the twilight held deep into the night. If she were not already married her days would be too full to spare much time to her old friend Jean Marcel. But there would have been rest and ease, after the months of toil and famine--long talks with Jules and Angus, with worry behind him in the hills. Instead he was returning to his friends branded as a criminal by the evidence of the cache on the Ghost.

At times, when the magic of the young spring, in the air, the forest, the hills, for a s.p.a.ce swept clean his troubled brain of dark memory, he dreamed that the water-thrushes in the river willows called to him: "Sweet, sweet, sweet, Julie Breton!" That yellow warblers and friendly chickadees, from the spruces of the sh.o.r.e, hailed him as one of the elect, for was he not also a lover? That the kingfishers which scurried ahead of his boat gossiped to him of hidden nests. Deeply, as he paddled, he inhaled the scent of the flowering forest world, the fragrance of the northern spring, while his birch-bark rode the choked current. And then, the stark realization that he had lost her, and the shadow of his new trouble, would bring him rough awakening.

Meeting no canoes of Cree hunters bound for the trade, for it was yet early, in nine days Marcel turned into the post. He smiled bitterly as he saw in the clearing a handful of tepees. Around the evening fires they had doubtless already convicted Jean Marcel, alive or dead.

Familiar with the half-breed weakness for exaggeration, he wondered in what form the story of the cache on the Ghost had been retailed at the trade-house. Well, he should soon know.

The howling of the post dogs announced his arrival, stirring Fleur after her long absence from the sight of her kind to a strenuous reply.

Leaving his canoe on the beach Marcel went at once to the Mission, where the door was opened by the priest.

"Jean Marcel!" The bearded face of the Oblat lighted with pleasure as he opened his arms to the wanderer. "You are back, well and strong? The terrible famine did not reach you?" he asked in French.

Jean's deep-set eyes searched the priest's face for evidence of a change toward him but found the same frank, kindly look he had always known.

"Yes, Father, I beat the famine but I have bad news. Antoine is dead. He was----"