Lords of the North. Agnes C. Laut
above the ragged edge of a storm cloud, and all the snow-laden evergreens stood out stately, shadowy and spectral, like mourners for the dead.
Again the road took to right-about at a sharp angle and the broad Chateau, with its noble portico and numerous windows all alight, suddenly loomed up in the center of a forest-clearing on the mountain side. Where the path to the garden crossed a frozen stream was a small open space. Here the Indians had been encamped. We hallooed for servants and by lantern light examined every square inch of the smoked snow and rubbish heaps. Bits of tin in profusion, stones for the fire, tent canvas, ends of ropes and tattered rags lay everywhere over the black patch. Snow was beginning to fall heavily in great flakes that obscured earth and air. Not a thing had we found to indicate any trace of the lost woman and child, until I caught sight of a tiny, blue string beneath a piece of rusty metal. Kicking the tin aside, I caught the ribbon up. When I saw on the lower end a child's finely beaded moccasin, I confess I had rather felt the point of Le Grand Diable's dagger at my own heart than have shown that simple thing to Hamilton.
Then the snow-storm broke upon us in white billows blotting out everything. We spread a sheet on the ground to preserve any marks of the campers, but the drifting wind drove us indoors and we were compelled to cease searching. All night long Eric and I sat before the roaring grate fire of the hunting-room, he leaning forward with chin in his palms and saying few words, I offering futile suggestions and uttering mad threats, but both utterly at a loss what to do. We knew enough of Indian character to know what not to do. That was, raise an outcry, which might hasten the cruelty of Le Grand Diable.
CHAPTER III.
NOVICE AND EXPERT.
Though many years have passed since that dismal storm in the spring of 1815, when Hamilton and I spent a long disconsolate night of enforced waiting, I still hear the roaring of the northern gale, driving round the house-corners as if it would wrench all eaves from the roof. It shrieked across the garden like malignant furies, rushed with the boom of a sea through the cedars and pines, and tore up the mountain slope till all the many voices of the forest were echoing back a thousand tumultuous discords. Again, I see Hamilton gazing at the leaping flames of the log fire, as if their frenzied motion reflected something of his own burning grief. Then, the agony of our utter helplessness, as long as the storm raged, would prove too great for his self-control. Rising, he would pace back and forward the full length of the hunting-room till his eye would be caught by some object with which the boy had played. He would put this carefully away, as one lays aside the belongings of the dead. Afterwards, lanterns, which we had placed on the oak center table on coming in, began to smoke and give out a pungent, burning smell, and each of us involuntarily walked across to a window and drew aside the curtains to see how daylight was coming on. The white glare of early morning flooded the room, but the snow-storm had changed to driving sleet and the panes were iced from corner to corner with frozen rain-drift. How we dragged through two more days, while the gale raved with unabated fury, I do not know. Poor Eric was for rushing into the blinding whirl, that turned earth and air into one white tornado; but he could not see twice the length of his own arm, and we prevailed on him to come back. On the third night, the wind fell like a thing that had fretted out its strength. Morning revealed an ocean of billowy drifts, crusted over by the frozen sleet and reflecting a white dazzle that made one's eyes blink. Great icicles hung from the naked branches of the sheeted pines and snow was wreathed in fantastic forms among the cedars.
We had laid our plans while we waited. After lifting the canvas from the camping-ground and seeking in vain for more trace of the fugitives, we despatched a dozen different search-parties that very morning, Eric leading those who were to go on the river-side of the Chateau, and I some well-trained bushrangers picked from the habitants of the hillside, who could track the forest to every Indian haunt within a week's march of the city. After putting my men on a trail with instructions to send back an Indian courier to report each night, I hunted up an old habitant guide, named Paul Larocque, who had often helped me to thread the woods of Quebec after big game. Now Paul was habitually as silent as a dumb animal, and sportsmen had nicknamed him The Mute; but what he lacked in speech he made up like other wild creatures in a wonderful acuteness of eye and ear. Indeed, it was commonly believed among trappers that Paul possessed some nameless sense by which he could actually feel the presence of an enemy before ordinary men could either see, or hear. For my part, I would be willing to pit that "feel" of Paul's against the nose of any hound that dog-fanciers could back.
"Paul," said I, as the habitant stood before me licking the short stem of an inverted clay pipe, "there's an Indian, a bad Indian, an Iroquois, Paul,"—I was particular in describing the Indian as an Iroquois, for Paul's wife was a Huron from Lorette—"An Iroquois, who stole a white woman and a little boy from the Chateau three days ago, in the morning."
There, I paused to let the facts soak in; for The Mute digested information in small morsels. Grizzled, stunted and chunky, he was not at all the picturesque figure which fancy has painted of his class. Instead of the red toque, which artists place on the heads of habitants, he wore a cloth cap with ear flaps coming down to be tied under his chin. His jacket was an ill-fitting garment, the cast-off coat of some well-to-do man, and his trousers slouched in ample folds above brightly beaded moccasins. When I paused, Paul fixed his eyes on an invisible spot in the snow and ruminated. Then he hitched the baggy trousers up, pulled the red scarf, that held them to his waist, tighter, and, taking his eyes off the snow, looked up for me to go on.
"That Iroquois, who belongs to the North-West trappers——"
"Pays d'En Haut?" asks Paul, speaking for the first time.
"Yes," I answered, "and they all disappeared with the woman and the child the day before the storm."
The Mute's eyes were back on the snow.
"Now," said I, "I'll make you a rich man if you take me straight to the place where he's hiding."
Paul's eyes looked up with the question of how much.
"Five pounds a day." This was four more than we paid for the cariboo hunts.
Again he stood thinking, then darted off into the forest like a hare; but I knew his strange, silent ways, and confidently awaited his return. How he could get two pair of snow-shoes and two poles inside of five minutes, I do not attempt to explain, unless some of his numerous half-breed youngsters were at hand in the woods; but he was back again all equipped for a long tramp, and as soon as I had laced on the racquets, we were skimming over the drift like a boat on billows. In the mazy confusion of snow and underbrush, no one but Paul would have found and kept that tangled, forest path. Where great trunks had fallen across the way, Paul planted his pole and took the barrier at a bound. Then he raced on at a gait which was neither a run nor a walk, but an easy trot common to the coureurs-des-bois. The encased branches snapped like glass when we brushed past, and so heavily were snow and icicles frozen to the trees we might have been in some grotesque crystal-walled cavern. The habitant spoke not a word, but on we pressed over the brushwood, now so packed with snow and crusted ice, our snow-shoes were not once tripped by loose branches, and we glided from drift to drift. In vain I tried to discern a trail by the broken thicket on either side, and I noticed that my guide was keeping his course by following the marks blazed on trees. At one place we came to a steep, clear slope, where the earth had fallen sheer away from the hillside and snow had filled the incline. First prodding forward to feel if the snow-bank were solid, Paul promptly sat down on the rear end of his snow-shoes, and, quicker than I can tell it, tobogganed down to the valley. I came leaping clumsily from point to point with my pole, like a ski-jumping Norwegian, risking my neck at every bound. Then we coursed along the valley, the habitant's eyes still on the trees, and once he stopped to emit a gurgling laugh at a badly hacked trunk, beneath which was a snowed-up sap trough; but I could not divine whether Paul's mirth were