Snowdrift.

by James B. Hendryx.

A PROLOGUE

I

Murdo MacFarlane, the Hudson's Bay Company's trader at Lashing Water post, laid aside his book and glanced across the stove at his wife who had paused in her sewing to hold up for inspection a very tiny shirt of soft wool.

"I tell you it's there! It's bound to be there," he announced with conviction. "Just waitin' for the man that's man enough to go an' get it."

Margot nodded abstractedly and deftly snipped a thread that dangled from a seam of a little sleeve. She had heard this same statement many times during the three years of their married life, and she smiled to herself as Molaire, her father, who was the Company's factor at Lashing Water, laid aside his well thumbed invoice with a snort of disgust. She knew her two men well, did Margot, and she could antic.i.p.ate almost word for word the heated argument that was bound to follow. Without rising she motioned to Tom Shirts, the Company Indian, to light the great swinging lamp. And as the yellow light flooded the long, low trading room, she resumed her sewing, while Molaire hitched his chair nearer the stove and whittled a pipeful of tobacco from a plug.

"There ye go again with ye're tomrot an' ye're foolishness!" exploded the old Frenchman, as he threw away his match and crowded the swelling tobacco back into the bowl of his pipe. "Always babblin' about the gold.

Always wantin' to go an' find out for ye'reself it ain't there."

"But I'm tellin' you it _is_ there," insisted MacFarlane.

"Where is it, then? Why ain't it be'n got?"

"Because the right man ain't gone after it."

"An' ye're the right man, I suppose! Still lackin' of twenty-five years, an' be'n four years in the bush; tellin' me that's be'n forty years in the fur country, an' older than ye before ever I seen it. Ye'll do better to ferget this foolishness an' stick to the fur like me. I've lived like a king in one post an' another--an' when I'm old I'll retire on my pension."

"An' when I'm old, if I find the gold, I'll ask pension of no man. It ain't so much for myself that I want gold--it's for them--for Margot, there, an' the wee Margot in yon." He nodded toward the door of the living room where the year-old baby lay asleep.

Molaire shrugged: "Margot has lived always in the bush. She needs no gold, an' the little one needs no gold. Gold costs lives. Come, Margot, speak up! Would ye send ye're man to die in the barrens for the gold that ain't there?"

Margot paused in her sewing and smiled: "I am not sending him into the barrens," she said. "If he goes, I go, and the little Margot, too. If one dies, we all die together. But there must be gold there. Has not Murdo read it in books? And we have heard rumors of gold among the Indians."

"Read it in books!" sniffed Molaire. "Rumors among Injuns! Ye better stick to fur, boy. Ye take to it natural. There's no better judge of fur in all the traders I've had. Before long the Company'll make ye a factor."

As young Murdo MacFarlane filled and lighted his pipe, his eyes rested with burning intensity upon his young wife. When finally he spoke it was half to himself, half to Molaire: "When the la.s.s an' I were married, back yon, to the boomin' of the bells of Ste. Anne's, I vowed me a vow that I'd do the best 'twas in me to do for her. An' I vowed it again when, a year later, the bells of Ste. Anne's rang out at the christening of the wee little Margot. Is it the best a man can do--to spend his life in the buyin' of fur for a wage, when gold 'twould pay for a kingdom lies hid in the sands for the takin'?"

Molaire's reply was interrupted by a sound from without, and the occupants of the room looked at each other in surprise. For it was February and the North lay locked in the iron grip of the strong cold.

Since mid-afternoon the north wind had roared straight out of the Arctic, driving before it a blue-white smother of powder-dry snow particles that cut and seared the skin like white-hot steel filings.

MacFarlane was half way across the floor when the door opened and a man, powdered white from head to foot, stepped into the room in a swirl of snow fine as steam. With his hip he closed the door against the push of the wind, and advancing into the room, shook off his huge bear-skin mittens and unwound the heavy woolen scarf that encircled his parka hood and m.u.f.fled his face to the eyes. The scarf, stiff with ice from his frozen breath, crackled as it unwound, and little ice-chips fell to the floor.

"Ha, it's Downey, who else? Lad, lad, what a night to be buckin' the storm!" cried the trader.

Corporal Downey, of the Royal North-West Mounted Police, grinned as he advanced to the stove. "It was buck the storm to Lashin' Water post, or hole up in a black spruce swamp till it was over. She looks like a three days' storm, an' I prefer Lashin' Water."

"Ye're well in time for supper, Corporal," welcomed Molaire, "and the longer the storm lasts the better. For now we'll have days an' nights of real whist. We've tried to teach Tom Shirts to play, but he knows no more about it now than he knows about the ten commandments--an' cares less. So we've be'n at it three-handed. But three-handed whist is like a three-legged dog--it limps."

Neseka, the squaw, looked in from the kitchen to announce supper, and after ordering Tom to attend to the Corporal's dogs, Molaire clapped his hands impatiently to attract the attention of MacFarlane and Downey who were beating the snow from the latter's moose hide parka. "Come,"

insisted the old man, "ye're outfit'll have plenty time to dry out. The supper'll be cold, an' we're losin' time. We've wasted a hand of cards already."

"Is the gold bug still buzzin' in your bonnet, Mac?" asked Downey, as Molaire flourished the keen bladed carving knife over the roasted caribou haunch.

"Aye," answered the young Scotchman. "An' when the rivers run free in the spring, I'll be goin' to get it."

A long moment of silence followed the announcement during which the carving knife of Molaire was held suspended above the steaming roast.

The old man's gaze centered upon his son-in-law's face, and in that moment he knew that the younger man's decision had been made, and that nothing in the world could change it. The words of Margot flashed through his brain: "If he goes, I go, and the little Margot, too. If one dies, we all die together." His little daughter, the light of his life since the death of her mother years before--and the tiny wee Margot who had snuggled her way into his rough old heart to cheer him in his old age--going away--far and far away into the G.o.d-knows-where of bitter cold and howling blizzard--and all on a fool's errand! The keen blade bit the roast to the bone, raised, dripping red juice, and bit again.

"_Mon Dieu_, what a fool!" breathed the old man, and as if in final appeal, turned to Corporal Downey, who had known him long, and who had guessed what was pa.s.sing in his mind. "Tell him, Downey, you know the North beyond the barrens. Tell him he is a fool!"

And Downey who was not old in years but very wise in the ways of men, smiled. He liked young Murdo MacFarlane, but he was a Scotchman himself and he knew the hard-headedness of the breed.

"Well, a man ain't always a fool because he goes huntin' for gold.

That's accordin'. Where is this gold, Mac? An' how do you know it's there?"

"It's there, all right--gold and copper, too. Didn't Captain Knight try to find it? And Samuel Hearne?"

"Yes," broke in Molaire, "an' Knight's bones are bleachin' on Marble Island with his ships on the bottom of the Bay, an' Hearne came back empty handed."

"That's why the gold is still there," answered MacFarlane.

"Where 'bouts is it?" insisted Downey.

"Up in the Coppermine River country, to the north and east of Bear Lake."

"How do you know?"

"The Injuns had chunks of it. That's what sent Knight and Hearne after it."

"How long ago?"

"Captain Knight started in 1719, an' Hearne about fifty years later."

"Gosh!" exclaimed Downey. "Ain't that figurin' quite a ways back?"

"Gold don't rot. If it was there then, it's there now. It's never been brought out."

"Yes--_if_ it was there. But, maybe it ain't there an' never was--what then?"

"I talked with an Injun, a year back, that said he had seen an Injun from the North that had seen some Eskimos that had dishes made of yellow metal."

"He was prob'ly lyin'," observed Downey, "or the Injun that told him was lyin'. I've be'n north to the coast a couple of times, an' I never seen no Injuns nor Eskimos eatin' out of no gold dishes yet."

"Maybe it's because you've stuck to the Mackenzie, where the posts are.

Have you ever crossed the barrens straight north--between the Mackenzie an' the Bay?"

"No," answered Downey, dryly, "an' I hope to G.o.d I don't never have to.

You've got a good thing here with the Company, Mac. If I was you I'd stick to it, anyways till I seen an Injun with some gold. I never seen one yet--an' I don't never expect to. An' speakin' of Injuns reminds me, I pa.s.sed a camp of 'em this forenoon."

"A camp of 'em!" exclaimed Molaire, in surprise. "Who were they? My Injuns are all on the trap lines."