CHAPTER XIII

THE RED TERROR

Nineteen years before these same rumors had come up from the south, and the Red Terror had followed. The horror of it still remained with the forest people; for a thousand unmarked graves, shunned like a pestilence, and scattered from the lower waters of James Bay to the lake country of the Athabasca, gave evidence of the toll it demanded.

From DuBrochet, on Reindeer Lake, authentic word first came to Lac Bain early in the winter. Henderson was factor there, and he pa.s.sed up the warning that had come to him from Nelson House and the country to the southeast.

"There's smallpox on the Nelson," his messenger informed Williams, "and it has struck the Crees on Wollaston Lake. G.o.d only knows what it is doing to the bay Indians, but we hear that it is wiping out the Chippewayans between the Albany and the Churchill." He left the same day with his winded dogs. "I'm off for the Revillon people to the west, with the compliments of our company," he explained.

Three days later, word came from Churchill that all of the company's servants and her majesty's subjects west of the bay should prepare themselves for the coming of the Red Terror. Williams' thick face went as white as the paper he held, as he read the words of the Churchill factor.

"It means dig graves," he said. "That's the only preparation we can make!"

He read the paper aloud to the men at Lac Bain, and every available man was detailed to spread the warning throughout the post's territory.

There was a quick harnessing of dogs, and on each sledge that went out was a roll of red cotton cloth. Williams' face was still white as he pa.s.sed these rolls out from the company's store. They were ominous of death, lurid signals of pestilence and horror, and the touch of them sent shuddering chills through the men who were about to scatter them among the forest people.

Jan went over the Churchill trail, and then swung southward along the Hasabala, where the country was crisscrossed with trap-lines of the half-breeds and the French. First, he struck the cabin of Croisset and his wife, and left part of his cloth. Then he turned westward, while Croisset harnessed his dogs and hurried with a quarter of the roll to the south. Between the Hasabala and Klokol Lake, Jan found three other cabins, and at each he left a bit of the red cotton. Forty miles to the south, somewhere on the Porcupine, were the lines of Henry Langlois, the post's greatest fox-hunter. On the morning of the third day, Jan set off in search of Langlois; and late in the afternoon of the same day he came upon a well-beaten snow-shoe trail. On this he camped until morning. When dawn came he began following it.

He pa.s.sed half a dozen of Langlois' trap-houses. In none of them was there bait. In three the traps were sprung. In the seventh he found the remains of a red fox that had been eaten until there was little but the bones left. Two houses beyond there was an ermine in a trap, with its head eaten off. With growing perplexity, Jan examined the snow-shoe trails in the snow. The most recent of them were days old. He urged on his dogs, stopping no more at the trap-houses, until, with a shrieking command, he brought them to a halt at the edge of a clearing cut in the forest. A dozen rods ahead of him was the trapper's cabin. Over it, hanging limply to a sapling pole, was the red signal of horror.

With a terrified cry to the dogs, Jan ran back, and the team turned about and followed him in a tangled ma.s.s. Then he stopped. There was no smoke rising from the clay chimney on the little cabin. Its one window was white with frost. Again and again he shouted, but no sign of life responded to his cries. He fired his rifle twice, and waited with his mittened hand over his mouth and nostrils. There was no reply. Then, abandoning hope, he turned back into the north, and gave his dogs no rest until he had reached Lac Bain.

His team came in half dead. Both c.u.mmins and Williams rushed out to meet him as he drove up before the company's store.

"The red flag is over Langlois' cabin!" he cried. "I fired my rifle and shouted. There is no life! Langlois is dead!"

"Great G.o.d!" groaned Williams.

His red face changed to a sickly pallor, and he stood with his thick hands clenched, while c.u.mmins took charge of the dogs and Jan went into the store for something to eat.

Mukee and Per-ee returned to the post the next day. Young Williams followed close after them, filled with terror. He had found the plague among the Crees of the Waterfound.

Each day added to the gloom at Lac Bain. For a time Jan could not fully understand, and he still played his violin and romped joyfully with Melisse in the little cabin. He had not lived through the plague of nineteen years before. Most of the others had, even to Mukee, the youngest of them all.

Jan did not know that it was this Red Terror that came like a Nemesis of the G.o.ds to cut down the people of the great Northland, until they were fewer in number than those of the Sahara desert. But he learned quickly. In February, the Crees along Wollaston Lake were practically wiped out. Red flags marked the trail of the Nelson. Death leaped from cabin to cabin in the wilderness to the west. By the middle of the month, Lac Bain was hemmed in by the plague on all sides but the north.

The post's trap-lines had been shortened; now they were abandoned entirely, and the great fight began. Williams a.s.sembled his men, and told them how that same battle had been fought nearly two decades before. For sixty miles about the post every cabin and wigwam that floated a red flag must be visited--and burned if the occupants were dead. In learning whether life or death existed in these places lay the peril for those who undertook the task. It was a dangerous mission. It meant facing a death from which those who listened to the old factor shrank with dread; yet, when the call came, they responded to a man.

c.u.mmins and Jan ate their last supper together, with Melisse sitting between them and wondering at their silence. When it was over, the two went outside.

"Mukee wasn't at the store," said c.u.mmins in a thick, strained voice, halting Jan in the gloom behind the cabin. "Williams thought he was off to the south with his dogs. But he isn't. I saw him drag himself into his shack, like a sick dog, an hour before dusk. There'll be a red flag over Lac Bain in the morning."

Jan stifled the sharp cry on his lips.

"Ah, there's a light!" cried c.u.mmins. "It's a pitch torch burning in front of his door!"

A shrill, quavering cry came from the direction of Mukee's cabin, and the two recognized it as the voice of the half-breed's father--a wordless cry, rising and dying away again and again, like the wailing of a dog. Sudden lights flashed into the night, as they had flashed years ago when c.u.mmins staggered forth from his home with word of the woman's death. He gripped Jan's arm in a sudden spasm of horror.

"The flag is up NOW!" he whispered huskily. "Go back to Melisse. There is food in the house for a month, and you can bring the wood in to-night. Bar the door. Open only the back window for air. Stay inside--with her--until it is all over. Go!"

"To the red flags, that is where I will go!" cried Jan fiercely, wrenching his arm free. "It is your place to stay with Melisse!"

"My place is with the men."

"And mine?" Jan drew himself up rigid.

"One of us must shut himself up with her," pleaded c.u.mmins. "It must be you." His face gleamed white in the darkness. "You came--that night--because Melisse was here. SOMETHING sent you--SOMETHING--don't you understand? And since then she has never been near to death until now. You must stay with Melisse--WITH YOUR VIOLIN!"

"Melisse herself shall choose," replied Jan. "We will go into the cabin, and the one to whom she comes first goes among the red flags.

The other shuts himself in the cabin until the plague is gone."

He turned swiftly back to the door. As he opened it, he stepped aside to let c.u.mmins enter first, and behind the other's broad back he leaped quickly to one side, his eyes glowing, his white teeth gleaming in a smile. Unseen by c.u.mmins, he stretched out his arms to Melisse, who was playing with the strings of his violin on the table.

He had done this a thousand times, and Melisse knew what it meant--a kiss and a joyous toss halfway to the ceiling. She jumped from her stool and ran to him; but this time, instead of hoisting her above his head, he hugged her up close to his breast, and buried his face in her soft hair. His eyes looked over her in triumph to c.u.mmins.

"Up, Jan, up--'way up!" cried Melisse.

He tossed her until she half turned in midair, kissed her again as he caught her in his arms, and set her, laughing and happy, on the edge of the table.

"I am going down among the sick Crees in c.u.mmins' place," said Jan to Williams, half an hour later. "Now that the plague has come to Lac Bain, he must stay with Melisse."

CHAPTER XIV

A LONG WAITING

The next morning Jan struck out over his old trail to the Hasabala. The Crees were gone. He spent a day swinging east and west, and found old trails leading into the north.

"They have gone up among the Eskimos," he said to himself. "Ah, Kazan, what in the name of the saints is that?"

The leading dog dropped upon his haunches with a menacing growl as a lone figure staggered across the snow toward them. It was Croisset.

With a groan, he dropped upon the sledge.

"I am sick and starving!" he wailed. "The fiend himself has got into my cabin, and for three days I've had nothing but snow and a raw whisky-jack!"

"Sick!" cried Jan, drawing a step away from him.

"Yes, sick from an empty belly, and this, and this!" He showed a forearm done up in a b.l.o.o.d.y rag, and pointed to his neck, from which the skin was peeling. "I was gone ten days with that red cloth you gave me; and when I came back, if there wasn't the horror itself grinning at me from the top of my own shanty! I tried to get in, but my wife barred the door, and said that she would shoot me if I didn't get back into the woods. I tried to steal in at night through a window, and she drenched me in hot water. I built a wigwam at the edge of the forest, and stayed there for five days. Hon-gree! Blessed saints, I had no matches, no grub; and when I got close enough to yell these things to her, she kept her word and plunked me through a crack in the door, so that I lost a pint of blood from this arm."

"I'll give you something to eat," laughed Jan, undoing his pack. "How long has the red flag been up?"

"I've lost all count of time, but it's twelve days, if an hour, and I swear it's going to take all winter to get it down!"