For three minutes the trader had been peering keenly at the sky. Then his eyes lowered, sweeping the horizon with a sharp discernment that would not admit of self-deception.
“Peter!” he called.
Peter Blackhawk came to the door, though he only came to that insistent voice when it suited him.
“Peter,” repeated the trader crisply, yet with something of deference in his tone, “we can't wait another hour for Louis. He should have been here with that pack of stone-marten a week ago. There is a thaw threatening and we can't wait.” Then almost pleadingly: “Can we, Peter?”
“No, Mr. McKenzie. I am afraid it will be hard to make Edmonton as it is,” answered the Indian.
“You have got to make Edmonton, or you and I will lose two thousand dollars apiece. Do you know that, Peter?”
The words got to lacked the tone of authority. The trader could never bully this Indian.
“Then I'll make it,” acquiesced Peter, with the pleasantness born of independence. “The dogs are fit, and I have got the mink and beaver ready, and a few—”
“How many mink skins?” demanded the trader.
“Sixteen hundred.”
“Not bad, not bad. They're the primest skins that ever went out of the north, and the price gone up sky-high. Not a bad pack, Peter.”
The strain on the trader's face relaxed. “But we must get them to the market, or they're fur, just plain fur, not money.”
The Indian scanned the horizon. “I'll start in an hour, if you say don't wait for Louis and the stone-marten.”
“Then don't wait for Louis and his d----d stone-marten,” jerked the trader, and turned on his heel with a curse at the threatening thaw.
Within the hour Mr. McKenzie was shaking hands with the Indian.
“Got everything, Peter?” he asked genially, now that the dog-train was really off. “Everything? Plenty of Muck-a-muck, tobac, dog-fish, matches, everything?”
“Everything,” said Peter Blackhawk, knotting his scarlet sash about the waist of his buffalo coat. “Plenty of everything but time.” He shook his head gravely. “I'm starting too late in the season, I will have to work them too hard,” he added, turning towards the dogs, which were plaintively yapping to be away, their noses raised snuffing into the wind, the chime of their saddle bells responding to every impatient twist of their wolfish bodies. Another hitch to the scarlet sash, an alert, quick glance at huskies and pack-sled, then—“Good-bye, Mr. McKenzie.”
“Good-bye, Peter, my boy.”
The red and the white palms met and the dog-train hit the trail.
An hour later the trader came to the door and looked out. Far against the southern horizon a black speck blurred the monotonous sweep of snows and sky. “He'll make it all right,” he assured himself. “He'll beat the thaw if any one can. But, d--m him, he wouldn't have gone if he didn't want to. You can't boss those Iroquois.”
Swinging into the southward trail towards the rim of civilisation, Peter Blackhawk was saying to himself, “I'll beat the thaw if any one can; but I wouldn't have come if I didn't want to. Those d----d traders can't boss an Iroquois,” which only goes to show that absolute harmony existed between those two men, trader and train-dog driver though they were.
Blackhawk had come from the far east with three score of his tribesmen on the first Red River Expedition. Voyageurs they were of a rare and desirable type, hardy, energetic, lithe, indomitable, as distinct from the western tribes as the poles from the tropics. Few of them had returned with Wolseley. The lure of the buffalo chase proved stronger than the call of their cradle lands. In the northern foothills they made their great camps, mixing with no other people, the exclusive, conservative habits of their forefathers still strong upon them. And young Blackhawk had grown into manhood, learned in the wisdom of the great Six Nations Indians of the east, and in the acquired craft and cult of the native-born plainsman of the west. McKenzie considered him the most valuable man, white or red, in all the Northwest Territories.
The third night out something disturbed Blackhawk in his sleep, and his head burrowed up from his sleeping bag. It was the heavy hour before dawn. The dogs lay sleeping, exhausted by their over-mileage of the previous day. The gray-white night lay around, soundless, motionless. What had awakened Blackhawk? His tense ears seemed to acquire sight as well as hearing. Then across his senses came the nearing doom—the honk, honk of wild geese V-ing their way along the shadow trail of the night sky. He heard the rush of their wings above, then again their heralding honk as they waned into the north. They were the death-knell of winter. Blackhawk whistled to his dogs.
“Soft snow after sunrise, boys,” he said aloud, after the manner of men who face the trail without human companionship. “We must travel at night after this, when sundown means hard surfaces.”
“The dogs stretched sulkily. They devoured their fish, while the man brewed coffee of cognac strength to fortify himself against limited sleep and increased action.
When the sun looked up above the rim of the white north, its gold was warm as well as dazzling. The snow ceased to drift under the keen night wind. The hummocks grew packed and sodden. The dogs slipped in their even trot, their feet wet and their flanks sweating. Peter put up his whip and prepared to stay until nightfall. He could not deceive himself. The snow was going and Edmonton dozens of leagues away! But with sunset the biting frost returned. The south outstretched before him, smooth, glassy, frozen hard; it was the hour of action for man and beast. Again the north became draped with an inverted crescent of silvery fringes that trembled into delicate pink, deep rose, inflammable crimson, and finally shifting into a poisonous purple, with high lights of cold, freezing cold, blue.
“God's lanterns,” whispered Peter. “He must mean me to make Edmonton. I cannot miss the trail with those northern lights ablaze.”
And night after night it was so, until one morning came a soft, feathery Chinook wind, the first real proclamation that spring was at his heels. That day gray geese in numberless flocks fishtailed the sky. As Blackhawk passed each succeeding slough, scores of brown muskrats crouched in the sunshine on the thin ice at the doors of their humped-up houses.
That night for the first time the Indian lashed the dogs, feeling in his heart the lash of his partner's tongue. Again hanging in the north were “God's lanterns,” but the invisible spirit of the coming thaw urged him on like a whip. At night he could feel its fingers clutching at the sled, balking its speed. He could see its shadowy presence ahead in the trail obstructing the course of the dogs, weighting their feet with its leaden warmth. It began to trail beside him, to mock and jeer at him, to speed neck and neck with him hour after hour. In the day-time it outstripped him, throwing up uncovered tufts of grass and black earth in the trail, so that the sled could not carry and the dogs almost bleated like sheep in their exhaustion. At night he distanced it, flying across the newly-frozen crusty snow and sloughs.
But the haunting thaw was on his track, coming nearer and nearer now even in the night time. It was tracing lines on his forehead, painting worry in his eyes. It was thinning the limbs and emptying the bellies of his dogs. It was whispering, then speaking, then shouting the word “Failure” at him. And that night a thin sickle of moon was born with its frequent change of weather. Snow fell, spongy, wet stuff. Once more the dog-train made time, and late the next afternoon, up the slush and mud of the main street in Edmonton trudged a weary-footed Indian, the sole alert thing about him being the shrewd bright eyes that snapped something of triumph to the casual greetings of acquaintances. At his heels lagged a train of four huskie dogs, cadaverous, inert, spent, their red tongues dripping, their sides palpitating, dragging the fur pack as if it were a load of lead.
But when the great fur-buyer greeted Blackhawk with a thousand questions, Peter had but four words to say, and he said them fifty times that night: “I beat the thaw.”
And when the sickle moon arose, round and ripened, Peter turned his back on the southern trail, facing once more God's lanterns of the north. This time the dogs trotted free of burden, and Peter took his ease astride a cayuse which had already begun to shed the long ragged coat it had grown for self-protection against the winter cold, leaving but the rich dark fuzz beneath, soon to be bleached buckskin colour by the hot Alberta sunshine. The little people of the prairies were thinking of spring garments; the rabbit and weasel were discarding their snowy coats for jackets of russet; the white owl was abandoning his ermine robe, calling through the night for darker, obscuring feathers; the wary lynx, which had grown huge, mat-like showshoes of fur about his feet last November, was replacing these articles, useful only for winter prowling, with his usual summer footwear of soft, silent padding.
For the third time that day Trader McKenzie came to the door and looked out. Then once more far against the southern horizon, a black speck blurred the monotonous sweep of prairie grass and sky.
“Peter,” he yelled, and taking a key from his leathern fob, unlocked a door that swung clear of the wall. From behind it he took a black bottle, ripped off the capsule, pulled the cork and set it on the table with two large horn cups.
They did not say much as they met and clasped hands, palm to palm, red and white. But McKenzie spoke: “Did you beat the thaw?”
“Beat it by driving like hell. Sold every pelt at the top-notch price—here's the credit.”
For an instant the two men eyed the paper with a gratification utterly devoid of greed. Then the Scot's hand reached for the bottle.
The horn cups were spilling full as each man raised one to his lips.
Then McKenzie said with some emotion: “Bully for you, Peter. Here's ho!”
“Ho,” said Peter.