CHAPTER VII

His first night in Five Fingers would always remain an unchangeable page in the history of Peter McRae. Time would not dim nor obliterate it but would only mellow the memory of its loneliness and its torture. In the hours when it seemed to him his world had come to an end, years pressed their weight of experience and understanding upon his shoulders, and for a little while pain and the poignancy of fears made him old, and he ceased to be a boy of fourteen.

Simon McQuarrie had left a candle burning in the loft of his cabin. By its light he had made Peter's bed, and had hugged the boy to him for a moment before saying good night; and in going, with his head and shoulders above the trap in the floor, he had paused for a moment to say: "Don't worry, Peter. They won't get your father. And you must sleep, because Mona will be looking for you early in the morning."

Then he had gone.

And now, two hours later, Peter was alone and still awake. The candle had burned out, but the moon was coming up over the eastern forests. It was a splendid spring moon, big and round and full of golden fire,[88] and its glow came in a flood through the open window of the loft.

At the window sat Peter, huddled and quiet. He knew Simon was sound asleep. All of Five Fingers was asleep. From the window he counted six or seven of the dozen log homes which made up the little settlement, and their windows were dark. They were floating in a great, yellow sea of moonlight. He could make out the dark walls of the forest and the silvery sheen of Middle Finger Inlet.

From beyond that sheen came the low murmur of Lake Superior beating against the rocks half a mile away. In springtime there was always this moaning of the big lake at Five Fingers, even on still nights when there was no wind.

And tonight it was so quiet Peter could hear his own heart beating. At times it hurt him. It rose up in him somewhere and choked him. Once or twice, if Simon had been awake, he could have heard the boy sobbing.

But Peter was beyond that now. His pale, thin face looking at the moon over the tree-tops had grown tense and set in its understanding and grief. Out under that moon his father was being hunted. Men were after him—men who would kill him or hang him if they caught him. He was no longer puzzled. His father was gone forever, just as his mother was gone, only she was dead.

He gulped hard, and his fingers clutched at the rough[89] wood of the windowsill. He could not remember his mother except as a beautiful dream. She had come to him sometimes that way, and he had felt the soft warmth of her hands and the sweet breath of her kisses in his sleep. In his brain he treasured a picture of her, but it was only a picture, while his father had been very real. Since the first day he could remember, it was his father who had made up his world, his father who had been pal, comrade and mother to him all his life, and who now—out under the light of the wonderful moon—was being hunted by men with guns, just as they had so often hunted the big white rabbits in the swamps.

Again and again as he sat alone at the window his mind went over the events which had passed so swiftly since the day before yesterday, when his father galloped in from the railroad settlement with the officers of the law at his heels, and together they ran into the safety of the woods, leaving the little cabin in the clearing which had been their home. After that had come the longer flight, two days and nights of exhaustion and hunger, and the final parting when they heard the axes of the men at Five Fingers. It was when he came to that point his heart rose up and choked him, and he wanted to cry out in the stillness of the night. If only his father had put greater faith in his strength and years, and had let him go along! He could run, and hide, and live without anything to eat for a long time, and he could sleep on the naked ground, and swim[90] streams, and he wasn't afraid. But his father had sent him on alone to this strange settlement of Five Fingers, where he had met Mona, and Aleck Curry, and Simon McQuarrie....

When his thoughts came to Mona a bit of comfort crept into Peter's soul. It wasn't so bad, with Mona near him. She had come into his life in a most unexpected and beautiful way, and had helped him whip the beast of a boy who had kicked her dog. He could still feel the warm thrill of her little hand as she led him through the woods and slashings into Five Fingers and he could see her eyes glowing at him in the dusk as she said:

"Your father is alive and he can come back. But mine can't, Peter. He is dead. And so is my mother."

Peter could almost hear her speaking those words now, whispering them, as if she realized in that instant the sacredness of the trust he had put in her. And she was right. His father was alive, and could come back, while hers....

The distant murmuring of the lake came to him faintly. It made him shiver. Out there, somewhere, her father and mother had been drowned. He wondered if Mona was awake and was also listening to that sound, so faint at times that it was like a breath of air. It must haunt her, he thought. It was always telling her about what had happened, just as she had told it to him, coming down the slope into Five Fingers, and probably it made her cry when she was[91] alone nights. It was terrible to remember one's father and mother dying like that, both at once, and Peter shuddered.

It made him a little ashamed, too. The sense of manhood which his father had planted and nurtured in him began to rise above his own hopelessness and heartache, and he leaned out of the window to look at the cabin of Pierre and Josette Gourdon, where Mona lived. That was dark, too. But Mona might be awake. He hoped so. Next to his father she was the biggest thing that had ever come into his life, and thought of her, and of her nearness, and of her lying awake thinking about him, sent a warm and comforting feeling through him, just as her gentle hands and soft eyes had brought him a mothering consolation in the earlier darkness of the forest that night.

It seemed to him, now that the reaction had come in his mind, that everything about the night was assuming a new aspect.

It was the kind of night he and his father loved, and its stillness, its shadows and floods of yellow moonlight brought him a new message. Their moon, they had always called it.

"You were born on a night with the moon shining like that," his father had told him. "It came in at the window to look at you, and it was mighty pleased."

So the moon had always been a personal thing to[92] Peter, just as it had been to his father. And the Man in the Moon, Peter observed, was in a friendly humor tonight. There was a sly look in his eyes and an odd twist to his mouth, as if he were winking at Peter and telling him how beautifully everything was coming out, both for his father and for himself. Between Mona and the moon the sickness grew less in his heart, and remembering he had not said the prayer which his father had never let him forget, he bowed his face on the windowsill and whispered the words to himself.

When he raised his head a big gray shadow was floating silently in the air just outside his window. It was one of the huge owls which turn snow-white in winter. He could hear the soft flutter of its wings as it twisted and turned and disappeared, more like a ghost than a living thing. And then a swift patter of little feet came on the roof of the cabin. It was another of the night folk, a flying squirrel. A few yards away was the big tree in which it must hide itself during the day. He wondered if the owl and the winged squirrel were among Mona's pets.

His ears began to attune themselves to the different sounds of the night. It wasn't so empty, after all. There was always the murmur of the lake, and he could hear the occasional soft thud of hoofs in the meadow, and the mooing of a cow. A loon sent out its quavering love call from somewhere beyond the dark wall of the forest, and a wolf howled to the north. Now and[93] then, deep in his sleep, Simon McQuarrie gave a snort in the room below. It was as if he were under water and came up at intervals for air, Peter thought.

Then he heard an odd chuckling, and a porcupine came waddling through the moonlight toward the cabin. Peter could see him clearly. He was big and fat and stupidly happy, and chattered like a cooing baby as he approached Simon's woodpile. And at last the tenseness went out of Peter's face, and his eyes brightened in the moonglow, and he pursed up his lips to whistle down softly at Porky. He wanted to warn him of the doom which Mona had said hovered over all porcupines at Five Fingers. But the creature was deaf and dumb and blind. He found the axe which Simon had forgotten, and grunted his satisfaction. Then he humped himself into a comfortable ball and his teeth began working like swiftly beating little hammers upon the helve of the axe, which was salty with the sweat of Simon's hands. Peter whistled.

"Get out, Porky!" he called softly.

He was considering the necessity of going down to save Simon's axe when a second chattering shadow waddled in out of the moonlit open between the cabin and the forest. It was another porcupine, a huge, black fellow who was carrying on an animated debate with himself as he advanced. Peter grinned. He loved to hear the porcupines talk to themselves. But he had never heard one quite like the big black fellow. It was[94] as if a mother pig were coming with a litter of little grunting ones at her heels, and he wondered if Simon would sleep through it all.

The newcomer made straight for the woodpile and the gray possessor of the axe helve turned to meet him. The axe was between them, a sweet morsel for porcupine teeth. Low, throaty sounds floated up to Peter. It might have been a meeting of brothers, or of sweethearts, or at least of very good friends if one judged by those sounds.

Then came a swift, flail-like movement of tails, followed by grunts and squeals and blows that sent a thrill of excitement through Peter. It was a glorious fight from the beginning, and somehow the big black fellow made him think of Aleck Curry, and in his eagerness to see the battle he leaned half out of the window.

The fighters rolled directly under him and he heard loose quills flying against the cabin as the tails struck out like clubs.

For a time he could not see who was getting the bad end of it. Then the black, who was more than ever like Aleck Curry, got a swing from the gray's tail that must have filled him with quills wrong-side in, for he let out a wail and began to retreat.

Not until then did Peter hear a sound from the room below him. A door opened. In another moment Simon McQuarrie came round the end of the cabin.

Simon was a tall and ghostly figure in his nightgown,[95] which fell to his knees, and in his hand he carried a club. The club rose and fell and Peter heard a sickening blow. A feeling of horror shot through him.

"Don't kill the white one!" he cried. "Don't kill it!"

Simon McQuarrie, about to make for his second victim, looked up at the window in surprise. Peter saw the gray porcupine ambling back toward the timber, grunting and protesting as he went, and Simon made no effort to overtake him.

"They were having a fine fight," explained Peter. "That black one was Aleck Curry, and the other was licking him. He was smaller, too."

For a space the Scotchman stood silent in the moonlight. Then he asked, "Have you been asleep, Peter?"

Peter shook his head. "No."

"What have you been doing?"

"Just looking at the moon."

Simon turned slowly, with a suspicious upward glance at Peter.

"Better go now," he advised. "If you don't I'll ask you to come down and sleep with me." As he disappeared round the end of the cabin, his scant nightgown flapping above his long and bony legs, Simon muttered under his breath: "Donald was wrong in having me tell the lad. Better to have lied and never let him know. As it is——"

An expression which only Donald McRae would have understood settled in his face, and he paused for a moment at his door to look across the open where[96] Pierre Gourdon's home lay in the radiance of the night. He could see the window of the room in which Mona slept, and the lines about his stern mouth softened.

"Poor little devils, both of them," he said, and went in to his bed.

Peter heard the door close. It seemed easier for him now to lie down upon the blankets. The moonlight streamed in upon him, and Peter could feel it. There was always that something warm and comforting about the moon. He closed his eyes, and his thoughts no longer brought a lump into his throat or hurt him. It was as if an older mind were helping him over certain difficult places. It assured him his father was safe. The police would not get him, and it would not be long before he returned. If he failed to do that he would surely write, and Peter could then go to him.

He began to think of Mona. She was, after all, the pleasantest thing he had ever had to think about, in spite of his happiness with his father. He reviewed the fight of that day and grew warm with anticipations of tomorrow and a renewal of hostilities. His hands clenched when he pictured Aleck Curry with his ugly face and big, heavy body, but they relaxed when he visioned Mona as she had taken part in the fight, with her shining black hair streaming about her and flaming eyes so beautiful he had at first been afraid to look at them. In his life in the wilderness he had never had much to do with girls, but here was one who[97] pleased him completely, and all the ideals which his father had built up in him were roused and set on fire. His mother must have been like Mona when she was a little girl, because it seemed to him his father had always pictured her like that.

Then he grew uneasy and shame crept a little upon him. It made him squirm in his blankets to think that Aleck Curry would have whipped him if Mona hadn't joined in those last two or three minutes of the fight. That Aleck was bigger and older than he, and that he had fought under the disadvantages of hunger and exhaustion, did not satisfactorily explain his own failure to Peter. He was glad his father had not seen that fight, even though he had been taken at a great disadvantage. But Mona had seen it. She had seen him on the ground in those final moments, with Aleck about to pommel him into disgraceful submission, and she had come in to save him.

There was only one thing to do under the circumstances, and the inspiration of it comforted him. He would go out early in the morning, hunt up Aleck Curry and lick him. He was sure he could do it now, even though he was smaller and lighter than Aleck, for he would be rested and would have a good breakfast to start with.

He fell asleep. The big owl hooted softly from the top of a stub near the mill, and the flying squirrel was joined by its mate in a game of tag on the roof. The moon sailed higher, and under it a buck and a doe[98] crossed within a stone's throw of Peter's window. All this Peter missed in an excitement of his own as his unsettled mind traveled swiftly from one dream to another. First he was fleeing with his father, and they were pursued by a horde of enemies, and all of these enemies were Aleck Currys. After that he dreamed of Aleck and Mona, and he fought so fiercely, with Mona's dark eyes and hair filling his vision, that Simon heard him twisting and groaning and climbed quietly up the ladder from below to look at him.

For a long time the stern Scotchman watched Peter, and in the fainter light of the moon which now filled the room a miracle of change passed over his face and it became as gentle as a woman's. No one, since long years ago, had ever caught that gentleness in Simon McQuarrie's face.

"It seems only yesterday," he whispered softly to himself, in a moment when Peter's pale face lay quietly in the crook of his arm. "Only yesterday, Helen."

Something trembled inside him, and he knew the mother was in that room with Peter, watching over him as he had seen her many times in those years when he had cared for the two, those beautiful but pitiless years when he had hardened his heart against all hope for himself in his devotion and duty to his hunted friend, Donald McRae. Only yesterday! And yet many hard and tedious years had passed since then,[99] and through them he had gone like a piece of iron that is hardened into steel by the alchemy of fire. Tonight had come the mysterious change. He climbed down softly, his heart trembling. He loved Peter. He loved him as he had loved the mother.