CHAPTER XIV

In the weeks and months following the plague at Five Fingers Father Albanel did not forget his promise to Peter, and back in the shelter of the woods, where their secret was safe between them, he taught the boy "how to fight like a gentleman—if he had to fight at all." It was then Peter learned there was something more helpful than brute strength, and as his skill increased and he mastered one after another what the little missioner called "the tricks of the fighting game," his enthusiasm rose to a point where he could scarcely keep his secret from Mona. Their boxing-gloves, which Father Albanel had smuggled from the settlement, they kept securely hidden, and not until years later did Peter know that the holy man who was teaching him had at one time been regarded by fighting men as the handiest man with his fists between Fort William and Hudson Bay.

What he had learned he did not fully realize until early in June, when Aleck Curry and his father and the hateful black tug returned to the settlement. Using the influence of a brother who had been successful in politics, Izaak Curry had obtained timber concessions in several directions about Five Fingers, and now built[183] himself a cabin near the shore, but hidden back in the spruce. This he tenanted with a third brother and his wife, and with them Aleck lived while the tug was making its trips between Five Fingers and Fort William.

Aleck had grown still bigger, and in spite of Peter's resolution to make friends with him he would have none of it. His hatred for Peter was like some deadly thing that had poisoned every drop of blood in his veins, and Mona's growing beauty, and her quite open affection for his rival, stirred something that was more than hatred—more than brooding vindictiveness—in Aleck's heart. His father was rich, and he knew what that meant back in town; and his uncle was a power in politics, and had recently become Commissioner of Provincial Police. It enraged him that these facts carried no weight in Five Fingers. His own importance as the son of a rich man and the nephew of a Commissioner was utterly unrecognized here, while in town it had given him a position of first rank in spite of his bullying nature. This lack of appreciation, as he thought of it, he laid entirely at Peter's door, for it was Peter who had robbed him of his chances with Mona in the first place, and it was Peter who was keeping her away from him now.

So it was not long after Aleck's arrival before the climax came. It happened well out of sight of everybody, where Aleck had schemed that it should be, for he wanted no interference in his "beating up" of Peter.[184] In the end both boys returned to the settlement with bleeding noses and black eyes. Neither was whipped. Aleck was dumbfounded. That his size and weight and all the training he had given himself during the winter had failed to beat Peter was unbelievable.

For two weeks after the fight there was not a day, excepting Sundays, when Father Albanel and Peter did not "take a walk" in the woods together. And along with these secret sessions Peter took advantage of every opportunity to run and swim that he might add to his wind. Almost daily he accepted insults from Aleck in order to avoid a fight, and never a day passed that Father Albanel did not repeat his warning to Peter to postpone further combat as long as possible. But the time came when Aleck once more followed up insult with physical action, with the result that he suffered a defeat so completely decisive that in August he returned to Fort William, fairly laughed out of Five Fingers.

Mona now made up Peter's world, and in his heart she kept constantly burning the faith that his father would return. But when winter came again, and another spring, and there was still no word from Donald McRae, Peter came at times to believe that his father was gone out of his life forever.

Aleck Curry again returned to Five Fingers in this third summer of Peter's life there. He was nineteen now, and was commissioned by his father to take an interest in his lumber business along the coast. A year[185] had made a big change in him, and his hatred for Peter and his passion for Mona he kept more to himself. His father told Simon that in another year Aleck was going to join the provincial police, and would soon hold a commission in it....

Early in September, when Mona was in her sixteenth year, the event against which Peter had been steeling his heart for many months became a fact. Pierre and Josette had long planned that after Marie Antoinette's teaching in the little settlement school Mona should spend a year, and possibly two, under the tutelage of the Sisters in the Ursuline Convent in the city of Quebec. On the day Mona left, accompanied by Joe's wife, who went to see her safely settled in the distant city, Peter's world went as black as on that other day when his father disappeared out of his life.

The winter that followed was an endless one for Peter. Once each week, as surely as the weeks came round, he received a long letter from Mona, and five times during the winter he made the trip to the railroad settlement alone that he might not miss the love and cheer which came from her. And he was at the train to meet her, with Pierre and Josette and Marie Antoinette and Joe, when she came from the school in June.

At first he was dazed by the change in her, she had grown so much taller, and more beautiful, and he stood as if turned into wood while she greeted and kissed all the others. Then she turned to him, and her face was flooded with a color which he had never seen in it[186] before. And after that—he could never remember how it happened—their arms were around each other, and Mona was crying—crying until tears blinded her—and he was kissing her, and she was kissing him, and then ran away from him to hug all the others again.

This summer in Five Fingers decided the lives of Peter and Mona. She was almost seventeen. She would go to school one more year, because that was the desire of Josette and Marie Antoinette. She would be nearly eighteen then. And when she was nineteen—on her nineteenth birthday, if Peter liked it that way—she would marry him.

During the second year of her absence Peter devoted every energy of soul and body toward making himself worthy of her. He worked and planned and studied hard under Marie Antoinette and Father Albanel. During this year several changes came to Five Fingers. Simon McQuarrie ended his dealings with Izaak Curry, and to rid their paradise of a bad memory Adette Clamart deliberately set fire to the Curry shack after he had gone, so that nothing remained but a square of ash and charred timbers. "And the wild phlox will cover that next summer," said Adette with a grim little shrug of her pretty shoulders.

Aleck Curry joined the police. In a day and a night, it seemed, he sprang into a great bulk of a man, heavy-faced, huge-shouldered, a giant in strength and physique, and with a hatred for Peter in his heart that had grown more merciless with the passing of years.[187] He saw Mona each summer, and when she returned from her second year at school her beauty stirred in him a passion which submerged all other instincts and desires. He became a watchful, waiting beast, hiding the flame that was consuming him, preparing himself for the opportunity which he was determined should some day come his way.

As each week brought nearer the day of their own supreme happiness Mona and Peter no longer sensed this menace, or even thought of it, and because Aleck was so utterly outside all the possibilities of her life the deeper sentiment of womanhood growing in Mona compelled her to treat him more kindly. Even Simon's suspicions were dulled, for during the winter preceding her nineteenth birthday Aleck visited the settlement only twice. Another spring and summer followed. The twelfth of the coming October was Mona's birthday. On that day she would become Peter's wife. It was planned that they should live with Pierre and Josette until the good logging snows came, when all of Five Fingers would join in building their home.

It was on a day in August that Mona set out alone for the beaver pond, carrying a basket in which was her own and Peter's supper. Peter, returning from a trip up the shore, had promised to meet her before sundown in their old trysting-place, where two winters before he had built her a little "play-house" cabin.

And on this same afternoon, as Mona left the settlement, a stranger was making his way toward it.

[188]

An attitude of unusual caution and a haunted way of looking about him were the two things one would have noticed first as he came out of a swamp into an open forest of white pine. He drew in a deep breath of the freer air, and with a gesture of relief wiped his face with a hand that was rough and twisted and scratched by contact with briers. He was oddly disheveled and smeared with swamp oil. His gray head with its grizzled and uncut hair wore no hat, his shirt was in rags at the throat and sleeves and his trousers were tucked into high boots which bore evidence of having gone through mud and water to their tops. Upon his shoulders he carried a pack, and though the tenuity of its folds emphasized its lightness in weight, the man freed himself from his burden with an audible gasp of relief.

Then he leaned against a pine and looked back at the swamp from which he had come, listening with singular intentness for any sound which might strike with warning or unusual import upon the languorous stillness of the afternoon. His face was pallid under its stubble of beard even after the heat and exertion he had passed through; his cheeks were sunken as if by sickness or hunger, and his lips were drawn and thin. In his eyes seemed to lie all the strength that remained in the man. They were furtive and questing as they watched, missing no shadow that moved.

The sweetness of ripened summer, its lazy whisperings and the stillness which comes in a deep wood when[189] the sun is overhead lay about him or trembled softly in the air. For hours he had been in an oven of swamp heat and winged pests; here it was cool. In the pine tops a hundred and fifty feet above his head was a faint stir of the breeze that came from Lake Superior. It reached down and touched his hot cheeks. He could taste the invigorating freshness of it, and there came slowly a change in his restless eyes, a softening of the tense lines about his mouth, a lighting up of his face where before it had held only suspense and watchful uncertainty. He picked up his shoulder pack, carrying it in his hand as he turned away from the swamp.

The transformation in the man's face was strangely at odds with the painful physical effort which accompanied his tedious progress. He no longer looked behind him but kept his eyes ahead, as if anticipating at any moment the appearance of something of vital importance toward which he was struggling with the last bit of strength that remained in his body. When at last he came to a little brook, gurgling between the pine roots, he fell rather than knelt beside it, and drank like one dying of thirst. Then again and again he plunged his face into hands filled with cold water and wet his head until his gray hair was dripping.

He followed the brook. Several times he stumbled and fell in the rougher places and once his toe caught a root and he plunged into the stream itself. At the end of an hour he had traveled a mile. Then he came to a knoll of hardwoods, crossed it and made his way[190] down through a lacework of yellow birch until he arrived at the edge of a deep, still pond that began in sunlight and lost itself in the almost cavernous coolness and shadow of a spruce and cedar forest. Instinctively the man knew it was a beaver pond, and almost instantly he had proof it was alive. A warning tail lashed the water with the sound of a paddle struck sideways, and across the pool, a short stone's throw away, an object moved through the water.

Dizzily the man sat down. His vision was clouded so that it was difficult for him to see even the moving object. He fell upon his side and stretched himself out on a couch of thick green grass. In another moment he was lying with his eyes closed but with ears keenly alert. During the next half-hour he heard every sound about him; then his pale eyelids closed heavily and a weariness of brain and body which he could no longer combat dulled his senses to a physical and mental inertness which was almost sleep.

In this state of somnolence he had lain for possibly a quarter of an hour when a sound reached his ears which first opened his eyes and then brought him in a quick and defensive movement to a posture that was half sitting and half crouching.

The sound came again, and amazement replaced the alarm in his face. What he heard was a feminine voice, strangely soft and subdued in this place of coolness and shadow and mysterious stillness. It was a note of laughter, almost birdlike in its sweetness, and the[191] man's fingers clutched at the breast of his ragged shirt as he listened. Then he began to crawl slowly in the direction of the sound, making his way through a green thicket of willows, careful that no twig snapped under his weight to give warning of his approach. Suddenly he came upon a scene whose unexpectedness was almost a shock to him.

He had reached the farther edge of the willows, and before him was a little meadow not more than half an acre in extent, green and filled with wild flowers. Almost within reach of his hands was a mountain ash weighted with ripening fruit, and under this tree, close to the edge of the pool, a girl was seated on the grass, partly facing him. His first glimpse of her was of a bowed head crowned by a wealth of coiled hair; then, as she looked up, he saw her face. Her cheeks were flushed, her dark eyes shone, and as she laughed again she snuggled her face close down over a furry thing scrambling about in her lap. The man saw there were two of these creatures—baby beavers. His eyes wandered a little. At the edge of the pond, half out of the water, was a full-grown beaver. And this older inhabitant of the place was conscious of his presence in the willow thicket!

The girl was talking and laughing with the little ones, calling them by name. One was Telesphore and the other Peterkin—and the man drew in his breath with a gasp. He watched her tease them with a carrot. One scrambled up and tangled a foot in her hair.

[192]

"Peterkin!" she cried. "Peterkin—you little ruffian!"

The old beaver remained stolid and motionless, watching the menace in the willows. A companion swam lazily past, scented the danger and struck the water a blow with his tail before he dived.

The girl looked up quickly and spoke to the old beaver. "What is the matter, Peter?" she cried. "Don't be foolish. Come and get your carrot!"

It was then she heard a little cry behind her, and turned and saw the man's face in the willows.