Fur Pirates - A. M. Chisholm

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rage. Out of the sudden silence that followed came Louis' voice, quite stripped of its jeering tone:

      "Go easy, Jackstraws! I don't let no man call me dose t'ing! You say somet'ing more, now, an' for sure I wring your ol' neck!"

      "I guess not," Hayes returned grimly. "You won't wring nobody's neck, you——" And he added a phrase quite unprintable.

      Came a bellow from Louis, the crash of an overturned chair, and the report of a pistol shot, shattering in that confined little space. I leaped from my bunk to the doorway.

      Louis had Hayes by the throat with his right hand, while with his left he held Hayes' right, which held a smoking six-shooter, toward the roof. For a moment they seemed to stand motionless, statuesque, in the white drift of the powder smoke which eddied in the lamplight, for this was in the days before smokeless powder had much favor. I knew that Louis, with his tremendous strength, could break Hayes in pieces. But, as I looked, Ballou sprang in, twisted away the gun, and cursed them both for a couple of old fools. He saw me standing in the door, and scowled blackly, but only for a moment.

      "Woke you up, did they, Bob? Well, there'll be no more of it. We're all going to bed."

      His eyes challenged contradiction. To my surprise, the two combatants made no objection. They grinned sardonically at each other.

      "Well, I guess I was too fast with my tongue and too slow with my gun," said Hayes. "In the old days you wouldn't have got your hands on me."

      "Mebbe I'm leetle faster myself when I'm yo'nger," Louis returned. "I guess we have 'noder leetle drink, an' hit dose blanket."

      Ballou followed me to my bunk, and, sitting down, began to unlace his moccasins.

      "I'm sorry this happened when you were here, Bob," said he. "They got a jolt or so too much. However, they're good friends now. Still I wouldn't want any one else to know about it."

      "I won't say anything," I promised. "I don't talk much."

      "I know you don't. That's one thing I like about you. You've got better judgment than a lot of men. I s'pose it was the shot woke you up?"

      "Yes, I guess so," I answered, which was not quite true, but eminently discreet; and, anyway, I had no idea what they had been talking about. He nodded.

      "Well, don't say nothing about it. If it got around, your uncle might not like your comin' here, and I wouldn't blame him, though nothin' like this is goin' to happen again. And then I was thinkin' that this fall you might come along with us on a hunt, and if he knew of this racket he might put his foot down on that."

      Which made my silence absolutely sure, for a hunting trip in the hills had been my dream for years, and I would not imperil its realization. And as for telling Peggy, though she was as a rule my confidante, naturally there must be many things in a man's life of which he does not speak to his womenkind.

      3. What the River Brought

      CHAPTER III.

       Table of Contents

      WHAT THE RIVER BROUGHT.

      That spring I was very busy. For, as it happened, Uncle Fred had sprained his ankle, and Gus Swanson's rheumatism laid him up for a week at a stretchy and so the bulk of the work fell on me.

      There was the garden to be planted and the grain to be sown and a patch of winter clearing to be broken and fenced, and a score of odd jobs done. And so I was hard at it from dawn to dusk; and, though I was strong beyond my years, I would nod over my supper and fall into a dead sleep immediately afterward.

      Though I worked cheerfully enough, in my heart I loathed the labor. And while I worked my thoughts were not of the tasks in hand, but of the fall and camp fires in the hills and mysterious, lonely waterways and still, dark-fringed lakes where moose and caribou and deer drank in the dawn fogs and the cold dusks.

      At last there came a time when the new fence stood, and the raw soil of the fresh clearing lay uppermost, and the wheat and oats sprouted green in the drills; and in our garden the peas shot out delicate tendrils, and the potatoes pushed upward sturdy stalks of dark green, and all flourished.

      Then I had breathing space to employ as I saw fit, and my inclinations led me to the water front, where I drove fresh stakes and made a new log landing and painted our two canoes, and sometimes sat for half an hour idle, my eyes on the ospreys wheeling against the blue and the vivid, darting, chattering kingfishers, or watching the slow, brown current slip by.

      Here Peggy joined me one quiet afternoon, and we sat talking of the future and wondering what it might hold for us.

      Suddenly Peggy exclaimed:

      "Look, Bob, there's a canoe!"

      I looked up. A canoe had rounded the bend and was coming toward us. It held two men. The one in the stern was an Indian, a particularly worthless Cree whom we knew as Joe Fishbelly. The other man was white, and a stranger. He was not paddling, though a paddle rested athwart the canoe in front of him. He lay with his back against a roll of dunnage, and seemed satisfied to let the Indian do the work, which was, of course, quite proper, for no doubt he was paying for it, but looked lazy. As he saw us, he turned and spoke to the Cree, who swung the nose of the canoe in on our landing.

      When they were close, I could see that the white man was young, and, though big of frame, very pale and thin, which was the more noticeable because he was naturally of a dark complexion. His head was bare, and his black hair clipped close to the scalp. His cheek bones seemed ready to start through the skin, and his cheeks were flat against his teeth, without any kindly padding. The angles of his jaw stood out prominently. Indeed his face, owing to his exceeding leanness, seemed all knobs and angles, and there were sad-colored hollows beneath his eyes. The eyes themselves put me in mind of some one's whom I knew, being full of a strange, whimsical, quizzical, quenchless deviltry, and yet steady and cool. And suddenly it came to me that in expression they were like Dinny Pack's, though his were blue and these were almost black.

      The canoe slid alongside the landing, and its passenger straightened up from his recumbent position and bowed to Peggy.

      "Good afternoon!" he said, smiling at us. The words were common enough, and yet there was something in his voice and manner which made us aware that he was not a man of the woods and rivers. "Can you tell me," he asked, "how far it is to Tom Ballou's? Man afraid of a paddle back there"—and he nodded back over his shoulder at Fishbelly—"says it's about twenty miles, as nearly as I can understand him, and that we can't make it to-day."

      "He's a liar," I said, for I held Fishbelly in contempt, and did not care whether I hurt his feelings or not. "It's not more than five."

      "I suspected something like that," said he. "Thank you. You hear that, my oxidized friend! I believe in my soul Ananias was a Cree!"

      "They're not all like him. But there's nobody at Ballou's. They're away somewhere—gone prospecting, I think—and they won't be back for two or three weeks, and perhaps longer."

      "The deuce they are!" he ejaculated ruefully, and rubbed his clipped scalp in comical perplexity. "I beg your pardon. But that puts me in a nice fix. Here, I'll come ashore for a minute, if you don't mind." He did so rather slowly, as though his legs were weak beneath him, and bowed once more to Peggy. "Before I tell you my troubles," said he, "permit me to introduce myself. My name is Dunleath, first name James, usually shortened down to a nonapostolic 'Jim.' I am a friend of Mr. Wallace Dent Fothergill, whom I think you know. I presume I am addressing Miss Cory and her brother, am I not?"

      "Yes, sir," I said. "I'm Bob Cory, and this is my sister Peggy."

      He bowed again, smiling, and Peggy smiled and I laughed without knowing why; but just, I suppose, because of the big, radiant friendliness of his smile and his eyes.

      "So now I'll unload

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