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TOM AKERLEY

His Adventures in the Tall Timber and
at Gaspard’S Clearings on the Indian River


      *      *      *      *      *      *

                 STORIES BY
     Captain Theodore Goodridge Roberts

           Comrades of the Trails
           The Red Feathers
           Flying Plover
           The Fighting Starkleys
           Tom Akerley

              THE PAGE COMPANY
      53 Beacon Street, Boston, Mass.

      *      *      *      *      *      *


[Illustration: “THE BEAR’S GREASE PROVED TO BE AS POTENT AS IT SMELT.”]


TOM AKERLEY

His Adventures in the Tall Timber and
at Gaspard’S Clearings on the Indian River


TOM AKERLEY

His Adventures in the Tall Timber and at
Gaspard’s Clearing on the Indian River

Related by

CAPTAIN THEODORE GOODRIDGE ROBERTS

Author of “The Fighting Starkleys,” “Comrades of the Trails,”
“Red Feathers,” etc.

Illustrated by Ernest Fuhr






Boston
L. C. Page and Company
(Incorporated)
MDCCCCXXIII

Copyright, 1922,
By Perry Mason Company

Copyright, 1923
By L. C. Page and Company
(Incorporated)

All rights reserved

Made in U. S. A.

First impression, April, 1923

Printed by C. H. Simonds Company
Boston, Mass., U. S. A.




                                CONTENTS

                      I The Flight
                     II The Girl and the Man
                    III Catherine’s Plan
                     IV The Heaviest Hitter
                      V The Plan Succeeds
                     VI Mick Otter, Injun
                    VII Taking to the Trail
                   VIII Black Forests and Gray Swamps
                     IX Gaspard Understands
                      X Mick Otter, Match-Maker
                     XI The Military Cross




                      LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

    “The bear’s grease proved to be as potent as it smelt.”

    “They sat side by side on a small heap of straw”

    “‘He was figgerin’ to lose ye in the woods’”

    “It was hard work and slow progress”

    “He ... thrust his head and shoulders out of the window”




                            TOM AKERLEY




                             CHAPTER I

                             THE FLIGHT


The night was hot and hazy. The aerodrome was in darkness save for a
moving light in the black maw of one of the hangars and a shine from
the open window of the office on the other side of the ground. All
the machines were down and in.

Two men were in the small hut which served as field-headquarters and
office for this particular unit of the Dominion Air Force. They sat
at opposite sides of a large table, one leaning back in his chair
with a cigar in his mouth, the other stooped forward over a map
which he studied intently. Clerks, orderlies, pilots, observers and
mechanics all were gone, with the exceptions of these two and the
man with the lantern across at the hangars.

“Ottawa seems determined to decorate every one who ever flew, be he
alive or dead,” remarked the elder of the two, without removing the
cigar from his mouth and still gazing upward at the low ceiling. “We
seem to have more Military Crosses and such things than we know what
to do with.”

“Yes, sir?” returned the younger officer inquiringly, looking up
from the map.

“It seems so to me,” continued Colonel Nasher. “You knew a fellow
named Angus Bruce, I believe.”

“Yes, I knew Angus Bruce.”

“Ottawa suggests a posthumous Military Cross for him.”

The younger officer said nothing to that, although the expression of
his face suggested that he wanted to say a great deal. Instead of
speaking he fell to studying his map again. The line of his mouth
was tense. Even the set of his broad, lean shoulders looked tense. A
keen observer would have noticed a general air of tenseness about
him—tenseness of self-control practiced under difficulties.

“But I think my letter to Ottawa will fix that,” added the colonel,
still speaking around his cigar.

The other looked across the table again.

“Fix it?” he queried.

His voice was low but slightly tremulous.

“Kill it,” replied the colonel.

“I don’t understand you, sir,” said the junior, still speaking
quietly. “Bruce earned it several times, to my personal knowledge.”

“I don’t agree with you. I knew the fellow for years. We used to
live in the same town. There’s a yellow streak in the breed. You
can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

“He had no yellow streak. He proved his courage a dozen times—scores
of times—his courage and his worth.”

“So you say, major.”

At that the major pushed his chair back and stood up.

“Yes, that’s what I say!” he cried.

Colonel Nasher sat up straight, plucked his cigar from his mouth and
stared at his second-in-command.

“And I mean what I say,” continued the major, in a loud and shaken
voice. “And I know what I am talking about.”

“But you forget to whom you are talking!” roared the colonel.

“No I don’t,” retorted the younger man, wildly. “I am talking to
you—and there is some true talk coming to you. You’ve been asking
for it ever since I joined this outfit. I know what your game is.
You want to get me out—to make people believe that my nerve is gone
and I’m no longer fit for the service. I’m fit enough—fit for
anything but to sit and listen to you lie about a friend of
mine—about the memory of a friend who was killed over the Boche
lines. You’re not fit to name a man like Angus Bruce. You never saw
him fight. You never saw anybody fight. A yellow streak? I have seen
him go up alone after four of them! You’ll swallow that lie, Colonel
Nasher, here and now!”

The colonel got to his feet, glaring. He was a large man with a
large face. The only small things about him were his heart and mind.
His eyes looked like polished gray stones in his red face.

“Your dead friend won’t get his cross and you’ll lose yours!” he
cried, pointing a thick finger at the ribbons on the major’s breast.
“I’ll break you for this, you upstart! Consider yourself under
arrest. I’ll teach you that you’re not in France now!”

The major stepped swiftly and with smooth violence around the end of
the table; and then, quick as a flash, his right fist came in
contact with the colonel’s red chin. Down went the colonel with a
crash.

The major stood above his prostrate C. O. for a few seconds, staring
down at the motionless bulk and shaking as if with fever chills.

“What’s the use!” he exclaimed hysterically, turning away. “I’m as
helpless as if I were under French mud with Angus Bruce.”

He took his leather cap and leather coat from a hook on the door,
opened the door and stepped into the dark warm night. He saw the
lantern beyond the level field and hastened across to it.

“I want the old bus out again, Dever,” he said.

“Very good, sir,” replied Dever.

They wheeled the ’plane from the open hangar. The major put on his
leather coat and cap and climbed in. He started the engines and
switched on the internal lights. Then he leaned over and said, “You
remember Major Angus Bruce, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir, I remember him well,” replied the man on the ground. “We
don’t forget that kind, sir, do we—nor ever will.”

“A good soldier, Angus Bruce.”

“One of the smartest and bravest in the Old Force, sir. He crashed
his sixth just a day after you crashed your seventh, sir.”

“Yes, I remember it. Now get me off, Dever, and then go over to the
office and see if the colonel wants anything. If he needs a
stimulant I think you’ll find something of the sort in the
right-hand drawer on his side of the table.”

“Very good, sir. When’ll you be back?”

“Not before sunrise. Don’t wait up for me.”

Dever gave a downward heave on a propeller-blade. Then the wide,
white ’plane slid, roaring, into the darkness.

                 *       *       *       *       *

Akerley was flying low; and when he saw the little smudge of yellow
light on the black expanse beneath him he went down to it like a
wing-weary duck to the sheen of water. The numbness of indifference
and confusion that had possessed him for an hour or more passed
swiftly from his brain and spirit. His nerves snapped back to duty
and his vision cleared. The light expanded to his gaze as he neared
it and by its form and position he judged it to come from an open
doorway of modest dimensions. It streamed out upon a green level;
and he reasoned hopefully that the level ground would, very likely,
be of considerable extent in front of the building. So he shut off
his flagging engines, swooped around, dipped and flattened.

The machine ran, swaying and lurching, through old Gaspard’s
half-grown oats; and just as Akerley was about to congratulate
himself on the soundness of his reasoning, the right plane came in
violent contact with an ancient and immovable stump of pine.

Akerley recovered consciousness in the dew-wet grain, in the gray
dawn. He lay on his left side, with his left shoulder dug into the
soft soil. The sappy stems of the young oats had saved his face and
head from serious injury; but there was blood on his cheek. He felt
a stab of pain through his shoulder as he sat up and looked dizzily
around; and his first thought was that a bullet had gone through
him. Then he remembered his changed situation and altered
circumstances.

He saw the machine on its nose beside the sturdy old stump. One wing
was ripped off and twisted hopelessly. That sight did not distress
him, for he had finished with the machine anyway. It had served his
purpose.

He sat in a field of half-grown oats, ten or twelve acres in extent,
rimmed all around by dense forest. A large log-house and two barns
stood in a group near the farther edge of the clearing.

Akerley got slowly and painfully to his feet and moved toward the
house, the door of which stood open. He had been so badly shaken by
his throw from the machine that he had to sink to his knees and
right hand several times on the way. He reached the door-step at
last and sat down on it. So far, he had not caught a glimpse of
anything human and alive. A few hens scratched about a stable door
and a small black dog eyed him inquiringly from a distance.

The door stood open upon the main apartment of the house, which was
very evidently kitchen and living-room in one. It contained a long,
high-backed settle against one wall, a deal table against another
and a dresser of unstained pine against a third. Plates, platters
and bowls, yellow, blue-and-white and a few adorned with flowery
designs in gorgeous hues, and a big brown tea-pot, stood on the
shelves of the dresser. There was a wide chimney with a fireplace
containing fire-dogs and a crane with dangling pot-hooks; and to one
side of the chimney, with an elbow of pipe leading into the rough
masonry, stood a small stove. Both hearth and stove were cold. A few
rag mats, and two deer skins worn bald in patches, lay on the floor
of squared timbers. The log walls were sheathed with thin strips of
cedar, the partitions and ceiling were of wide pine boards. Rough
hewn rafters ran across the ceiling. There was no sign of plaster
anywhere in that wide room. There were closed doors in the
partitions to the right and left, and one in the log wall beside the
chimney, opposite the open door. A wide ladder went steeply up from
a corner to an open trap in the ceiling.

Akerley got stiffly to his feet and crossed the threshold. He
knocked sharply on the open door; he crossed to the stove and hit
the top of the oven with the poker; he shouted, “Wake up!”, “Good
morning,” and “Is any one at home?” Knocks and shouts alike failed
to produce a response of any sort except from the little black dog.
The dog looked in at him across the threshold with an expression of
sharp but good-humored curiosity on his black face; and when the
intruder addressed him familiarly by the name of “Pup” and asked him
where the devil every one was gone to, he wriggled with delight but
continued to keep his distance.

Akerley opened the back door and looked out, under the roof of a
narrow porch and across a wood-yard, at the high edge of the forest.
Sunshine was flooding over the clearing by this time like a bright,
level tide. The porch ran the length of the house; and in its
shelter stood an upright churn, a couple of tubs, and two benches
supporting empty pails and pans and “creamers” which shone like
silver in the sun. Also, there were two old splint-bottom
rocking-chairs on the porch; and on the seat of one of these lay an
open book on its face.

Akerley stepped out onto the rough hewn flooring of the porch and
stared about him inquiringly. Here was a comfortable and well-kept
home; here were the material things of peaceful industry and
leisure; but where had the people gone to? He knew that they had
been at home last night, for the light from their open door had
guided him to his landing. He sat down in one of the chairs, for he
was still weak from the shaking and the pain in his shoulder, and
lifted the book from the other.

“My hat!” he exclaimed. “Where am I?”

The book was the elder Dumas’ “Three Musketeers,” printed in the
original language of that great and industrious romancer.

He replaced the book and reëntered the house. The dog, who had
advanced as far as the middle of the room, immediately beat a
wriggling retreat to his old position beyond the threshold. Akerley
ascended the ladder and searched through the loft, which was divided
into three chambers—a bedroom, a storeroom and a lumber-room. Nobody
was hidden there. He descended and opened the closed doors off the
main room. Behind them he found a pantry and storeroom combined, a
long apartment containing a carpenter’s table and several large
grain bins, and a bedroom. They were all as empty of humanity as the
kitchen and upper floor.

It was now fifteen minutes past six by the clock on the
chimney-shelf; and the intruder felt keen stirrings of hunger. He
had not eaten since an early hour of the previous day. He made a
fire in the stove with kindlings and dry wood which lay ready to
hand, and then looked about for water. There was none in the house.
He took an empty pail from the porch and followed a path that ran
from the chip-yard into the green gloom of the forest. He found the
spring within ten paces of the edge of the clearing, roofed over and
fenced about with poles. The clear water brimmed the oblong basin
that had been dug for it; and in the lower end of the basin stood
two tin “creamers” held down by a stone-weighted board across their
tops.

“Last night’s milk, I suppose,” said Akerley, as he filled his pail.
“What about this morning’s milking? Are they leaving that to me, I
wonder?”

He returned to the house and cooked and ate a very good breakfast.
He found everything he wanted—bread, tea, sugar, butter, bacon and
jam. Then he lit a cigarette.

“I won’t wash dishes, anyway,” he said, “I draw the line at that.
I’ll dirty every cup and plate in the house first. But I suppose
I’ll have to go and look for those blasted cows.”

His shoulder felt better, but still very stiff. He placed a dish of
bread and milk on the floor and pointed it out to the little dog,
then hung two tin pails on his arm and went out to look for the
dairy herd. On his way, he searched the barns. The stables were
empty, save for a few dozens of scratching fowls. He found a
pig-house of two pens and open runs behind one of the barns. One
suite was occupied by a large sow and the other by five promising
pink youngsters. They all greeted the sight of him enthusiastically.

“Pigs!” he exclaimed. “I suppose they think I’ll attend to their
confounded pigs.”

He entered the pig-house and found there a small iron stove and
large iron pot. The pot, which had a capacity of about two flour
barrels, was half-full of a stiff sort of porridge. Beside it stood
a spade with a short handle. He set the pails on the floor and
spaded a quantity of this mess into the troughs to right and left.
The exertion sent stabs of pain through his injured shoulder. He
glared at the big sow on his right and the small pigs on his left,
who had dashed in from their yards at the sounds of his spading and
were now sunk to the eyes and knees in their untidy breakfast.

“They’d better come home before that pot is empty,” he said. “If
they think I’m going to cook for a bunch of pigs while they go
fishing they’re everlastingly mistaken.”

The big field of oats spread completely around the barns, but from
the barn-yard a fenced road led through the crop to a second
clearing behind a screen of trees. This clearing, which was rough
pasture, was fenced and occupied by three horses and a foal; and in
a small, square yard at the near edge of it stood five cows in
expectant attitudes. One cow had a bell at her neck, which she
ding-donged restlessly.

Akerley had learned to milk when he was a small boy and used to
visit a brother of his mother’s housekeeper in the country. The
knack of it is not easily lost, though the muscles of hands and
wrists may suffer from neglect of the exercise. He milked the five
cows, grumbling at the necessity; and he was glad that two of them
proved to be remarkably light producers. He then let them into the
pasture with the horses; and upon seeing them hasten toward a green
clump of alders in a far corner, he knew that he would not have to
carry water for them. Owing to the painful condition of his
shoulder, he was forced to make two trips with the milk. He found
the house still unoccupied, save by the little black dog.

One thing led naturally to another; and Akerley found no time that
morning to consider the graver problems of his situation. He was
conscientious to an extraordinary degree and knew just enough about
farm life to feel the responsibilities of his peculiar position.
Milking led to the care of milk and the washing of creamers. He
carried the skimmed milk to the pigs, cooked and ate his dinner,
then fell asleep in one of the chairs on the porch.

Akerley slept heavily and senselessly for several hours; but at last
his head slipped along the back of the chair into so uncomfortable a
position that his brain shook off its torpor and busied itself with
the spinning of dreams. They were startling and distressing dreams.
They were of flying in fogs and over strange cities and through
resounding barrages, of fighting against fearful odds, and of
falling—falling—falling. Crash!—and he awoke just in time to save
himself from tumbling sideways off the chair.

He opened his eyes wide and straightened himself with a gasp. His
heart was going at a terrific rate, his nerves were all twanging,
and for a second or two he felt numb with fear. Then he saw the
afternoon sunlight along the edge of the forest and remembered. He
laughed with relief.

“This is better,” he said to the black dog, who sat on the edge of
the porch and faced him with an expression of undiminished interest
and expectancy. “Yes, a great deal better, you black pup. Better for
the nerves and better for everything—and you can take a
flight-commander’s word for it, Pup.”

So great was his relief at awakening from his nightmares to those
peaceful and rustic surroundings that, for several minutes, his mood
and manner of whimsical complaint were forgotten. He surveyed the
yard, with its cord wood, chips and saw-horse; and the path leading
into the brown and green shades of the forest; and the dog wagging
its tail in front of him, with the keenest satisfaction. His
appreciative glance lowered to the floor between his feet and the
dog.

“What’s this!” he exclaimed, staring. “Where’d it come from?”

He stooped forward and picked up a piece of folded white paper. It
was written on with pencil, in a round hand, as follows:—

    “_Sir_; My Grandfather refuses to return for he will not
    believe that you are not a devil. He is not an educated
    man, and has not been more than forty miles from here in
    the last thirty years. He has always believed in the
    Devil, but never in aëroplanes or anything of that kind,
    although I have shown him pictures of them. I am glad
    you were not killed and sorry you broke your aëroplane.
    You did not find the calves, which are in a pen at the
    far end of the cow-stable. I fed them a few minutes ago.
    The cows do not pasture with the horses, as Jess kicks
    cows—so I let them out. The bars in the brush-fence are
    just beyond the brook among the alders. I shall bring my
    grandfather back to the house as soon as he recovers
    from his foolish fright; but how soon that will be I
    cannot state definitely, for he is a very stubborn old
    man. I have left him asleep in the woods. He made me
    promise not to speak to you.

                                       Yours very truly,
                                                 Catherine MacKim.”

Akerley read with astonished haste, studied the signature, then
re-read the letter slowly from the beginning. This done, he raised
his head and gazed searchingly around him.

He entered the house and looked at the clock on the chimney-piece.
It pointed to four; and he corrected the watch on his wrist by it.
Again he read the note before putting it carefully away in his
pocket-book. He stood for some time in the center of the room, deep
in thought, fingering his stubbly chin. Then he entered the bedroom.

This was evidently Grandfather’s sleeping-place and nothing else.
Its walls of natural wood were bare save for a few earthy and
unshapely garments of coarse material hanging from nails. A pair of
mud-caked boots with high legs stood crookedly in a corner. On the
window-sill lay a black clay pipe, the heel of a plug of black
tobacco and a shabby spectacle-case. The only articles of furniture
were a large chest and a bed. The chest was not locked; and Akerley
rummaged through it in search of a razor. He found an ancient suit
of black broadcloth, a leather wallet fat with ten and twenty-dollar
bank notes, flannel shirts, rifle cartridges rolled up in a woolen
sock, a packet of papers, cakes of tobacco, suits of winter
underclothes so aggressively wooly that his back itched as he beheld
them, a Bible, a cardboard box full of trinkets—and, last of all, a
razor in a stained red case.

He had to go up to the bedroom in the loft to find a mirror; but he
did not shave there, feeling that he would be taking an
unwarrantable liberty in doing so. With the mirror and a purloined
cake of pink soap he returned to the kitchen. Nothing like a
shaving-brush was to be found, high or low, so he did without. The
pink soap proved to be a poor producer of lather, and the ancient
razor seemed to prefer either sliding or digging to cutting; and so
it was twenty minutes to five before Akerley considered himself
shaved. He returned the mirror and soap to their places and went out
to his crippled machine.

Akerley had no further use for the plane. He felt that it had
fulfilled its mission, quite apart from the fact that it was damaged
beyond immediate repair with the tools and materials at hand. He
judged by the atmosphere and appearance of his surroundings and the
fact that the old man of the place had mistaken him for a devil,
that he had gone far enough. And the nearest supply of petrol was
sure to be many weary miles away. So much the better—for petrol
stood for the very things he was most anxious to avoid at this
particular stage of his career. Now he was anxious to put the
machine out of sight in the shortest possible time, and for a few
minutes he seriously contemplated breaking it to pieces and burning
and burying the fragments. But he decided against this violent
course. He hadn’t the dull toughness of heart for the task; for this
plane had served him well, as many others had served him well and
truly in the past. So he set briskly to work at dismantling it.

It was after seven o’clock when Akerley went for the cows. He found
them waiting outside the bars in the brush fence among the alders,
yarded them and milked them. He then fed the calves and pigs,
prepared and ate his own supper, and returned to his work on the
machine. Later, he found and lit a lantern. It was close upon
midnight when his task was completed to his satisfaction. Then he
threw himself, boots and all, on the old man’s bed, and sank into
dreamless sleep.




                             CHAPTER II

                        THE GIRL AND THE MAN


The twilight of dawn was brightening over the clearing when Akerley
was suddenly awakened by the grip of fingers on his injured
shoulder. He could not have leapt back to consciousness more swiftly
and violently if a knife had been driven into him. He sat up with a
jerk and opened his eyes in the same instant of time; and fear shone
visibly in his eyes for a fraction of a second. The look of fear
gave place to one of relief, and that changed in a wink to an
expression of polite and embarrassed surprise.

A girl stood beside the bed, staring at him wide-eyed. Her lips were
parted and she breathed hurriedly.

“Get up,” she whispered. “You must hide in the woods. Grandfather is
coming. Climb out the window and run.”

He swung his feet to the floor and stood up before her.

“But why should I run and hide?” he asked.

She placed her hands on his breast and pushed him backward until he
brought up against the wall beside the open window.

“He will kill you,” she replied. “He has his rifle. Get out, quick,
and hide in the woods. Please go! And watch the house. And I’ll tell
you later. Crawl away. Don’t let him see you.”

“But why does he want to shoot me?”

“Go! Go! I don’t want you to be killed!”

“I am not afraid of any old man with a rifle!”

The girl’s eyes blazed and the color faded out of her cheeks. She
raised her right hand as if she would strike him in the face.
Daunted and bewildered, Akerley turned quickly and slipped out of
the window into the dew-wet grass. He moved toward the edge of the
woods by the shortest line, on his hands and knees, without pausing
once to look back. Upon reaching the shelter of bushes and round
spruces along the front of the forest, he lay flat and turned and
surveyed the house and clearing. His shoulder hurt him, and he felt
angry and hungry and generally abused; but his mind was soon
diverted from himself by the sudden appearance of a tall old man
within fifteen or twenty paces of where he lay.

The old man stared at the house from beneath the brim of a wide and
weather-stained felt hat. Abundant white whiskers showed with
startling distinctness against the breast of his dark shirt. He held
a rifle in his right hand, at the short trail. After standing
motionless for half a minute, he stooped almost double and advanced
toward the house with long strides. He reached the porch and
vanished from view through the back door.

“She was right,” soliloquized Akerley. “The old bird is out for
blood and no mistake. He certainly has his nerve with him—if he
still thinks I’m a devil.”

He lay still, watching the house. The minutes dragged past; and his
hunger and the soreness of his shoulder again attracted his
attention. Presently the girl appeared in the doorway, paused there
for a moment and then stepped out onto the porch with her
grandfather close at her heels. The old man was in the act of
passing her when she turned swiftly and halted him, and stayed him
with a grip of both hands on the front of his shirt. Akerley,
watching intently, again forgot his discomfort and hunger. He knew
something of the strength of those small hands.

“I hope she’ll pull out his blasted whiskers,” he muttered.

The two were evidently of different opinions on some matter of
importance. The old man seemed to be all for leaving the porch
immediately, and the girl for having him remain there. He waved his
left hand violently. He waved his right hand, in which the steel of
the rifle-barrel shone blue. She continued to cling to the front of
his shirt. It was plain to be seen that they argued the point hotly.
He side-stepped toward the edge of the porch and she pulled him back
sharply to his former ground. He struggled to get away and she
struggled to retain her hold on him. He broke away suddenly and fell
backwards off the edge of the raised floor. It was a drop of about
two feet. The rifle flew from his grasp as he struck the ground. He
lay on his back for a few seconds, then turned over and raised
himself to his hands and knees. From that position he got slowly to
his feet. He stood facing Akerley’s hiding-place for a moment,
swaying uncertainly, then staggered forward a few paces, reeled
suddenly, fell heavily on his face and lay still. The girl sprang
down from the porch and knelt beside him.

Akerley saw the girl make several attempts to get the old man to his
feet. He left his cover after the third unsuccessful attempt and
approached the yard. He was half-way to the porch when the girl
raised her head and saw him. She signalled him to make haste; and he
immediately broke into a run.

“He is hurt!” she exclaimed, breathlessly. “He is unconscious. He
has not opened his eyes since he fell. There’s no doctor this side
of Boiling Pot. What am I to do?”

“He is stunned, that’s all,” replied Akerley. “He breathes right
enough, and his heart is working away like a good one. Very likely
he knocked the back of his head on a stone or something when he
crashed. We had better carry him in-doors, I think, and pour some
water over him.”

Akerley lifted him by the shoulders, the girl gathered him up by the
knees, and so they carried him into the house and laid him on his
own bed. Akerley asked if there were any brandy or whiskey on the
premises.

“Not for him!” she cried. And then, in a lower tone, “There is some
brandy, but I have hidden it from him,” she continued. “It is the
worst thing in the world for him, for it inflames his temper; and I
think it is his temper that is the matter with him, mostly. He has
been like that twice before, and both times he was in a terrible
rage.”

“Pleasant company, I don’t think,” remarked Akerley. “But the
trouble isn’t entirely bad temper this time, Miss MacKim. Here’s the
bump where he assaulted something hard with the back of his skull.
It doesn’t seem serious—but he is very old, I suppose.”

The girl investigated the bump with her fingers.

“I’ll bathe that,” she said. “See, he looks better already. It was
foolish of me to be afraid. Please get out of sight before he opens
his eyes. Get your breakfast now, please, and make as little noise
about it as possible; and I’ll keep him here until you have
finished, even if he recovers consciousness in the meantime.”

“Does he still think I am a devil?” he asked.

“Yes—and that it is his sacred duty to kill you,” she replied. “He
was terrified at first; but he is not at all afraid of you now. The
very thought of you, and of the way you frightened him when you
rushed down from the sky, fills him with fury.”

“But am I to hide from him always?”

“Always? Did you come here to settle for life?”

“My machine is smashed and I have dismantled it; and I need a rest.”

“You will not get much rest with Grandfather hunting you all the
time; and there are other and more usual ways of leaving here than
by aëroplane. But go now—quick!”

Akerley left the room and closed the door behind him. He lit a fire
in the stove stealthily, boiled water and made tea. He did not fry
bacon, for fear that the smell of it might start the old man into
action again; so he breakfasted on bread and butter and jam. He was
about to light a cigarette—the last one in his case—when the girl
appeared from the old man’s bedroom. She came very close to him,
with a finger on her lip for warning.

“He has come around, but he is very weak and shaken,” she whispered.
“He seems quite dazed, just as he did the other times; but he will
soon recover his wits and energy, you may be sure. He may be like
this all day, or perhaps only for a few hours; and then he’ll be out
with the rifle again, looking for you. What have you done with your
aëroplane?”

Akerley eyed her steadily and thoughtfully before replying.

“I have hidden the parts here and there,” he said. “I’ll show you,
any time you say. One plane is badly smashed, but not hopelessly. I
may mend it some day; but just now the important thing for me is to
have all the parts out of sight.”

“So that Grandfather can’t find them and destroy them?” she queried.

“That is one reason,” he replied. “The fact is, I should not like
any one from outside to find any trace of the old bus around here.
It might prove very awkward for me. The less known about me and the
machine the better for me, Miss MacKim. If I tell you why I’ll put
myself at your mercy—which I shall do sometime when we can talk in
more security. Now I think I had better milk and do the chores.”

“Are you in danger?” she whispered.

“I shall be glad to explain my position to you, as far as possible,
at the first opportunity,” he answered, smiling. “But there are
other things to do now that need to be done quick—the milking, for
one—and if I could get hold of your grandfather’s ammunition I’d
extract the charge from every cartridge. Then I’d feel less uneasy.
My nerves are not in the best shape, as it is.”

She went to the front door with him and instructed him to keep out
of line of the old man’s window, not to bring the milk to the house
but to leave it on the floor of the larger barn, and to remain in
the barn until he saw her again.

“And I’ll bring you every rifle-cartridge I can find,” she
concluded.

He thanked her and started off to attend to the cows; but before he
had gone a dozen paces he turned and came back to where she still
stood on the threshold.

“I had forgotten the milk-pails,” he explained.

After milking and turning the cows out, he fed the pigs. He could
not feed the calves, for he had not brought their breakfast of
hay-tea and skimmed milk from the house. He retired to the barn then
and gave his mind to very serious and painful thought.

“What’s the use?” he exclaimed, at last. “Thinking won’t undo what’s
already done. The past is out of my hands—and I hope to heaven it is
buried! I can only help myself in the future.”

The girl found him a few minutes later. She carried a small basket
containing sixty cartridges.

“These are all I could find,” she said. “I took them from the box in
his room, and from behind the clock, and from the rifle and even
from his pockets. He is feeling much stronger already.”

She took up the pails of milk and was about to go when Akerley
begged her to wait a minute. He produced a knife of parts from a
pocket and with one of its numerous attachments pried the bullet out
of a cartridge and extracted the explosive charge. Then he refixed
the bullet in the empty shell and handed it to the girl.

“Please put that in his rifle,” he said. “Nothing will go off but
the cap when he pulls the trigger on that. I’ll have the rest of
them fool-proof in a couple of hours.”

She complimented him on his cleverness, told him not to budge from
the barn until her return, and went away with the milk and the
harmless cartridge. He was very busy throughout the next two hours.
He counted the seconds of the third hour, paced the dusty floor and
looked out every minute.

She came at last, with his dinner in a basket covered with a linen
napkin. Everything looked as right as could be to him then—and he
did not know why. He thought it was because he felt hungry. His
pleasure lit his eyes upon beholding her and sounded in his voice
when he welcomed her; and these things did not escape her notice and
at once pleased and puzzled her.

[Illustration: “THEY SAT SIDE BY SIDE ON A SMALL HEAP OF STRAW.”]

They sat side by side on a small heap of straw in a corner of the
threshing-floor, and she set out the dinner at their feet—sliced
cold chicken, bread and butter, pickles, two large wedges of
Washington pie and a pitcher of hot coffee.

“I left Grandfather eating his in bed, so I’ll have mine with you,”
she said.

She told him that the old man had recovered sufficiently to demand
his rifle, and that she had placed the chargeless cartridge in the
breech before giving it to him.

“He still thinks it was a devil who lit in the oats,” she ran on,
“so if you intend to stay here for some time we must think of a way
of leading him to believe that you are not the person who came down
from the sky. You must get some other clothes, and a pack, and walk
into the clearing as if you had come in all the way from Boiling Pot
on foot. I may be able to fix over some of his things so that he
won’t recognize them. Haven’t you a hat? And is that your only coat?
You must have been very cold up in the air.”

“I have a cap and a wool-lined leather coat,” he replied. “They are
both hidden away with the engine of the poor old bus; and if I am
wise I will hide this one, too.”

She looked at him curiously, and he returned her gaze gravely.

“This is a military coat, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes, a khaki service jacket.”

“You are a soldier, then.”

“An officer of the Royal Air Force.”

“I knew you were a soldier when I saw you asleep in the chair
yesterday. I knew by that ribbon.”

She placed the tip of a finger on the left breast of his jacket, and
he kinked his neck and looked down at it.

“The Legion of Honor. So you have seen that ribbon before.”

“I have it—the cross and ribbon. It belonged to my Grandfather
MacKim. He won it in the Crimean War.”

“That old boy?”

“No, not that one. His name is Javet, Gaspard Javet—and he was never
a soldier. What are the other ribbons?”

“One is the Military Cross and the others are service medals. But
tell me about your Grandfather MacKim, please.”

“Not now. I am the questioner to-day. You came here without being
invited, so I have a right to ask you questions. It is my duty to do
so.”

“Of course it is. It is one of your duties as a hostess. Ask away,
and I’ll tell you the truth or nothing.”

“Very well. Are you in great danger?”

“I don’t know. If people from the outside don’t find me or learn
that I am here I shall be safe enough for the present—except from
your grandfather; and I am not seriously afraid of him.”

“But you ran away from something or someone! You flew away! What
were you afraid of, to make you fly away? You are not a coward. What
are you afraid of?”

“Of disgrace for one thing.”

“Have you done a disgraceful deed?”

“No—but you wouldn’t understand. My nerves are not quite right—and I
lost my temper. I struck a senior officer.”

“And you are a soldier! And the king has decorated you!”

“Any soldier would have done it. You would have done it yourself,
under the same circumstances. It was about a friend of mine who is
dead. Those swankers who have never seen the whites of the enemies’
eyes don’t understand. He lied about him! I got out and up, and flew
and lost myself, and when my petrol was done I made a landing to
your light—and here I am.”

“Did you kill him?”

“I don’t know. I hope not. I didn’t wait to see. My nerves aren’t
right yet. I hit him with my fist. Any man in my place with an ounce
of blood in him would have done what I did. But I’m afraid that
won’t help me much if they find me, even if he was only knocked out
for the count.”

“Listen! It is Grandfather shouting for me. I must go, or he may get
out of bed to look for me. You stay here.”

“For how long?”

“Until I come back—which will be as soon as I can get away. I’ll
take these cartridges. Climb into a mow, and if you hear anyone
coming hide under the hay.”

“I am in your hands. You believe what I have told you?”

“Yes, everything.”

“Even that you would have done it yourself?”

“Yes, I believe that. There!—he is shouting again!”

“Will you bring me something to smoke? I haven’t a cigarette left.”

“Yes, yes,” she cried, and ran from the barn.




                            CHAPTER III

                          CATHERINE’S PLAN


Old Gaspard Javet did not return to the war-path with the celerity
feared by Catherine. He kept to his bed all that afternoon and all
the next day, his rifle on the patchwork quilt beside him, without
showing any sign of his usual energy beyond the power of his voice
and an occasional flash of the eyes. The tumble had given his dry
joints and stiff muscles a painful wrenching; and his mind had also
suffered from the sudden shock of the fall and the emotional
explosion that had led to it. Now and then, for brief periods, his
memory of the immediate past served him faithfully and he thought
clearly and violently on the subject of the unwelcome intruder; and
at other times, for hours together, he lay in a state of peace and
mild bewilderment.

To understand this old man, one must know that he was more Scottish
than French, (despite his name), and that a dark old strain of
Iroquois blood ran in his veins. He had lived rough and wild most of
the years of his life, and neither the ministers of the Kirk nor the
priests of the Church of Rome had enjoyed a fair opportunity of
shaping him to any authorized form of religious thought and
practice. He had been a scoffer and unbeliever until past
middle-life; but for years now he had been deeply, and sometimes
violently, religious according to his own lights and to laws of his
own conception. Born in the wilderness far north of the city of
Quebec eighty years ago, of a father of two strains of blood and a
mother of three, he had been bred early to self-reliance, privation,
loneliness, and physical dexterity and endurance. He spoke French
and English fluently but incorrectly, several Indian languages with
as much fluency as their vocabularies permitted, and he read English
with difficulty. All his reading was done in Holy Writ; and,
considering the laborious process of that reading, the ease and
freedom of his interpretations were astonishing.

While the old man was confined to his bed, Akerley was permitted
almost unlimited freedom of action; but he was not allowed to enter
the house or intrude on the field of vision of Gaspard’s bedroom
window. He milked the cows, fed the calves and pigs, and hoed in a
secluded field of turnips and corn. For two nights he made his bed
in the hay of the big barn, with blankets brought to him by the
girl. She also supplied him with a clay pipe and tobacco belonging
to her grandfather; and though he had smoked cigarettes for years
and the first pipeful made his head spin, he soon learned to take
his tobacco hot and heavy according to the custom obtaining in those
woods. He saw and talked to the girl frequently during that time.
She frankly seized every opportunity of leaving her grandfather and
her household tasks to be with him. She did not question him
further, just then, concerning his deed of violence, nor did her
manner toward him suggest either fear or repugnance after he had
made his confession. And yet her manner was not entirely as it had
been before his frank answers to her questions had placed him at her
mercy. It was changed for the better. It was more considerate of his
feelings. In short, it was the manner of a sympathetic and trusting
friend; and yet she knew nothing more of him, good or bad, than the
bad he had told of himself. He was wise enough, understanding
enough, not to doubt her full recognition of the fact that he had
placed his freedom, his honor and perhaps his life, in her hands. He
believed that her manner of sympathy was sincere. He credited her
with a heart of utter kindness and an unshaken faith in her own
instincts concerning the hearts of others; and he was deeply moved
by admiration and gratitude.

She brought him his supper at seven o’clock in the evening of the
second day of his residence in the barn, and went back to the house
immediately. He made short work of the food, then took up a position
behind the barn-yard fence, from which he had a clear view of the
house, and awaited her reappearance. When eight o’clock came with no
sight of her he felt a sudden restlessness and began to pace back
and forth. By half-past eight he was in a fine fume of impatience
and anxiety; and then he suddenly realized the silliness of it and
made bitter fun of himself. She was safe, there in her own home not
two hundred yards away—so why worry about her? And who was he to
worry about her? She had never heard of him, nor he of her, four
days ago. Why should he expect her to come hurrying back to talk to
him? Wouldn’t it be the natural thing for her to prefer her
grandfather’s company to his?

He asked himself all these questions and answered them all with
disinterested logic; and yet he felt no less anxious and no less
impatient. He climbed the fence and stared accusingly at the house.
He was joined by the little black dog, with whom he was now on
familiar terms. Together they strolled to the far side of the barns,
where Blackie started a chipmunk along the pasture fence; but
Akerley could not wait to watch the excitement. He left the chase in
full cry and hastened back to a point from which he could see the
house as if he had been absent a year. It had been out of his sight
for exactly five minutes; and still she was not on her way. He
wondered if he had said anything that could possibly have offended
her, anything that she could possibly have misunderstood, and
wracked his memory for every word that they had exchanged since
morning. He could not recall anything of the kind or anything in her
manner to suggest anything of the kind. Again he took himself to
task for his foolishness.

“Your nerves are crossed, Tom Akerley,” he said. “Your wind is up in
vertical gusts. Your brains are addled. You are so devilish lonely
that you’ve gone dotty. You expect a girl who doesn’t know you from
Adam to sit around and entertain you all the time and neglect her
poor old grandfather; and it isn’t because you are used to it, old
son, for no other woman ever neglected so much as a dog to entertain
you. Buck up! Pull yourself together! Forget it!”

He filled and lit the clay pipe and sat on the top rail of the fence
and smoked. Twilight deepened to dusk, the stars appeared, bats
flickered and fire-flies blinked their sailing sparks; and lamplight
glowed softly from the windows of the house.

It was long past ten o’clock when Catherine made her appearance,
carrying a lighted lantern in her left hand and a large bundle under
her right arm. She found Akerley on the top rail of the fence. He
slid to his feet the moment the swinging circle of light discovered
him, and strode forward to meet her.

“I was afraid you were never coming,” he said. “I began to fear that
the old man had mistaken you for the devil. What have you there?”

“I thought I’d find you asleep,” she replied. “I didn’t say I was
coming back to-night, you know. But I had to. Grandfather is feeling
much better and will be up and out bright and early in the morning,
so I have had to get these clothes ready for you to-night. And here
are an old quilt and things—a frying-pan and old kettle—to make a
pack of. You must leave here before sunrise and come back about
breakfast-time. I’ll show you the road to come in by now—the road
from Boiling Pot.”

Akerley took the bundle from her.

“You have been working all evening for me; and I am not accustomed
to this sort of thing,” he said. “You are a very wonderful person,
Catherine MacKim.”

“What do you mean by wonderful?” she asked curiously.

“You are wonderfully kind. I don’t believe there are many girls in
the world who would take the trouble to fit me out like this. I may
be wrong, for I don’t know many girls or women.”

“Didn’t a woman have anything to do with—with what you did?”

“A woman! Bless you, no! What made you think that?”

“I don’t know. Please put these things in the barn, and then I’ll
show you the road.”

He obeyed and returned to her. She extinguished the lantern.

“He may be awake,” she explained. “He is very restless to-night; and
there is no saying what he might do if he saw a lantern wandering
about the edge of the woods.”

It was a still, vague night of blurred shadows and warm gloom. The
dim stars did no more than mark out the close sky. The girl found a
path through the oats and led the way along it until they came to
the edge of the forest and the opening of the rough track that wound
away from old Gaspard Javet’s clearings to the nearest settlement.

“There has never been a wheel on this end of it,” she said. “We do
our hauling in winter; and we don’t pay road-taxes. Grandfather
doesn’t seem to mind how far out of the world he lives.”

“Thank Heaven for that!” replied Akerley.

They walked for a short distance along this track, feeling the way
with cautious feet and frequently brushing against the dense
undergrowth to right and left. She halted suddenly, so close to him
that her shoulder touched his arm for a moment.

“Do you think you will be able to find it in the morning?” she
asked.

“Easily,” he assured her. “It is due south from the house.”

“Yes, just to the right of the two big pines. But that will not be
all. You must invent a story about how you came in, and why, and all
sorts of things. He is slightly mad about devils from the sky, you
know. He has been expecting one. So, to save your life, you had
better say that you lost your canoe and outfit—everything but the
quilt and frying-pan—in the rapids below Boiling Pot.”

“But what is this boiling pot?”

“It is the pool below the falls, and it is also a little settlement,
about fifteen miles from here. We are on the height-o’-land, you
know, and you can’t get to within six miles of us from any direction
by water, even in a canoe. The spring where we cool our creamers and
the one in the pasture are the beginnings of Indian River. But what
will you say about yourself?—who you are and what you are looking
for? And what kind of person will you pretend to be?”

“I’ll think of something to-night—but I wish your grandfather was
more modern and rational. I know a good deal about the woods, though
this part of the country is new to me; and I can use an ax, and
manage a canoe in white water. So don’t worry. I’ll think up
something pretty safe. But have you told him that the devil has
cleared out?”

“Yes, I told him so yesterday; and he thinks I am mistaken. Are you
sure that the aëroplane is hidden where he won’t find it? I don’t
see how it can be.”

“I took it to pieces, and the pieces are carefully hidden. I meant
to tell you before what I had done with them. The engines are packed
and stowed away in the little loft over the pig-house. The planes
are under the hay in the small barn, where they should be safe until
I can think of a better place for them. The old machine is scattered
as if a shell had made a direct hit on her. I even took the liberty
of putting a few small but very valuable parts in your room.”

“I found them. They are safe there.”

“So you see, Catherine, I have not only put my own fate in your
hands, but that of the old bus as well. I have not practiced
half-measures.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that—my liberty and honor. Suppose you were to let people know
that I am here—that a stranger had come here by air? What would
become of me? I might run into the woods and hide—and starve. The
game would be played out and ended, whatever I did.”

“But you have never thought that there was any danger of such a
thing!”

“Never. Not for a moment. But what right had I to treat you like
this—to tell you the truth about myself and then throw myself on
your mercy? You must think me a poor thing.”

“You have not asked for mercy from me; and you have told me that any
man of spirit would have done what you did.”

“Any man of spirit and jangled nerves.”

They returned to the barn-yard in silence. There they lit the
lantern.

“Don’t forget to put on the old clothes,” she said. “And please give
me that coat now. I will take good care of it, ribbons and all; and
I will give it back to you when you want to fly away from here.”

“I have neither the petrol nor the desire for flight,” he returned.
“There are letters in the pockets, so please hide it securely.”

He took off the jacket, folded it and laid it over her arm.

“Good night,” she said, and hurried away.




                             CHAPTER IV

                        THE HEAVIEST HITTER


Akerley lay awake for hours on a blanket spread on a mattress of
innumerable springs—a ton or more of last year’s timothy, bluejoint
and clover. He had air enough, though it was still and warm; for one
of the wide doors stood open and the fingers could be thrust
anywhere between the horizontal poles of which the sides and ends of
the barn were constructed. Only the roof was weather-tight.

His thoughts kept him awake; and yet he let them deal only with the
immediate past and the immediate to-morrow. He did not think
backward or forward beyond this forest-farm. What was the use of
brooding over the past or dreaming of the future? After much
reflection, he decided on the character in which he was to emerge
from the woods into the clearing and encounter that formidable old
Gaspard Javet. He would come as a backwoodsman from the upper waters
of the main river, two hundred miles or more away to the west and
south, looking for new land and seclusion. He had known that country
well, years ago. This was a part that he could act with a degree of
interest and realism; and he would explain it to the old man—sooner
or later, as circumstances determined—that the game-wardens of his
old stamping-grounds wanted him in connection with a little matter
of spearing salmon at night by the light of a torch. The confession
of a crime against the Game Laws was not likely to prejudice the old
woodsman against him; and this was a particularly mild offense. He
knew enough of back-countrymen to believe that his story would
excite Gaspard’s sympathy—if Gaspard were true to type.

He worked out his part carefully, giving all his thought to it until
he considered it to be as nearly perfect as was possible to bring it
before the actual performance. He saw that certain details of
character and action would have to be left until the illumination of
the psychological moment. As the thing had to be done, it must be
well done—with all his brain, all his will and all his skill. If
not, then it was not worth attempting. This was the spirit in which
he had set his hand and mind to every task, congenial or otherwise,
in the lost past. Success had been won by him again and again in
this spirit; and though the task before him was but a play, a game,
the stakes for which he was to play were serious enough to give it
the dignity of a great adventure. The stakes were honor and freedom.

Still he did not sleep. Invention seemed to have agitated his mind.
He continued to keep his thoughts within the former limits of time,
but he could not soothe them to rest. They made pictures for him of
every one of his waking hours since his first awaking among the
young oats in the gray dawn. He heard mice rustling in the hay and
scampering on the rafters. At last he slept. He awoke sharply at the
first hint of dawn. He continued to lie still for a little while,
recalling the details of his plan of action for the new day. Then he
donned the ancient and rustic garments which Catherine had brought
him and hid his own shirt and breeches. His high, moccasin-toed
boots were in part with his new character. He hid his wrist-watch
and identification disc, then took up his bundle and left the barn.
He made his way swiftly and cautiously to the nearest point of woods
and, behind a screen of saplings, to the road. He followed this road
toward Boiling Pot for several miles through the awakening forest.
Here and there, in swampy hollows, he encountered mud-holes and
intentionally stepped into them. By the time he sat down on an old
stump and lit his pipe he looked as if he had come a long and rough
journey.

He had not been seated more than ten minutes when his reveries were
disturbed by the appearance of a large young man with an axe on his
shoulder and a pack on his back. The stranger came into view
suddenly and close at hand, around a bend in the track from the
direction of Boiling Pot.

He halted abruptly at sight of Akerley.

“Good day,” said Akerley, coolly.

“Where’d you come from?” exclaimed the other.

“I’m a stranger in these parts,” returned Akerley; “and what I want
to know is, where’ve I got to?”

“Into the woods, that’s where. But you know where you come from,
don’t you? You ain’t just been born right here, I reckon.”

“Maybe I was.”

“Say, you know where you’re headin’ for, don’t you?”

“Sure thing. I’m heading for somewhere north of here on this track.”

“Well, it’s got a name, ain’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

“T’ell you say! Where do you cal’late to fetch up at?”

“Somewhere quite a way north of this—if I don’t have to spend all
day answering questions.”

“Looka here, friend, you don’t want to git too cussed sassy.”

“Friend nothing! I choose my friends.”

“Say, d’you reckon you’re talkin’ to me?”

“That’s what I am dead sure of. It’s you I am talking to; and unless
you change your line of conversation for the better pretty quick
I’ll quit talking.”

The big young man in the road flung down his ax and pack, uttered a
string of blistering language and spat on the palms of his hands.

“What’s the idea?” queried Akerley, still smoking his pipe, still
hunched forward with his elbows on his knees.

The other raised and flipped his feet about as if in the opening
steps of a popular rustic dance, and at the same time began to chant
in sing-song tones of a marked nasal quality.

“Stan’ up an’ take yer medicine, ye pore skunk,” he chanted. “Git up
onto yer hind legs so’s I kin knock ye off’n ’em again, ye
slab-sided mistake. Git onto yer splayed feet, or I’ll sure lam ye
in the lantern right where ye set.”

“I don’t know if you want to dance or fight,” said Akerley, calmly
but clearly, “but I’ll tell you this—I don’t feel like dancing. And
I warn you not to start anything else, for I am a smart man with my
hands.”

“Git up,” sang the other, continuing to jink about on his booted
feet without shifting his ground. “Git up so’s I kin swing onto ye.
Stan’ up on yer feet, dad blast ye, or git down onto yer
prayer-handles an’ say ye’re bested already—for I’m Ned Tone, the
heaviest hitter in Injun River.”

“So be it—but never say that I didn’t warn you,” replied Akerley,
laying aside his pipe.

Then he complied with Ned Tone’s reiterated request with speed and
violence suggestive of the releasing of tempered springs within him.
His feet touched the ground in the same instant of time that his
right fist touched the cheek of the heaviest hitter on Injun River.
That was a glancing blow. Ned Tone turned completely around in his
tracks, but he did not fall. He staggered and lurched. He recovered
his balance quickly and plunged at his antagonist. He spat blood as
he plunged, for his cheek had been cut against his teeth. He flailed
a murderous blow—but it returned harmlessly to him through the
non-resistant air. He jumped again, quick as thought, with a jab and
a hook.

Akerley employed all his skill of defense, for he realized in a
moment that the big bushwhacker was a practical fighter and that he
possessed agility as well as weight. In height and reach there was
little to choose between them—but that little was in favor of the
woodsman. Akerley’s left shoulder was still tender; and when he
caught a swing on it like the kick of a mule he gasped with pain and
realized that now was the time for him to do all that he knew how
for all that he was worth. His left was useless for offense, but he
managed to keep it up so that it looked dangerous. After a little
more clever foot-work, which seemed to bewilder and madden the
heaviest hitter on Indian River, he stepped close in and did his
very best at the very top of his speed.

Akerley was glad to sit down and press his hands to his head. He
felt dizzy and slightly sick with the pain in his shoulder and neck.
The dizziness and nausea passed almost instantly; but he continued
to sit limp and gaze contemplatively at the sprawled bulk of the
heavy hitter.

Ned Tone lay flat on the moss of that woodland road. For a few
minutes he lay face-down; then he turned slowly over onto his broad
back, with grunts of pain. He opened one eye slowly, only to close
it immediately.

“Feeling bad?” asked Akerley, drily.

“Kinder that way,” replied Tone, thickly.

“As if you’d had enough, perhaps?”

“Too durned much.”

“You’ll be right as you ever were in a little while, so cheer up. I
didn’t hit you hard.”

“Ye hit me hard enough, I guess—but I ain’t complainin’.”

“You remember that I warned you.”

“Sure thing. I ain’t complainin’ none. Leave me be, can’t ye?”

“I’m talking for your good, just as it was for your own good that I
hammered your ugly mug.”

“Sure. I feel real good.”

Akerley laughed, then took his frying-pan in hand and went along to
a green, alder-grown dip in the road. There he found water, and
after drinking deep and bathing his face, neck and wrists, he filled
the pan and returned to the heavy hitter. Tone drank what he could
of that panful and asked that the rest be poured over his damaged
face. Akerley humored him in this; after which Tone sat up groggily.

“Ready to start?” asked Akerley.

“Start nothin’!” retorted Tone, in a voice of bitter disgust. “I
ain’t goin’ back nor forrards till my grub gives out or my face
mends. I’m makin’ camp right here. I ain’t fit to show myself at
Javet’s place nor yet back home.”

“Javet’s place? Who’s Javet?”

“Gaspard Javet. He’s an old codger got a farm back here in the
woods.”

“Is it far from here?”

“Ol’ Gaspard’s farm? Seven or eight mile to the west of this. Ye
turn off jist round that bend. Ye can’t miss the track.”

“Thanks. And where does this road go to?”

“Straight north to nowhere. Maybe ye’d find an old camp if ye went
far enough.”

“Javet’s place for me,” said Akerley, turning and moving away.

“Watch out on yer left,” Ned Tone called after him. “The road to
Gaspard’s clearin’s turns off jist past the next bend.”

The unexpected encounter with the heavy hitter had delayed the
intruder’s plan by nearly an hour, so now he stepped forward
briskly. But he did not feel very brisk. The mill with the big
woodsman had been a more strenuous before-breakfast job than he
liked or was accustomed to; and now his shoulder and neck felt even
worse than when he had first opened his eyes in the young oats in
the gray dawn. He decided to blame the imaginary accident in the
rapids below Boiling Pot for the crippled condition of his left
shoulder.

When he issued from the green shade of the forest into the wide
light of Gaspard’s clearings he saw that the front door of the house
stood open and smoke trailed straight up into the sunshine from the
gray chimney. He moved slowly but unfalteringly toward the house.

He had not gone far before Catherine appeared in the doorway, only
to vanish instantly. Then old Gaspard Javet appeared, with the rifle
in the crook of his right arm. The devil-hunter stepped across the
threshold and stood with a hand raised to shade his eyes.

Akerley thought of the extracted cordite and smiled. He was more
than half-way to the house before the old man broke his dramatic
attitude in front of the door and moved forward with the obtrusive
rifle at the port.

“What are you doing with that gun?” cried Akerley, halting. “Do you
take me for a moose? What’s the matter with you, anyhow?”

Old Gaspard Javet continued to advance with long and even strides.
He came to a standstill within three paces of the intruder and
regarded him searchingly for several seconds. The young man returned
the gaze steadily.

“I’m out gunnin’ for a devil,” said Gaspard. “At fust glimp I kinder
hoped you was him, but now I reckon ye ain’t. Ye’re in luck. Hev ye
seen him by any chance?”

“Seen who?”

“The devil.”

“I don’t know him by sight.”

“He’s somewheres ’round in these woods.”

“I met a fellow back along that track a few miles who may be a
devil. His temper was bad enough; but he said his name was Ned Tone.
I haven’t seen anyone else.”

“Ned Tone, hey? No, that ain’t the one I’m lookin’ fer.”

“I don’t know what you’re looking for or what you’re talking
about—but if you asked me if I had a mouth I’d make a guess at what
you meant.”

“Come along to the house an’ hev some breakfast. Ye look all played
out, that’s a fact.”

“Now you’re talking English.”

Gaspard turned and led the way to the house. Akerley followed him
into the wide living-room. Breakfast was on the table; and between
the stove and the table stood Catherine, with a glow of conflicting
excitements and emotions in her eyes and on her cheeks.

“This here’s a young feller jist in time for a bite of breakfast,”
said Gaspard. “He ain’t a devil, nor he ain’t seen the devil. Don’t
know his name nor his business.”

“My name is Anderson,” said Akerley, with an apologetic smile at
Catherine.

“Good morning,” she replied, none too steadily.

They sat down at the table, and the old man made a long arm and
speared half a dozen pancakes from a central platter with his fork.
Catherine poured coffee.

“The young feller here says as how he see Ned Tone a ways back along
the road,” said Gaspard, spanking butter on the hot cakes.

The girl started and shot a quick glance of anxious inquiry at her
guest. Guessing the reason for her alarm, he smiled reassuringly at
her. They had not considered or guarded against that ghost of a
chance of his meeting anyone on the road.

“Is Ned Tone coming here?” she asked.

“I think not,” answered Akerley. “Not for a few days, anyway.”

“Why ain’t he comin’ here?” said Gaspard. “Not that he’s wanted—but
he’s comin’ all the same! Where else would he be on his way to but
here?”

“He told me he wasn’t,” replied Akerley, pouring molasses on his
cakes. “He said he would stay where he was—where I met him—as long
as his grub hung out.”

His hearers did not make the slightest effort to hide their
astonishment.

“Ye’re crazy!” exclaimed the old man. “What’s the matter with him,
that he ain’t comin’ here? He’s been here often enough before, durn
his pesky hide!”

Akerley looked fairly into the girl’s eyes for a moment, then turned
his glance back to her grandfather.

“He doesn’t consider himself fit to be seen either here or back
where he came from,” he said. “He has a black eye, a cut cheek, a
swollen ear, a split lip and a skinned nose.”

“He run agin the devil, that’s sure!”

“You’re wrong. He started roughing it with me, when I was sitting as
quiet and polite as you please, smoking my pipe. He asked for it.
But for my hurt shoulder I’d have given him more than he asked for.”

“What’s that ye say? Walloped Ned Tone! Bested the heaviest hitter
on Injun River an’ split his lip! Stranger, I wisht it was true—but
it ain’t. It couldn’t be done by no one man as ever I see—leastwise
not since my own j’ints begun to stiffen. Young man, ye’re a liar.”

“Grandfather!” exclaimed Catherine.

“That’s as may be—but it is no lie when I tell you I pounded the pep
out of Ned Tone,” replied Akerley. “You can go and see for yourself.
You’ll find him at the edge of the road, about two miles from here.”

“That so? Reckon I’ll go take a look after I’ve et my breakfast. But
it’s that devil out o’ the sky I wanter see! I got what he needs an’
don’t want, young man—bullets nigh an inch long, in nickel jackets!”

The old man had a fine appetite; and he could do several things at
the same time. He could not only talk with his mouth full but he
could quaff coffee from his saucer in the same breath. He asked many
questions. He heard that his guest’s name was Tom Anderson, that Tom
had come from somewhere about the upper waters of the main river and
lost his canoe and outfit, and injured his left shoulder, on Indian
River.

But Akerley did not tell his story gracefully, though it was to save
his life.

“Whereabouts on Injun River?” asked Gaspard.

“In white water, below a big pool and a fair-sized fall.”

“B’ilin’ Pot. An’ how’d ye git here?”

“I took a track ’round the pool and the falls and struck a road that
led me into the crease in the woods that brought me here.”

“Didn’t ye see no clearin’ nigh the Pot?”

“Maybe I did. What does it matter what I saw? I was heading for the
tall timber; and when Ned Tone overhauled me this morning I wasn’t
more than two miles from here. After our fight—after Tone woke up—he
told me to take the first turn off to the west and follow that track
seven or eight miles and I’d strike Gaspard Javet’s farm—but I
guessed he was lying by the look in his available eye, so I didn’t
turn off to the west.”

[Illustration: “‘HE WAS FIGGERIN’ TO LOSE YE IN THE WOODS.’”]

“Did he tell you that?” cried the girl. “To go to the west—seven or
eight miles! And he saw that you hadn’t a rifle, or any food! And he
didn’t know that you knew better than to go to the west!”

“Knowed better!” exclaimed the old man, testily. “It wasn’t what he
knowed brought him here—it was the hand of Providence. That thar Ned
Tone’s a pore skunk! He was layin’ to lose ye in the woods; for ther
ain’t a house due west o’ this here within sixty mile, an’ all ye’d
find at the end o’ that loggin’ road is an empty shack that was
built by Mick Otter the Injun an’ me one year we cut out a bunch o’
pine timber. He was figgerin’ to lose ye in the woods, the mean
critter!”

“The coward!” exclaimed Catherine, pale with scorn.

Old Gaspard eyed her contemplatively for a moment. Akerley felt a
pleasant warmth at his heart.

“I’ll step along an’ take a look,” said Gaspard. “Ye kin stop right
here, young man, an’ rest up. I ain’t heared all about ye I wanter
know yet. Maybe ye’re a liar, fer all I know.”

“Liar or not, you’ll find me right here when you get back,” replied
Akerley.




                             CHAPTER V

                         THE PLAN SUCCEEDS


Old Gaspard Javet was no more than out of the house before Akerley
commenced a detailed account of the morning’s adventure; and when
that was finished—and it was brief as it was vivid—the girl
expressed her delight at Ned Tone’s defeat. But she confessed her
satisfaction was somewhat chilled by apprehension of trouble of the
bully’s making. Akerley made light of her fears on that score.

“I am glad it happened just as it did,” he said. “He picked the
fight. I’m not worrying about him, so long as you are glad I did the
beating. And I don’t think he will talk about it, even after his lip
heals.”

“The less he talks the more he will think,” she said. “He is stupid
and ignorant; and now we know he is bad—a murderer at heart. What
brains he has are inclined to craftiness and cunning. Hatred will
stimulate them—and he is sure to hate you for that thrashing.”

“I believe you. He has hopes of my starving in the woods. But hatred
is not the only sentiment I inspire in him. He is afraid of me.”

“Of course he is afraid of you. He will never stand up to you again
in a fair fight, if he can avoid it.”

“That is not all. Fear of my fists is not his greatest fear of me.
He would rather know me to be dead in the woods, by his lies, than
know me to be here. This came to me when your grandfather was
talking. Now I am beginning to understand things that I used to half
see and half-heartedly wonder at; and of course I have read about
them in books, as you have, too, I suppose. This has been an
illuminating morning to me.”

She looked at him inquiringly; and there was a shadow of
embarrassment in her eyes. She smiled and lowered her glance.

“When you talk like this I am certainly reminded of things I have
read in books,” she said. “But that is not enough intelligent
conversation, is it? What things do you mean?”

Akerley took pipe and tobacco from his pocket and regarded them
fixedly in the palm of his hand.

“I mean jealousy—and things like that,” he said, in a somewhat
stuffy voice. “Jealousy of one man for another—about a woman—and
that sort of ro—er—thing.”

“Oh, that sort of thing! Are you really ignorant of things like
that?—you, who have lived in the big world of men and women?”

Akerley glanced at her, then back at his pipe and tobacco. He
produced a knife and fell to slicing a pipeful.

“It is a fact,” he said. “Ever since I was a small boy I have had to
drive all my brains and energy at other things. I have been only an
onlooker at games of that sort, big and little; and as I didn’t know
the rules, and couldn’t guess them by looking, I wasn’t an
interested onlooker. But I have learned a great deal since I landed
in this clearing; and this very morning Ned Tone tried to lose me in
the woods simply to keep me away from here. Nothing like that ever
happened to me before.”

Catherine colored slightly.

“I wonder if you know anything of the horrors of loneliness,” she
said in a low voice.

“I have been lonely in cities and on crowded roads,” he replied;
“and I have been lonely in the air, sometimes with the old earth
like a colored map below me and flying blind in the fog, and with
sunlit clouds under me like fields and drifts of solid snow.”

“But you had your work,” she said; “and you were not always alone;
and in crowds you were always elbowed by strangers. I have never
seen a crowd of people. You have not known such loneliness as
this—of endless woods, and empty clearings, and winds lost in
everlasting tree-tops, and empty skies with only a speck of a hawk
circling high up. You worked and fought—but I had nothing to do. But
for books I’d have gone mad, I believe.”

“I can imagine it—but I wish you would tell me all about it.”

At that moment the expression of her eyes changed and she got
quickly up from the table.

“What if Grandfather tells Ned Tone about your arrival!” she
exclaimed. “About the devil he is looking for? Ned is from the
settlements. He often goes out to the towns on the main river. He
would know it was an aëroplane, and he would suspect the truth about
you.”

“He may not mention it,” said Akerley; “so why go to meet trouble?”

Then he did a thing that astonished himself more than it seemed to
surprise Catherine. He stood up, stepped around the table and took
her passive right hand awkwardly in his.

“We have both read of this in books, and I have often seen it done
on the stage,” he said, in a wooden tone of voice; and he raised her
hand, bowed his head and touched his lips to the backs of her
fingers. Releasing her hand swiftly he turned, went out by the back
door, took two pails from the bench against the wall and started for
the cow-yard.

The young woman ran after him and called from the porch that she and
her grandfather had already attended to the milking. He returned and
replaced the milk-pails.

“It is just as well,” he said. “I could only use one hand, anyway,
for that big rube caught me one smasher on my lame shoulder.”

She advised him to bathe the shoulder and put arnica on it. She gave
him the arnica along with the advice; and he accepted both. After
that he helped her with the work about the house; and then they sat
on the porch and she told him a great deal about her parentage and
herself while they awaited the reappearance of Gaspard Javet.

Catherine MacKim had been born twenty-one years ago, in this very
house in this clearing. She could not remember anything of her
mother, Gaspard’s daughter, for she had been left motherless at two
years of age; but her father, a son of the Crimean veteran, had
often talked to her about Catherine Javet, whom he had met and
married, cherished and buried in this wilderness. Hugh MacKim had
been utterly lacking in worldly ambition; and though not a weakling
in mind or body, he had possessed none of that particular blunt yet
narrow variety of strength by which thousands of men force
themselves successfully through life. He had been born in a big
house in a prosperous farming district in Ontario. His father, Major
Ian MacKim, who had been awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor
for his services before Sevastopol when an ensign in an infantry
regiment of the line, had moved to Canada soon after his retirement
from the active list of the army. Whatever the major may have been
when operating against the enemies of his King and Country, he had
proved himself an extraordinarily violent, stupid and difficult
person in civil life. As a farmer he had made himself an object of
terror and dislike to his neighbors and of fear and distress to his
family. The fact that he had contracted the causes of that bitter
and unreasoning temper while serving his country at the risk of his
life excused it to those of his connections and acquaintances who
were so fortunate as never to come into contact with it; but the
truth is that rheumatism from Russia and a liver whose action had
been dulled and deranged in India had made that valiant old soldier
a terror to his own children.

Under the circumstances young Hugh MacKim, (who was later
Catherine’s father), had been glad to leave the farm and go to
school in Montreal; and when his school years had come to an end and
he had been ordered to return to the farm, he had taken to the woods
instead. That life had suited him. He had given up, without regret,
most of the things to which he had been born and bred; and of all
that collection of inherited and acquired tastes and habits, only
his mild affection for books, his good manners and his sense of fair
play had survived. From one point and another of the northern fringe
of settlement he had written occasionally to his mother.

After the major’s death the widow had sent the Cross of the Legion
of Honor to her strayed son Hugh, hoping that it might act as a spur
to hereditary pride and ambitions. It had pleased him mildly, that
was all. So the widow had turned to her younger son for an
acknowledgment of family and class responsibilities. Then Hugh had
come into the Indian River country, “cruising timber” for a big firm
of Quebec operators; and here he had discovered Gaspard Javet and
his secluded clearings and his beautiful daughter. Hugh had not gone
farther. He had even neglected to retrace his steps to Quebec and
submit his report on the timber of the lands which he had gone forth
to explore. He had simply fallen in love with Catherine Javet and
thrown in his lot with her father.

Hugh MacKim had known happiness and contentment in his
height-of-land for seven years—until his wife’s death; and after
that—after time had dulled the cutting edge of his loneliness for
her—he had known contentment for the remaining years of his life.
His appetite for the woods, and for those dexterities of hand and
eye which life in the wilderness called for, had never failed him.
He had been a poet in his appreciation of nature. His eye for the
weather had never been as knowing as Gaspard’s, but always more
loving. He had always seen more in dawns and sunsets than promises
of rain or wind or frost. And his had been the knowledge and skill,
but never the ruthlessness, of a first-rate trapper and hunter. He
had delighted in the companionship of his father-in-law from the
first; and admiration and affection had been mutual in the
friendship of those two. His love for his daughter had been tender
and unfaltering. He had taught her the delight of books and of the
life around her. He had taught her to read two languages from
printed pages and the hundred tongues and signs of wood, water and
sky. He had died two winters ago.

“I should like to have known your father,” said Akerley. “I believe
he was right about himself, his own life—but didn’t he ever look
ahead? Did he picture you here in the woods always?”

“There was no place in the big world for him,” she replied. “We
belonged to these woods, he and I; and, of course, he did not know
that he was to die so soon. His health was good. He was ill only a
few days.”

“Part of his brain must have been asleep,” said Akerley. “He thought
of you always as a child, I suppose. All this would be well enough
if you never grew up; but you are grown up already. And your
grandfather cannot live for ever. He is queer, anyway—with this
crazy idea in his head about devils.”

“Here he is,” said Catherine.

Gaspard Javet stepped out onto the back porch and stood his rifle
against the wall. He sat down and reflectively combed his beard with
long fingers crooked with the toil of the woods. Then he looked at
Akerley with a new interest, new curiosity and a distinct light of
kindliness in his gray eyes.

“I found Ned Tone,” he said. “He tol’ me how he’d had a fight with a
b’ar—an’ he looked it. I didn’t gainsay him.”

“Did you tell him anything, Grandad?” asked Catherine.

“Yes, I told ’im how I’d like fine to see the b’ar.”

“Nothin’ about the devil, Grandad?”

“Not me—to be laughed at fer an old fool by them fat-heads down
round B’ilin’ Pot.”

“Did you ask him why he told this gentleman to go to the westward to
find these clearings?”

“I didn’t tell ’im nothin’ about what doesn’t consarn ’im. If he
wants to know what’s happened to this young feller he kin take the
old road to the west an’ try to find out.”

“I think you are very clever and wise, Grandad,” said the girl; and
she glanced at Akerley with relief in her eyes.

Akerley felt relief, too. The heavy hitter was off his trail for the
moment, at least. But something else worried him.

“About that devil,” he said, turning to Gaspard. “What makes you
think it was a devil?”

“I heared it miles an’ miles away,” replied the old man, “It was a
devilish sound, hummin’ all ’round in the dark. It was foretold to
me long ago in a dream—how I’d be beset by a devil, an’ how I’d best
’im if I kep’ my eyes skinned an’ my gun handy. I ain’t afeared of
’im—but I was at first. I hid in the woods; but pretty soon that old
dream come back to me about how a devil would beset me one day fer
the cussin’, unbelievin’ ways o’ my youth, but how I’d surely git
’im in time if I kep’ after ’im.”

“What would you do if you found him?” asked Akerley.

The old man twitched a thumb toward the rifle against the wall.

“But if he’s a devil you couldn’t hurt him with a bullet.”

“Ye’re wrong. In my dream I shot ’im dead as pork. And now that I’ve
told you all about that devil, young man, I’d like to hear more
about yerself.”

“Have you ever heard of men flying in the air?”

“What’s that?” exclaimed Gaspard, with a swift change of voice and a
queer, dangerous gleam in his gray eyes. “Men flyin’? No, I ain’t!
Nor I don’t want to. Devils may go disguised, in lonely places as
well as in towns, fer to dig pit-falls fer the feet of men. But men
can’t fly!”

Catherine gave the intruder a warning glance.

Akerley sighed and told a story of his past—a very patchy one—along
the lines which he had planned while lying awake in the barn the
night before. But his heart was not in it. He felt that the old
woodsman was doing him an injustice and an injury in believing in
flying devils and at the same time refusing to believe in flying
men. He felt that, but for this crazy kink in Gaspard’s brain, he
could safely be as frank with him as he had been with Catherine—for
he saw the qualities of kindness and understanding in the old man.
But he had to invent a silly story as he valued his life.

He was from the big river, he said: but he had lived in towns
sometimes and even gone to school. He had made his living in the
woods of late years in lumber-camps and on the “drives” and that
sort of thing. He had trapped for one winter, without much success;
and he had taken city sportsmen up-country several times, for
fishing in summer and to hunt moose and deer in the fall. He was not
a registered guide, and he had not kept to any one part of the
country for long at a time.

“What started ye fer Injun River?” asked Gaspard.

“I had to start for somewhere, and quick at that,” replied Akerley.

“Had to, hey? Chased out?”

“I didn’t wait to see if I was chased. I had plenty of gas, as it
happened, and—”

“Hey?”

“Grub. I shifted my ground quick and stepped light so’s not to leave
any tracks in the mud. My canoe was ready.”

“I reckon ye mean that the Law’s on yer tracks,” said Gaspard,
eyeing him keenly. “Ye don’t look like a law-breaker to me—onless
maybe it was a game-law ye busted.”

“Anything you prefer.”

“Well, some game-laws have hoss-sense an’ reason to ’em and others
ain’t.”

“He wouldn’t kill deer or moose or caribou out of season,” said
Catherine, looking intently at the intruder. “But I wouldn’t think
the worse of anyone who took a salmon out of a rented pool, as Mick
Otter did on Indian River.”

There was something in her glance that caused Akerley to sit up and
use his brains quick.

“I am glad you feel that way,” he said, quite briskly.

He remembered an actual incident of a trip he had made into the
wilds years ago.

“I dipped into a pool with a spear that was given me by an old
Indian,” he continued. “I got a fine fish—twenty-four pounds. You
should have seen him come up like a ghost through the black water to
the light of the birch-bark torch. Great sport—but it isn’t inside
the law now-a-days.”

“Ye’re right!” exclaimed old Gaspard Javet. “I ain’t speared a
salmon in thirty years—but I reckon I’ve done worse.”

“So here I am—with a frying-pan and an old quilt,” said Akerley.

“Thar’s grub enough fer ye here, an’ work too,” said Gaspard. “Grub
an’ work, an’ blankets to sleep in—which is enough fer any sensible
man. Ye’re welcome to all three fer as long as it suits ye, fer I
like yer looks.”




                             CHAPTER VI

                         MICK OTTER, INJUN


The newspapers had a great deal to say about the extraordinary
behavior and mysterious disappearance of Major T. V. Akerley, M. C.,
of the Royal Air Force. Why had he hit Lieutenant-Colonel E. F.
Nasher on the point of the chin? That was the question; and no one
seemed to be so ignorant of the answer as Colonel Nasher himself.
Many young men who possessed pens of ready writers (more or less)
and little else dealt lengthily with the problem.

The Press soon came to the conclusion that the major had hit the
colonel out of pure cussedness—that a young and distinguished
officer had committed assault and battery; insubordination with
violence; behavior unbecoming an officer and a gentleman; and
desertion coupled with theft of Government property, all in an
outburst of causeless and unreasoning temper.

Then military men, demobilized and otherwise, of various arms of the
Service and various ranks, began dipping unaccustomed pens on the
vanished Akerley’s behalf. One wrote, “I was Major Akerley’s groom
when he was a cavalry lieutenant. He was the quietest officer I ever
knew. Some of our officers ...; but that Mr. Akerley didn’t even get
mad, so’s you’d notice when his batman burnt his boots he’d paid
seven guineas for in London. I guess Major Akerley had a reason for
doing what he did.”

Many other warriors wrote in the same vein, among them a retired
major-general. Much was written of Akerley’s reserve of manner,
devotion to duty, skill as an airman and cool courage as a fighter.
All these champions had known Akerley in France, of course; and all
denied any personal knowledge of Colonel Nasher, whose military
activities had not carried him beyond Ottawa.

The result of all this literary effort on the part of the veterans
was a very general sympathy, strong and wide-spread, for the
run-away Ace—but as neither newspapers nor the faintest echoes of
public opinion reach Gaspard’s clearings, Akerley knew nothing of
it. The civil and military police continued to scratch their heads,
and run finger-tips (not entirely free from splinters) across and
around maps of the world, and submit reports to their respective
headquarters through the proper channels, with a view to the
disciplining and undoing of Major Akerley and the recovery of the
aëroplane.

Tom Akerley, known to old Gaspard as Tom Anderson, lived his new
life from day to day and tried not to worry. His shoulder mended
rapidly, and he worked about the farm with a will. He spent much of
his time in Gaspard’s company, working in the crops, mending fences
and clearing stones from the fields; and the fact that the old man’s
rifle always lay or stood near at hand at once amused and irritated
him.

Gaspard continued to cling to his belief that he had been visited by
a devil, a fiend of darkness out of the night, and that the visitor
was still somewhere in the vicinity; and sometimes Tom joined him on
these fruitless hunts for the intruder through the surrounding
forests. On these occasions, Tom was armed with a muzzle-loading,
double-barrelled gun, the left barrel rammed with a bullet and the
right with duck-shot.

“Would you know him if you saw him?” asked Tom during one of these
expeditions, as they rested after a stumbling struggle through an
alder swamp.

“He’d be discovered to me quick as the flash of an eye,” replied the
old man. “Fer years have I bin expectin’ him, in punishment for the
reckless ways o’ my youth; an’ I’ll know ’im when I set eyes on ’im,
ye kin lay to that!”

“And then what will you do?” asked Tom.

“Pump it to ’im! Pump it into ’im!” exclaimed the old man, heartily;
and he illustrated his pleasant intention by crooking and wiggling
the trigger-finger of his right hand.

Even the knowledge of the fact that the cartridges in the rifle were
harmless failed to put Tom entirely at his ease.

Tom enjoyed the evenings and rainy days. Then he read or played
chess with Catherine or listened to Gaspard’s stories of the past.
The old man told some stirring tales of his physical prowess; and
always at the conclusion of such narratives he would say, in a
fallen voice, “Vanity, vanity, all sich things is vanity.”

The grass ripened for the scythe; and Tom drew Gaspard’s attention
to the fact.

“Mick would feel reel put out if we started hayin’ before he got
here,” said Gaspard. “He ain’t missed a hayin’ in twenty year, Mick
Otter ain’t.”

“Where does he live?” asked Tom.

“Everywheres,” replied the old man. “Mostly crost the
height-o’-land, I reckon. He can’t keep still fer long, that Injun.
Soon as the ice busts up he’s off, runnin’ the woods till the grass
is ripe. He lights out agin after harvest, an’ lives on the gun till
the snow lays a foot deep over these clearin’s. He’ll be here inside
the week, to mow the first swath—onless somethin’s happened to ’im.”

They took down the scythes next morning, and Tom turned the
grindstone while Gaspard ground the long blades. They were intent on
their task in the sunshine when a shadow fell suddenly upon the
stone. Tom glanced up and saw a squat figure standing within a few
feet of him. He ceased to turn the stone and straightened his back.
Old Gaspard poured water from a rusty tin along the edge of the
blade, tested its keenness with a thumb and said, “How do, Mick.”

“How do,” replied the old Maliseet. “You start hayin’, what?”

“Reckoned ye’d be along in time to cut the first swath,” returned
Gaspard.

Mick Otter nodded his head and looked at Tom. His eyes were round
and dark and very bright. He stared unwinking for several seconds,
then turned again to Gaspard.

“You got young man for Catherine, what?” he said.

Gaspard smiled.

“That’s as may be,” he replied. “Ask Catherine herself, if ye wanter
know. Howsumever, this here’s Tom Anderson, from ’way over on the
upper St. John. He speared a salmon an’ the wardens chased ’im out.”

“That so?” said Mick Otter. “Chase ’im quite a ways, what?”

Tom laughed goodnaturedly.

The three went into the house, where Catherine welcomed Mick Otter
cordially and produced a second breakfast. The Maliseet ate swiftly,
heartily and in silence, nodding or shaking his head now and then in
answer to a question. Then the three men returned to the scythes and
the grindstone. Fifteen minutes later they were mowing in the oldest
and ripest meadow. Mick Otter led along the edge of the field; old
Gaspard followed and Tom brought up the rear. Tom had learned to
swing a scythe when a small boy. Like swimming and milking, it is a
knack not easily forgotten. Catherine came out and sat on the fence.
Mick Otter left his place and walked over to her, wiped his long
blade with a handful of grass and then played on it with his ringing
scythe-stone. Returning the stone to his hip-pocket, he said, “How
that young feller come here, anyhow?”

“Why, how would he come?” returned the girl, “not in a canoe, that’s
certain; and he didn’t bring a horse.”

“Maybe he walk here, hey?”

“That seems reasonable, Mick.”

“An’ maybe he don’t walk, what?”

Catherine glanced over to assure herself that her grandfather was
out of ear-shot, then descended from her perch on the top rail and
stepped close to the old Maliseet.

“What do you mean, Mick Otter?” she asked in a whisper.

“That young feller no guide nor lumberman,” said Mick. “Big man,
him. See his picter in the paper, all dress up like soldier.”

While he spoke his round, bright eyes searched her eyes.

“Keep quiet,” she whispered. “Grandad doesn’t know—nobody knows.
I’ll tell you first chance I get. You are my friend, Mick. You’ll
keep quiet, won’t you? Grandad thinks it was a devil—and he is
always hunting around with his rifle.”

“That a’ right,” said the Indian; and he returned to his work.

Catherine soon found an opportunity for speech with Akerley. She
told him of her conversation with Mick Otter.

“I am not afraid of him,” she continued. “He is kind and sane: He
will keep your secret, if we are perfectly frank with him. I am
afraid of the newspapers. A mail comes in once a fortnight to
Millbrow, and that is only ten miles below Boiling Pot; and perhaps
Ned Tone has already seen a paper with your photograph and story in
it.”

Tom’s face paled for an instant.

“Please don’t think that I am afraid of Ned Tone,” he said. “I am
only afraid of being driven away from here. But perhaps there is no
real danger of it. That fellow’s eyes may not be as sharp as Mick
Otter’s. If the old Indian is to be trusted I’ll just carry on and
let Ned Tone make the next move; but I think he would have been
nosing around before this, if he had recognized my phiz in a
newspaper.”

“But he does not know you are here,” said the girl. “He has every
reason to believe that you are lost in the woods, wandering about
eating wild berries—or dead.”

When old Mick Otter heard Tom Akerley’s story from Catherine, he
permitted himself the faintest flicker of a smile. The thing that
tickled his sense of humor was the position of his old friend
Gaspard Javet.

“Gaspar’ he hate devil darn bad an’ like Tom darn well, what?” he
remarked. “We bes’ fix them catridges again before Gaspar’ shoot at
deer or bobcat, or maybe he smell somethin’, hey?”

“But what shall we do if Ned Tone sees a newspaper and suspects the
truth about Tom?” asked Catherine.

“How you know that until he come, hey? He don’t git no newspaper,
maybe, down to B’ilin’ Pot. We watch out sharp, anyhow; an’ if Ned
Tone make the move, me an’ Tom take to the big woods; an’ nobody
find ’im then, you bet. Ned Tone got nothin’ in his skull ’cept some
muscle off his neck.”

With this the girl had to be satisfied, but she believed that both
Tom and the old Maliseet under-rated Ned Tone’s cunning and the
possible danger which he represented.

The weather held fine and the hay-making went briskly on day by day;
and in odd half-hours, usually late at night, Mick and Tom worked at
replacing the explosive charges in Gaspard’s cartridges. Catherine
helped in this, by carrying and returning, as she had helped Tom in
the work of withdrawing the same charges of cordite. She and Tom
felt no fear now of the old man’s recognizing Tom as the being that
had swooped down from the sky; and Tom felt so sure now of Gaspard’s
friendship and sanity that, but for the girl, he would have
confessed the facts of the case to him. She would not hear of this,
however.

“You don’t know him as well as I do,” she argued. “He is a dear,
kind old man—but he is quite mad on that one subject of a visit from
a devil. But, of course, if you want to be shot dead, if you are
tired of life in this dull place, tell Grandad.”

“Then I’ll not tell him—for I was never more interested in life than
I am now,” said Tom, gravely.

Soon all the grass was cut, cured and housed, except that in the
“new clearin’.” This piece of land was actually four, five and six
years old as a clearing. Though not more than four acres in extent
it represented three seasons’ brushing and burning. Old Gaspard
Javet had cleared every rod of it single-handed. Each spring, as
soon as the ground was dry, he had set to work, cutting out the
brush and smaller growth at the roots but leaving waist-high stumps
in the felling of the larger timber. Then, having trimmed and
twitched out the stuff for fence-rails and firewood, he had piled
the brush and branches and set fire to them, piled them again and
burned them again, then scattered his oats and grass-seed and
harrowed them into the ashes among the scorched stumps. Thus he had
taken a crop of grain, or a crop of fodder if the frosts fell early,
from each patch of new land in the first year, and harvests of hay
in the following years. Now the whole clearing stood thick with long
spears of timothy grass that topped the gray and black stumps.

The new clearing lay north of the older fields and was separated
from them by a belt of woods several hundred yards wide.

Tom cut into the ripe timothy early one morning, while Gaspard Javet
and Mick Otter were still engaged in an argument concerning the
relative merits of several methods of trapping mink. He cut along
the northern edge of the field—a wavering swath, owing to obtrusive
stumps. He was about to return to the starting-point when the
excited barking of Blackie, the little dog of obscure antecedents,
attracted his attention. There was a serious, threatening note in
Blackie’s outcry that was new to it—a tone that Tom had never heard
when chipmunks, or even porcupines, were the cause of the
excitement.

“He has found something interesting,” said Tom, and he immediately
balanced the scythe on the top of a stump, vaulted the brush-fence
and made for the sound through the thick undergrowth of young
spruces. The dog continued to bark; and suddenly Tom realized that
he was moving to the right in full cry. So he quickened his own pace
and shouted to the dog as he ran. Then he heard the crashing of a
heavy body through the thickets, receding swiftly; and Blackie’s
angry yelps, also receding, took on a breathless note. He ran at top
speed for several hundred yards, avoiding the trunks of trees but
setting his feet down blindly, until a sprawled root tripped him and
laid him flat on the moss. He sat up as soon as he had recovered his
breath.

“It didn’t sound like a deer,” he reflected. “It wasn’t jumping. The
pup doesn’t pay any attention to deer. It may have been a bear or a
moose—though I can’t quite imagine either of them running away from
that pup.”

He got to his feet and spent a few minutes in searching around for
tracks in the moss. Though rain had fallen during the night, he
failed to discover any marks of hoof or claw. So he returned to the
clearing; and there he found Gaspard and Mick.

“What you bin chasin’, hey?” asked the Maliseet.

Tom told them. Mick immediately discarded his scythe and scrambled
through the fence. Old Gaspard Javet grinned and stroked his white
whiskers.

“There goes that durned Injun, fer a run in the woods,” he said,
with an expression of face and voice as if he were speaking of a
beloved infant. “He’s the everlastin’est wild-goose chaser I ever
see. He’d foller a shadder, Mick would—aye, foller its tracks, an’
overhaul it, too—an’ maybe try to skin it. But he’s more for the
chase nor the kill, Mick is—more for the hunt nor the skin. He’s
what Cathie’s pa uster call a good sportsman, I reckon—that
gad-about old Injun.”

Then he swung his scythe with a dry swish through the stems of tall
timothy and a thousand purple-powdered heads bowed down before him.

Gaspard and Tom moved steadily among the stumps for about half an
hour; and then Mick Otter scrambled back through the fence with the
little dog panting at his heels.

“That b’ar got boots on, anyhow,” said Mick.

“Boots, d’ye say?” exclaimed Gaspard. “Boots!—an’ spyin’ ’round like
a wild critter instead of walkin’ up to the house an’ namin’ his
business like a Christian. I reckon I best take a look at him an’
his boots.”

He laid aside the scythe and took up his ever-handy rifle.

“You think him devil, what?” said Mick.

“Ye can’t never tell,” returned Gaspard, climbing the barrier of
brush that shut the forest from the clearing.

Mick Otter and the little dog followed. Tom checked his own impulse
to go rambling in the cool woods, filled and lit his pipe and
returned to the mowing. He had not gone half the length of the field
before Catherine came running to him, straight through the standing
crop.

“Ned Tone is at the house,” she said, breathlessly; and then, “Where
are the others?” she asked.

Tom told her of the morning’s excitement.

“That was Ned Tone,” she said. “He had been running, I know. You
didn’t see him; and I am sure he didn’t see you, by the questions he
asked. But he wouldn’t have come spying like that if he didn’t think
there was a chance of your being here.”

“Do you suppose he has seen a paper and suspects something?” asked
Tom.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see anything in his manner to suggest it.
He was just as he always is—except that he asked if I had seen
anything of a stranger recently.”

“Where is he now?”

“Sitting on the porch. I told him to wait there—that I would soon be
back.”

“And he didn’t wait!” exclaimed Tom. “He came sneaking after you.”

He stepped past the girl and ran forward through the tall grass.

“I see you,” he shouted as he ran. “What are you prying ’round here
for? Stand up and show yourself.”

Ned Tone advanced reluctantly from the belt of forest that separated
the old clearings from the new, with an air of embarrassment and
anger. Tom walked aggressively up to him, halting within a yard of
him. They were in plain sight of Catherine.

“So it’s you!” exclaimed Tom. “Were you looking for me?”

“Nope, I wasn’t,” said Tone. “Who be ye, anyhow?”

“I’m the man who didn’t take the track to the left, as you know very
well,” replied Tom, smiling dangerously. “Your face looks better
than it did when I last saw you. Your lip has healed quite nicely.”

“’S that so! Mind yer own business, will ye? Have I got to ask yer
leave to come to Gaspard Javet’s clearin’s?”

“Certainly not—but I thought you didn’t know the way. You told me
that Gaspard’s place lay to the west. What were you spying ’round
here for, half an hour ago?”

Tom jerked a thumb toward the northern edge of the field.

“What of it?” retorted the other. “I go where I choose. I was here
afore ye ever come an’ I’ll be here still, after ye’re gone. I don’t
step outer my tracks fer every tramp an’ thief that runs the woods.
Don’t think ye own this country jist because the game-wardens chased
ye away from where ye belong.”

“What do you know about the game-wardens?” asked Tom, in surprise,
wondering where the fellow had heard the yarn which he had been
forced to tell to old Gaspard Javet.

“I ain’t a fool,” returned Ned Tone, with a knowing leer. “What else
would ye’ve come into this country for? But if ye don’t clear out,
I’ll put old Gaspard wise to ye; an’ he’ll run ye outer these
woods.”

Tom laughed cheerfully; and Catherine heard it and caught the note
of relief in it.

“Gaspard is hunting you with his rifle this very minute,” he said.
“He and Mick Otter are on your tracks.”

“Huntin’ me!” exclaimed Tone. “Me an’ this family is old friends.”

Catherine MacKim joined them at that moment.

“You are not a friend of ours, Ned Tone,” she said, looking him
straight in the eyes. “Grandad and I don’t have cowards and liars
for friends.”




                            CHAPTER VII

                        TAKING TO THE TRAIL


Ned Tone flinched and reddened at the insult.

“That ain’t no way to talk to me!” he cried. “You wouldn’t dare say
it if ye was a man.”

“Yes, I would. You showed yourself in your true colors when you
misdirected this stranger. That was the lowest, meanest trick ever
played in these woods by white man or Indian.”

“’S that so. Maybe _he’s_ the liar. Who is he, anyhow, an’ what’s he
hidin’ ’round here for? Where’d he come from? He’s a slick talker;
an’ I reckon that’s all ye know about him, Catherine MacKim.”

“We’ll just step back into the woods, you and I, out of the lady’s
sight and hearing, if she’ll excuse us for a few minutes,” said Tom,
in a quiet voice.

“Not me,” replied the big woodsman. “I got nothin’ to say to ye in
private. If ye’re lookin’ fer a fight ye’re lookin’ up the wrong
tree, I wouldn’t dirty my hands on ye.”

“Again, you mean.”

“So ye’ve bin braggin’ about that, have ye?”

“Well, it was something to brag about, don’t you think so?—to beat
up the heaviest hitter on Indian River? Gaspard Javet wouldn’t
believe it possible until he saw you—and you told him you’d had a
scrap with a bear.”

“It ain’t true,” snarled Tone. “It’s all lies. My word’s as good as
yourn—an’ better. I won’t fight, anyhow.”

“In that case, please go away from here immediately!” exclaimed
Catherine.

Her voice shook and her face was pale with anger and scorn.

“D’ye mean that?” cried Tone. “Order me off like a dog, without bite
or sup, because I won’t fight with this here tramp? An’ me a
neighbor from B’ilin’ Pot! Treat me worse’n ye’d treat a drunk
Injun! That ain’t the way we do things in this country, Catherine
MacKim. We don’t turn agin our neighbors jist to please slick-spoken
hoboes a-sneakin’ ’round tryin’ to shake the game-wardens. Like
enough there’s more nor game-wardens after this smart Alec—the
police theirselves, like as not.”

“I wonder why you stand there talking when no one wants to listen to
you,” said the girl.

Tone received those quiet words as if he had been struck in the
face. He had been amazed and angered before—but the amazement and
anger which he now felt were beyond anything of the sort he had ever
known or even imagined. His eyes darkened with the dangerous shadows
of outraged vanity and goaded fury. So he stared at her for a few
seconds; and then, quick as a flash, he turned and flung himself
upon Tom Akerley.

Tom, who had not seen the change in the other’s eyes, was not ready
for the onslaught. Over he went, flat on his back in the long grass,
with the big bushwhacker on top of him; and so he lay—for a fraction
of a second.

Ned Tone’s fingers were on Tom’s windpipe, and one of his knees was
on the chest and the other in the pit of the stomach of the
prostrate one, when Tom suddenly turned over on his face and humped
himself like a camel. Tone felt a grip as of iron on both wrists, a
cracking strain on the muscles of his arms and shoulders, and then a
sense of general upheaval. His feet described an arc in the air and
he struck the ground full-length with jarring force.

Tone got up slowly and saw Tom standing beside Catherine.

“You don’t know any more about wrestling than you do about boxing,”
said Tom, pleasantly. “But even if you were trained you wouldn’t be
much good, for all your weight and muscle—because you haven’t any
spirit, any grit.”

Tone turned without a word and started slowly for the road that cut
through the belt of forest and connected the new clearing with the
older fields. The others followed him, Tom smiling and the girl
still pale with indignation and scorn. Tone did not look around. As
he passed close to the house, on his way to the road that led afar
through the wilderness to Boiling Pot, Tom overtook him and
suggested that he should rest awhile and have something to eat.
Tone’s reply to the offer of hospitality would scorch the paper if
written down. So Tom let him go. Tone turned at the edge of the
woods and shook his fist.

Tom turned to Catherine, who had come up and halted beside him, and
said, “He is so futile that I feel sorry for him.”

“He would be dangerous if he knew—but it is quite evident that he
doesn’t know,” she said. “But he’ll do you some injury if he
possibly can. I think he hates you. I am afraid I would not have let
him off so easily if I had been in your place to-day, after that
treacherous attack.”

“He doesn’t seem to like me, that’s a fact,” returned Tom, with a
quiet smile. “I suppose it is natural that he should feel that way
about me, for several reasons; and I am not sorry.”

Catherine glanced at him quickly, and the color was back in her
cheeks.

“You are wonderfully good-natured,” she said, “and you seem to have
a marvelous control of your temper. I can’t understand your striking
that colonel.”

“My nerves are better than they were then,” he replied. “But even
now—well, when it comes to a fellow like that saying that your dead
friend was a coward!—but he was fat and out of condition, and I
shouldn’t have hit him on the chin.”

“I am not finding fault with you for that,” she said. “Far from it.”

She entered the house, and Tom returned to his mowing in the new
clearing. As he took up his scythe he muttered, “I wonder what’s
going to happen to me here—and when?”

Gaspard and Mick Otter were late for dinner, but they found
Catherine and Tom waiting at the table for them. After hearing all
about Ned Tone’s visit, Gaspard used threatening language. Mick
Otter plied his knife with a preoccupied air.

“You don’t like him, hey?” he queried, looking at Gaspard.

“No, or never did, durn his hide!” exclaimed the other.

“Guess he feels sore,” said the Maliseet, looking reflectively at
Catherine. “You like ’im one time maybe, hey Cathie?”

“Never!” cried the girl. “I never liked him!”

Mick wagged his head and glanced at Tom.

“You best watch out or maybe he shoot you from b’ind a tree one
day,” he said.

The hay was all cut and gathered in; the oats and buckwheat were
harvested; the potatoes were dug and stored; and still old Mick
Otter stuck to the clearings and the hard work, and in all that time
nothing more was seen or heard of Ned Tone from Boiling Pot. Gaspard
Javet continued to keep his rifle handy, but whether in readiness
for a snap at the fiendish visitor or at the heaviest hitter on
Indian River the others were not sure.

Mid-September came, with nights of white frost, mornings of gold and
silver magic, and noons of sunshine faintly fragrant with scents of
balsamy purple cones and frost-nipped berries and withering ferns.
Red and yellow leaves fell circling in windless coverts; and cock
partridges, with trailing wings and out-fanned tails, mounted on
prostrate trunks of old gray pines, filled the afternoons with their
hollow drumming. Then a change came over Mick Otter. His interest in
agricultural pursuits suddenly expired. Fat pigs, well-fed cattle,
full barns and his comfortable bed suddenly lost all meaning for
him. He sniffed the air; and his eyes were always lifting from his
work to the hazy edges of the forest. Even the virtues of
Catherine’s cooking suddenly seemed a small and unimportant matter
to him.

One evening at supper he said, “Set little line o’ traps ’round
Pappoose Lake maybe. Plenty musquash, some fox, some mink, maybe.
You don’t trap that country long time now, hey?”

“Ain’t trapped it these five years,” replied Gaspard. “I’d help ye
set the line but I be afeared o’ rheumatics—an’ I gotter watch out
’round these here clearin’s.”

“You come, hey?” queried Mick, turning to Tom. “Git plenty fur,
plenty money, plenty sport.”

“Where is it?” asked Tom, without enthusiasm.

“Five-six mile,” replied Mick. “You come back when you like to see
Gaspar’, what?”

Tom reflected that money might be useful in the future, although he
had lived through these last three months without a cent. He could
see no likelihood of ever being able to touch the few hundreds of
dollars to his credit in the bank, in the distant world from which
he had fled. Yes, he might need money some day; and furs of almost
every variety brought a high price now, he had heard. So why not
join Mick Otter in this venture? If their activities took them no
farther afield than Pappoose Lake he would be able to visit the
clearing twice or thrice a week—and oftener, with luck. He glanced
covertly at Catherine.

Catherine had been watching him; and the moment their eyes met, she
nodded slightly and smiled.

“That a’ right!” exclaimed Mick Otter, whose sharp eyes and active
wits had missed nothing.

“Yes, I’ll go with you,” said Tom, with an embarrassed grin. “But I
warn you that I don’t know anything about trapping fur.”

“That a’ right,” returned the Maliseet. “Mick Otter got the brain
for the both of us, you got the arm an’ the leg for the hard work.
Take plenty fur, you bet.”

They set out for Pappoose Lake, six miles to the northward, two days
later. They carried blankets, axes, Mick Otter’s rifle, a small bag
of flour, tea, bacon, a kettle, a frying-pan and half a dozen traps.
It took them three hours to get to the lake, for the way was rough
and not straight and their loads were heavy. There Tom rested for
half an hour; and Mick cruised around for a likely site for their
camp. Then Tom returned to the clearings, dined with Gaspard and
Catherine, loaded up with more provisions, four more traps and a
tarpaulin, and headed northward again for Pappoose Lake.

Catherine followed him from the house, and called to him just as he
was climbing the brush-fence at the northern edge of the new
clearing. He turned very willingly and lowered his pack to the
ground.

“I have just thought of something,” she said. “Ned Tone is still
dangerous, and we should be ready for him if he comes back. The
danger of his seeing something, or hearing something, to cause him
to suspect your identity, isn’t passed, you know.”

“I know it,” said Tom. “I realize that I am still in danger of
discovery. That is the only thing that worries me now.”

“And if you are found, it will be through Ned Tone,” she said. “You
must be careful. Whenever you come back, take a look at the house
before you show yourself. If there is danger I’ll show something
white in my window.”

“And at night?”

“A candle on my window-sill. But that is not all. If the danger
seems acute, if there is a chance of people searching the woods for
you, I’ll come and warn you.”

“But do you know the way?”

“Yes, I have been to Pappoose Lake.”

Tom thanked her somewhat awkwardly for her thoughtfulness, hoisted
his lumpy pack to his shoulders again and scrambled slowly across
the brush-fence. He turned on the other side.

“Perhaps I’ll be able to tell you—to show you, some day—to prove to
you—what I think of your kindness—and you,” he said.

Then he turned and vanished in the underbrush; and the girl turned
and went back to the house, thoughtful but happy.

Mick Otter and Tom made two camps, one on the western end of
Pappoose Lake and the other seven miles away to the northwest, on
Racquet Pond. The first was nothing more than a lean-to, walled with
woven brush and roofed with the tarpaulin. The second was built of
poles chinked with moss—four walls broken by a doorway and a tiny
window-hole. In the middle of the mossy floor lay a circular hearth
of stones; and directly above the hearth, in the sloping roof of
poles and sods, gaped a square hole.

Mick Otter was proud of the Racquet Pond camp—but Tom didn’t think
very highly of it. Having completed the camps to the old Maliseet’s
entire satisfaction, they set the lines of traps—five traps in the
vicinity of Pappoose Lake and five around Racquet Pond. For three
weeks they made the lean-to their headquarters; and in that time Tom
made half a dozen visits to Gaspard Javet’s farm; finding that
everything was right there and that nothing more had been seen or
heard of Ned Tone.

The last week of October was one of miserable weather. A heavy frost
had frozen the swamps and driven the woodcock south; and this was
followed by days of chilly rain—rain so exceedingly chilly that it
sometimes fell in the form of hail. It was in this time of
discomfort that Mick Otter suggested the removal of headquarters to
Racquet Pond. He said, very truthfully, that the farther camp was
warmer and drier than the lean-to and that the farther line of traps
had already beaten the Pappoose line by three mink and a fox.

“Do pretty good with ten traps on Racquet,” he said.

“Take the traps, if you want to,” replied Tom, “but I stay right
here until something happens.”

So Mick moved alone, taking his blankets, the kettle and frying-pan,
some of the grub and two traps along with him. Bad as the weather
was, Tom immediately set out for the clearings, to borrow another
pan and another kettle. He spent a very pleasant evening with
Catherine and her grandfather.

Tom was to recall that happy and comfortable evening often before
spring. Catherine was as frankly friendly as ever—but the old man’s
attitude toward him was not quite as usual. It was as friendly as
ever, but different. Tom caught the old man gazing at him several
times with an expression of new interest, curiosity and wonder in
his searching eyes.

“You aren’t saying much to-night,” remarked Tom, after his host had
sat silent for nearly an hour and two games of chess had been
played.

“An’ thinkin’ all the more, lad,” replied Gaspard, pleasantly.

“But what about, Grandad?” asked Catherine.

“One thing an’ another, one thing an’ another—but mostly about human
vanity an’ ignorance an’ the hand o’ Providence,” answered Gaspard.

The young people let it go at that. They smiled at each other across
the corner of the table and set up the chessmen again. The subjects
of human vanity and ignorance did not touch their imaginations, and
they were well content with the workings of the hand of Providence.

Tom left the house after breakfast, with a light pack on his
shoulder. His heart was light, too, though the sky was gray and a
cold and gusty wind blew smothers of icy rain across the clearings.
Upon reaching camp he immediately built up the fire, which lay full
length across the front of the lean-to, dried himself thoroughly and
smoked a pipe. The heat and cheery light beat into the shelter,
thrown forward by mighty back-logs. Hail-stones rattled in the
trees, hopped on the frozen moss and hissed in the hot caverns of
the fire. A big, smoke-blue moose bird or “whiskey jack” fluttered
about the camp, harsh of voice, confiding, and possessed of
curiosity in that extreme degree that is said to have killed a cat.

Tom felt happy in the present moment and situation. He even felt
that his happiness might well be established here for a lifetime, if
only the great world, from which he had parted so violently and
suddenly, would continue to leave him in peace. He was glad that he
had not followed Mick Otter and the lure of peltries seven miles
farther afield. He felt that the distance of six miles was quite far
enough for any sane person to be separated from Gaspard Javet’s
clearings.

He dined at mid-day on tea and bacon and Catherine’s bread and
Catherine’s home-made strawberry jam. He fed the attentive moose
bird with rinds of bacon and bits of bread soaked succulently in hot
fat. The rain and hail ceased early in the afternoon. He left the
shelter and worked his ax for an hour, felling and trimming selected
trees for fuel. The moose bird kept him company, flitting about him
and attending upon every stroke of the ax as if expecting it to
produce bacon rinds, instead of chips. Then he inspected the three
traps that Mick had left with him. They were empty—but their
condition did not chill his sense of contentment in the least.

Soon after supper he heaped the long fire high with green logs and
rolled himself in his blankets. The night was frosty, but the gusty
wind had gone down with the sun; and the fire-lit shelter seemed an
exceedingly comfortable and secure retreat to him. To fully
appreciate comfort, one must be within arm’s-length of discomfort or
but recently emerged from it. Thousands of persons in steam-heated
places with electric bells and janitors do not know what they are
enjoying—or what they are missing.

Tom was fully conscious of his comfort. He lay for some time with
his eyes half open, gazing up at the flicker of firelight on the
poles and tarpaulin overhead; thinking drowsily of Catherine MacKim,
and of Gaspard with his good heart and extraordinary beliefs; and of
Mick Otter. He liked Gaspard better than any other elderly person of
his acquaintance, despite the old woodman’s embarrassing ambition to
deal with the supposed devilish powers of the air with a rifle. And
he liked Mick Otter, too. In short, he liked every one he had met in
Gaspard’s clearings except Ned Tone. It was really wonderful how
full his heart was of affection and how entirely he seemed to have
finished with worldly ambition. He would make an early start on the
morrow for Racquet Pond, to see how that amusing old Indian was
getting along; and he would visit the clearings again on the day
after that, for a game of chess. A fine game, chess—an old and
romantic game—an ancient pastime of kings and queens. He fell asleep
and dreamed of kings and queens in romantic costumes playing chess
with ivory pieces—and all the queens looked like Catherine MacKim.

Tom was awakened by the clutch of a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t
believe it at first. He tried to sink back, to submerge again, to
that delicious depth of sleep from which the hand had partially
raised him. But the grip of fingers tightened on his shoulders and
he became conscious of an insistent voice in his ear. He opened his
eyes and saw dimly that some one crouched over him. There was no
more than a ghost of light to see by—a pale filter of faint
starshine; and there was no glow from the fire across the open front
of the lean-to, for it had fallen to a bank of ash-filmed embers
against the charred back-log.

“What’s the matter, Mick?” he asked, sleepily.

The dim figure drew back and stood upright.

“It isn’t Mick,” said Catherine, in an excited and distressed
whisper. “Ned Tone and another man are at the house—a policeman of
some sort—a detective. They came this afternoon—looking for you,
Tom. I got away as soon as they were asleep, to warn you.”

Tom was sitting up before she got this far with her statement, you
may be sure. He threw aside his blankets, stepped out from the
shelter of the tarpaulin and kicked a little pile of dry spruce
branches onto the coals. Tongues of flame licked up through the
brush, crackling sharply; and in the flickering light he turned to
the girl and took her mittened hands in his bare hands.

“You came alone!” he exclaimed. “Six miles through these woods in
the dark, alone! Cathie, you’re a wonder.”

“That’s nothing,” she said. “I knew the way and I’m not afraid of
the dark. The thing was to get here quickly. You must pack up
immediately and move over to Racquet Pond; and Mick Otter will know
where to go from there. You are lucky to have Mick for a friend.”

“I am lucky in my friends, sure enough,” he replied.

He persuaded her to enter the shelter and rest. He placed more wood
on the fire.

“How did it happen?” he asked. “What did Tone and the other fellow
say? Have they the right dope?—or is Tone just trying to start
something on his own?”

“They know you are Major Akerley—at least, Ned Tone feels sure that
you are. He saw an old newspaper in Millbrow, with your story and
photograph in it—a copy of the same paper that Mick Otter saw, I
suppose. Then he got hold of this detective and brought him in. They
reached the clearings about supper-time. They haven’t told Grandad
what they want you for, so of course he thinks the stranger is a
game warden from the St. John River. Ned Tone showed me the paper
and sneered about my new friend who is wanted by the police—but I
laughed at him. His idea is that you came down somewhere in the
woods and that I didn’t know who you were until he told me—that you
had lied to me and fooled me.”

Tom put on his boots and outer coat. He looked at his watch and saw
that it was one o’clock in the morning.

“We had better start,” he said. “You won’t get much sleep, as it
is.”

“We?” she queried. “You have to pack and go to Racquet Pond and warn
Mick.”

“I’ll see you safely home first.”

“But there is no time for that, Tom! You are in danger. You must get
away with Mick Otter as soon as possible.”

“I need ammunition for Mick’s rifle, and my leather coat. You must
let me go with you—or I’d worry all the time until I saw you again.
We really do need cartridges, Cathie—and I don’t think a couple of
hours will make any difference. They won’t make a bee-line for
Pappoose Lake in the morning.”

So he saw her home; and on the way they decided on the following
plan of campaign. Tom was to keep far away from Gaspard’s clearings,
in such hidden recesses of the wilderness as seemed best to Mick
Otter, for six full weeks. If he and Mick were still at liberty and
unmolested at the end of that time, Mick was to pay a cautious visit
to the camp on Racquet Pond. There he would find either a blank
sheet of writing paper or a sheet of paper marked with a black
cross; and the blank paper would mean that they might safely return
to the clearings, to the best of Catherine’s belief; and the black
cross would mean that the danger was still imminent. Should Mick
find the cross, he and Tom would take to the trackless wilds again
without loss of time and refrain from visiting Racquet Pond in
search of further information until after the middle of January.




                            CHAPTER VIII

                   BLACK FORESTS AND GRAY SWAMPS


The house in the clearing was dark and quiet as the grave when
Catherine and Tom reached it. Blackie did not bark at them, for he
was with them, shivering cheerfully at Tom’s heels from the
combination of loyal enthusiasm and chilliness. Catherine entered
the house, as silent as a shadow of the night. Tom went to one of
the barns and unearthed his wool-lined leather coat and with it on
replaced the patched mackinaw of Gaspard’s which he had been
wearing. He returned to the house just as Catherine reappeared with
twenty-five of her grandfather’s cartridges, half a dozen cakes of
his tobacco and a small bag of flour.

Tom received these things from her hands with mumbled words of
thanks. He behaved so awkwardly that he dropped the tobacco and had
to get down on his hands and knees to recover it.

“Snowshoes and moccasins,” she whispered. “I almost forgot them; and
I’m sure it will snow before morning.”

Again she slipped into the sleeping house; and again she returned,
this time with a pair of cowhide moccasins, an assortment of woolen
socks and two pairs of snowshoes. They retired to a safe distance
from the house and there made everything into a pack of sorts. She
helped him lift the pack to his shoulders and adjust it.

“Now you must go, you must hurry,” she said.

He extended his mittened hands and rested them lightly on her
shoulders.

“I’ll go—and I’ll hurry, of course,” he replied, in husky and
hurried tones. “But if it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t move an inch—I’d
let them catch me and court-martial me and break me. Hunted by those
fellows! A fugitive! But they’ll forget it some day—and that’s the
day I am praying for—the day when I can tell you what I think of
you, Cathie MacKim!”

Next moment she was gone from beneath his extended hands—gone, and
vanished in the gloom toward the blacker gloom of the silent house.

He stood motionless for fully a minute, scarcely breathing, with his
hands still extended. Then his arms sank slowly to his sides and his
breath escaped in a gasping sigh of suggestive astonishment and even
greater emotion. He hitched his pack higher, turned abruptly and
headed northward through the cold and dark. But cold as it was and
dark as it was he felt as warm as toast and stepped out as assuredly
as if the sun were shining.

“By thunder, she kissed me!” he whispered. “Quick as winking—but
that is what it was! They can’t catch me now, the poor Rubes—not in
fifty years!”

He would probably have continued in this high strain for several
minutes had he not strode squarely into the raking barrier of a
brush-fence. After that, he walked with more circumspection; but in
spite of a scratched face and a barked skin he felt at the top of
his form.

The snow which Catherine had predicted began to circle down just as
Tom reached his camp on Pappoose Lake. He placed his pack in the
lean-to, fed the fire, and then went out and brought in his three
traps. One had a mink. Returning to the camp he made all his
possessions—including the tarpaulin and the dead mink—into two
formidable packs. He shouldered one of these and started for Racquet
Pond.

It was close upon seven o’clock in the morning, and snow was still
falling, when Tom reached the camp on Racquet Pond. He found Mick
Otter up and breakfasting by the light of the fire in the middle of
his floor. He explained the situation without loss of time, in the
fewest possible words.

“Got you,” said the old Maliseet, gulping the last of his mug of tea
as he rose to his feet. “I go. You eat breakfas’, then fetch in two
trap by brook, then pack. Git other five trap sometime maybe. Don’t
matter now.”

Tom breakfasted and lit his pipe. He brought in the two nearest
traps, which were empty. The snow continued to circle down through
the windless air. The morning came on grayly, without a gleam of
sunshine. He made another pack of everything that he could find
about the camp—pelts dried and fresh, provisions and blankets and
the two traps—and wondered what was to be done with all this
luggage.

It was ten o’clock when Mick Otter appeared, staggering. He dropped
his load, shook and beat the clinging snow from his head and
shoulders and sat down with a grunt in the doorway of the shack.

“You make darn bad pack,” he said.

He pulled the mitten from his right hand, produced a short clay pipe
from somewhere about his person and passed it over his shoulder,
without turning his head.

“You fill a pipe,” he said. “You got dry ’baccy, what?”

He was a generous man, but he always made a point of cadging
tobacco.

Tom, who stood behind him, took the pipe, filled it and returned it,
then lit a splinter of wood at the fire and held the flame to the
bowl. Mick puffed strongly.

“That a’ right,” he said. “Chuck fire out now. Smoke smell long
ways.”

Tom obeyed, tossing the fire out into the new snow brand by brand.

“Good,” said Mick. “This snow darn good too, you bet. Don’t let up
one-day, maybe. We make toboggan now an’ git out, what.”

“Whatever you say,” replied Tom. “You are in command, so long as we
stay on the ground. But what shall we make the toboggan of, and how
long will the job take us? We are supposed to be in a hurry, I
believe.”

Mick got to his feet, ax in hand, and walked to a big spruce that
towered nearby, all of it but the brown base and lower branches lost
to view in the twirling white veils of snow. He hoisted himself to
the lowest branch and lopped it off. Thus he cut six tough, wide
branches. With these, and strips cut from a blanket, he quickly
fashioned what he was pleased to call a toboggan. Upon it he laid
all the packs and fastened them down with the tarpaulin. He rigged
strong traces of blanket to the forward end of the thing.

“Now we pull him,” he said. “Guess he slide pretty good; an’ the
snow fill up his track darn quick.”

They rounded the western end of the pond, dragging their possessions
at their heels. They headed north then, pulling like horses, each
with a rope of blanket over a shoulder and gripped in both hands.
The toboggan, so called, stuck frequently and had to be yanked this
way and that and lifted by the stern. It was hard work and slow
progress—but they kept at it without rest until three o’clock in the
afternoon; and the snow continued to fall thickly and windlessly all
that time.

They pulled into a close thicket of young spruces, made a small fire
and boiled snow for tea. After eating a few slices of bread and
drinking a kettleful of tea, they lit their pipes and continued
their journey. The visionless day darkened to black night; and still
they toiled forward. The light, new snow took them to the knees. It
was rough going all the way, with never more than a few yards of
level ground at a time—over blow-downs and hidden hummocks of moss
and hidden rocks, and through tangles of every variety of
underbrush. Mick Otter missed his footing and fell twice and Tom did
the same thing four times. Twice one of the packs worked loose and
fell off; and at last the sledge itself fell apart from sheer wear
and tear.

[Illustration: “IT WAS HARD WORK AND SLOW PROGRESS.”]

“Guess we go far ’nough to-night,” said the old Maliseet.

They cleared themselves a space in the heart of a clump of cedars
and rigged the tarpaulin for a roof. As the snow was still falling
thickly they permitted themselves a good fire. They took to their
blankets and fell asleep before the bowls of their after-dinner
pipes were cold.

When the fugitives awoke just before the first pale shimmer of dawn
the snow had ceased to fall—but it lay all around them almost
hip-deep and clung to the bowed tops and branches of the forest in
great masses. They fried bacon and boiled the kettle at a mere pinch
of fire. They constructed a new and stronger drag for their baggage,
changed their boots for moccasins, donned their snowshoes and pulled
out. The east showed silver, then red, then gold through the
snow-burdened towers of the forest. Presently the sun lifted above
the world’s edge, and with it arose a vigorous wind. Before that
wind the light snow went up in clouds, even in the sheltered woods;
and it fell from the shaken trees in showers and masses.

“Good,” said Mick Otter. “Snow hide our track yesterday, wind hide
him to-day.”

“We seem to be playing in luck,” replied Tom; and then, “Are you
heading for anywhere in particular?” he asked.

“Git to one dam good camp by sundown, maybe,” answered Mick. “Have
buckwheat flapjacks an’ molas’ for supper, maybe.”

“A camp!” exclaimed Tom. “Do you mean a lumber-camp? That would be a
crazy thing to do!”

“Nope, don’t mean lumber-camp. Camp I make long time back. Live in
him three-four week las’ winter.”

An hour later, while crossing a corner of open barren, they were
almost smothered by the drifting snow. And the cold was piercing.
Also, the lightness of the snow made the “going” exceedingly
difficult—but this condition improved as the wind drove it into
white headlands and packed it tight.

Before noon, the backs of Tom’s legs were attacked by snowshoer’s
cramp. It was exactly noon when he relinquished the painful struggle
and sat down with a yelp of pain. Mick Otter saw what the trouble
was at a glance. He made a fire and dragged Tom close to it. Then he
produced a pot of bear’s grease from the luggage, melted a quantity
of it and rubbed it vigorously into the cramped muscles of Tom’s
legs. Tom held his nose.

“If the detective gets a whiff of that he will track us around the
world,” he said, at the conclusion of the operation.

“We don’t go ’round the world, so that a’ right,” replied the
Maliseet.

The bear’s grease proved to be as potent as it smelt; and by the
time dinner had been cooked and eaten, Tom’s muscles were free from
pain and comparatively limber. But it was not until a full hour
after sunset that Mick Otter halted and said they had arrived. He
let fall his trace and vanished in a wall of spruces. Tom backed up
and reclined on the loaded drag; and presently he saw the glow of
firelight through the heavy branches and crowded stems of the
thicket.

“Come in,” called Mick. “Plenty time unload after supper.”

The camp was one to be proud of. It was at least thirty feet long.
In width it dwindled from about fifteen feet to as many inches, and
its height permitted Tom to stand upright. Its front wall was built
of logs and a part of the roof of poles and brush. The sides and the
greater part of the roof were of rock and earth. It pierced the
rugged hill at a gentle slant. It had been a brush-filled little
gully backed by a little cave inhabited by a large bear, when Mick
Otter first found it, many years ago.

When Tom scrambled through the small doorway, his snowshoes still on
his feet, he found the place full of smoke from the newly lighted
fire. The fire burned in a chimney of mud-plastered stones that went
crookedly upward against one rocky wall and vanished through the
roof of poles. Tom remarked on Mick’s evident appetite for smoke,
remembering the camp on Racquet Pond.

“A’ right pretty soon, you bet,” said Mick. “Coons make nest in the
chimley, maybe, or maybe snow stuff him up. One darn good chimley,
anyhow. He suck up smoke fine most times.”

Snow was the trouble; and at that moment a bushel of it slid down
and extinguished the fire, leaving the owner and his guest in
absolute darkness.

“That a’ right,” said Mick. “Now he suck up smoke fine.”

He quickly cleared the snow and wet faggots from the hearth and laid
and touched a match to dry bark and dry wood. He was right—the smoke
went straight up the chimney in the most knowing manner. He was
pleased.

“You don’t find no better chimley nor him in Fredericton nor Noo
York nor Muntree-hall,” he said.

Then, working by the increasing illumination from the hearth, he
raised a square of poles from the floor—a thing that looked more
like a miniature raft than a door—and propped it across the low
entrance of the cave.

“He have two good hinges made of ol’ boot las’ winter, but some darn
b’ar come along an’ bust him in, I guess,” he explained.

“Don’t apologize,” said Tom, kicking off his snowshoes and throwing
aside his fur cap and leather coat. “If I had been the bear I would
have stayed right here till spring, once I had forced the door.”

He sat down on a heap of dry brush close to the fire. Mick went to
the far end of the cave, to investigate the condition of the stores
which he had left there the winter before.

“That b’ar stop plenty long enough!” he exclaimed. “He eat all the
prune an’ all the backum, darn his long snout!”

“Is that so!” cried Tom, now keenly interested. “And what about the
molasses?”

“He don’t git that molas’, no,” replied Mick. “He don’t have no
corkscrew ’long with him that trip, I guess.”

“And the buckwheat meal? How about that?”

“Buckwheat a’ right, too.”

“I’ll fetch the pan and the kettle and the baking powder.”

The supper was a success. The flapjacks, fried in a pan greased with
a rind of bacon and flooded with molasses at the very moment of
consumption, were delicious. Even the two that missed the pan in the
act of turning and flapped into the fire lost nothing in flavor.

After supper they brought in the outfit and spread their blankets to
warm. There was enough dry fuel inside to last for several days.
Outside, the wind continued to blow and the snow to drift before it.

In the morning they found the hingeless door banked high with snow;
and upon pushing their way out they found the trail of their
approach drifted full up to the edge of the dense wood which
screened the front of their retreat. A land of small, heavily wooded
hills lay around them. The sky was clear, a thin wind was still
blowing and the air was bitterly cold. They made their way over the
roof of their dwelling and up the rough slope behind, plunging and
squirming through tangles of brush and snow hip-deep; and, upon
reaching the crown of the hill, Tom climbed into the spire of a tall
spruce. From that high perch he could look abroad for miles in every
direction. He looked back over the country through which they had
made the laborious journey, and saw nothing but black forests and
gray swamps; with here and there the pale trunks of birch trees, and
here and there a ridge of high gray maples and beeches, and patches
and strips of gleaming snow everywhere. Nothing moved but the wind,
and thin, sudden clouds of snow that puffed up and ran and sank
before it. No least haze of smoke, no sign of human habitation or
trafficking, tinged the clear air above the forests or marred the
white of the open spaces. He turned his head and searched the bright
horizon all around the world and every square yard of the landscape
within his range of vision. There was no smoke or ghost of smoke
anywhere, nor any break in the timber that looked as if it had been
cut by the hand of man, nor any sign of movement on the patches and
lanes of snow. He descended and reported to Mick Otter.

“That a’ right,” said Mick. “Guess we stop here an’ see what happen,
hey? Don’t make no tracks in front an’ lay low, what?”

“Sounds good to me—but what about our smoke?” asked Tom.

Mick pointed down the southern slope of the hill, where the
underbrush between the boles of the wide-limbed spruces and firs
grew thick and interlaced.

“Darn little smoke git through that,” he said. “Burn dry hard-wood
all day, anyhow—an’ mighty little of him.”

“It seems to me that we might stay here until Tone and the detective
chuck it. If we keep a sharp look-out they won’t catch us in
daylight; and they’ll never find that cave at night. It suits me. I
don’t want to go any farther away than I have to.”

“Maybe—but we stop here only two-three day, to rest up an’ look out.
Go north an’ west then, to place I know where we buy grub—an’ find
little camp of mine pretty near the hull way. Maybe they don’t know
nothin’ ’bout you over to Timbertown—so we trap an’ make some money,
what?”

“Buy grub? We have enough to last us weeks—and I haven’t a dollar.”

The Maliseet smiled and tapped his chest with a mittened finger.

“Got plenty dollar an’ plenty fur, me, Mick Otter,” he said.

They worked all that day and the next at the construction of a real
toboggan, leaving their work only to eat, and to climb into the top
of their look-out tree once in every couple of hours of daylight.
They failed to discover any sign of pursuit.

This toboggan was made of thin strips of seasoned ash which Mick had
prepared for this very purpose two years ago. These were held in
place, edge to edge, by numerous cross-pieces of the same tough
wood; and as they lacked both nails and screws they had to tie the
cross-pieces down with thongs of leather. They were without a
gimlet; they hadn’t even a small bit of wire to heat and burn holes
with; so the numerous holes through which the thongs of leather were
passed had to be bored and cut with knives—Mick Otter’s sheath-knife
and Tom’s pen-knife. The strips of ash of which the floor of the
toboggan was formed were an inch thick. They bored and they gouged.
They raised blisters in unexpected places on their hard fingers. Tom
broke the tips off both blades of his knife. But they stuck to it
and made a good job of it.

They buried half of their wheat flour and a little of their bacon in
the cave, along with the half-full jug of molasses and the tin can
of buckwheat meal, and banked the low door with logs and brush. Then
they dragged their new toboggan up and over the hill and down its
northern slope. The newly-risen sun showed a hazy face above the
black hills, and the light wind that fanned along out of the east
had no slash or sting in it.

“That snow work for us agin, maybe,” said Mick Otter.




                             CHAPTER IX

                        GASPARD UNDERSTANDS


Back in Gaspard’s clearings the days had not passed so pleasantly
nor so uneventfully. You may remember Catherine’s parting with Tom
in the dark, outside the big log house, and the effect of her
parting action on Tom. In that case I need only say that she had
been almost as keenly and deeply affected as Tom by her action. Her
astonishment had been almost as great as his—but not quite, of
course. She had slipped into the house again and safely up to her
room without disturbing any one of the three sleepers, and had lain
wide awake for hours. At five o’clock she had heard sounds in the
house—the voices of Ned Tone and the detective, then the voice of
her grandfather; then the rattling and banging of the lids and door
of the stove. But she had continued to lie still, denying her
hospitable instincts. She had heard the front door open and shut
half an hour later; and then she had left her bed, gone to her open
window and thrust her hand out between the woolen curtains. She had
smiled happily at the touch of the big snow-flakes on her hand. Then
she had dressed and gone downstairs and found her grandfather seated
alone at the lamp-lit table, feeding scraps of scorched bacon to
Blackie.

“I didn’t cook fer ’em nor eat with ’em,” he had said.

Gaspard had worked about the barns all that morning. Ned Tone and
the detective had returned to the house at noon. They had
immediately asked questions: Had the man who called himself Tom
Anderson gone away alone? Did he know these woods? When had they
seen him last? Was he alone then? Had he provisions and a rifle?

Catherine had smiled at these questions and Gaspard had scowled at
them. Neither had made the least pretence of answering them. Then
Ned Tone had blustered and spoken in a large, loose manner of the
might of the law; and old Gaspard Javet had confronted him with
bristling eye-brows, flashing eyes and quivering whiskers and
threatened to throw him out of the house. Then the stranger, the
detective, had said, “Don’t lose your temper and do anything rash,
old man. I represent the Law here.”

“Prove it!” Gaspard had retorted.

The other had opened his inner coat and displayed a metal badge.
Gaspard had sneered at that, and had said, “I warn the two of ye
right here an’ now to git out o’ my house an’ off my land. I reckon
ye don’t know who I am, stranger. If I fight my own battles agin the
likes of Ned Tone an’ yerself, it ain’t because I hev to; an’ if I
was to do a mite o’ shootin’ meself it wouldn’t be because I had to.
This here Law ye talk about wasn’t made jist so’s ignorant, no-count
lumps like yerself an’ Ned Tone can clutter up an honest man’s
kitchen. Clear out, or there’ll be some shootin’ now—an’ maybe some
law later.”

The man-hunters had gone reluctantly out into the storm and built
themselves a camp half a mile away. They had brought in with them
blankets, and enough provisions to last them ten days, from Boiling
Pot.

“Do you think that was wise, Grandad?” Catherine had asked.

“It was right, anyhow,” the old woodsman had replied. “We ain’t
hidin’ Tom. He went off with Mick Otter to trap fur, didn’t he; an’
if they don’t know Mick’s along with him that’s thar own look-out.
If any harm ever comes to Tom, it won’t be my fault—nor yers either,
I reckon.”

For two days after the expulsion of Ned Tone and the detective from
the kitchen, Catherine and Gaspard saw nothing of those unwelcome
invaders; and during that time the old man talked a great deal in a
very truculent manner of what he would do if they crossed his
threshold again; and how he would have handled Ned Tone in his
prime; and what would happen to them if they did catch Tom and Mick
Otter; and what in thunder the world was coming to, anyhow. It was
loose and careless talk for so stiff and elderly a person—but it
warmed Catherine’s heart to hear.

On the third day Gaspard left the house immediately after breakfast,
rifle in hand as usual, and did not return until close upon one
o’clock. He stood the rifle in a corner and sat down to his dinner
without a word. He ate in silence, looking at the girl frequently
with an expression of accusing inquiry in his deep-set eyes.

“What is the matter?” she cried, at last. “Why do you look at me
like that, Grandad?”

The old man was evidently embarrassed by the questions. He pushed
back his chair from the table and hooked his pipe from his pocket
before attempting an answer; and even then his answer was a
counter-question.

“I wanter know if ye figger as how I be crazy?” he asked.

“Crazy?” said the girl, in her turn embarrassed.

“Yes, crazy,” he replied. “Not ravin’, but queer.”

He tapped his forehead with a long finger, in an explanatory manner,
looking at her keenly but kindly.

“Queer about that thar devil,” he continued. “Kinder cracked about
the devil. That’s how ye figgered it out, I reckon.”

“Yes,” replied Catherine. “You acted very queerly about that,
Grandad, raving around with your rifle.”

Gaspard nodded his head and sighed. Catherine left her seat and went
over and stood beside him, with a hand on his shoulder. She shook
him gently until he looked up at her.

“Do you remember that Tom once tried to tell you that man can fly,
and what you said and how you looked?” she asked.

“I remember,” he said. “I was queer.”

“It was Tom himself who flew down from the sky that night,” she
said, speaking quickly. “You would have shot him if you had found
him before I did. But as soon as he knew you, he wanted to tell
you—but I wouldn’t let him, I honestly thought you would kill him
even then, Grandad.”

“Not after I knowed ’im, Cathie. I was queer—but knowin’ that lad,
an’ workin’ longside ’im an’ talkin’ to ’im made me feel happier an’
put the thoughts o’ that devil outer my head. An’ now the police are
huntin’ that lad—not the game-wardens, but the police!”

“You knew, before I told you, Grandad. You found out about Tom
to-day. Where have you been?”

“I’ve bin studyin’ on it fer quite a spell now; an’ when I was
forkin’ over some hay in the north barn this mornin’ I come on a
queer contraption that kinder put me wise. So I went over to Ned
Tone’s camp; an’ the both of ’em was still settin’ thar eatin’
breakfast. So I sez, ‘All ye lads ’ill ever catch in these woods is
a cold’; an’ after a little chat about the law I sez, ‘Ye seem
almighty wrought up about a salmon. That’ll be an all-fired costly
fish by the time ye catch Tom Anderson, I reckon.’ Then they up an’
told me how Tom’s name is Akerley an’ how he’s wanted by the police
an’ the military for worse things nor spearin’ a salmon.”

“I’ll tell you all about that, Grandad,” said the girl; and she told
him.

“And it was all my fault that he told you that story about losing
his canoe below Boiling Pot and about spearing salmon—because I told
him that you would shoot him for a devil if he didn’t make up a
story—and so you would have,” she concluded.

“Ye’re right,” said Gaspard, deeply moved. “I was ignorant—but I’ve
larned a lot since Tom come to these clearin’s. How was I to know
that men can fly in the air, like birds—onless Old Nick himself had
his finger in it? But it seems they can; an’ if Tom done it then I
ain’t got nothin’ to say agin it—but it do seem like temptin’
Providence. An’ soldierin’ in the air! That do seem to me a mite
presumptuous—a flyin’ ’round an’ fightin’ in the sky, like the
angels o’ the Lord!”

Catherine went up to her room, and returned in a minute with Tom’s
service jacket. She explained the rank badges and the decoration and
medal ribbons to the old man. He recognized the red ribbon of the
Legion of Honor; and he had frequently heard from his son-in-law the
story of how Major MacKim had won that white and gold cross in the
Crimea. Then Catherine told him about the Military Cross, and what
the war medals signified—the ’14-15 Star, the General Service and
the Victory.

“Tom fought on the ground before he fought in the air,” she
said—“before he knew how to fly, even. He was a lieutenant in a
cavalry regiment that went over without its horses with the First
Canadian Division and fought in the trenches as infantry—a regiment
of Seely’s brigade. When our cavalry was sent out of the line to get
its horses—that was after Currie had taken command of the
division—Tom joined the Flying Corps, because he thought that the
mounted troops wouldn’t get much fighting. That was in the winter of
Nineteen-Fifteen; and since then he flew and fought all the time,
except when he was in hospital, until the end of the war.”

“An’ now this here detective, an’ this here bully from B’ilin’ Pot,
figger on catchin’ him an’ havin’ the law on him—fer hittin’ a fat
feller who named his dead friend, who died fightin’ in France, a
coward!” exclaimed Gaspard, in tones of rage and disgust. “Whar’s
the sense or the jedgment or the decency in that, I’d like to know?
An’ him still jumpy when he done it from flyin’ round an’ round
’way up in the sky a-shootin’ at them Germans an’ them a-shootin’
at him! Law? Show me law that ain’t got reason nor decency nor
jedgment in it an’ I’m dead agin it! What does Ned Tone know about
shootin’?—’cept shootin’ off his mouth an’ pluggin’ bullets into
moose an’ sich that can’t shoot back? I don’t know Seeley nor
Currie, nor never heared of ’em before, but I know that lad Tom; an’
ye kin tell me all ye want to about that war, Cathie. I’d be glad to
larn about it, for I reckon I be kinder ignorant an’ behind the
times.”

Catherine told him what she knew of those momentous years and
events, which wasn’t very much. During the war she had seen an
occasional newspaper and magazine, and recently Tom had told her a
good deal of what he had seen. At the conclusion of the talk her
grandfather was deeply moved and torn with regret that he had not
trimmed his whiskers and shouldered his rifle and gone to war; and
of two things he was sure—that the Emperor of Germany had started a
terrible thing in a cowardly and dishonorable way and that Tom
Akerley had jumped into it and stopped it.

“An’ Ned Tone, the heaviest hitter on Injun River, reckoned as how
he could do what that thar Kaiser couldn’t!” he sneered.

When Gaspard went to the camping-place of Tone and the detective
next day, he found the shelter deserted and a trail heading toward
Boiling Pot. Two days later he found a new trail of snowshoes and a
toboggan running northward to the west of his clearings. He returned
to the house and informed Catherine of this: and together they
followed it to Pappoose Lake, where they found Ned Tone and the
detective encamped, with a tent and a fine supply of grub. They went
back to the house without having disclosed themselves to the
sleuths. Gaspard set out before sunrise the next day and found that
the man-hunters had again broken camp and moved on. He followed
their tracks five or six miles beyond the lake before turning back.
He was late when he reached the house, and his ancient muscles were
very stiff and sore. But there was great stuff in Gaspard Javet; so,
after a day’s rest and a brief but violent course of bear’s grease,
Minard’s liniment and elbow grease, he set out again on the trail of
the trailers, this time carrying food and blankets and an ax as well
as his rifle. The snow was thoroughly wind-packed by this time. None
had fallen since that first heavy and prolonged outpouring. He took
a straight line to the point at which he had turned back two days
before; and from there he followed a difficult trail. The erasing
wind had been busy. There was no faintest sign of that trail except
where it pierced the heaviest growths of spruce and fir; and even in
such sheltered spots it was drifted to nothing but occasional white
dimples. He lost it entirely before sundown; but he knew that it
passed far beyond, and well to the westward of Racquet Pond. He
struck out for home next morning and accomplished the journey
without accident.

Two weeks passed without sight or sound of Ned Tone and the
detective or any news of the fugitives; and then one gray noon, when
snow was spilling down with blinding profusion, a knock sounded on
Gaspard’s door and Catherine opened to a fur-muffled and snow-draped
Ned Tone.

“Stop whar ye be!” cried Gaspard from his seat at the dinner-table.
“If ye cross that threshold I’ll do fer ye. I run ye outer this
house once, an’ that was for keeps.”

Catherine stood aside, leaving the door open.

“Ye’re a hard old man,” said Tone, without moving. “What have I ever
done to ye that ye treat me like this—worse nor a dog? If it wasn’t
that we uster be friends, Gaspard Javet, I’d have the Law on ye for
interferin’ with the course o’ justice.”

“Go ahead,” replied the old man, drily. “It’ll make a grand story to
tell the magistrates down on the main river.”

Tone shuffled his feet uneasily.

“What I come here now for is to tell ye an’ Cathie as how I’ve quit
huntin’ that feller who was here,” he said. “I’ve told the police,
that detective ye seen with me, that I was mistook about that
feller.”

“Ye must be reel popular with him,” remarked Gaspard.

“All I want is decent treatment from old friends,” continued the big
young woodsman. “That tramp’s nothin’ to me, whatever he done to git
the police after him—but he ain’t fit company for a girl like
Cathie. I’ve scart him away, an’ I’m ready an’ willin’ to let it
rest at that.”

“Whar’s yer friend?” asked Gaspard.

“He’s went on out. I told him I’d made a mistake. He was sore at me,
an’ I had to pay him for his time—but let bygones be bygones, sez
I.”

“Ned Tone,” said the old man, slowly and clearly, “ye’re lyin’
quicker’n a horse can trot right thar whar ye stand. I’d know it
even if I didn’t know yerself, fer it’s in yer eyes. Ye’re lookin’
fer money from the Gover’ment, an ye’re lookin’ fer vengeance agin a
young man whose got more vartue in his little toe nor ye’ll ever
have in yer hull carcass. Ye fit him fair once, an’ he trimmed ye;
then ye tried yer durndest to send him astray in the woods, without
a rifle an’ without grub; an’ then ye fit him dirty an’ got trimmed
agin; an’ now yer huntin’ him with the help o’ the police. An’ ye
know as how he be a better man nor yerself—a man who sarved his
country whilst ye hid under the bed; an ye know that the thing he
done that the law’s huntin’ him for, wouldn’t have been nothin’ if
it wasn’t that he’d sarved his country as a soldier an’ still wore
the uniform. An’ still yer so all-fired scart o’ Tom Akerley that
ye’d jump a foot into the air if ye knowed he was standin’ behind ye
this very minute.”

Ned Tone jumped and turned in a flash. But there was nothing behind
him except the twirling curtains of snow.

“Confound ye!” he cried.

“That’s all I got to say to ye, Ned Tone,” said Gaspard. “Shut the
door, Cathie.”

Cathie shut the door; and Ned Tone went slowly away and rejoined the
detective at the edge of the woods.

“I told them we was gettin’ out,” said Ned.

“Has Akerley been back?” asked the other.

“Guess not. They didn’t say.”

“Well, I got something better to do than spend the winter cruisin’
these woods for a man you say is Major Akerley. A gent like that one
would head for a big town, as I’ve told you before. If you don’t
show me him or his machine inside the nex’ two weeks I’ll get out in
earnest.”

“Keep yer shirt on! It was yer idee chasin’ him, wasn’t it? All we
got to do is hang ’round here, out o’ sight o’ the old man and the
girl, until he comes snoopin’ back.”

“Then he’d better come snoopin’ pretty darned quick or he won’t have
the honor of bein’ arrested by me.”

They moved to a secluded and sheltered spot five miles to the
eastward of the clearings and there went into camp. The snow filled
in the tracks of their snowshoes and toboggan.

In the meantime, Mick Otter and Tom Akerley held on their way
undisturbed, traveling in fair weather and remaining in camp in
foul. Day after day they moved through a wilderness that showed
neither smoke nor track of human occupation, nor any sign of man’s
use save occasional primitive shelters, and small caches of
provisions and mixed possessions, for which Mick Otter was
responsible. This was Mick’s own stamping-ground, his country, the
field of his more serious activities and (apart from what food he
ate at Gaspard’s place) the source of his livelihood. Sometimes a
whim drew him to the east or the west or the south, but this was the
area of wilderness that knew him every year and had paid toll to him
in good pelts for many years. He was familiar with every rise and
dip and pond and brook of it; and when on the move he looked forward
from each knoll and hill-top, as he gained it, with the clear
picture already in his mind’s eye of what he was about to see; as a
scholar foretastes familiar pleasures when turning the leaves of a
beloved book.

Of late years, however, Mick’s trapping operations in this
wilderness region of his own had been of a sketchy and indolent
nature—had been just sufficient, in fact, to let other Maliseet
trappers know that he was still in occupation.

He told this to Tom Akerley.

“But why?” asked Tom. “Aren’t furs worth more now then they ever
were?”

“You bet,” replied Mick. “Worth four-six time more nor ever before.
Sell red fox two dollar long time ago—fifty year ago, maybe. But I
got plenty money now an’ plenty pelt too. You want some money, hey?”

“I’ll very likely want some, and want it badly, one of these days—if
those fellows don’t catch me,” replied Tom.

“Never catch you on this country long’s Mick Otter don’t die; an’
when you want money, a’ right.”

“You are very good, Mick.”

“Sure. Good Injun, me.”

They were now far over the height-of-land; far out of the Indian
River country; far down a water-shed that supplied other and greater
streams. Even Mick’s trapping country was left far behind—but still
he knew the ground like a book.

One day, immediately after breakfast, Mick said, “Go down to
Timbertown to-day an’ buy some molas’ an’ pork an’ baccy. Come back
to-morrow. You stop here. Maybe they hear about you.”

“Will you trust me for the price of a razor?” asked Tom.

“Sure. But you don’t shave off them fine whisker till that policeman
quit huntin’ you. What else you want, hey?”

“What about a book for Cathie? But I don’t suppose they sell books
in Timbertown.”

“Good bookstore in that town, you bet. Buy plenty everything there.
That one darn good town. You smoke cigar, maybe.”

“Not a cigar, Mick—but I often wonder if cigarettes still taste as
good as they used to.”

“You like fat cigarette or little thin feller, hey? Doc Smith smoke
the fat feller an’ Doc Willard don’t smoke nothin’ but eat whole
lot.”

“Books, cigarettes and two doctors!—it sounds like a city! But still
I haven’t any money.”

“That a’ right. You smoke him fat or thin, hey?”

“What about a little package of fat ones, Santa Claus? And I’ll
write down the name of a few books.”

Mick went away with his rifle on his shoulder and a few slices of
bread and cold pork in his pockets. He arrived home an hour before
sundown of the following day with a pack on his tough old back as
big as the hump on a camel.

“Buy all I kin tote,” he said, as Tom helped him ease the load to
the snow. “Take two-three a’mighty strong feller to tote what I got
plenty ’nough money for to buy, you bet.”

They examined the pack after supper, by the light of candles which
it had contained. Here were cakes of tobacco, a small jug of
molasses, bacon, salt pork, a copy of Staunton’s “Chess,” a copy of
Stevenson’s “Black Arrow,” and a well-thumbed romance by Maurice
Hewlett named “Forest Lovers.” Also, here were cigarettes, a razor,
a shaving-brush, sticks and cakes of soap, rifle ammunition and a
green and red necktie of striking design.

“Give him Gaspar’ for Chrismus,” said Mick Otter, holding the tie
aloft. “He shine right through Gaspar’s whiskers, what?”

“You are right—but tell me about this book. Is there a second-hand
book-shop in Timbertown? I didn’t put it on the list, either—but it
is a good story. Where’d you get it?—this old copy of ‘Forest
Lovers’?”

“That book? Doc Smith send him for you an’ Cathie.”

“What does he know about Cathie and me? Have you been talking all
over Timbertown about me?”

“Nope. Nobody there know you fly into the woods—but Doc Smith, he
know you fine—so I tell him.”

“He knows me! And you told him where I am hiding! Have you gone mad,
Mick? What’s your game?”

“Doc Smith one darn good feller. You trust him like yer own
trigger-finger, you bet. Good friend to me, Doc Smith—an’ good
friend to you, too. He know you at the war, doctor you one time,
some place don’t know his name, when you have one busted rib.”

“Smith? Not the M. O. with the red head; a jolly chap who sang ‘The
Fiddler’s Wedding’, who hung out just east of Mont St. Eloi in the
spring of ’Seventeen?”

“Sure. He say St. Eloi. He read all about you, but nobody ’round
Timbertown hear ’bout how you hide in these woods. He read how that
feller you hit go live on farm when all the soldier write to the
paper how he ain’t no good an’ you one a’mighty fine fighter; an’
Gover’ment take your money outer bank an’ say how you still owe him
seven thousand dollar for flyin’ machine.”

“Is that so,” remarked Tom, reflectively. “Seven thousand—and took
my money?”

He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, in a silence so vibrant
with deep and keen thought that Mick Otter respected it.

“They’ve got my money,” he said, at last, “and they’ll have the old
bus, too, some day—but they’ll never catch me to hold a court on me.
They’ll never get my decorations!”

“What you mean, bus?” asked the Maliseet.

“The machine. The ’plane. Do you know where I can get oil and
petrol? Are there any gasoline engines in Timbertown?”

“Sure. Doc Smith got one, you bet, for to pump water. He got
bath-tub, too; an’ one little Ford what can jump fence like breachy
steer.”

“Then he is the man I must see.”

Tom and Mick left the camp together next day, with an empty toboggan
at their heels. They timed their progress so as not to reach the
town before sunset. They went straight to Doctor Smith’s house and
were fortunate enough to find him at home and about to sit down to
his evening meal with Mrs. Smith, a lady of whose existence Mick
Otter had not informed Tom.

Smith recognized Tom instantly, in spite of the beard, and welcomed
him cordially.

“Dickon, this is Major Akerley, of whom I told you last night,” he
said to his wife; and at the look of consternation on Tom’s face he
laughed reassuringly.

“She is safe, major,” he continued. “She’d never peach on a good
soldier. I first met her under bomb-fire; and she wears the Royal
Red Cross when she’s dressed up.”

Tom talked freely during dinner; and after dinner he made known to
the Smiths his intention of assembling the aëroplane and returning
it to the Government in the spring. He said that he should require
petrol and oil and certain tools.

“Guess I can fit you out,” said the doctor; “but I advise you not to
fly up to the front door of Militia Headquarters and send your card
in to the Inspector General. Even those who don’t know why you hit
Nasher think that you did a good thing—but for all that, there’s the
old mill waiting to grind you. Keep away from it, major. Don’t force
it to do its duty.”

“You are right,” returned Tom. “If I can get the old bus patched up
I’ll fly her over here somewhere for you to discover and pass on.
And I’ll continue to lie low, officially lost—unless some fool
starts another war.”

“But do you mean to continue to hide in the woods until your case is
forgotten?” asked Mrs. Smith.

“There are worse places than the woods,” replied Tom.

“So Mick Otter tells me,” remarked the doctor.

Tom and Mick did not go to bed that night; and long before sunrise
they pulled out of Timbertown with a small but hefty load on the
toboggan. They reached camp early in the afternoon; and before the
next sunrise they commenced their slow and cautious return to Mick’s
trapping-grounds. Again the wilderness was all around them,
trackless and smokeless save for the smoke and tracks of their own
making. Days passed without disclosing to them any sight or sign of
Ned Tone and the detective. One morning Mick killed a fat young buck
deer. In time they reached the cave, the snuggest and least
conspicuous of Mick’s posts, and found it undisturbed. Here they set
out a short line of traps; and then the Maliseet went on alone to
Racquet Pond.

Mick found the little camp on Racquet Pond just as he had left it,
save for snow that had drifted in at the doorway and fallen in
through the square hole in the roof. If the pursuers had found it
they had left no sign behind them; but in a corner lay a square of
white paper marked with a black cross. Mick snorted at sight of the
paper, then pocketed it and laid in its place a red woolen tassel
from the top of one of his stockings.




                             CHAPTER X

                      MICK OTTER, MATCH-MAKER


Mick Otter scouted cautiously around Racquet Pond and took up the
two traps which had been left behind in the haste of the flight
across the height-of-land. One of them, set near an air-hole in a
brook, had evidently made a catch of a mink—but a fox, or a lynx, or
perhaps another mink, had visited the trap ahead of the trapper.

Mick returned to the cave and showed the marked paper to Tom; so the
two extended their line of traps and settled down to pass the time
until the middle of January as comfortably and profitably as
possible. They kept their eyes skinned, as the poet has it. Tom made
a practice of climbing the look-out tree four times a day when the
weather was clear. They refrained from firing the rifle; and they
were careful to burn only the driest and least smoky wood on their
subterranean hearth, except at night. Snow fell frequently and
thickly. They were fortunate with their traps, taking a number of
red foxes and one patch, a few mink, an otter and half a dozen
lynx—all fine pelts; and with some very small traps from one of
Mick’s caches they even managed to catch a few ermine.

In the clearings, Catherine and Gaspard carried on and hoped for the
best. Catherine had made the trip to Racquet Pond with the warning
to the fugitives in a snow-storm, and so had left no tracks either
going or coming. Gaspard spied on the camp of the sleuths now and
again; and, finding it always in the same spot, he twigged their
game. He wondered how long their patience would last.

One morning the detective came knocking on the door of the big log
house. Catherine opened to him; and he entered weakly and sat down
heavily on the floor. One of his cheeks was discolored just below
the eye and his lower lip was swollen.

“A drink, please,” he said, in a voice of distress. “Anything—even
cold tea. I feel all tuckered out.”

The girl gave him a cup of coffee.

“Ye look kinder like ye’d caught up to Tom Anderson,” remarked
Gaspard. “An’ whar’s yer pardner?”

“Him!” exclaimed the detective, his voice shaken with anger. “That
big slob! He’s lit out for home—and beyond.”

“But he told us, weeks ago, that you had gone out to the
settlements—that both of you had given up looking for Tom Anderson,”
said the girl.

The detective swallowed the last drop of coffee, shook his mittens
from his hands, pulled off his fur cap and pressed his hands to his
head.

“The liar!” he cried. “He’s a fool—and he’s made a fool of me, with
his story about that man Anderson bein’ an officer—the great Major
Akerley. I must hev been crazy to believe him for a minute. And now
the big slob has beat it for the settlements; and he’ll keep right
on goin’, for the Law’s after him now—or will be as soon’s I’m fit
to travel agin.”

“Maybe yer lyin’, an’ again maybe yer tellin’ the truth,” said
Gaspard. “Howsumever, we’re listenin’.”

“I’m talkin’ Gospel,” replied the man on the floor. “Tone lit out
last night—but he beat me up before he left. He jumped onto me when
I wasn’t lookin’; and I guess he bust me a rib or two. I’m about all
in, anyhow.”

So saying, he sagged back against the wall, toppled slowly sideways
and lost consciousness.

Gaspard Javet was greatly put out by this accident. He glared at the
unconscious man on the floor.

“If I was to lay him out in the snow till he come to, an’ then run
him off the place with the toe o’ my boot, it wouldn’t be more’n
fair play,” he muttered. “Tom would be in jail now if this sneak had
had his way—an’ here he comes an’ lays down on my floor. I’m right
glad Ned Tone smashed ’im; an’ I wish he’d smashed Ned Tone too.”

“We must do something for him,” said Catherine. “He may be seriously
hurt. The sooner we doctor him the sooner he’ll go away, Grandad.”

Gaspard snorted angrily and lifted the detective from the floor.

“I hope I’ll drop ’im an’ bust all the rest o’ his ribs,” he said;
and so he carried him carefully into his own room and put him down
gently on his own bed.

When the detective recovered consciousness he found himself very
snugly established between the sheets of Gaspard’s bed, and the old
man standing near with a steaming bowl in his hand. The bowl
contained beef-tea, and the detective drank it eagerly.

“Yer ribs ain’t bust, I reckon,” said Gaspard. “They ain’t stove
clear in, anyhow—but they do look kinder beat about,—an’ the color
o’ yer eye. What did Ned Tone hit ye with?”

“He knocked me down with his fist and then he whaled me with a stick
of firewood,” replied the other.

“I’m goin’ out to scout ’round a bit,” said Gaspard. “If ye git
hungry or thirsty while I’m gone give a holler an’ Cathie’ll hear
ye. I put arnica on yer ribs an’ tied ’em up with bandages.”

The old man went out and straight to the most recent camping place
of the sleuths. There he found the tent still standing, snugly
banked with snow: but Ned Tone was not there, nor were his snowshoes
or rifle. The provisions were scattered about, the tea-kettle lay
upset in the ashes of the fire, and an air of violence and haste
possessed the entire camp. A few bright spatters of blood marked the
trampled snow; and Gaspard correctly inferred that one of Ned Tone’s
blows had landed on the detective’s nose. Large, fresh, hasty
snowshoe tracks led away from the camp southward into the forest.

“He was sartinly humpin’ himself,” remarked the old man, setting his
own feet in the tracks. “I reckon he’s quit an’ lit out for home,
like the stranger said—but I’ll make sure.”

He followed the trail of Ned Tone steadily for more than an hour;
and every yard of it pointed straight for Boiling Pot.

Gaspard and Catherine nursed and fed the detective as well as if he
had been a beloved friend, and so had him up in a chair beside the
stove in two days; on his feet in three; and well able to undertake
the journey out to the settlements within the week. And he was as
eager to go as they were to have him gone—eager to go forth on the
trail of Ned Tone and to follow that trail until the treacherous,
violent, cowardly bushwhacker was brought to his knees before the
might and majesty of the Law. As for the case of Tom Anderson, he no
longer felt the least interest in it. It was his firm belief that
even Tone had never really suspected Anderson of being Major
Akerley, but had invented the case from motives of personal spite
and greed. He did not find Ned Tone in Boiling Pot, however; nor did
he find him at Millbrow; nor yet in any town on the big river. In
short, he never caught up with the ex-heaviest hitter on Injun
River; and, for all I know, and for all the detective knows, Ned
Tone may still be on the run.

                 *       *       *       *       *

Tom Akerley and Mick Otter returned to the clearings on the evening
of January the Seventeenth, in time for supper; and Catherine was
ready for them with roast chickens, mince pies and the best coffee
they had tasted since their departure from that wide and hospitable
room. All four were in high spirits—but it was Gaspard who made most
noise in the expression thereof. He told all that he knew of the
adventures of Ned Tone and the detective in the most amusing manner;
and when he wasn’t talking he chuckled.

“You feel darn good, what?” remarked Mick Otter, eyeing him keenly
but kindly. “Maybe you catch that devil an’ shoot him flyin’, hey?”

“Ye’re wrong thar,” replied Gaspard. “I found ’im, but he wasn’t
flyin’. Caught ’im on the ground—but I ain’t shot him yet. But I got
his wings.”

Tom looked at Catherine and was relieved to see her smiling at her
grandfather.

“If you catch him on the groun’ why you don’t shoot him, hey?” asked
Mick. “You make a’mighty noise ’bout shootin’ him one time.”

“An’ Mick Otter laughin’ all the time at pore old Gaspard Javet for
a durn ignorant old fool. Well, I don’t blame ye, Mick, I’d hev
laughed meself to see me a-devil-huntin’ all the time, with my rifle
handy an’ the devil mowin’ grass at my elbow or totin’ the old
duck-gun ’round helpin’ me to hunt himself.”

“So you know!” exclaimed Tom, getting quickly to his feet and
staring anxiously at the old man.

Gaspard made a long arm across the table.

“Lay it thar, lad,” he said, “Thank God I didn’t know when the
vainglorious madness was on me, when I was that et up with the pride
o’ my wild youth an’ present piety that I reckoned on havin’ a reel
devil sent to me for to wrastle with—for I like ye, lad.”

“Me, too,” said Mick Otter. “You pretty big feller on these woods,
Tom, you bet. Gaspar’ like you too much for to shoot, an’ Mick Otter
like you; an’ maybe Cathie like you, too, one day, now Ned Tone go
’way with policeman chasin’ him, what?”

Both old men gazed quizzically at the girl with their bright, kindly
eyes. She smiled a little, looked squarely at the swarthy round face
of the Maliseet, then at the bewhiskered visage of her grandfather,
blushed suddenly and deeply, and then said,

“I like him much more than either of you do—or both of you together;
and he knows it.”

Then Mick Otter actually chuckled; and as for Gaspard Javet, his
delighted laughter filled the room. And Catherine and Tom joined in
the old man’s mirth, but with an air of not quite seeing the joke.
Gaspard became silent at last and helped himself to a second piece
of mince pie.

“She never told me before,” said Tom, very red in the face and short
of breath. “Not like that. And I—well, you know how it has been with
me—and still is, to a lesser degree. I had to keep how I felt under
my hat—more or less, I mean to say—as much as I could. She knew all
the time, of course. Didn’t you? How I felt, I mean—and that sort of
thing. But as things were with me—and still are, I suppose—well, I
had to lie doggo. What I mean is, I was a fugitive from justice.
Only honorable thing to do, you know. But now that you’ve seemed to
notice it, and have mentioned it, I feel myself at liberty to say
that when I fell into this clearing I fell for her, for you, I mean
for Cathie. First time I saw her, anyhow; and it has got worse—more
so, I mean to say—ever since. But I always wished that you knew the
truth about me, Gaspard—for I didn’t like pretending, and I wanted
you to know that I was—that I wasn’t just a breaker of
game-laws—what I mean to say is, I wanted you to know that I have
fought bigger things than Ned Tone. I have been happier ever since I
landed to your light than ever before in my life, and—and now that I
know—well, I hope that I shall never again be chased out of these
clearings.”

The old men exchanged glances and approving nods; and Tom got hold
of Catherine’s hand under the edge of the table.

Life continued to go forward sanely and delightfully in the secluded
world of Gaspard Javet’s clearings. A spirit of cheer and security
possessed the big log house and the brown barns. Gaspard read his
Bible with more hopeful eyes than of old. He was in fine form and
full of brisk stories of his youth. He had learned to play chess—a
game which, until recently, he had eyed somewhat askance as an
intricate and laborious example of human vanity. Mick Otter spent
much of his time in the woods, but went no farther northward than to
Racquet Pond nor remained away from home for longer than four days
at a time. He made one trip south to Boiling Pot and found the
villagers blissfully ignorant and unsuspicious of the mysterious
affair of Tom Anderson and Tom Akerley, the flying major. His
cautious inquiries proved them to be equally ignorant of the
whereabouts of Ned Tone. It was quite evident that the heaviest
hitter had kept his suspicions and the story of his and the
detective’s activities strictly under his hat.

Catherine and Tom were happy; but after that mutual declaration at
supper on the night of Tom’s return from the north, they both
avoided any further mention of the inspiration of their happiness.
They knew that their position was not yet secure from the menace of
the outside world. But they were not afraid, and they understood
each other. Their brains cautioned them to keep a sharp look-out
beyond the southern edge of the clearings and a firm grip on their
dreams; and their hearts told them that their future happiness was
as secure as if no fat colonel had ever been hit on the chin; and
they heeded both their brains and their hearts and sailed a
delightful middle course.

Tom attended to a string of traps near Pappoose Lake, but seldom
allowed that business to keep him abroad all night. Also, he worked
about the barns with Gaspard and cut out firewood and rails.
Catherine often worked with him in the woods. The girl could swing
an ax with the force and precision of an expert chopper. She also
helped with the threshing of the oats and buckwheat, which was done
at odd times; and in handling a flail the extraordinary grace of her
swing detracted nothing from the force of her blow.

The necessity of making a journey to Boiling Pot, to obtain a supply
of wheat and buckwheat flour, made itself undeniably evident in the
last week of March. Mick Otter and Tom were both to go, for it was
likely to prove a formidable expedition owing to the fact that the
long road through the forests was entirely unbroken; but as Tom had
done away with his disguising beard, it was decided that he should
not venture all the way to the grist-mill in the village.
Preparations were made during the day before the start. A track was
broken across the drifted clearing, from the barn-yard to the mouth
of the road. A few high drifts had to be cut through with shovels.
On the road, itself, the snow was not more than knee-deep, for there
had been a great deal of melting weather of late. But there was a
stiff crust which would have to be broken for the safety of the
horses’ legs. A light set of bob-sleds were fitted with a light body
and loaded with ten two-bushel bags of buckwheat and rations of hay
and oats.

Tom was up at four o’clock next morning, to water and feed the
horses. Breakfast was eaten half an hour later, by lamplight; and
the horses were hitched to the sled and a start made well before
six. The air was still and cold and the horses lively. For a few
miles Tom led the way, breaking the cutting crust ahead of the eager
horses, and Mick held the reins. Then, for a few miles, Mick broke
the crust and Tom teamed. So they toiled forward until noon; and as
Tom was heavier and longer in the leg and stronger than the old
Maliseet, he did more breaking than teaming. After a rest of two
hours the journey was continued; and before dusk they struck a
well-broken road and the impatient horses went forward at a trot.
Tom dropped off a mile this side of the settlement, with blankets
and provisions, and made camp about fifty yards in from the road.

Mick Otter did not reappear until noon. The return journey proved to
be an easy and speedy affair compared to the outward trip, in spite
of the heavier load. There was no crust to break, and Tom walked
only occasionally, for the exercise. It was not quite seven o’clock
when they issued from the forest into the clearing and saw the
yellow lights of the big log house gleaming on the snow. Tom was
holding the lines at the time and Mick was sitting hunched up beside
him; and as the horses swung to the left and pulled for the barns
with a sudden burst of enthusiasm, Mick slipped a small package into
the pocket of Tom’s leather coat that was nearest to him.

A few minutes later, in the kitchen, when Tom was stuffing his
mittens into his pockets, he felt the small package and produced it.
He stepped toward the lamp on the table, holding the package
extended on the palm of his hand.

“What’s this?” he said. “Where’d it come from?”

“Ye’d best open it an’ look, if ye don’t know,” suggested Gaspard,
crowding against his left elbow.

And so, with Gaspard on one side of him and Catherine and Mick Otter
on the other, Tom unwrapped the little package. Within the wrapper
he found a cardboard box, and within that a smaller box of a
different shape and material. This inner box had a hinged top that
was fastened down with a catch; and when Tom undid the catch and
turned back the top he gasped with astonishment at the thing he saw.
Old Gaspard’s white whiskers shook with excitement and Cathie’s
cheeks and eyes brightened like roses and stars. Mick Otter alone
showed no sign of emotion.

“I didn’t buy this,” said Tom to the girl. “I haven’t any money, as
you know, and still owe the Government some thousands on account of
a stolen aëroplane. If this were mine, and all danger of my being
cashiered were past—”

“It was in your pocket,” said the girl.

“True; and I’ll pay for it when my skins are sold. Show me a finger,
please.”

She raised her left hand and extended to him a finger of peculiar
significance.

“On the understanding that you will transfer it to another finger if
I am caught and broken,” he said; and then he slid the ring into
place.

“Never,” she whispered, closing her hand tight; and the little
diamond flashed defiant fire from her small brown fist.

“Mick Otter have to larn ’em how to get engage’,” said the old
Maliseet, in a voice of pity and mild scorn.

“Vanity! Vanity!” exclaimed old Gaspard, shaking his head slowly.
“But I reckon I never see a purtier little ring,” he added.

“What’s for supper?” asked Mick Otter, in sentiment-chilling tones.
“Hungry man can’t eat rings, nor vanity neither.”

They were seated at supper, and Gaspard was in the middle of a story
of his vainglorious past to which only Mick Otter was paying any
attention, when the latch of the front door lifted, the door opened
slowly and a figure muffled in blankets stepped noiselessly into the
room. Gaspard, who sat facing the door, ceased articulating suddenly
and stared with open mouth. Catherine and Tom glanced over their
shoulders and Mick Otter got to his feet and hurried to the visitor.

“Got sick pappoose here,” said the muffled figure, closing the door
with a heel and leaning weakly against it; and before Mick could get
a grip on it, it sagged slowly to the floor.

In his attempt at succor, Mick pulled a fold of the blanket aside,
thus disclosing the haggard face of a young squaw. The blanket fell
lower and a ragged bundle clutched tight in thin arms came to view;
and at that moment a faint, shrill wail of complaint arose from the
bundle. This brought Catherine flying and lifted Gaspard and Tom out
of their chairs and stunned Mick Otter to immobility. The girl took
the bundle swiftly but tenderly from the relaxing arms even as the
squaw closed her eyes.

Fifteen minutes later both the mother and pappoose were in Gaspard’s
wide and comfortable bed, more or less undressed. A nip of strong
coffee, then a nip of brandy, had been successfully administered to
the squaw and a little warm milk had been spoon-fed to the baby; and
all this, except the carrying, had been accomplished by Catherine.
Gaspard and Mick Otter were of no use at all, though Mick was eager
to get busy asking questions. Tom warmed milk very well and filled
two bottles with hot water which were placed at the foot of the bed.

The pappoose wailed with a thin and plaintive voice for an hour,
then took a little more nourishment and fell asleep. The mother
drank a bowl of warm milk and slept like a log. It was close upon
midnight when Gaspard’s fur robes and blankets were laid on the
floor of the big room, between the robes and blankets of Mick’s and
Tom’s humble and mobile pallets.

Mick Otter questioned the young squaw industriously next day, but
acquired very little information. Her answers were suspiciously
vague. She did not seem to know how far she had come, or where from,
or why. She said again and again, in answer to every question, that
the baby was sick and needed a doctor; but the baby, full-fed now,
seemed to be in the pink of condition. Hunger and fatigue seemed to
be the only thing the matter with either of them. In three days they
were both as right as rain, beyond a doubt; and still the young
woman would not say where she had come from or why she had left home
and seemed to entertain no idea whatever of where she was bound for.

Mick Otter, anxious and thoroughly exasperated, took the case firmly
in his own hands at the end of a week. He made a snug apartment in
one of the barns, established a rusty old stove in it and, deaf to
Cathie’s protests, moved the visitors out of Gaspard’s room. The
weather was mild by this time. The barn-chamber was very
comfortable. Mick made a fire in the stove every morning and saw
that every spark was dead before bed-time. He carried all the
squaw’s food and the baby’s milk to the barn, forbade the others
visiting the strangers and refused the mysterious squaw admittance
to the house. He was hard as flint in the matter. One day he lost
his temper with Catherine, who threatened to have the mother and
baby back in the house in spite of his cruel whims.

“You know her, an’ why she come here?” he cried. “Nope, you don’t
know. You know why she run away?—what she run away from? Nope nor me
neither. When we know, then you call Mick Otter one darn fool all
you want to,—maybe. What Mick Otter think,—what he see before
two-three time—that squaw run away from big sickness maybe with her
pappoose. So you keep ’way—an’ shut up!”

Tom and Gaspard were far too busy to worry much about Mick Otter’s
peculiar treatment of the strangers. They had cleared the
threshing-floor of the largest barn and turned it into a work-shop;
and there, in a week, they had straightened and mended the buckled
plane of Tom’s old bus.




                             CHAPTER XI

                         THE MILITARY CROSS


The machine was brought together bit by bit, from this hiding-place
and that. The little engines were assembled and tested. The car was
put together and the engines were fastened in place. Gaspard and
Mick, and even Catherine, could scarcely believe their dizzied eyes
when the little engines first turned the thin blades of the
propeller over, and then over and over until nothing was to be seen
of those blades but a gray vortex into which they had dissolved and
out of which roared a wind that threatened to blow the barn
inside-out. The noise of that wind frightened fur folk great and
small miles away and sent crows cawing and flapping out of distant
tree-tops. It almost stunned the secretive squaw with terror—for I
think her conscience was not quite at ease; and it even distressed
Catherine. But Catherine was not feeling up to the mark at this
time. She had caught a slight cold, she thought; so she drank a
little ginger-tea and said nothing about it.

One evening in the first week in May an Indian came to the house and
asked if his squaw and pappoose were here and, if so, how they were
getting along. He looked an honest and somewhat dull young man and
complacent beyond words.

“You Gabe Peters from Tinder Brook,” said Mick Otter.

The visitor nodded. Then Mick took him by an elbow, backed him to
the threshold of the open door and talked to him swiftly in the
Maliseet tongue. The other replied briefly now and then. Mick became
excited. His excitement grew by leaps and bounds; and at last he
turned Gabe Peters of Tinder Brook completely around, kicked him
from the threshold into the outer dusk and shut the door with a
bang.

Gaspard and Tom were stricken voiceless with amazement by Mick
Otter’s treatment of the visitor. Catherine seemed scarcely to
notice it, however. Mick turned from the door and went straight to
the girl, where she sat close to the stove.

“You go to bed,” he said. “Take plenty medicine an’ go to bed darn
quick.”

She protested, but without much spirit.

“Go to bed!” cried the old Maliseet, violently.

The girl stood up and moved toward the steep stairs. Tom hastened to
her, took her hands and looked at her closely.

“What is it, Cathie?” he asked. “Your hands are hot, dear.”

“I have a cold, I suppose,” she replied. “My head aches—and I think
Mick is crazy. But I’ll go to bed,—just to keep him quiet. Don’t
worry.”

She went up to her room. Mick got Tom and Gaspard each by an elbow.

“Diptherie at Tinder Brook,” he whispered harshly. “That why Gabe
Peters’ squaw run ’way with pappoose. He don’t have it but he bring
it here, I guess. Cathie gettin’ sick, anyhow. Guess she need doctor
pretty darn quick.”

Gaspard Javet groaned. He had been so happy of late—or had his
happiness been only a dream? He sat down heavily in the nearest
chair. Tom Akerley paled but did not flinch. He looked steadily at
the old Maliseet and in a steady voice said,

“It may not be anything more than a cold, Mick. I’ll get a doctor
immediately—but you don’t think she is seriously ill, now, do you?”

“Dunno. Take too darn much chance a’ready, anyhow. Where you get a
doctor quick, hey? No doctor at B’ilin’ Pot. Go way out to Millbrow
an’ find one darn poor doctor maybe. Take a’mighty long time
anyhow—an’ maybe we don’t find him.”

Tom opened the door and looked up at the sky. It was a fine night.
He aroused Gaspard and sent him up to Catherine to consult her in
the matter of treatment for her own cold. Then, with two lanterns,
he and Mick Otter went out to the big barn. Tom set to work
immediately. Mick visited the mother and baby. He found Gabe Peters
there and devoted a few minutes to telling all three what he thought
of them. He was particularly severe with the squaw, because of her
secretive behavior. Then he returned to the work-shop and assisted
Tom for three hours.

Tom was the first of the household to wake next morning. The first
thing he did was to go out and look at the weather. There was not a
breath of wind. The dawn of a fine spring day was breaking in silver
and gold along the wooded east. He woke Gaspard then, lit the fire
and dressed. Gaspard went up to Catherine’s room and found her
sleeping—but she tossed and moaned in her sleep. Her face was
flushed.

Tom opened the doors of his work-shop wide and fell to work by the
level morning light. Mick Otter cooked the breakfast. Gaspard looked
after Catherine, who drank a little weak tea and complained of a
sore throat.

Breakfast was eaten in ten minutes. Mick fed the three unwelcome
guests and locked them in their quarters. Then Tom, Mick and Gaspard
worked like beavers for two hours; and by the end of that time the
’plane squatted wide-winged before the barn, like a wounded goose of
gigantic proportions. The three wheeled it to the top of the oldest
and levelest meadow.

Tom donned his leather coat and went to the house. He entered and
called up the stairs to Catherine. She answered him and he went up.
He found her lying bright-eyed and flushed of face, staring eagerly
at the door.

“Oh, I am glad you are real!” she cried. “I was queer last night—and
I thought you weren’t real.”

He laughed.

“I am one of the realest things you ever saw, of my own kind,” he
said. “I’m no dream, Cathie. And now I’m going to make a little
journey, to fetch you a doctor—so when you hear my engines wish me
luck, girl—put up a little prayer for me.”

He stooped, touched his lips lightly and quickly to her hot
forehead, and left her. He ran to his machine and started the
engines. He put on his cap and goggles. He twirled the propeller;
and suddenly it hummed.

“Stand clear!” and he scrambled to his seat.

The old bus thrilled, lurched, then moved forward down the field,
slowly for a few yards, then less slowly, then fast. Gaspard and
Mick stared after it, frozen with awe; and when they suddenly
realized that the little wheels were no longer on the mossy sod they
felt as if their hearts were stuck in their windpipes. Yes, the
little wheels were off the ground! And the wide wings were climbing
against the green wall of the forest; now they were swooping around;
and now they were against the morning blue; and still the great bird
circled as it rose. Now it was high over the house, high above the
blue smoke from the chimney. Now it was over the barns, and over the
woods beyond, still circling and rising. Four times it circled the
clearings, flying wider and higher each time; and then it headed
north and flew straight away into the blue.

Then those two aged woodsmen suddenly recovered the use of their
lungs and limbs. They shouted triumphantly and waved their arms in
the air. They leaped together and embraced.

The frail thing that flew northward with so much of their pride and
love dwindled and dwindled and at last vanished from their sight.

“An’ that’s the man Ned Tone fit with,” said Gaspard, in a voice
thrilled with pride and shaken with awe.

“An’ you an’ me help him fasten it together,” said Mick Otter, in
tones of reverence and satisfaction.

Gaspard returned to the house, and Mick went to the barn in which he
had shut the people from Tinder Brook and unlocked the door. The man
and the woman were in a tremor of fear. The fierce song of the
birdman’s flight, striking down at them through the roof, had
chilled them with a nameless dread. Mick gave them provisions,
blankets, a kettle and frying-pan, and told them to get out and
travel quick. They obeyed with alacrity. He told them that if they
ever mentioned the great sound they had heard that morning a
terrible fate would overtake them swiftly, no matter how far they
traveled or where they hid; and they believed him, for truth gleamed
in his eyes.

Gaspard found Catherine sitting straight up in a tumbled bed,
staring at the window.

“Has he gone?” she cried. “Was it Tom? Has he flown away?”

“Now don’t ye worry, Cathie,” returned the old man, with an
unsuccessful attempt to speak calmly. “Yes, it was Tom. An’ he
flew—ay, he surely flew. He’ll fetch in a doctor for ye, girl, if
thar be a doctor in the world to fetch. I’ve saw eagles an’ hawks
fly in my day, an’ wild geese an’ ducks an’ crows, but nary a bird
o’ the lot could fly like Tom. The sight of it shook me to the
vitals. If I was a young man only a few years younger, nor what I
be, I’d sure git him to larn me how to do it. It was the
shiverin’est sight I ever see—shiverin’er nor the swash an’ wollop
an’ windy roar o’ fifty gray geese gittin’ up all of a suddent out
o’ the mist at yer very feet; an’ ye mind how that sets yer heart a
gulpin’, girl.”

Catherine lay back heavily on her pillow.

“Yes, I mind,” she said. “All the great wings beating the air. I
wish I had seen Tom fly. Now that my head feels so queer it all
seems like a dream to me—all about Tom—how he flew down to us that
night, to the light of our open door—and how brave and strong he is.
I wonder if it is true.... I wish I had a drink, Grandad. My throat
is burning—and it aches.”

Gaspard hastened away, pottered about the stove and the dairy, and
soon returned with milk hot and cold, cold spring water and hot tea.
She drank thirstily of the cold milk and water, talked for a few
minutes in a vague and flighty vein that terrified the old man, and
then drifted off into a restless doze.

                 *       *       *       *       *

Tom Akerley flew straight and swift, high up in the spring sunshine,
into the clean bright blue of the northern sky. He held his course
by compass and sun, and read his progress on the ever unrolling
expanse of hill and vale and timbered level beneath him—so far below
him that the mightiest pines looked smaller than shrubs in a
window-box and forests through which he and Mick Otter had toiled
for weary hours were scanned from edge to edge at a glance. He saw
the silver shine of lakes and ponds like scattered coins and bits of
broken glass; black and purple vasts of pine and spruce and fir;
gray dead-lands and brown barrens; and here and there his exploring
eyes caught a flush of red-budded maples, a pale green wave of
poplars in new leaf, and a smudge of yellow where crowded willows
hung out their powdery blooms. A flock of geese flying northward
with him at the same altitude, swerved from their course by a few
points as they came abreast of him and drew slowly ahead and away.
His machine was not the swiftest in the world, by any means, but it
slid along those free tracks of air at an unvarying rate of sixty
miles an hour; its taut sinews humming against the wind of its
flight and its trusty engines singing full and strong and smooth
with a voice of loyalty and power.

Doctor Smith and Mrs. Smith, of Timbertown, lunched that day with
one of the windows of the dining-room wide open, so bland and bright
was the air. They had trout from the mill-pond—the first of the
season—and steamed apple-pudding. Their trusty cook, who also waited
on table, had the platter of trout bones in one hand and the pudding
in the other, and was on the point of removing the first from before
the doctor and replacing it with the second, when a shadow fell
across a corner of the table. All three looked up and beheld a
bare-headed young man in a leather coat at the window.

The cook set the pudding down with a thump that split it from top to
bottom; but as the doctor and his wife jumped to their feet without
so much as a glance at the wrecked pastry, the cook also ignored it
and retired hastily with the platter of bones.

“Hello!” exclaimed the doctor. “Speak of the—we were just talking
about you, major. Come in. Glad to see you.”

“I’d better not,” replied Tom. “I’ve come to take you to Gaspard
Javet’s clearings. His grand-daughter is ill, and Mick Otter thinks
it is diphtheria,—thinks it came with some Indians from Tinder
Brook. The bus is about two miles away,—so if you’ll give me a tin
of gas and come along, I’ll be greatly obliged.”

The Smiths looked greatly concerned.

“I’m with you,” said the doctor. “A tin of gas? Right-o. Better put
on furs, hadn’t I? Eat something while I hustle. Feed the major,
Dickon.”

As Tom persisted in his refusal to enter, from fear that he might
have the germs of diphtheria on his person, Mrs. Smith fed him on
the window-sill with cold ham and pudding and coffee.

“We were speaking of you just a little while before you appeared,”
she said. “Last week’s Herald arrived this morning, with good news;
and we were just wondering how we could get word to you; and here
you are—with bad news. But you mustn’t worry, major. Jim is a great
doctor.”

“I know he is,” replied Tom. “I’ve seen him at work. He is a
two-handed man. And I haven’t wasted any time. Mick Otter threw the
scare into me last night and I nailed the old bus together and
started this morning.”

“I am glad you hurried—but you’ll be careful, won’t you? Try not to
crash with Jim, please.”

“I’ll do the very best I know how, you may be sure. I promise you
that I’ll bring him back just as carefully as I take him away. I
can’t say more than that.”

“No, indeed. Now where is that Herald? Here is it.”

The lady picked up a newspaper from the floor and began to search
its columns for a particular item; but before she had found what she
wanted the doctor entered the room. He wore a fur cap and carried a
fur coat on his arm; in one hand was a professional bag and in the
other a can of gasoline. The lady folded the paper small and stuffed
it into one of his pockets.

“Take it with you,” she said. “It should bring you luck on the
journey.”

He set his burdens on the floor and embraced her.

“Don’t expect me back till you hear us coming,” he said. “And don’t
worry, Dickon. If I had the pick of the whole Air Force for this
trip I’d pick the major.”

He took up his burdens and left the room, joining Tom in front of
the house. Tom led the way at a sharp pace to where the aëroplane
lay in a secluded clearing about two miles from the outskirts of the
town. The doctor had picked up a slight knowledge of air-craft
during his service in the army, so together they filled the
petrol-tank and went thoroughly over the machine. The result of the
inspection was satisfactory. Then Tom stowed the doctor and his bag
aboard and donned his cap and goggles.

It was exactly three o’clock when the old bus took wing and flew
straight away into the south.

Mick Otter was the first of the family to catch the song of the
homeward flight. He was out in the wood-yard at the time, splitting
up an old cedar rail for kindlings. He dropped his ax and cocked his
head. He scanned the clear horizon and the blue vault above it,
blinking his eyes when he faced the west. At last he spotted it, and
it looked no bigger than a mosquito. It grew steadily in his vision
and yet did not seem to move; grew to the size of a snipe—continued
to grow, hanging there against the sky, until it looked like a
lonely duck homing to its feeding-grounds. And the sound of its
flight grew too, droning in from all round the horizon. Little
Blackie heard it then and crawled apologetically under the back
porch.

[Illustration: “HE ... THRUST HIS HEAD AND SHOULDERS OUT OF THE
WINDOW.”]

Gaspard Javet heard it. He left his chair beside Catherine’s bed,
crossed the floor on tip-toe and thrust his head and shoulders out
of the window. He saw it, rubbed his eyes and looked again to make
sure, then withdrew from the window and turned to the girl in the
bed.

“Here he comes,” he said.

Catherine moved her head restlessly on the pillow. Her eyes were
wide open, but she paid no attention to her grandfather’s remark.
Instead, she put out a hand gropingly toward a mug of water which
stood on a chair beside the bed. Gaspard went to her in one stride,
raised her head on his arm and gave her a drink. She swallowed a sip
or two with difficulty.

“Hark, Cathie girl,” he whispered. “Don’t ye hear it now? the hum o’
Tom’s flyin’-machine?”

“I’ve heard it for hours,” she answered faintly. “It isn’t true. It
is in my poor head.”

“But I see it this very minute dear, when I looked out the winder.
Thar it was, plain as a pancake, a-hummin’ home like a big June-bug.
It’s Tom, I tell ye, and if he ain’t got a doctor with him then all
the doctors has died! Don’t ye hear it gittin’ louder an’ louder?”

“Yes, it is growing louder,” she said, slowly, “louder than the
noise in my head has ever been—as loud as when Tom flew down out of
the dark that night and frightened you into the woods.”

Gaspard lowered her head to the pillow and hastened from the room in
his socks. He was in such a hurry that he left the door open behind
him and took the short, steep stairs at a slide. He got outside in
time to see the ’plane sink below the top of the dark wall of
forest, flatten out and run on the sod. He raced Mick Otter to it,
shouting as he ran.

The doctor went up alone to see Catherine; while Tom, Mick and
Gaspard sat on the back porch and stared at the resting ’plane
without a word. Tom still had his great gloves on his hands, his
goggles on his eyes and his fur-lined cap on his head.

The doctor returned to them in fifteen minutes; at sight of the
expression on his face they all sighed with relief, and Tom pulled
off his gloves and head-dress.

“Mick, you were right,” said the doctor. “That’s what is the matter
with her, but it hasn’t got much of a hold. And she is strong and
I’m here in plenty of time.”

Mick Otter nodded his head just as if this good news was no news to
him. Gaspard leaned heavily on Tom’s shoulder. Tom took off his
goggles and fell to polishing them diligently with a handkerchief.

“Bless that old bus,” he said, making a swift and furtive pass with
the handkerchief across his eyes.

Doctor Smith pulled a cigarette-case and a folded newspaper from a
side-pocket of his coat. He lit a cigarette and then unfolded the
paper.

“Ah! here it is,” he said. “Dickon and I were wondering how we could
get word to you about it, Tom. Here you are.”

He handed the big sheet to Tom, indicating this official
advertisement with a finger.

    “Major Thomas Villers Akerley, M. C. This officer is
    hereby instructed to apply at his early convenience for
    transfer to the Reserve of Officers, with his present
    rank and seniority, and to return to any Officer of the
    Permanent or Active Militia, with a complete statement
    attached, all such Government Property for which he is
    officially responsible. Major Akerley will understand
    that, in consideration of his distinguished services,
    fine record and good character and the peculiar
    circumstances of his case, his compliance with these
    instructions will cause the cessation of all Official
    action in the matter.

                                    (Signed) T—— W——
                                       Deputy Minister of Militia.”

Tom read it three times, very slowly. The full meaning of it struck
him suddenly, and he trembled. The wide sheet shook between his
hands, fluttered clear and swooped to the floor. Mick Otter picked
it up and stared at it like an owl.

“I see the mark of your finger in that,” said Tom to the doctor.

“And of the fingers of every other old soldier in Canada,” returned
the doctor.

“When may I show it to Catherine?” asked Tom.

“To-morrow, I think. I am counting on that bit of news to save me a
lot of medicine and professional effort.”

Six days later, very early in the morning, Tom Akerley and Dr. Smith
flew away from Gaspard’s clearings—but not northward across the
height-of-land toward Timbertown. They carried the Winter’s catch of
furs with them, which included several exceptionally fine pelts of
otter and mink and a few of “patch” fox. Tom wore the same clothes,
ribbons and all, in which he had landed so violently amid the young
oats on that June night, now almost a full year ago.

They passed high over Boiling Pot and made a landing in a meadow on
the outskirts of a small town. There they attracted a good deal of
attention; so they took flight again as soon as the doctor had
dispatched a telegram to Timbertown and procured petrol and a map.

Their second and last landing was made in the Agricultural
Exhibition Park of a city. Leaving the machine in the charge of a
policeman, and taking the package of pelts with them, they went to
the nearest hotel. From the hotel Tom rang up Militia Headquarters
and the doctor rang up a dependable dealer in furs.

An hour later, Tom gave his name to an orderly. The orderly was back
in fifteen seconds.

“The general will see you now, sir,” he said. “This way, if you
please.”

He opened a door and backed inwards with it, keeping his hand on the
knob.

“Major T. V. Akerley, M. C.,” he announced; and as Tom crossed the
threshold three paces, halted with a smack of his right heel against
his left and saluted, the door closed behind him.

The Inspector General, a large man in a large suit of gray tweed,
looked up from some papers on his desk and said, “How are you,
Akerley? Glad to see you.”

“Thank you, sir,” returned Tom, standing very stiff.

The general left his desk, advanced and extended his hand. Tom
grasped it.

“Glad to hear the machine is all right,” said the general. “You have
had a long flight. Loosen up, my boy. You are not on the carpet, I’m
glad to say.”

Tom’s back and shoulders relaxed a little.

“I can scarcely believe it, sir,” he replied. “May I ask how it
happened? Did Colonel Nasher say how the trouble began?”

“Something like that,” said the general. “Not of his own free will,
of course. It came hard, but we scared it out of him. One of your
men, Dever by name, told of your speaking to him of poor Angus Bruce
just before you flew away that night. And we had Nasher’s letter
objecting to Bruce’s name on the list of posthumous awards; a letter
fairly reeking with cowardly spite. A disgraceful letter. I looked
into that matter and learned that Nasher and the father of Angus
Bruce were enemies of long standing in their home town. I was
inspired to put one and one together and suspect the result of being
two; so I sent for Nasher, to see if the answer really was two. He
came; and I saw at a glance that his wind was up already. The Vets
were hot on his tracks by that time, you know. Half the old soldiers
in Canada had pen in hand, most of them painting you in colors
almost too good to be true; and the remainder demanding to know why,
when and by whom, a person like Nasher had been given a commission.
So, when I asked Nasher, in this very room, what he had said to you
about your friend, young Bruce, fear shook enough of the truth out
of him to satisfy me that you had done exactly what I should have
done in your place.”

“You would have knocked his head clean off, sir,” said Tom.

The general grinned and walked across the room to an open window. He
stood there for half a minute, with his hands behind his back. He
turned suddenly, strode back and laid a hand on the airman’s
shoulder.

“If you feel fit for it, Akerley, I shall be glad to have you carry
on,” he said. “The past year can be called sick-leave. There was
something of the sort due you, anyway.”

Tom changed color several times before he found his voice.

“I feel fit for a fight, sir—but not for peace-time duty, I’m
afraid,” he replied. “I feel that I need to be in the woods, sir,
where I’ve been ever since last June. But if you will put me in the
Reserve, sir, so that I may come back if needed—to fight, you
know—I’ll be very much obliged,—as I am about everything now—more
than I can say.”

“That shall be done,” said the general. And then he added, “So
you’ve been in the woods? What did you do in the woods?”

“Farmed and trapped, sir. It’s a great life.”

“I believe you. Have you bought land?”

“Not yet, sir; but I hope to do so.”

“That reminds me! You must go to the Pay Office. Show them this
receipt for the machine you brought back.”

Then the general walked Tom to the door, still with a hand on his
shoulder, and opened the door. They halted and faced each other on
the threshold.

“Did Angus Bruce get his M. C., sir?” asked Tom.

“He did,” replied the general. “His mother has it. And that reminds
me! You are improperly dressed, Akerley.”

“I am sorry, sir,” returned Tom, in confusion. “I hadn’t any other
clothes to put on.”

“That’s not what I refer to,” said the general, placing a finger-tip
on the ribbon of the Military Cross on Tom’s left breast. “You have
been awarded a bar to this. Get it and put it up before you go back
to the woods, or there’ll be trouble. Send me your permanent
address. Good-by. Good luck.”

It was a long and round-about journey back to Gaspard’s clearings.
But Tom Akerley made it with a light and eager heart, thinking
fearlessly of the past and dreaming fearlessly of the future.