The Courage of Marge O'Doone by James Oliver Curwood (10 best books of all time TXT) 📕

not bring himself to ask whether this picture--some strange spirit it might possess--had reached out to him, quieted him, made him sleep, brought him dreams that were like a healing medicine. And yet....
He remembered that in one of his leather bags there was a magnifying glass, and he assured himself that he was merely curious--most casually curious--as he hunted it out from among his belongings and scanned the almost illegible writing on the back of the cardboard mount. He made out the date quite easily now, impressed in the cardboard by the point of a pencil. It was only a little more than a year old. It was unaccountable why this discovery should affect him as it did. He made no effort to measure or sound the satisfaction it gave him--this knowledge that the girl had stood so recently on that rock beside the pool. He was beginning to personalize her unconsciously, beginning to think of her mentally as the Girl. She was a bit friendly. With her looking at him like that he did not feel quite so alone with himself. And there could not be much of a change in her since that yesterday of a year ago, when some one had startled her there.
It was Father Roland's voice that made him wrap up the picture again, this time not in its old covering, but in a silk handkerchief which he had pawed out of his bag, and which he dropped back again, and locked in. Thoreau was telling the Missioner about David's early rising when the latter reappeared. They shook hands, and the Missioner, looking David keenly in the eyes, saw the change in him.
"No need to tell me you had a good night!" he exclaimed.
"Splendid," affirmed David.
The window was blazing with the golden sun now; it shot through where the frost was giving way, and a ray of it fell like a fiery shaft on Marie's glossy head as she bent over the table. Father Roland pointed to the window with one hand on David's arm.
"Wait until you get out into _that_," he said. "This is just a beginning, David--just a beginning!"
They sat down to breakfast, fish and coffee, bread and potatoes--and beans. It was almost finished when David split open his third piece of fish, white as snow under its crisp brown, and asked quite casually:
"Did you ever hear of the Stikine River, Father?"
Father Roland sat up, stopped his eating, and looked at David for a moment as though the question struck an unusual personal interest in him.
"I know a man who lived for a great many years along the Stikine," he replied then. "He knows every mile of it from where it empties into the sea at Point Rothshay to the Lost Country between Mount Finlay and the Sheep Mountains. It's in the northern part of British Columbia, with its upper waters reaching into the Yukon. A wild country. A country less known than it was sixty years ago, when there was a gold rush up over the old telegraph trail. Tavish has told me a lot about it. A queer man--this Tavish. We hit his cabin on our way to God's Lake."
"Did he ever tell you," said David, with an odd quiver in his throat--"Did he ever tell you of a stream, a tributary stream, called Firepan Creek?"
"Firepan Creek--Firepan Creek," mumbled the Little Missioner. "He has told me a great many things, this Tavish, but I can't remember that. _Firepan Creek_! Yes, he did! I remember, now. He had a cabin on it one year, the year he had small-pox. He almost died there. I want you to meet Tavish, David. We will stay overnight at his cabin. He is a strange character--a great object lesson." Suddenly he came back to David's question. "What do you want to know about Stikine River and Firepan Creek?" he asked.
"I was reading something about them that interested me," replied David. "A _very_ wild country, I take it, from what Tavish has told you. Probably no white people."
"Always, everywhere, there are a few white people," said Father Roland. "Tavish is white, and he was there. Sixty years ago, in the gold rush, there must have been many. But I fancy there are very few now. Tavish can tell us. He came from there only a year ago this last September."
David asked no more questions. He turned his attention entirely to his fish. In that same moment there came an outburst from the foxes that made Thoreau grin. Their yapping rose until it was a clamorous demand. Then the dogs joined in. To David it seemed as though there must be a thousand foxes out in the Frenchman's pens, and at least a hundred dogs just beyond the cabin walls. The sound was blood-curdling in a way. He had heard nothing like it before in all his life; it almost made one shiver to think of going outside. The chorus kept up for fully a minute. Then it began to die out, and David could hear the chill clink of chains. Through it all Thoreau was grinning.
"It's two hours over feeding time for the foxes, and they know it, m'sieur," he explained to David. "Their outcry excites the huskies, and when the two go together--_Mon Dieu_! it is enough to raise the dead." He pushed himself back from the table and rose to his feet. "I am going to feed them now. Would you like to see it, m'sieu?"
Father Roland answered for him.
"Give us ten minutes and we shall be ready," he said, seizing David by the arm, and speaking to Thoreau. "Come with me, David. I have something waiting for you."
They went into the Little Missioner's room, and pointing to his tumbled bed, Father Roland said:
"Now, David, strip!"
David had noticed with some concern the garments worn that morning by Father Roland and the Frenchman--their thick woollen shirts, their strange-looking, heavy trousers that were met just below the knees by the tops of bulky German socks, turned over as he had worn his more fashionable hosiery in the college days when golf suits, bulldog pipes, and white terriers were the rage. He had stared furtively at Thoreau's great feet in their moose-hide moccasins, thinking of his own vici kids, the heaviest footwear he had brought with him. The problem of outfitting was solved for him now, as he looked at the bed, and as Father Roland withdrew, rubbing his hands until they cracked, David began undressing. In less than a quarter of an hour he was ready for the big outdoors. When the Missioner returned to give him a first lesson in properly "stringing up" his moccasins, he brought with him a fur cap very similar to that worn by Thoreau. He was amazed to find how perfectly it fitted.
"You see," said Father Roland, pleased at David's wonder, "I always take back a bale of this stuff with me, of different sizes; it comes in handy, you know. And the cap...."
He chuckled as David surveyed as much as he could see of himself in a small mirror.
"The cap is Marie's work," he finished. "She got the size from your hat and made it while we were asleep. A fine fisher-coat that--Thoreau's best. And a good fit, eh?"
"Marie ... did this ... for me?" demanded David.
The Missioner nodded.
"And the pay, Father...."
"Among friends of the forests, David, never speak of pay."
"But this skin! It is beautiful--valuable...."
"And it is yours," said Father Roland. "I am glad you mentioned payment to me, and not to Thoreau or Marie. They might not have understood, and it would have hurt them. If there had been anything to pay, _they_ would have mentioned it in the giving; _I_ would have mentioned it. That is a fine point of etiquette, isn't it?"
Slowly there came a look into David's face which the other did not at first understand. After a moment he said, without looking at the Missioner, and in a voice that had a curious hard note in it:
"But for this ... Marie will let me give her something in return--a little something I have no use for now? A little gift--my thanks--my friendship...."
He did not wait for the Missioner to reply, but went to one of his two leather bags. He unlocked the one in which he had placed the photograph of the girl. Out of it he took a small plush box. It was so small that it lay in the palm of his hand as he held it out to Father Roland.
Deeper lines had gathered about his mouth.
"Give this to Marie--for me."
Father Roland took the box. He did not look at it. Steadily he gazed into David's eyes.
"What is it?" he asked.
"A locket," replied David. "It belonged to _her_. In it is a picture--her picture--the only one I have. Will you--please--destroy the picture before you give the locket to Marie?"
Father Roland saw the quick, sudden throb in David's throat. He gripped the little box in his hand until it seemed as though he would crush it, and his heart was beating with the triumph of a drum. He spoke but one word, his eyes meeting David's eyes, but that one word was a whisper from straight out of his soul, and the word was:
"_Victory!_"


CHAPTER VII
Father Roland slipped the little plush box into his pocket as he and David went out to join Thoreau. They left the cabin together, Marie lifting her eyes from her work in a furtive glance to see if the stranger was wearing her cap.
A wild outcry from the dogs greeted the three men as they appeared outside the door, and for the first time David saw with his eyes what he had only heard last night. Among the balsams and spruce close to the cabin there were fully a score of the wildest and most savage-looking dogs he had ever beheld. As he stood for a moment, gazing about him, three things impressed themselves upon him in a flash: it was a glorious day, it was so cold that he felt a curious sting in the air, and not one of those long-haired, white-fanged beasts straining at their leashes possessed a kennel, or even a brush shelter. It was this last fact that struck him most forcefully. Inherently he was a lover of animals, and he believed these four-footed creatures of Thoreau's must have suffered terribly during the night. He noticed that at the foot of each tree to which a dog was attached there was a round, smooth depression in the snow, where the animal had slept. The next few minutes added to his conviction that the Frenchman and the Missioner were heartless masters, though open-handed hosts. Mukoki and another Indian had come up with two gunny sacks, and from one of these a bushel of fish was emptied out upon the snow. They were frozen stiff, so that Mukoki had to separate them with his belt-axe; David fancied they must be hard as rock. Thoreau proceeded to toss these fish to the dogs, one at a time, and one to each dog. The watchful and apparently famished beasts caught the fish in mid-air, and there followed a snarling and grinding of teeth and smashing of bones and frozen flesh that made David shiver. He was half disgusted. Thoreau might at least have boiled the fish, or thawed them out. A fish weighing from one and a half to two pounds was each dog's allotment, and the work--if this feeding process could be called work--was done. Father Roland watched the dogs, rubbing his hands with satisfaction. Thoreau was showing his big, white teeth, as if proud of something.
"Not a bad tooth among them, _mon Pere_," he said. "Not one!"
"Fine--fine--but a little