Gilbert Parker

“ But Pierre could play a part, she knew, and could involve others in trouble, and escape himself. He was a man with a reputation for occasional wickednesses of a naked, decided type. She knew that he was possessed of a devil, of a very reserved devil, but liable to bold action on occasions. She knew that he valued the chances of life or death no more than he valued the thousand and one other chances of small importance, which occur in daily experience. It was his creed that one doesn’t go till the game is done and all the cards are played. ”

“ There was no man in the Western Territories to whom it was not familiar. There was no traveller who crossed the lonely waste but was glad of it, and would go twenty miles out of his way to rest a night on a corn-husk bed which Jen Galbraith’s hands had filled, to eat a meal that she had prepared, and to hear Peter Galbraith’s tales of early days on the plains, when buffalo were like clouds on the horizon, when Indians were many and hostile, and when men called the great western prairie a wedge of the American desert. ”

“ He continued: “No, I have not much love; but Val, well, I think of him some. His tongue is straight; he makes no lies. His heart is fire; his arms are strong; he has no fear. He does not love Pierre; but he does not pretend to love him. He does not think of me like the rest. So much the more when his trouble comes I help him. I help him to the death if he needs me. To make him my friend—that is good. Eh? Perhaps. You see, Galbraith?” ”

“ And now she begged Trafford to go southwards before winter froze the plains impassably, and the snow made tombs of the valleys. Thereupon he gave the word to go, and said that he had done wrong—for now the spell was falling from him.
But she, seeing his regret, said: “Ah, Just, it could not have been different. The passion of it was on you as it was on us, as if to teach us that hunger for happiness is robbery, and that the covetous desire of man is not the will of the gods. The herds are for the Mighty Men when they awake, not for the stranger and the Philistine.” ”

“ He answered to the name of Pierre without pride, but like a man and not as a sick woman. And huddled on the floor beside him was an idiot fondling a pipe, with a shred of pemmican at his lips.
As if in irony of man’s sacrifice, the All Hail and the Master of Things permitted the fool to fulfil his own prophecy, and die of a sudden sickness in the coming-on of summer. But he of God’s Garrison that remained repented not of his deed. Such men have no repentance, neither of good nor evil. ”

“ Pierre followed with a swift, inquiring look; then, in the succeeding pause, he offered cigarettes. Wendling took one; and all, silent, sat down. The sun streamed intemperately through the doorway, making a broad ribbon of light straight across the floor to Wendling’s feet. After lighting his cigarette, he looked into the sunlight for a moment, still not speaking. Shon meanwhile had started his pipe, and now, as if he found the silence awkward,—“It’s a day for God’s country, this,” he said: “to make man a Christian for little or much, though he play with the Divil betunewhiles.” ”

“ All the tale of the hunt was given by Malbrouck to joyful ears; for the mother lived again her youth in the sunrise of this romance which was being sped before her eyes; and the father, knowing that in this world there is nothing so good as courage, nothing so base as the shifting eye, looked on the young man, and was satisfied, and told his story well;—told it as a brave man would tell it, bluntly as to deeds done, warmly as to the pleasures of good sport, directly as to all. In the eye of the young man there had come the glance of larger life, of a new-developed manhood. ”

“ Pretty Pierre went out of one door, a malediction between his white teeth, and Aleck went out of another door with a malediction upon his gloomy lips. But both maledictions were levelled at the same person. Poor Aleck.
“Poor Aleck!” That is the way we sometimes think of a good nature gone awry; one that has learned to say cruel maledictions to itself, and against which demons hurl their deadly maledictions too. Alas, for the ne’er-do-weel!
That night a stalwart figure passed from David Humphrey’s door, carrying with him the warm atmosphere of a good woman’s love. ”

“ All shall be quite fair, as when you and I played in the little house by the Chaudiere—at first, Lucy,—before I was a devil.”
Was this peculiar softness to his last tones assumed or real? She looked at him inquiringly; but he moved away to the window, and stood gazing down the hillside towards the town below. His eyes smarted.
“I will die,” she said to herself in whispers—“I will die.” A minute passed, and then Pierre turned and said to her: “Lucy, he is coming up the hill. Listen. If you tell him that I have seen you, I will shoot him on sight, dead. ”

“ Within easy range, Trafford swung his gun shoulder-wards to fire, but at that instant a cloud of snow rose up between him and his quarry so that they all were blinded. And when they came into the clear sun again the buffalo were gone; but flaming arrows from some unseen hunter’s bow came singing over their heads towards the south; and they obeyed the sign, and went back to where Hester wore her life out with anxiety for them, because she knew the hopelessness of their quest. Women are nearer to the heart of things. ”

“ They had all now recovered from the disturbing sentiments of the first portion of the journey; life was at full tide; the spirit of the hunter was on them.
At length one night they camped in a vast pine grove wrapped in coverlets of snow and silent as death. Here again Pierre became moody and alert and took no part in the careless chat at the camp-fire led by Shon McGann. The man brooded and looked mysterious. Mystery was not pleasing to Trafford. He had his own secrets, but in the ordinary affairs of life he preferred simplicity. ”

“ Nobody except Gregory Thorne and myself knows the history of the Man and Woman, who lived on the Height of Land, just where Dog Ear River falls into Marigold Lake. This portion of the Height of Land is a lonely country. The sun marches over it distantly, and the man of the East—the braggart—calls it outcast; but animals love it; and the shades of the long-gone trapper and ‘voyageur’ saunter without mourning through its fastnesses. When you are in doubt, trust God’s dumb creatures—and the happy dead who whisper pleasant promptings to us, and whose knowledge is mighty. ”

“ Pretty Pierre bent over and said slowly: “If you stay here, Grah, the Indian get your scalp; if you go, the snow is deep and the frost is like a badger’s tooth, and you can’t be carried.”
“Oh, Oh!—my mother dead—poor Annie—by God, Grah want pipe—poor Grah sleep in snow-bubble, bubble—Oh, Oh!—the long wind, fly away.” ”

“ And the half-breed looked up at the Irishman from under his dark brows so covertly and meaningly that Shon saw visions of a trouble as silent as a plague, as resistless as a great flood. This noiseless vengeance was not after his own heart. He almost shivered as the delicate fingers drummed on his breast.
“Angels begird me, Pretty Pierre, but it’s little I’d like you for enemy o’ mine; for I know that you’d wait for y’r foe with death in y’r hand, and pity far from y’r heart; and y’d smile as you pulled the black-cap on y’r head, and laugh as you drew the life out of him, God knows how! ”

“ Though winds were fierce, and travel full of peril, they kept their word, and passed along wide steppes of snow, until they entered passes of the mountains, and again into the plains; and at last one ‘poudre’ day, when frost was shaking like shreds of faintest silver through the air, Shon McGann’s sight fled. But he would not turn back—a promise to a dying man was sacred, and he could follow if he could not lead; and there was still some pemmican, and there were martens in the woods, and wandering deer that good spirits hunted into the way of the needy ”

“ The elusive, sinister look in the missionary’s face was etched in strong lines now. A dogged sullenness hung about his lips. He noticed that one hand only of Pretty Pierre was occupied with the relics of the dead girl; the other was free to act suddenly on a hip pocket. “What do you want me to do”? he said, not whiningly, for beneath the selfish flesh and shallow outworks there were the elements of a warrior—all pulpy now, but they were there.
“This,” was the reply: “for you to make one more outlaw at Fort Anne by drinking what is in this bottle—sit down, quick, by God!” ”

“ These were the words he was singing as Sergeant Tom rode towards the tavern:
“The hot blood leaps in his quivering breast Voila! ‘Tis his enemies near! There’s a chasm deep on the mountain crest Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear! They follow him close and they follow him fast, And he flies like a mountain deer; Then a mad, wild leap and he’s safe at last! Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear! A cry and a leap and the danger’s past Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear!”
At the close of the verse, Galbraith said: “I don’t like that song. I—I don’t like it. You’re not a father, Pierre.” ”

“ In one of the silences that fell between Shon’s attempts to give hilarity to the occasion, there came a rumbling far-off sound, a sound that increased in volume till the earth beneath them responded gently to the vibration. Trafford looked up inquiringly at Pierre, and then at the Indian, who, after a moment, said slowly: “Above us are the hills of the Mighty Men, beneath us is the White Valley. It is the tramp of buffalo that we hear. A storm is coming, and they go to shelter in the mountains.” ”

“ What had happened to The Man when he lived in the village became almost as great a legend as the Indian fable concerning The Stone. In the minds of the people one seemed as old as the other. Women who knew the awful disasters which had befallen The Man brooded at times most timidly, regarding him as they did at first—and even still—The Stone. Women who carried life unborn about with them had a strange dread of both The Stone and The Man. ”

“ She had a dread of Pierre, and, only the night before, she had determined to make one last great effort to save Aleck, and if he would not be saved—strange that, thinking it all over again, as she watched the figure on horseback coming nearer, her mind should swerve to what she had heard of Sergeant Fones’s expected promotion. Then she fell to wondering if anyone had ever given him a real Christmas present; if he had any friends at all; if life meant anything more to him than carrying the law of the land across his saddle. ”

“ The Indian hath knowledge, even as the white man; and because his heart is open, the trees whisper to him; he reads the language of the grass and the wind, and is taught by the song of the bird, the screech of the hawk, the bark of the fox. And so he comes to know the heart of the man who hath sickness, and calls upon someone, even though it be a weak woman, to cure his sickness; who is bowed low as beside a grave, and would stand upright. ”

“ And Pierre, who knew that evil things are exorcised by mighty conjuring, sang loudly, from a throat made thin by forced fasting, a song with which his mother sought to drive away the devils of dreams that flaunted on his pillow when a child: it was the song of the Scarlet Hunter. And the charm sufficed; for suddenly of a cheerless morning they came upon a trapper’s hut in the wilderness, where their sufferings ceased, and the sight of Shon’s eyes came back. When strength returned also, they journeyed to an Indian village, where a priest laboured. ”

“ At length he said: ‘I know a good priest, Father Corraine, who has a cabin sixty miles or more from here, and I’ll guide you to him, if so be you can trust a half-breed and a gambler, and one men call an outlaw. If not, I’m feared it’ll go hard with you; for the Cypress Hills are not easy travel, as I’ve known this many a year. And should you want a name to call me, Pretty Pierre will do, though my godfathers and godmothers did different for me before they went to Heaven.’ And nothing said he irreverently, father. ”

“ I find astonishing likenesses between the perfectly human and the perfectly animal. Did you never see how beautiful and modest the faces of deer are; how chic and sensitive is the manner of a hound; nor the keen, warm look in the eye of a well-bred mare? Why, I’d rather be a good horse of blood and temper than half the fellows I know. You are not an animal lover as I am ”

“ The angel of wisdom was gone, and chaos spluttered on the lolling lips again; the Idiot sat feeling for the pipe that he had dropped.
And never again through the days that came and went could Pierre, by any conjuring, or any swaying torch, make the fool into a man again. The devils of confusion were returned forever. ”

“ And Pierre, looking upon the Idiot, saw his face glow, and his eye stream steadily to the light, and he said, “What is it that you see, Grah?—speak!”
All pitifulness and struggle had gone from the Idiot’s face, and a strong calm fell upon it, and the voice of a man that God had created spoke slowly: “There is an end of blood. The great chief Yellow Arm is fallen. He goeth to the plains where his wife will mourn upon his knees, and his children cry, because he that gathered food is gone, and the pots are empty on the fire. And they who follow him shall fight no more. ”

“ Lazenby admired Pierre; said he was good stuff, and voted him amusing, with an ingenious emphasis of heathen oaths; but advised him, as only an insolent young scoundrel can, to forswear securing, by the seductive game of poker or euchre, larger interest on his capital than the H. B. C.; whose record, he insisted, should never be rivalled by any single man in any single lifetime. Then he incidentally remarked that he would like to empty the Company’s cash-box once—only once;—thus reconciling the preacher and the sinner, as many another has done. Lazenby’s morals were not bad, however. ”

“ But Pierre heard a mighty flood groaning on them, and he blinded as he stretched his arm in response. He caught at Wendling’s shoulder, but felt him lifted and carried away, while he himself stood still in a screeching wind and heard impalpable water rushing over him. In a minute it was gone; and he stood alone in Red Glen.
He gathered himself up and ran. Far down, where the Glen opened to the plain, he found Wendling. The hands were wrinkled; the face was cold; the body was wet: the man was drowned and dead. ”

“ And now she sees, for the first time, two horsemen riding slowly in the track from Fort Desire towards Galbraith’s Place. She notices that one sits upright, and one seems leaning forward on his horse’s neck. She shades her eyes with her hand, but she cannot distinguish who they are. But she has seen men tied to their horses ride as that man is riding, when stricken with fever, bruised by falling timber, lacerated by a grizzly, wounded by a bullet, or crushed by a herd of buffaloes. ”

“ And so, as you say, ‘bien,’ and we each have our way, bedad!”
Sergeant Tom noticed that the half-breed’s eyes nearly closed, as if to hide the malevolence that was in them. He would not have been surprised to see a pistol drawn. But he was quite fearless, and if it was not his duty to provoke a difficulty, his fighting nature would not shrink from giving as good as he got. Besides, so far as that nature permitted, he hated Pretty Pierre. He knew the ruin that this gambler had caused here and there in the West, and he was glad that Fort Desire, at any rate, knew him less than it did formerly. ”

“ The Stone hung on a jutting crag of Purple Hill. On one side of it, far beneath, lay the village, huddled together as if, through being close compacted, its handful of humanity should not be a mere dust in the balance beside Nature’s portentousness. Yet if one stood beside The Stone, and looked down, the flimsy wooden huts looked like a barrier at the end of a great flume. For the hill hollowed and narrowed from The Stone to the village, as if giants had made this concave path by trundling boulders to that point like a funnel where the miners’ houses now formed a cul-de-sac. ”

“ Arrah, give me, sez I, the crack of a stick, the bite of a gun, or the clip of a sabre’s edge, with a shout in y’r mouth the while!”
Though Pierre still listened lazily, there was a wicked fire in his eyes. His words now came from his teeth with cutting precision. “I have a great thought tonight, Shon McGann. I will tell you when we meet again. But, my friend, one must not be too rash—no, not too brutal. Even the sabre should fall at the right time, and then swift and still. Noise is not battle. ”

“ You are young, quite young in the world, Tom Liffey.”
“Young I may be with a glint o’ grey at me temples from a night o’ trouble beyand in the hills; but I’m the man, an’ the only man, that’s climbed to the glacier-top—God’s Playground, as they call it: and nivir a dirty trick have I done to Injin girl or any other; and be damned to you there!”
“Sometimes I think you are as foolish as Shon McGann,” compassionately replied the half-breed.
“You have almighty virtue, and you did that brave trick of the glacier; but great men have fallen. You are not dead yet. ”

“ A little later the Idiot sat inside the store, wrapped in loose furs, and blowing bubbles; while Pretty Pierre, with many handfuls of bullets by him, waited for the attack.
“Eh,” he said, as he watched from a loophole, “Gyng and the others have got safely past the Causeway, and the rest is possible. Well, it hurts an idiot as much to die, perhaps, as a half-breed or a factor. It is good to stay here. If we fight, and go out swift like Grah’s bubbles, it is the game. If we starve and sleep as did Grah’s mother, then it also is the game. ”

“ In the bar-room some early traveller was talking to Peter Galbraith. A wandering band of Indians was camped about a mile away, the only sign of humanity in the waste. Jen sat in the doorway culling dried apples. Though tragedies occur in lives of the humble, they must still do the dull and ordinary task. They cannot stop to cherish morbidness, to feed upon their sorrow; they must care for themselves and labour for others. And well is it for them that it is so.
The Indian camp brings unpleasant memories to Jen’s mind. ”