The Timber Pirate

NIGHT’S sable curtain was soon to fall on the short-lived drama of a Winter day in the Laurentians. The departing sub-arctic sun, in its last pale glory, sent up from the omnipresent whiteness myriads of glistening beams that stabbed the eyes like leaping darts of fire. Of sounds there was oppressive absence. Not even a vagrant breeze sighed in the tree-tops; but at irregular intervals the intense stillness was smitten by the lugubrious “Spon-n-n-n-g!” of some aged tree splitting open to the heart where freezing moisture expanded in its crevices. All life and warmth seemed utterly exterminated in the pre-twilight calm save for the distant Monarch of Day slowly receding from his stark white world of desolation.

Yet even in these desolate wastes Man moved and had his being; for on the trail that wound down from the heights to the northwest there was the ribbonlike tracing of a dog sled and beside it the oval imprints of snowshoes. At a small cleared area in the scrub timber, just above where the trail dipped into a mighty, spruce-bearded ravine, the sled marks and the snowshoe patterns ceased.

On this spot, by a camp fire in the snow, hunched an elderly white man wrapped to his throat in blankets, beard and eyebrows thickly frosted from the vapour of his breath. His face, the wasted face of one who had endured intense physical suffering, was bereft of tangible expression; his eyes fixed dully on the slow-leaping, soundless flames from which there ascended into the zero-freighted air a wispy, hairlike strand of smoke. Roundabout him were scattered canvas packsacks, rolls of bright coloured woollen blankets, fire-blackened pots and pans, two light chopping axes and a short-barrelled repeating rifle. Nearby, on the trail, a spent and footsore string of sled dogs lay flattened in the snow. Noses stretched to the fire, eyes closed and limbs inert, they might be mistaken for dead and frozen things but for the occasional faint heave of their flanks as their trained lungs drew sparingly of the biting ozone.

Of a sudden the deathlike calm was shattered by the whining crack of a high-power rifle. Closer by there was a swish and flap of clumsy wings, and a dowdy, slate-coloured wesse-ke-jak circled the camp uttering dismal cries of “Meat—meat—meat!”

Every canine head came to life with a start. The figure in the blankets winced as though struck from behind by an unseen icy fist, doubling forward in a racking fit of coughing that reverberated through the solitudes in listless, unsympathetic echoes. The man desisted with a choking gasp, his frame shaking in a palsy. Weakly he slumped back against a nearby packsack, hands clutching at his heart.

“Laddie,” he called in a voice that was pitifully faint, “Laddie—oh, Laddie!”

His arms sagged and went limp by his sides, his breath coming and going in the swift, sibilant gasps of a life flickering out from exhaustion.

A wolf-dog in the sled pack pricked up his pointed ears, and, straining away from his fellows, sniffed weirdly in the direction of the stricken man. The treacherous huskie leaped savagely against his restraining harness, a low, ominous growl issuing from the ugly curve of his long, trembling jaws. A woolly black-and-tan of the faithful Collie strain gave a snarl of warning; then, with bristles rising on his thick, powerful neck, leaped at the throat of the traitor. That was the signal for a general release of pentup canine irritation. In a trice the whole sled pack was engaged in a furious free-for-all of flying fur and white-flashing fangs.

“Lie down!”

The command came low, deep and vibrant with a faint click of teeth. In electric unison the pack flattened, cowering silent in their places—all but the loyal Collie, which turned with slow-wagging tail and crouching rump to express its fealty as the scrub of the trail parted and a tall youth of spare but powerful build strode into the camp with the carcass of a young buck deer on his shoulder.

The newcomer flung the deer and his rifle to the snow and rushed to the side of the dying man, applying a pocket flask to his lips while he raised him on an arm with the tenderness of a woman. But the elder one was sinking fast—was beyond human aid.

For a few moments he rallied. “Laddie—thank God—you came,” he murmured weakly. “It is the end—the end of the trail—for me. There is so much—so much left undone, Laddie—so much wrong—an erring old man should undo—but you—you, Alexander, my boy—you won’t forget—the mine—the gold mine—goes to—”

The young man bent close to catch the whispered name.

Suddenly the invalid straightened as though galvanised in a last brief lease of life, eyes fixed on some vision above and beyond his companion.

“Black Jack! Black Jack Carlstone!” He cried it as one who cries from the wells of the heart. “Black Jack, my one true friend—you—you will see that the boy—you will see that he carries out my will—”

His torso sagged and his head dropped limply on his chest before he finished.

With reverent touch the young man closed the tired old eyes, while his own welled up and there was a suggestion of a stifled sob in his throat. Mutely for some moments he remained on one knee in the snow, stoically still, looking into the face of the dead man as though questioning the cruel vagaries of Fate.

But as quickly his expression changed. Presently, when he arose and strode over to the fire, a hard, uncanny light flickered over his face—a face whose intense pallor accentuated the blackness of his extraordinary eyes. Framed in the close-fitting muskrat cap, it was a face that bespoke undeveloped power, strikingly handsome in its mephistophelian mould and portending a sagacity beyond its years.

He stood with arms outstretched to the setting sun, for the moment transformed to a pagan chieftain, and from his lips there issued the single word, “Kee-am!” which in the Indian means: “Nothing matters!”

“The gold mine goes to—” Slowly he repeated the dead man’s injunction. The lids of his black eyes narrowed until they became slits of flame and the lines of his mouth set close-pressed and cruel.

But when he turned and addressed the corpse his features relaxed and his voice was gutturally soft and musical: “It shall be as you willed, my kindest friend—but, for the present, the mine is lent to me.”

The sun, now a great, boiling globe under a fanlike glaze of scarlet, eased down upon the bleak western ranges, bordering their purple-shrouded crests with a narrow edging of brightest gold; hesitated one brief second in fiery farewell, then plunged behind the ragged rim of the northern world. Night swept with swift stealth across the wilderness, transforming it to a realm of spectrelike shadows.

A solemn hush, like a requiem of Nature for the day that was dead, fell over the forests.

The lone figure by the camp fire bent forward strangely as though gripped by an inward paroxysm.

As he did so, the deeps of the woods vibrated with a long-drawn, unearthly cry that echoed and re-echoed its fearsome notes far in the hills. It had seemed to rise from nowhere, a howl neither human nor bestial, but a demoniac blending of both; half anguished wail, half mocking laughter.

No prowling timber wolf broke the succeeding silence with an answering call. Even the wolf-dog in the sled pack cowered deeper in his snowy bed in whimpering fear.