Cross trails : the story of one woman in the north woods

Front matter

CROSS TRAILS.

HERMAN WHITAKER |

Books BY HERMAN WHITAKER

CHAPTER I ITH her pen poised hesitantly above the

account-book that served this roughest of frontier hotels for a register, the young woman stood for a few seconds before she wrote down her name. Apparently she was debating the form of the prefix, for when the pen finally dipped to the paper it began on a capital ““M’’. But there it stopped. When, after a second hesitancy, she was forced to some conclusion by her uneasy consciousness of the landlord’s scrutiny, and the open admiration of a mixed crowd of settlers and half-breeds at the other end of the room, the name stood:

“Gabrielle Ferrier, Montreal.”

Left thus without a hint of his guest’s condition, Joe Lacrosse exercised the gallantry which goes with even the thinnest strain of French blood. While ushering her to a bedroom—a corner of a long attic, partitioned off with cotton sheets from the general sleeping-quarters of the male boarders—he ventured to give her the virgin title.

“Tt ees all right, mees,’’ he combated her misgiving concerning the “‘bedroom.” “Julie—she ees my wife—sleeps in the next bed. Ou, it ees all right, for Julie she ees ver’ strong on the propaire.”’

The horror that distended the girl’s gray eyes under their black lashes—they were big enough without it—was here qualified by a touch of amusement, for she had caught a glimpse of Julie, a large, slouchy, almost full-blooded squaw, through the open door of the kitchen. But enough remained to make her jump at a chance of escape. Joe, however, shook his black shock head when she inquired if the mail-sled from Lake Winnipegosis would be in to-day.

“The Winnipegoos mail? Out, it comes here —hbut in the wintaire not so mooch.”’ He could easily have put it stronger than that, but with the instinct of a born innkeeper he left the breaking of unwelcome news to others. “You can find out at the post-office, mees. It ees in the Hudson Bay store, one block up the street.”’

They had ascended by means of a widerunged ladder that was nailed on one side to the logs of the wall, and which brought up midway of the long room that served the hotel for parlor, dining-room, and office. Descending, she came again under the fire of the loungers’ eyes. In this, the first year the Canadian Pacific Railway had crossed the Manitoba plains, white women were still rarely seen in Portage la Prairie. In summer the passage of a settler’s wife along its one street invariably produced a wake of following glances, and Gabrielle Ferrier was by no means one of that angular, labor-worn type.

The feet that felt cautiously for the rungs of the ladder were small and delicately shod. Above them slender ankles and limbs rounded into a well-molded figure and fine, flat shoulders. At twenty-three, with a height of five feet seven, her weight gravitated about one hundred and thirty-seven—rather to her alarm. The annoyance which a few extra ounces caused her was, however, quite unnecessary. One glance at the nervous nostril, trembling sensitiveness of her mouth, told that the bugbear of fat need never affright her. Without the creamy smoothness of her skin, plentiful dark hair, she would have been pretty, for the big gray eyes under black lashes would have satisfied many a woman. With them—well, Red Dominique, the freighter; Roberts, the “remittance man”; McGregor, the Seotch-Canadian trader, and the half-dozen settlers that completed the tale of Joe’s guests were not to be blamed for their glances.

They were not offensive. Did a glance cross hers, it instantly dropped. Yet, though they were merely the product of the healthy curiosity natural in men long deprived of feminine companionship, expressing awe and respect that | 3 would have excited the laughter of a blasé city man, they made her supremely uncomfortable. Descending, she required both hands to steady her against the wall. But the instant she reached the bottom she instinctively loosened and held out her fur cloak with her elbows so that it hid all but her shoe-tips while she crossed the room.

Stepping out into the street, she vented her relief in a sigh that was quite premature, for in the looks of the three lumberjacks who had just stepped on the porch was no hint of the consideration displayed inside. Huge hulks of men, their natural roughness was accentuated by their dress, the moose-skin coats, moccasins, thick arctic socks pulled on over heavy blue overalls, which added to their bulk and gave them the uncouth look and rolling gait of so many bears. While the faces of two displayed merely the coarse animalism of the type, in the third this was adulterated by an expression of vicious cunning and fired by a certain ferocity that glowed in his curiously red, lidless eyes. In passing they stared in her face, then turned and looked after. Replying to the third man’s comment, the other two burst out with hoarse guffaws that caused her to tingle with anger and shame.

“Brutes!’ It issued with none the less of force because uttered beneath her breath. Hur-

rying on, she added that which hinted at pre- 4 vious unpleasant experiences: “‘But then—they are men!”

The vigorous utterance also indicated reserves of strength beneath her soft exterior, the will and purpose that presently caused the postmaster, a gray old factor of the Hudson Bay Company, to raise his shaggy brows. ‘“‘The mail, miss”— he was guided by the cool innocence of her gray eyes—‘“‘is not due for another week.”

“A week?” She almost screamed it.

“Yes, miss.” He nodded. “Ye’'ll see it only comes down every two weeks, and twas here last Tuesday. But if you'll be the young leddy that was expected by Mr. Byron, he left word for you to be made comfortable in the hotel at his chairges.”’

Alone? For a week? With all those rough men? The unspeakable sleeping-arrangements, with the proprieties guarded and conserved by Julie and Joe in the next bed? Coming on top of her anger, disappointment deprived her temporarily of speech. Walking to the window at the end of the rough counter, she peered through the one pane that had been cleared of frost and ice.

There was little of cheer in the prospect. Where, two years ago, a Hudson Bay post had raised its blockhouses and stockades from infinite wastes of snow, a shack town now rambled over the nearer view, wiping out the last jot of the romantic or picturesque. The stations and grain-sheds, stores with false fronts, intermittent boardwalks, presented an appearance hopelessly squalid, and even the great whiteness beyond was marred and despoiled by the serrated line of telegraph-poles.

A week? Though her plight was due, as she

recognized, to her own departure from Nellie Byron’s directions, the fact did not alter the situation. Of course, if Nell had informed her that the mail ran only every two weeks instead of directing her to meet it on a certain date she, Gabrielle, would never have stayed over a week with a friend in Winnipeg. But then—Nell hadn’t!

- Looking out over the frozen prospect, she wondered at herself for accepting the invitation in the first place. It suffered by contrasts with the gray spires, quaint old streets of Montreal, the warmth and comfort of her own home. At Lake Winnipegosis, where Nell was wintering with her husband, a commissioner of the Hudson Bay Company; it would, of course, be different. There the old life of the posts still ran as it did a half-century before the Mayflower discharged her first load of Pilgrim Fathers upon Plymouth Rock. And she longed to see Nell, her schoolchum! But this—

At this point her reflections were given a twist by a man who had just emerged from a store and was now making his way through the snow to the station. Though she could see only his back, his carriage appeared familiar. But had she been well enough acquainted with northern winter styles to subtract two suits of heavy woolens and several shirts from his bulk, the differences in the appearance and gait of a man in conventional clothes and stiff shoes to the freedom and easy stealth with which he goes in moccasins and moose-skins would have more than destroyed the resemblance.

But long after she had dismissed. the illusive likeness, the person whom it had recalled remained in her mind. A trifle of self-consciousness tinctured her thought: “Of course there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be here; his father has lumbering interests somewhere in this part of the world.” She had known all along that said person’s appearance was more than a possibility. Self-consciousness became self-deception when she added: “If it were he—I’d take the afternoon train back to Winnipeg,” for deep down in her heart she knew that she wouldn’t. Fight him she might with every weapon that scorn and dislike can place in the hands of a spirited woman. But run— never!

“Why not go back to Winnipeg, anyway?” The man’s disappearance timed the thought which she answered the next second herself. *Oh no! It would look silly, and, lovely as she is, Elisabeth saw enough of me last week.”’ With a renewal of the chagrin induced by the stares and rude laughter of the lumberjacks she quickly added, “But I can not, will not stay here.”

On the heels of this resolution came the exhibition of purpose and determination that caused the Scotch factor’s spectacles to fall from his nose.

“Can ye hire a horse and rig?” he repeated after her. “Ye'll be needin’ a man to drive ye, then.”

She did not. To escape man, the miserable starer, was the very crux of her purpose, and she voiced her feeling with no uncertain sound. “No; I shall drive myself.”

“But my dear young leddy”—his shaggy brows flew up, dislodging the specs that were stuck over his brow—“‘my dear young leddy, to Winnipegoos is full ninety miles!”

*‘T’m used to horses, and have driven farther.” She answered quite curtly. “There are stoppinghouses, I suppose?”’

“Yes, there’s Norway’s, twenty-five mile out, where ye'll be comfortable, for if Norway’s three daughters have a big lick of Cree blood ye'll travel far to find nicer spoken girls. From there it’s a long skip of forty miles to McDonald’s, But the tote teamsters to the lumber-camp have built two cabins in between, so if ye did run into a storm there’d be no lack of fire or grub. The next day, of course, ye'll jump into Winnipegoos. An’ the trail’s good—beaten hard as a pike-road for fifty miles by the tote teams. Nevertheless, t on the chance of a blizzard, I'd be advising ye to tak’ a man.”

“Now about a rig?’ She totally ignored the suggestion.

If she were not to be dissuaded there was nothing in his canny philosophy to prevent him from coining her obstinacy into pence. “ Ye’ll find no fancy cutters here. But if an Indian jumper and a shaganappy, the toughest beast on earth, will suit ye, they’re mine to hire. Mr. Byron can send them down again with the mail.”

“Very well.’ In her eagerness to get away she snapped him up. “Have it hitched at once, and’’—a vivid and distasteful memory of the gauntlet she had run was responsible for the addition—“‘send some one to the hotel for my suitcases. My trunk can wait for the mail.”

When it appeared at the store door half an hour later the outfit did not “look” the twenty dollars demanded for its hire, and, as a matter of fact, it could have been purchased outright for little more. But if the sled was merely a light “bob” built of raw birch and bound together with horsehide thongs in lieu of nails, it was still fitter for a long, cold trail than a heavy Eastern “cutter.”? At a hundred yards the pony’s china eyes proclaimed its Indian parentage, but of horses Gabrielle knew enough to divine the staying qualities that were bound up in its ragged buckskin hide.

In her eagerness to remove herself beyond the

2 9 sphere of masculine observation she would in any case have accepted a sheep or a dog, and she gave up the twenty with an ease that filled the Scotchman with disgust at himself for not demanding more. That being impossible, and the Moloch of business appeased, he indulged in a natural kindly feeling. After compelling her to accept the loan of his own fur coat he tucked rugs and buffalo robes about her till she resembled nothing so much as a pack of furs, and there was nothing to be seen but her face.

Thus accoutered, she drove out on the north trail to the everlasting wonder of the watching town, and it was still buzzing over her departure when, after he had finished checking off a carload of freight, the man whom she had watched returned to the hotel.

“By Gar, Boss, you meesit.”” Red Dominique, the freighter, hailed him while he still stood stamping the snow out of his moccasins in the doorway. ‘Now it ees too late. She ees gone.”

“Gone? Who? Where?”

“The gel. By Gar, prettier she ees as the leetle deer. If I could but find one like her—I would quickly build the cabin by the lak’, eh?”

“Pretty? You bet she’s pretty,” the “‘remittance man” coincided. “She’s going out to Byron’s at Winnipegoos. She wouldn’t wait for the mail nor have any one drive her; just went off on her own blooming hook. Her name? I didn’t look. It’s over there, though, in the book.” 10

Crossing the room, the man opened the register, then stood, stone-still, staring down at the signature. Several seconds elapsed before he muttered under his breath, “‘ Well, I am damned!’’ Half a minute later the thought formed in his mind: ‘“‘Serupulous as ever, but”—he smiled bitterly, scrutinizing the incomplete “* M’’—“‘she stuck on that.

‘Dominique!’ He looked sharply up. “Get your team over to the station.”

“But you say we don’t go out till morning?” the freighter objected.

“Yes, I know, but a consignment of beef came in on this train, and they are shy of meat at the camp. Besides’—he nodded at the three lumberjacks who were sitting in the circle of loafers around the box stove—“these fellows want to get out.”

“Fine excuse.” The remittance man laughed. *“Going to chase her up, heigh?”’

““Well—hardly.” He covered a flash of irritation with a laugh. “You said she was going out to Norway’s? We stop at the first cabin, fifteen miles out.”

Chapter II

» UT on the trail Gabrielle was getting along %\ J very nicely—in miles, at least.

At first sight and until usage dulls the impression, a winter prairie is apt to oppress the lonely traveler, driving in a sense of his own littleness by contrast with its solitary immensity. But if the girl felt herself shrinking to microscopic dimensions, saw herself crawling like an insect on the face of the great whiteness, she could always look back on the town, which rose like a black reef from the sea of snow. While reminiing her of the human companionship from which she was doing her best to flee, it neverthc!ess diminished the feeling of isolation, thus acting as a double spur. After every backward glim»se she would lay on the whip, and, developing unsuspected speed, the pony carried her in the course | of a couple of hours into woodland country where poplar copse limited and diversified the frozen prospect. Almost before she knew it—but not a whit too soon, for the short northern day was _ already drawing to a close—she raised Norway’s road-house, a comfortable “Red River frame” 12 of logs, that sat with its stables in the embrace of a poplar bluff.

The sight of a woman, white and pretty at that, traveling alone on a winter trail brought all of Norway’s occupants out of doors, and at her first glimpse of the three dark, gentle-eyed girls Gabrielle was ready to subscribe to the Scotch factor’s praises. Uttering soft exclamations of wonder at her hardihood, they extracted her from the wrappings in which she now sat like a frozen chrysalis; then, dark having closed in while she was being warmed and fed, they carried her off to the one real bedroom in a circle of a hundred miles. Despite this proud distinction, it had little in common with her own luxurious chamber at home. The steads of its two beds were made of poplar poles. The furnishings were merely boxes draped with chintz. Yet the sheets, blankets, cotton curtains were all as white as the lime-washed log walls, and Gabrielle, who was usually quite “finicky”? about her sleeping - arrangements, readily accepted a timid invitation from Lois, the youngest girl, to bed with her.

If, moreover, her resentful attitude toward the men of the town might have seemed hypersensitively unreasonable to an impartial observer, no fault could have been found with her present behavior. In five minutes she was head over heels in one of those bedroom conversations that are so dear to the heart of the eternally femi- 13 nine. Puffing his pipe in one corner of the big mud hearth down-stairs, Norway, a grizzled old half-breed, wondered at the steady buzz that was punctuated on occasion with bursts of soft laughter.

The cause, a filmy nightdress that was little more than a frothy sea of lace bounded by shores of baby ribbon, was not, however, for him. When Gabrielle produced it from her suit-case three pairs of dark eyes distended with admiration that lacked a particle of envy, and not until they had admired both it and the superior whiteness of the shoulders it failed to hide did Marie, the eldest, register an objection.

“It ees beautiful, oh yes, but not to be worn in the wintaire. You would freeze.”

In its place she offered a woolen garment that felt, to Gabrielle, like a blanket, but after the fire died below and the water-pails began to freeze inside the house she not only appreciated its warmth, but also snuggled closer to and thanked her lucky stars for the gift of her pretty sleeping partner. Despite the fifty or sixty degrees of frost that spread her breath in a white hoar over her hair and the blankets she slept warmly, breakfasted next morning with keen appetite on hot bannock, tea, and bacon; took the trail immediately thereafter, quite happy for the feminine association, warmth of heart and body, with a good prospect of remaining so by reason of the hot stones the girls had prepared for her feet and hands. 14

Morning had broken fair and frosty and not so very cold for those regions, with the spirit at thirty-six below. When the sun slipped out of his cold, white blankets, a golden frost veil had hung in mid-air, and a pair of “‘sun dogs” gave warning of hard weather to come.

“It ees too mooch to tell,’ Norway said, tucking her in. “The storm he may bre’k like ol’ hell to-day or hol’ off for a week. I tink you mek’ Winnipegoos all right. If it comes queek, then ees there one freighter’s cabin twenty miles out where you will find fire an’ grub. Ten miles farther the tote trail swings off nor’east, an’ after that the Winnipegoos trail, he ees no dam’ good.”

To Gabrielle, rattling along the hard trail that presently laid ten miles of silver ribbon along the dead flatness of Lake Manitoba, foreboding seemed absurd. Exhilaration induced by the rapid motion plus bright sunlight and sharp, clear air, put her in happier mood. Also Romance, the chameleon, who had peeped at the half-breed girls through the insertion and lace of that wonderful nightdress, now looked at her out of their gentle eyes. Spinning along she wove small romances into the warp of their simple lives, and when she tired of that she still had Nell and Byron, the picturesque life of the forts, to fill her mind. Absorbed in which preoccupations, she never noticed a stealthy hissing which grew and strengthened till it silenced the groan of her sled. 15

It was the drift, imperceptible in its beginnings, invisible to an untrained eye. She did notice that it was growing colder, for cold in the northland is a question of wind, and the slight breeze drove the frost in through her furs. Wrapped in her thoughts, however, she barely noticed when the sun went out, gave no significance to the low groans and creakings of the poplar into which the trail had plunged after leaving the lake.

Shortly thereafter she'came swinging around a bluff upon the freighter’s hut. Merely a log shack with a lean-to stable behind, it raised only half of its walls from the heart of a drift, the mud chimney was smokeless and the doorway blocked with snow. But had it appeared less inhospitable, a vivid recollection of the Portage lumberjacks was more than sufficient to drive her on. Laying the whip on the pony, which would fain have stopped, she fed it the oats Norway had tucked in the back of the sled in the shelter of a copse a mile farther on.

That was the last shelter, for, beyond, the trail ran In open country where the rising wind had things all its own way. Strengthening as she proceeded, it picked up the snows of the last storm and hurtled them southward in a solid sheet. Over the icy surface of the “tote trail,” which rode level with the snows, the drift slid harmlessly or banked only at sharp turns. But at the forks where the poorly beaten Winni- 16 pegosis trail branched off, the latter was buried out of sight. When, already very cold and just a trifle frightened, she passed about midafternoon, there was nothing to choose between it and any other quirk of the trail. She was completely unconscious of its very existence.

Later it began to snow; and the wind roared in shrieking crescendos, piling one on the other to the full pitch of a “‘blizzard.”” Snatching tenfoot drifts from under the lee of the copse, from the prairies a foot of snow, it whirled and wheeled, beat and churned the mass till the air was thick as cheese. By this time Gabrielle was genuinely frightened; but, sustained by the thought that she must be nearing McDonald’s, she held on till the short day faded and inky blackness shrouded the ‘whirling chaos.

The blizzard’s giant monotone drowned all sound, and at last, from sheer lack of contrast, it registered itself merely a vibration in her ears. But for the jerking of the lines under the pony’s distressful snorts she would have fallen into utter despair. That, however, comforted her with a sense of brute companionship. Though it was headed directly into the storm, the plucky little beast held the trail with all of the pertinacity of its stubborn race, and had there been any port ahead it would have fetched it with instinct just as sure. Being none, its obstinate courage worked harm, for all the time Gabrielle was growing colder. Long ago she had absorbed the last of the heat from the stones, and now, turning traitor, they helped to chill her feet. Her hands were so numbed that she could not feel them, and she drove with the reins twisted around her wrists. |

“Surely the stopping-house cannot be much farther.”

Again and again, with all of the agony of a prayer, it fell from her stiffening lips, and always the words were snatched away and lost in the wild black whorl of the storm, so she was denied the dubious comfort of hearing her own voice. Blind and deaf, nearly as cold as the dead, she was drawn through a dark void to the final catastrophe which came when, whirling at last from the cutting edge of the wind, the pony upset the “jumper” and sent her headlong into deep ~ snow.

Half frozen and completely numbed, the instinct of self-preservation still asserted itself, and she struggled up—but so slowly that the pony had gained a hundred yards on the back trail before she stood erect. Blindly she tried to follow. But her numbed limbs refused to obey her will. Stumbling, she fell across the trail and lay, conscious yet, but, oh, so tired and sleepy! For a few minutes vague dreams of places and people flitted through consciousness, then she passed completely under the merciful anesthesia which precedes death by frost.

Chapter III

BOUT two hours after Gabrielle’s departure Norway stepped outdoors and took a look at the weather. At each end of the house a stovepipe was ejecting smoke in white gasps with a sound similar to the exhaust of a locomotive. Always a sign of intense cold, it combined with the low, stern hiss of the drift to produce the anxiety that suddenly filled every wrinkle in the old fellow’s face.

“TI no lak’ hees looks.” He wagged his head dubiously at Lois, who had followed to the doorway. “I was the great fool to let her go. Already comes the dreeft, an’ soon it will be blowing ol’ hell. Ouz, I was one dam’ fool. Before she comes to the forks the Winnipegoos ‘trail will be buried under.”

“Then will she be lost.’”? His anxiety set a reflection of fear in her soft eyes. “‘You must heetch, pére, an’ go after her.”

“Heetch?” He threw up hands and shoulders. *““Heetch what—the cat or the dog? Your brother, Pierre, took the shaganappy yesterday to mek’ the round of hees traps. The buckskin?

A curse on his unlucky soul! He ees gone lame 19 all week. There remains only my feet. Forty years ago I could have caught her—out, even with this long start—but not now.”

“Oh, what can we do?”

*“Nothing’’—he crossed himself—‘‘but trust the good God to stop her at the first freighter’s hut.”

‘An’ surely He will, pére. She is so beautiful, the good God would never destroy such a pretty thing.”

It is to be feared that the wonderful nightdress was included in the picture of beauty that filled her mind’s eye. Yet was she none the less sincere. Her hands, clutched to her breast, powerfully expressed her concern and _ fear. The thought that clouded her dark face told that she was struggling to find some means of rescue. After a few seconds she broke out in a little scream:

“Oh, the freighters, pére! Red Dominique comes to-day. I hear bells. But not hees. Out, ’tis the double string on the Boss’s ponies.”

When, a minute later, his duller ear picked out the jangle Norway divined the fact. “By Gar! They came out to the first cabin las’ night.”

In the roomy “jumper” which slid out, still a minute later, from behind a bluff a second man sat with the Boss. Leaving the other two to come on with Dominique, he had brought along the fellow whose comment had caused Gabrielle such anger and confusion, and as, reining in, he 20 sat listening to Norway, there came into view striking differences between the two. While both faces were raw-tanned by wind and frost, the lumberjack’s was also blotched with the purple flush of dissipation. Between the open hazel eye and thoughtful brow of the one and the small, choleric eyes, beaked nose, general air of low cunning that stamped the other, there was a vivid contrast which even Lois felt without quite knowing why. While retreating from the fellow’s rude stare she even put her impression into words:

*T no lak’ heem, that man.”

A certain nervousness that had showed both in the Boss’s greeting and manner gave place to anxious gravity. “That’s bad,’? he commented upon Norway’s report, “for we’re sure in for a blizzard. If she takes the Winnipegoos trail at the forks she’ll never make McDonald’s, and if she doesn’t—”’

Taking their cue from the tightening reins, the ponies sprang from a standstill into a gallop. But his voice came drifting back: “Tell the girls not to be afraid. III catch her before dark.”

His ponies, half blood and half shaganappy, the toughest cross that was ever sired by the devil, undoubtedly did their share toward making good his promise in the next few hours. About the time Gabrielle stopped to feed her beast at one end of the lake they plunged out upon it at the other, and, though the drift now spread like a1 sand over the trail, deadening the sledding, they covered the ten-mile stretch at speed that cut her lead in two.

As they shot past the “Forks” the Boss saw there was no break in the drifts of the Winnipegosis trail; in the shelter of a copse farther on he came upon Gabrielle’s sled-tracks. “If she only stops at the cabin!” he told himself. But when at dusk it suddenly loomed up dark and solitary, the hope died. Settling back in his seat, he did that which he had not done before, gave the ponies their heads, laid on the whip, nor tightened a line upon them until, after two hours’ run through the black storm, they stopped with suddenness that almost sent him out over the dashboard.

It was, of course, impossible to see or hear, but, shoving the reins into his companion’s hands, he sprang out and, leaning almost at an acute angle, forced his way against the enormous pressure of the wind to the ponies’ heads—to find them rubbing noses with Gabrielle’s beast. Leading the animal out into the snow, he worked his own ponies past, then walked on ahead, hopeless, dreading the worst.

Almost as though he had been present, his experience gave him the facts of the case. He saw in his mind the pony turn from the wind, the jumper upset as one runner dropped off the high trail, the girl thrown out and left by the runaway beast. “If she wanders a foot from the trail 22 she’s gone!’ He cried it aloud in sudden panic, and as the wind snatched the words ayay he tripped and fell over her.