The leather-tanned immobility of her face underwent no whit of change when Cummins solemnly declared that the little Melisse was about to begin teething. She sat grimly and watched them in silence when between them, upon a bearskin stretched on the floor, they tried vainly to persuade Melisse to use her feet.
It was great fun for Melisse, and she enjoyed it immensely; so that as the days passed, and the post still remained deserted, John Cummins and Jan Thoreau spent much of their time upon their knees. In their eyes, the child's progress was remarkable. They saw in her an unceasing physical growth, and countless symptoms of forthcoming mental development. She delighted to pull the strings of Jan's violin, which was an unmistakable token of her musical genius. She went into ecstasies over the gaudy plates in the fashion paper. She fingered them in suggestive and inquiring silence, or with still more suggestive grunts, and made futile efforts to eat them, which was the greatest token of all.
Weeks passed, and Williams came in from the southern forests. Mukee followed him from the edge of the barrens. Per-ee returned from the Eskimo people, three-quarters starved and with half of his dogs stolen. From the north, east, west, and south the post's fur-rangers trailed back. Life was resumed. There was a softness in the air, a growing warmth in the midday sun. The days of the big change were near. And when they came, John Cummins and Jan Thoreau, of all the factor's people, wore patches at their knee.
CHAPTER VI
DAYS OF TRIUMPH
One afternoon, in the beginning of the mush-snow, a long team of rakish Malemutes, driven by an Athabasca French-Canadian, raced wildly into the clearing about the post. A series of yells, and the wild cracking of a thirty-foot caribou-gut whip, announced that the big change was at hand—that the wilderness was awakening, and life was drawing near.
The entire post rushed out to meet the new-comer—men and dogs, the little black-and-tan children, and even Williams' fat and lethargic wife. For a few moments there was a scene of wild disorder, of fighting Malemutes buried under a rush of angry huskies, while men shouted, and the yelling Frenchman leaped about and cut his caribougut in vicious slashes over the wolfish horde around his heavily laden sledge.
Partial order being restored, Mukee and Per-ee took charge of the snarling Malemutes, and, surrounded by Williams' men, the trapper stalked to the company's office. He was Jean de Gravois, the most important man in the Fond du Lac country, for whose good-will the company paid a small bonus. That he had made a record catch even the children knew by the size of the packs on his sledge and by the swagger in his walk.
Gravois was usually one of the last to appear at the annual gathering of the wilderness fur-gatherers. He was a big man in reputation, as he was small in stature. He was known as far west as the Peace River, and eastward to Fort Churchill. He loved to make his appearance at the post in a wild and picturesque rush when the rest of the forest rovers were there to look on, and to envy or admire. He was one of the few of his kind who had developed personal vanity along with unerring cunning in the ways of the wild. Everybody liked Gravois, for he had a big soul in him and was as fearless as a lynx; and he liked everybody, including himself.
He explained his early arrival by announcing in a nonchalant manner that after he had given his Malemutes a day's rest he was going on to Fort Churchill, to bring back a wife. He hinted, with a punctuating crack of his whip, that he would make a second visit, and a more interesting one, at just about the time when the trappers were there in force.
Jan Thoreau listened to him, hunching his shoulders a little at the other's manifest air of importance. In turn, the French-Canadian scrutinized Jan good-naturedly. Neither of them knew the part which Jean de Gravois was to play in Jan's life.
Every hour after the half-breed's arrival quickened the pulse of expectancy at the post. For six months it had been a small and solitary unit of life in the heart of a big desolation. The first snow had smothered it in a loneliness that was almost the loneliness of desertion. With that first snow began the harvest days of the people of the wilderness. Far and wide they were busy along their trap-lines, their lonely shacks hidden in the shelter of thick swamps, in deep chasms and dense forests. For six months the short days and the long nights had been days and nights of fur-gathering.
During those months the post was silent. It lived and breathed, but that was all. Its life, for Williams and the few people whom the company kept with him, was a life of waiting. Now the change was at hand. It was like the breath of spring to the awakening wilderness.
The forest people were moving. Trap-lines were being broken, shacks abandoned, sledge-dogs put to harness. On the day that Jean de Gravois left for Hudson's Bay, the company's supplies came in from Fort Churchill—seven toboggans drawn by Eskimo dogs, laden with flour and cloth; fifty pounds of beads, ammunition, and a hundred other things to be exchanged for the furs that would soon be in London and Paris.
Fearfully Jan Thoreau ran out to meet the sledges. There were seven Indians and one white man. Jan thrust himself close to look at the white man. He wore two revolver-holsters and carried an automatic.
Unquestionably he was not a missionary, but an agent of the company well prepared to care for the company's treasure.
Jan hurried back to the cabin, his heart bubbling with a strange joy.
"There ees no missioner, Melisse!" he cried triumphantly, dropping beside her, his face glowing with the gladness of his tidings. "You shall be good and beautiful, lak HER, but you shall not be baptize by missioner! He has not come!"
A few minutes later Cummins came in. One of his hands was torn and bleeding.
"Those Eskimo dogs are demons!" he growled. "If they knew how to stand on their legs, they'd eat our huskies alive! Will you help me with this?"
Jan was at work in an instant, bandaging the wounded hand.
"It ees not deep," he said; and then, without looking up, he added:
"The missioner did not come."
"No," said Cummins shortly. "Neither has the mail. He is with that."
He did not notice the sudden tremble of Jan's fingers, nor did he see the startled look that shot into the boy's down-turned eyes. Jan finished his bandaging without betraying his emotion, and went back with Cummins to the company's store.
The next morning, two Chippewayans trailed in with a team of mongrel curs from the south. Thereafter Cummins found but little time to devote to Melisse. The snow was softening rapidly, and the daily increasing warmth of the sun hastened the movement of the trappers.
Mukee's people from the western Barren Lands arrived first, bringing with them great loads of musk-ox and caribou skins, and an army of big-footed, long-legged Mackenzie hounds that pulled like horses and wailed like whipped puppies when the huskies and Eskimo dogs set upon them.
From east and west and south all trails now led to the post. By the end of the third day after the arrival of the company's supplies, a babel of fighting, yelling, ceaselessly moving discord had driven forth the peace and quiet in which Cummins' wife had died. The fighting and discord were among the dogs, and the yelling was a necessary human accompaniment. Half a hundred packs, almost as wild and as savage as the wolves from whom half of them possessed a strong inheritance of blood, were thrown suddenly into warring confusion.
All the dogs were fighters except the big, soft-throated Mackenzie hounds, with the slow strength of oxen in their movements, and the quarter-strained and half-strained mongrels from the south; and upon these unfortunates the others preyed. Packs of fierce Labrador dogs, never vanquished except by death, came from close to Hudson's Bay.
Team after team of the little yellow and gray Eskimo dogs, as quick with their fangs as were their black