The Valley Of Silent Men
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James Oliver Curwood >> The Valley Of Silent Men
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16 THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN
A STORY OF THE THREE RIVER COUNTRY
BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
AUTHOR OF "THE RIVER'S END," ETC.
THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN
Before the railroad's thin lines of steel bit their way up through
the wilderness, Athabasca Landing was the picturesque threshold
over which one must step who would enter into the mystery and
adventure of the great white North. It is still Iskwatam--the
"door" which opens to the lower reaches of the Athabasca, the
Slave, and the Mackenzie. It is somewhat difficult to find on the
map, yet it is there, because its history is written in more than
a hundred and forty years of romance and tragedy and adventure in
the lives of men, and is not easily forgotten. Over the old trail
it was about a hundred and fifty miles north of Edmonton. The
railroad has brought it nearer to that base of civilization, but
beyond it the wilderness still howls as it has howled for a
thousand years, and the waters of a continent flow north and into
the Arctic Ocean. It is possible that the beautiful dream of the
real-estate dealers may come true, for the most avid of all the
sportsmen of the earth, the money-hunters, have come up on the
bumpy railroad that sometimes lights its sleeping cars with
lanterns, and with them have come typewriters, and stenographers,
and the art of printing advertisements, and the Golden Rule of
those who sell handfuls of earth to hopeful purchasers thousands
of miles away--"Do others as they would do you." And with it, too,
has come the legitimate business of barter and trade, with eyes on
all that treasure of the North which lies between the Grand Rapids
of the Athabasca and the edge of the polar sea. But still more
beautiful than the dream of fortunes quickly made is the deep-
forest superstition that the spirits of the wilderness dead move
onward as steam and steel advance, and if this is so, the ghosts
of a thousand Pierres and Jacquelines have risen uneasily from
their graves at Athabasca Landing, hunting a new quiet farther
north.
For it was Pierre and Jacqueline, Henri and Marie, Jacques and his
Jeanne, whose brown hands for a hundred and forty years opened and
closed this door. And those hands still master a savage world for
two thousand miles north of that threshold of Athabasca Landing.
South of it a wheezy engine drags up the freight that came not so
many months ago by boat.
It is over this threshold that the dark eyes of Pierre and
Jacqueline, Henri and Marie, Jacques and his Jeanne, look into the
blue and the gray and the sometimes watery ones of a destroying
civilization. And there it is that the shriek of a mad locomotive
mingles with their age-old river chants; the smut of coal drifts
over their forests; the phonograph screeches its reply to le
violon; and Pierre and Henri and Jacques no longer find themselves
the kings of the earth when they come in from far countries with
their precious cargoes of furs. And they no longer swagger and
tell loud-voiced adventure, or sing their wild river songs in the
same old abandon, for there are streets at Athabasca Landing now,
and hotels, and schools, and rules and regulations of a kind new
and terrifying to the bold of the old voyageurs.
It seems only yesterday that the railroad was not there, and a
great world of wilderness lay between the Landing and the upper
rim of civilization. And when word first came that a steam thing
was eating its way up foot by foot through forest and swamp and
impassable muskeg, that word passed up and down the water-ways for
two thousand miles, a colossal joke, a stupendous bit of drollery,
the funniest thing that Pierre and Henri and Jacques had heard in
all their lives. And when Jacques wanted to impress upon Pierre
his utter disbelief of a thing, he would say:
"It will happen, m'sieu, when the steam thing comes to the
Landing, when cow-beasts eat with the moose, and when our bread is
found for us in yonder swamps!"
And the steam thing came, and cows grazed where moose had fed, and
bread WAS gathered close to the edge of the great swamps. Thus did
civilization break into Athabasca Landing.
Northward from the Landing, for two thousand miles, reached the
domain of the rivermen. And the Landing, with its two hundred and
twenty-seven souls before the railroad came, was the wilderness
clearing-house which sat at the beginning of things. To it came
from the south all the freight which must go into the north; on
its flat river front were built the great scows which carried this
freight to the end of the earth. It was from the Landing that the
greatest of all river brigades set forth upon their long
adventures, and it was back to the Landing, perhaps a year or more
later, that still smaller scows and huge canoes brought as the
price of exchange their cargoes of furs.
Thus for nearly a century and a half the larger craft, with their
great sweeps and their wild-throated crews, had gone DOWN the
river toward the Arctic Ocean, and the smaller craft, with their
still wilder crews, had come UP the river toward civilization. The
River, as the Landing speaks of it, is the Athabasca, with its
headwaters away off in the British Columbian mountains, where
Baptiste and McLeod, explorers of old, gave up their lives to find
where the cradle of it lay. And it sweeps past the Landing, a slow
and mighty giant, unswervingly on its way to the northern sea.
With it the river brigades set forth. For Pierre and Henri and
Jacques it is going from one end to the other of the earth. The
Athabasca ends and is replaced by the Slave, and the Slave empties
into Great Slave Lake, and from the narrow tip of that Lake the
Mackenzie carries on for more than a thousand miles to the sea.
In this distance of the long water trail one sees and hears many
things. It is life. It is adventure. It is mystery and romance and
hazard. Its tales are so many that books could not hold them. In
the faces of men and women they are written. They lie buried in
graves so old that the forest trees grow over them. Epics of
tragedy, of love, of the fight to live! And as one goes farther
north, and still farther, just so do the stories of things that
have happened change.
For the world is changing, the sun is changing, and the breeds of
men are changing. At the Landing in July there are seventeen hours
of sunlight; at Fort Chippewyan there are eighteen; at Fort
Resolution, Fort Simpson, and Fort Providence there are nineteen;
at the Great Bear twenty-one, and at Fort McPherson, close to the
polar sea, from twenty-two to twenty-three. And in December there
are also these hours of darkness. With light and darkness men
change, women change, and life changes. And Pierre and Henri and
Jacques meet them all, but always THEY are the same, chanting the
old songs, enshrining the old loves, dreaming the same dreams, and
worshiping always the same gods. They meet a thousand perils with
eyes that glisten with the love of adventure.
The thunder of rapids and the howlings of storm do not frighten
them. Death has no fear for them. They grapple with it, wrestle
joyously with it, and are glorious when they win. Their blood is
red and strong. Their hearts are big. Their souls chant themselves
up to the skies. Yet they are simple as children, and when they
are afraid, it is of things which children fear. For in those
hearts of theirs is superstition--and also, perhaps, royal blood.
For princes and the sons of princes and the noblest aristocracy of
France were the first of the gentlemen adventurers who came with
ruffles on their sleeves and rapiers at their sides to seek furs
worth many times their weight in gold two hundred and fifty years
ago, and of these ancient forebears Pierre and Henri and Jacques,
with their Maries and Jeannes and Jacquelines, are the living
voices of today.
And these voices tell many stories. Sometimes they whisper them,
as the wind would whisper, for there are stories weird and strange
that must be spoken softly. They darken no printed pages. The
trees listen to them beside red camp-fires at night. Lovers tell
them in the glad sunshine of day. Some of them are chanted in
song. Some of them come down through the generations, epics of the
wilderness, remembered from father to son. And each year there are
the new things to pass from mouth to mouth, from cabin to cabin,
from the lower reaches of the Mackenzie to the far end of the
world at Athabasca Landing. For the three rivers are always makers
of romance, of tragedy, of adventure. The story will never be
forgotten of how Follette and Ladouceur swam their mad race
through the Death Chute for love of the girl who waited at the
other end, or of how Campbell O'Doone, the red-headed giant at
Fort Resolution, fought the whole of a great brigade in his effort
to run away with a scow captain's daughter.
And the brigade loved O'Doone, though it beat him, for these men
of the strong north love courage and daring. The epic of the lost
scow--how there were men who saw it disappear from under their
very eyes, floating upward and afterward riding swiftly away in
the skies--is told and retold by strong-faced men, deep in whose
eyes are the smoldering flames of an undying superstition, and
these same men thrill as they tell over again the strange and
unbelievable story of Hartshope, the aristocratic Englishman who
set off into the North in all the glory of monocle and
unprecedented luggage, and how he joined in a tribal war, became a
chief of the Dog Ribs, and married a dark-eyed, sleek-haired,
little Indian beauty, who is now the mother of his children.
But deepest and most thrilling of all the stories they tell are
the stories of the long arm of the Law--that arm which reaches for
two thousand miles from Athabasca Landing to the polar sea, the
arm Of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police.
And of these it is the story of Jim Kent we are going to tell, of
Jim Kent and of Marette, that wonderful little goddess of the
Valley of Silent Men, in whose veins there must have run the blood
of fighting men--and of ancient queens. A story of the days before
the railroad came.
CHAPTER I
In the mind of James Grenfell Kent, sergeant in the Royal
Northwest Mounted Police, there remained no shadow of a doubt. He
knew that he was dying. He had implicit faith in Cardigan, his
surgeon friend, and Cardigan had told him that what was left of
his life would be measured out in hours--perhaps in minutes or
seconds. It was an unusual case. There was one chance in fifty
that he might live two or three days, but there was no chance at
all that he would live more than three. The end might come with
any breath he drew into his lungs. That was the pathological
history of the thing, as far as medical and surgical science knew
of cases similar to his own.
Personally, Kent did not feel like a dying man. His vision and his
brain were clear. He felt no pain, and only at infrequent
intervals was his temperature above normal. His voice was
particularly calm and natural.
At first he had smiled incredulously when Cardigan broke the news.
That the bullet which a drunken half-breed had sent into his chest
two weeks before had nicked the arch of the aorta, thus forming an
aneurism, was a statement by Cardigan which did not sound
especially wicked or convincing to him. "Aorta" and "aneurism"
held about as much significance for him as his perichondrium or
the process of his stylomastoid. But Kent possessed an unswerving
passion to grip at facts in detail, a characteristic that had
largely helped him to earn the reputation of being the best man-
hunter in all the northland service. So he had insisted, and his
surgeon friend had explained.
The aorta, he found, was the main blood-vessel arching over and
leading from the heart, and in nicking it the bullet had so
weakened its outer wall that it bulged out in the form of a sack,
just as the inner tube of an automobile tire bulges through the
outer casing when there is a blowout.
"And when that sack gives way inside you," Cardigan had explained,
"you'll go like that!" He snapped a forefinger and thumb to drive
the fact home.
After that it was merely a matter of common sense to believe, and
now, sure that he was about to die. Kent had acted. He was acting
in the full health of his mind and in extreme cognizance of the
paralyzing shock he was contributing as a final legacy to the
world at large, or at least to that part of it which knew him or
was interested. The tragedy of the thing did not oppress him. A
thousand times in his life he had discovered that humor and
tragedy were very closely related, and that there were times when
only the breadth of a hair separated the two. Many times he had
seen a laugh change suddenly to tears, and tears to laughter.
The tableau, as it presented itself about his bedside now, amused
him. Its humor was grim, but even in these last hours of his life
he appreciated it. He had always more or less regarded life as a
joke--a very serious joke, but a joke for all that--a whimsical
and trickful sort of thing played by the Great Arbiter on humanity
at large; and this last count in his own life, as it was solemnly
and tragically ticking itself off, was the greatest joke of all.
The amazed faces that stared at him, their passing moments of
disbelief, their repressed but at times visible betrayals of
horror, the steadiness of their eyes, the tenseness of their lips
--all added to what he might have called, at another time, the
dramatic artistry of his last great adventure.
That he was dying did not chill him, or make him afraid, or put a
tremble into his voice. The contemplation of throwing off the mere
habit of breathing had never at any stage of his thirty-six years
of life appalled him. Those years, because he had spent a
sufficient number of them in the raw places of the earth, had
given him a philosophy and viewpoint of his own, both of which he
kept unto himself without effort to impress them on other people.
He believed that life itself was the cheapest thing on the face of
all the earth. All other things had their limitations.
There was so much water and so much land, so many mountains and so
many plains, so many square feet to live on and so many square
feet to be buried in. All things could be measured, and stood up,
and catalogued--except life itself. "Given time," he would say, "a
single pair of humans can populate all creation." Therefore, being
the cheapest of all things, it was true philosophy that life
should be the easiest of all things to give up when the necessity
came.
Which is only another way of emphasizing that Kent was not, and
never had been, afraid to die. But it does not say that he
treasured life a whit less than the man in another room, who, a
day or so before, had fought like a lunatic before going under an
anesthetic for the amputation of a bad finger. No man had loved
life more than he. No man had lived nearer it.
It had been a passion with him. Full of dreams, and always with
anticipations ahead, no matter how far short realizations fell, he
was an optimist, a lover of the sun and the moon and the stars, a
worshiper of the forests and of the mountains, a man who loved his
life, and who had fought for it, and yet who was ready--at the
last--to yield it up without a whimper when the fates asked for
it.
Bolstered up against his pillows, he did not look the part of the
fiend he was confessing himself to be to the people about him.
Sickness had not emaciated him. The bronze of his lean, clean-cut
face had faded a little, but the tanning of wind and sun and
campfire was still there. His blue eyes were perhaps dulled
somewhat by the nearness of death. One would not have judged him
to be thirty-six, even though over one temple there was a streak
of gray in his blond hair--a heritage from his mother, who was
dead. Looking at him, as his lips quietly and calmly confessed
himself beyond the pale of men's sympathy or forgiveness, one
would have said that his crime was impossible.
Through his window, as he sat bolstered up in his cot, Kent could
see the slow-moving shimmer of the great Athabasca River as it
moved on its way toward the Arctic Ocean. The sun was shining, and
he saw the cool, thick masses of the spruce and cedar forests
beyond, the rising undulations of wilderness ridges and hills, and
through that open window he caught the sweet scents that came with
a soft wind from out of the forests he had loved for so many
years.
"They've been my best friends," he had said to Cardigan, "and when
this nice little thing you're promising happens to me, old man, I
want to go with my eyes on them."
So his cot was close to the window.
Nearest to him sat Cardigan. In his face, more than in any of the
others, was disbelief. Kedsty, Inspector of the Royal Northwest
Mounted Police, in charge of N Division during an indefinite leave
of absence of the superintendent, was paler even than the girl
whose nervous fingers were swiftly putting upon paper every word
that was spoken by those in the room. O'Connor, staff-sergeant,
was like one struck dumb. The little, smooth-faced Catholic
missioner whose presence as a witness Kent had requested, sat with
his thin fingers tightly interlaced, silently placing this among
all the other strange tragedies that the wilderness had given up
to him. They had all been Kent's friends, his intimate friends,
with the exception of the girl, whom Inspector Kedsty had borrowed
for the occasion. With the little missioner he had spent many an
evening, exchanging in mutual confidence the strange and
mysterious happenings of the deep forests, and of the great north
beyond the forests. O'Connor's friendship was a friendship bred of
the brotherhood of the trails. It was Kent and O'Connor who had
brought down the two Eskimo murderers from the mouth of the
Mackenzie, and the adventure had taken them fourteen months. Kent
loved O'Connor, with his red face, his red hair, and his big
heart, and to him the most tragic part of it all was that he was
breaking this friendship now.
But it was Inspector Kedsty, commanding N Division, the biggest
and wildest division in all the Northland, that roused in Kent an
unusual emotion, even as he waited for that explosion just over
his heart which the surgeon had told him might occur at any
moment. On his death-bed his mind still worked analytically. And
Kedsty, since the moment he had entered the room, had puzzled
Kent. The commander of N Division was an unusual man. He was
sixty, with iron-gray hair, cold, almost colorless eyes in which
one would search long for a gleam of either mercy or fear, and a
nerve that Kent had never seen even slightly disturbed. It took
such a man, an iron man, to run N Division according to law, for N
Division covered an area of six hundred and twenty thousand square
miles of wildest North America, extending more than two thousand
miles north of the 70th parallel of latitude, with its farthest
limit three and one-half degrees within the Arctic Circle. To
police this area meant upholding the law in a country fourteen
times the size of the state of Ohio. And Kedsty was the man who
had performed this duty as only one other man had ever succeeded
in doing it.
Yet Kedsty, of the five about Kent, was most disturbed. His face
was ash-gray. A number of times Kent had detected a broken note in
his voice. He had seen his hands grip at the arms of the chair he
sat in until the cords stood out on them as if about to burst. He
had never seen Kedsty sweat until now.
Twice the Inspector had wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. He
was no longer Minisak--"The Rock"--a name given to him by the
Crees. The armor that no shaft had ever penetrated seemed to have
dropped from him. He had ceased to be Kedsty, the most dreaded
inquisitor in the service. He was nervous, and Kent could see that
he was fighting to repossess himself.
"Of course you know what this means to the Service," he said in a
hard, low voice. "It means--"
"Disgrace," nodded Kent. "I know. It means a black spot on the
otherwise bright escutcheon of N Division. But it can't be helped.
I killed John Barkley. The man you've got in the guard-house,
condemned to be hanged by the neck until he is dead, is innocent.
I understand. It won't be nice for the Service to let it be known
that a sergeant in His Majesty's Royal Mounted is an ordinary
murderer, but--"
"Not an ORDINARY murderer," interrupted Kedsty. "As you have
described it, the crime was deliberate--horrible and inexcusable
to its last detail. You were not moved by a sudden passion. You
tortured your victim. It is inconceivable!"
"And yet true," said Kent.
He was looking at the stenographer's slim fingers as they put down
his words and Kedsty's. A bit of sunshine touched her bowed head,
and he observed the red lights in her hair. His eyes swept to
O'Connor, and in that moment the commander of N Division bent over
him, so close that his face almost touched Kent's, and he
whispered, in a voice so low that no one of the other four could
hear,
"KENT--YOU LIE!"
"No, it is true," replied Kent.
Kedsty drew back, again wiping the moisture from his forehead.
"I killed Barkley, and I killed him as I planned that he should
die," Kent went on. "It was my desire that he should suffer. The
one thing which I shall not tell you is WHY I killed him. But it
was a sufficient reason."
He saw the shuddering tremor that swept through the shoulders of
the girl who was putting down the condemning notes.
"And you refuse to confess your motive?"
"Absolutely--except that he had wronged me in a way that deserved
death."
"And you make this confession knowing that you are about to die?"
The flicker of a smile passed over Kent's lips. He looked at
O'Connor and for an instant saw in O'Connor's eyes a flash of
their old comradeship.
"Yes. Dr. Cardigan has told me. Otherwise I should have let the
man in the guard-house hang. It's simply that this accursed bullet
has spoiled my luck--and saved him!"
Kedsty spoke to the girl. For half an hour she read her notes, and
after that Kent wrote his name on the last page. Then Kedsty rose
from his chair.
"We have finished, gentlemen," he said.
They trailed out, the girl hurrying through the door first in her
desire to free herself of an ordeal that had strained every nerve
in her body. The commander of N Division was last to go. Cardigan
hesitated, as if to remain, but Kedsty motioned him on. It was
Kedsty who closed the door, and as he closed it he looked back,
and for a flash Kent met his eyes squarely. In that moment he
received an impression which he had not caught while the Inspector
was in the room. It was like an electrical shock in its
unexpectedness, and Kedsty must have seen the effect of it in his
face, for he moved back quickly and closed the door. In that
instant Kent had seen in Kedsty's eyes and face a look that was
not only of horror, but what in the face and eyes of another man
he would have sworn was fear.
It was a gruesome moment in which to smile, but Kent smiled. The
shock was over. By the rules of the Criminal Code he knew that
Kedsty even now was instructing Staff-Sergeant O'Connor to detail
an officer to guard his door. The fact that he was ready to pop
off at any moment would make no difference in the regulations of
the law. And Kedsty was a stickler for the law as it was written.
Through the closed door he heard voices indistinctly. Then there
were footsteps, dying away. He could hear the heavy thump, thump
of O'Connor's big feet. O'Connor had always walked like that, even
on the trail.
Softly then the door reopened, and Father Layonne, the little
missioner, came in. Kent knew that this would be so, for Father
Layonne knew neither code nor creed that did not reach all the
hearts of the wilderness. He came back, and sat down close to
Kent, and took one of his hands and held it closely in both of his
own. They were not the soft, smooth hands of the priestly
hierarchy, but were hard with the callosity of toil, yet gentle
with the gentleness of a great sympathy. He had loved Kent
yesterday, when Kent had stood clean in the eyes of both God and
men, and he still loved him today, when his soul was stained with
a thing that must be washed away with his own life.
"I'm sorry, lad," he said. "I'm sorry."
Something rose up in Kent's throat that was not the blood he had
been wiping away since morning. His fingers returned the pressure
of the little missioner's hands. Then he pointed out through the
window to the panorama of shimmering river and green forests.
"It is hard to say good-by to all that, Father," he said. "But, if
you don't mind, I'd rather not talk about it. I'm not afraid of
it. And why be unhappy because one has only a little while to
live? Looking back over your life, does it seem so very long ago
that you were a boy, a small boy?"
"The time has gone swiftly, very swiftly."
"It seems only yesterday--or so?"
"Yes, only yesterday--or so."
Kent's face lit up with the whimsical smile that long ago had
reached the little missioner's heart. "Well, that's the way I'm
looking at it, Father. There is only a yesterday, a today, and a
tomorrow in the longest of our lives. Looking back from seventy
years isn't much different from looking back from thirty-six WHEN
you're looking back and not ahead. Do you think what I have just
said will free Sandy McTrigger?"
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