Pierre And His People, [Tales of the Far North], Volume 2.

G >> Gilbert Parker >> Pierre And His People, [Tales of the Far North], Volume 2.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

This eBook was produced by David Widger

[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
entire meal of them. D.W.]

PIERRE AND HIS PEOPLE

TALES OF THE FAR NORTH

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.

A PRAIRIE VAGABOND
SHE OF THE TRIPLE CHEVRON
THREE OUTLAWS

A PRAIRIE VAGABOND

Little Hammer was not a success. He was a disappointment to the
missionaries; the officials of the Hudson's Bay Company said he was
"no good;" the Mounted Police kept an eye on him; the Crees and Blackfeet
would have nothing to do with him; and the half-breeds were profane
regarding him. But Little Hammer was oblivious to any depreciation
of his merits, and would not be suppressed. He loved the Hudson's Bay
Company's Post at Yellow Quill with an unwavering love; he ranged the
half-breed hospitality of Red Deer River, regardless of it being thrown
at him as he in turn threw it at his dog; he saluted Sergeant Gellatly
with a familiar How! whenever he saw him; he borrowed tabac of the half-
breed women, and, strange to say, paid it back--with other tabac got by
daily petition, until his prayer was granted, at the H. B. C. Post. He
knew neither shame nor defeat, but where women were concerned he kept his
word, and was singularly humble. It was a woman that induced him to be
baptised. The day after the ceremony he begged "the loan of a dollar for
the love of God" from the missionary; and being refused, straightway, and
for the only time it was known of him, delivered a rumbling torrent of
half-breed profanity, mixed with the unusual oaths of the barracks. Then
he walked away with great humility. There was no swagger about Little
Hammer. He was simply unquenchable and continuous. He sometimes got
drunk; but on such occasions he sat down, or lay down, in the most
convenient place, and, like Caesar beside Pompey's statue, wrapped his
mantle about his face and forgot the world. He was a vagabond Indian,
abandoned yet self-contained, outcast yet gregarious. No social
ostracism unnerved him, no threats of the H. B. C. officials moved him;
and when in the winter of 187_ he was driven from one place to another,
starving and homeless, and came at last emaciated and nearly dead to the
Post at Yellow Quill, he asked for food and shelter as if it were his
right, and not as a mendicant.

One night, shortly after his reception and restoration, he was sitting
in the store silently smoking the Company's tabac. Sergeant Gellatly
entered. Little Hammer rose, offered his hand, and muttered, "How!"

The Sergeant thrust his hand aside, and said sharply: "Whin I take y'r
hand, Little Hammer, it'll be to put a grip an y'r wrists that'll stay
there till y'are in quarters out of which y'll come nayther winter nor
summer. Put that in y'r pipe and smoke it, y' scamp!"

Little Hammer had a bad time at the Post that night. Lounging half-
breeds reviled him; the H. B. C. officials rebuked him; and travellers
who were coming and going shared in the derision, as foolish people do
where one is brow-beaten by many. At last a trapper entered, whom
seeing, Little Hammer drew his blanket up about his head. The trapper
sat down very near Little Hammer, and began to smoke. He laid his plug-
tabac and his knife on the counter beside him. Little Hammer reached
over and took the knife, putting it swiftly within his blanket. The
trapper saw the act, and, turning sharply on the Indian, called him a
thief. Little Hammer chuckled strangely and said nothing; but his eyes
peered sharply above the blanket. A laugh went round the store. In an
instant the trapper, with a loud oath, caught at the Indian's throat; but
as the blanket dropped back he gave a startled cry. There was the flash
of a knife, and he fell back dead. Little Hammer stood above him,
smiling, for a moment, and then, turning to Sergeant Gellatly, held
out his arms silently for the handcuffs.

The next day two men were lost on the prairies. One was Sergeant
Gellatly; the other was Little Hammer. The horses they rode travelled so
close that the leg of the Indian crowded the leg of the white man; and
the wilder the storm grew, the closer still they rode. A 'poudre' day,
with its steely air and fatal frost, was an ill thing in the world; but
these entangling blasts, these wild curtains of snow, were desolating
even unto death. The sun above was smothered; the earth beneath was
trackless; the compass stood for loss all round.

What could Sergeant Gellatly expect, riding with a murderer on his left
hand: a heathen that had sent a knife through the heart of one of the
lords of the North? What should the gods do but frown, or the elements
be at, but howling on their path? What should one hope for but that
vengeance should be taken out of the hands of mortals, and be delivered
to the angry spirits?

But if the gods were angry at the Indian, why should Sergeant Gellatly
only sway to and fro, and now laugh recklessly, and now fall sleepily
forward on the neck of his horse; while the Indian rode straight, and
neither wavered nor wandered in mind, but at last slipped from his horse
and walked beside the other? It was at this moment that the soldier
heard, "Sergeant Gellatly, Sergeant Gellatly," called through the blast;
and he thought it came from the skies, or from some other world. "Me
darlin'," he said, "have y' come to me?" But the voice called again:
"Sergeant Gellatly, keep awake! keep awake! You sleep, you die; that's
it. Holy. Yes. How!" Then he knew that it was Little Hammer calling
in his ear, and shaking him; that the Indian was dragging him from his
horse . . . his revolver, where was it? he had forgotten . . . he
nodded . . . nodded. But Little Hammer said: "Walk, hell! you walk,
yes;" and Little Hammer struck him again and again; but one arm of the
Indian was under his shoulder and around him, and the voice was anxious
and kind. Slowly it came to him that Little Hammer was keeping him alive
against the will of the spirits--but why should they strike him instead
of the Indian? Was there any sun in the world? Had there ever been? or
fire or heat anywhere, or anything but wind and snow in all God's
universe? . . . Yes, there were bells ringing--soft bells of a
village church; and there was incense burning--most sweet it was! and the
coals in the censer--how beautiful, how comforting! He laughed with joy
again, and he forgot how cold, how maliciously cold, he had been; he
forgot how dreadful that hour was before he became warm; when he was
pierced by myriad needles through the body, and there was an incredible
aching at his heart.

And yet something kept thundering on his body, and a harsh voice shrieked
at him, and there were many lights dancing over his shut eyes; and then
curtains of darkness were dropped, and centuries of oblivion came; and
then--then his eyes opened to a comforting silence, and some one was
putting brandy between his teeth, and after a time he heard a voice say:
"'Bien,' you see he was a murderer, but he save his captor. 'Voila,'
such a heathen! But you will, all the same, bring him to justice--you
call it that? But we shall see."

Then some one replied, and the words passed through an outer web of
darkness and an inner haze of dreams. "The feet of Little Hammer were
like wood on the floor when you brought the two in, Pretty Pierre--and
lucky for them you found them. . . . The thing would read right in a
book, but it's not according to the run of things up here, not by a
damned sight!"

"Private Bradshaw," said the first voice again, "you do not know Little
Hammer, nor that story of him. You wait for the trial. I have something
to say. You think Little Hammer care for the prison, the rope?--Ah, when
a man wait five years to kill--so! and it is done, he is glad sometimes
when it is all over. Sergeant Gellatly there will wish he went to sleep
forever in the snow, if Little Hammer come to the rope. Yes, I think."

And Sergeant Gellatly's brain was so numbed that he did not grasp the
meaning of the words, though he said them over and over again. . . .
Was he dead? No, for his body was beating, beating . . . well, it
didn't matter . . . nothing mattered . . . he was sinking to
forgetfulness . . . sinking.

So, for hours, for weeks--it might have been for years--and then he woke,
clear and knowing, to "the unnatural, intolerable day"--it was that to
him, with Little Hammer in prison. It was March when his memory and
vigour vanished; it was May when he grasped the full remembrance of
himself, and of that fight for life on the prairie: of the hands that
smote him that he should not sleep; of Little Hammer the slayer, who had
driven death back discomfited, and brought his captor safe to where his
own captivity and punishment awaited him.

When Sergeant Gellatly appeared in court at the trial he refused to bear
witness against Little Hammer. "D' ye think--does wan av y' think--that
I'll speak a word agin the man--haythen or no haythen--that pulled me out
of me tomb and put me betune the barrack quilts? Here's the stripes aff
me arm, and to gaol I'll go; but for what wint before I clapt the iron on
his wrists, good or avil, divil a word will I say. An' here's me left
hand, and there's me right fut, and an eye of me too, that I'd part with,
for the cause of him that's done a trick that your honour wouldn't do--
an' no shame to y' aither--an' y'd been where Little Hammer was with me."

His honour did not reply immediately, but he looked meditatively at
Little Hammer before he said quietly,--"Perhaps not, perhaps not."

And Little Hammer, thinking he was expected to speak, drew his blanket up
closely about him and grunted, "How!"

Pretty Pierre, the notorious half-breed, was then called. He kissed the
Book, making the sign of the Cross swiftly as he did so, and unheeding
the ironical, if hesitating, laughter in the court. Then he said:
"'Bien,' I will tell you the story-the whole truth. I was in the Stony
Plains. Little Hammer was 'good Injin' then. . . . Yes, sacre! it
is a fool who smiles at that. I have kissed the Book. Dam! . . . He
would be chief soon when old Two Tails die. He was proud, then, Little
Hammer. He go not to the Post for drink; he sell not next year's furs
for this year's rations; he shoot straight."

Here Little Hammer stood up and said: "There is too much talk. Let me
be. It is all done. The sun is set--I care not--I have killed him;"
and then he drew his blanket about his face and sat down.

But Pierre continued: "Yes, you killed him-quick, after five years--that
is so; but you will not speak to say why. Then, I will speak. The
Injins say Little Hammer will be great man; he will bring the tribes
together; and all the time Little Hammer was strong and silent and wise.
Then Brigley the trapper--well, he was a thief and coward. He come to
Little Hammer and say, 'I am hungry and tired.' Little Hammer give him
food and sleep. He go away. 'Bien,' he come back and say,--'It is far
to go; I have no horse.' So Little Hammer give him a horse too. Then he
come back once again in the night when Little Hammer was away, and before
morning he go; but when Little Hammer return, there lay his bride--only
an Injin girl, but his bride-dead! You see? Eh? No? Well, the Captain
at the Post he says it was the same as Lucrece.--I say it was like hell.
It is not much to kill or to die--that is in the game; but that other,
'mon Dieu!' Little Hammer, you see how he hide his head: not because he
kill the Tarquin, that Brigley, but because he is a poor 'vaurien' now,
and he once was happy and had a wife. . . . What would you do, judge
honourable? . . . Little Hammer, I shake your hand--so--How!"

But Little Hammer made no reply.

The judge sentenced Little Hammer to one month in gaol. He might have
made it one thousand months--it would have been the same; for when, on
the last morning of that month, they opened the door to set him free, he
was gone. That is, the Little Hammer whom the high gods knew was gone;
though an ill-nourished, self-strangled body was upright by the wall.
The vagabond had paid his penalty, but desired no more of earth.

Upon the door was scratched the one word: How!

SHE OF THE TRIPLE CHEVRON

Between Archangel's Rise and Pardon's Drive there was but one house. It
was a tavern, and it was known as Galbraith's Place. 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.

It was night on the prairie. Jen Galbraith stood in the doorway of the
tavern sitting-room and watched a mighty beacon of flame rising before
her, a hundred yards away. Every night this beacon made a circle of
light on the prairie, and Galbraith's Place was in the centre of the
circle. Summer and winter it burned from dusk to daylight. No hand fed
it but that of Nature. It never failed; it was a cruse that was never
empty. Upon Jen Galbraith it had a weird influence. It grew to be to
her a kind of spiritual companion, though, perhaps, she would not so have
named it. This flaming gas, bubbling up from the depths of the earth on
the lonely plains, was to her a mysterious presence grateful to her; the
receiver of her thoughts, the daily necessity in her life. It filled her
too with a kind of awe; for, when it burned, she seemed not herself
alone, but another self of her whom she could not quite understand. Yet
she was no mere dreamer. Upon her practical strength of body and mind
had come that rugged poetical sense, which touches all who live the life
of mountain and prairie. She showed it in her speech; it had a measured
cadence. She expressed it in her body; it had a free and rhythmic
movement. And not Jen alone, but many another dweller on the prairie,
looked upon it with a superstitious reverence akin to worship. A
blizzard could not quench it. A gale of wind only fed its strength. A
rain-storm made a mist about it, in which it was enshrined like a god.
Peter Galbraith could not fully understand his daughter's fascination for
this Prairie Star, as the North-West people called it. It was not
without its natural influence upon him; but he regarded it most as a
comfortable advertisement, and he lamented every day that this never-
failing gas well was not near a large population, and he still its owner.
He was one of that large family in the earth who would turn the best
things in their lives into merchandise. As it was, it brought much grist
to his mill; for he was not averse to the exercise of the insinuating
pleasures of euchre and poker in his tavern; and the hospitality which
ranchmen, cowboys, and travellers sought at his hand was often prolonged,
and also remunerative to him.

Pretty Pierre, who had his patrol as gamester defined, made semi-annual
visits to Galbraith's Place. It occurred generally after the rounding-up
and branding seasons, when the cowboys and ranchmen were "flush" with
money. It was generally conceded that Monsieur Pierre would have made an
early excursion to a place where none is ever "ordered up," if he had not
been free with the money which he so plentifully won.

Card-playing was to him a science and a passion. He loved to win for
winning's sake. After that, money, as he himself put it, was only fit
to be spent for the good of the country, and that men should earn more.
Since he put his philosophy into instant and generous practice, active
and deadly prejudice against him did not have lengthened life.

The Mounted Police, or as they are more poetically called, the Riders of
the Plains, watched Galbraith's Place, not from any apprehension of
violent events, but because Galbraith was suspected of infringing the
prevailing law of Prohibition, and because for some years it had been a
tradition and a custom to keep an eye on Pierre.

As Jen Galbraith stood in the doorway looking abstractedly at the beacon,
her fingers smoothing her snowy apron the while, she was thinking thus to
herself: "Perhaps father is right. If that Prairie Star were only at
Vancouver or Winnipeg instead of here, our Val could be something, more
than a prairie-rider. He'd have been different, if father hadn't started
this tavern business. Not that our Val is bad. He isn't; but if he had
money he could buy a ranch,--or something."

Our Val, as Jen and her father called him, was a lad of twenty-two, one
year younger than Jen. He was prairie-rider, cattle-dealer, scout,
cowboy, happy-go-lucky vagrant,--a splendid Bohemian of the plains. As
Jen said, he was not bad; but he had a fiery, wandering spirit, touched
withal by the sunniest humour. He had never known any curb but Jen's
love and care. That had kept him within bounds so far. All men of the
prairie spoke well of him. The great new lands have codes and standards
of morals quite their own. One enthusiastic admirer of this youth said,
in Jen's hearing, "He's a Christian--Val Galbraith!" That was the
western way of announcing a man as having great civic and social virtues.
Perhaps the respect for Val Galbraith was deepened by the fact that there
was no broncho or cayuse that he could not tame to the saddle.

Jen turned her face from the flame and looked away from the oasis of
warmth it made, to where the light shaded away into darkness, a darkness
that was unbroken for many a score of miles to the north and west. She
sighed deeply and drew herself up with an aggressive motion as though she
was freeing herself of something. So she was. She was trying to shake
off a feeling of oppression. Ten minutes ago the gaslighted house behind
her had seemed like a prison. She felt that she must have air, space,
and freedom.

She would have liked a long ride on the buffalo-track. That, she felt,
would clear her mind. She was no romantic creature out of her sphere, no
exotic. She was country-born and bred, and her blood had been charged by
a prairie instinct passing through three generations. She was part of
this life. Her mind was free and strong, and her body was free and
healthy. While that freedom and health was genial, it revolted against
what was gross or irregular. She loved horses and dogs, she liked to
take a gun and ride away to the Poplar Hills in search of game, she found
pleasure in visiting the Indian Reservation, and talking to Sun-in-the-
North, the only good Indian chief she knew, or that anyone else on the
prairies knew. She loved all that was strong and untamed, all that was
panting with wild and glowing life. Splendidly developed, softly sinewy,
warmly bountiful, yet without the least physical over-luxuriance or
suggestiveness, Jen, with her tawny hair and dark-brown eyes, was a
growth of unrestrained, unconventional, and eloquent life. Like Nature
around her, glowing and fresh, yet glowing and hardy. There was,
however, just a strain of pensiveness in her, partly owing to the fact
that there were no women near her, that she had, virtually, lived her
life as a woman alone.

As she thus looked into the undefined horizon two things were happening:
a traveller was approaching Galbraith's Place from a point in that
horizon; and in the house behind her someone was singing. The traveller
sat erect upon his horse. He had not the free and lazy seat of the
ordinary prairie-rider. It was a cavalry seat, and a military manner.
He belonged to that handful of men who patrol a frontier of near a
thousand miles, and are the security of peace in three hundred thousand
miles of territory--the Riders of the Plains, the North-West Mounted
Police.

This Rider of the Plains was Sergeant Thomas Gellatly, familiarly known
as Sergeant Tom. Far away as he was he could see that a woman was
standing in the tavern door. He guessed who it was, and his blood
quickened at the guessing. But reining his horse on the furthest edge of
the lighted circle, he said, debatingly: "I've little time enough to get
to the Rise, and the order was to go through, hand the information to
Inspector Jules, and be back within forty-eight hours. Is it flesh and
blood they think I am? Me that's just come back from a journey of a
hundred miles, and sent off again like this with but a taste of sleep and
little food, and Corporal Byng sittin' there at Fort Desire with a pipe
in his mouth and the fat on his back like a porpoise. It's famished I am
with hunger, and thirty miles yet to do; and she, standin' there with a
six months' welcome in her eye. . . . It's in the interest of Justice
if I halt at Galbraith's Place for half-an-hour, bedad! The blackguard
hid away there at Soldier's Knee will be arrested all the sooner; for
horse and man will be able the better to travel. I'm glad it's not me
that has to take him whoever he is. It's little I like leadin' a fellow-
creature towards the gallows, or puttin' a bullet into him if he won't
come. . . . Now what will we do, Larry, me boy? "this to the
broncho--"Go on without bite or sup, me achin' behind and empty before,
and you laggin' in the legs, or stay here for the slice of an hour and
get some heart into us? Stay here is it, me boy? then lave go me fut
with your teeth and push on to the Prairie Star there." So saying,
Sergeant Tom, whose language in soliloquy, or when excited, was more
marked by a brogue than at other times, rode away towards Galbraith's
Place.

In the tavern at that moment, Pretty Pierrre was sitting on the bar-
counter, where temperance drinks were professedly sold, singing to
himself. His dress was singularly neat, if coarse, and his slouch hat
was worn with an air of jauntiness according well with his slight make
and almost girlish delicacy of complexion. He was puffing a cigarette,
in the breaks of the song. Peter Galbraith, tall, gaunt, and sombre-
looking, sat with his chair tilted back against the wall, rather
nervously pulling at the strips of bark of which the yielding chair-seat
was made. He may or may not have been listening to the song which had
run through several verses. Where it had come from, no one knew; no one
cared to know. The number of its verses were legion. Pierre had a sweet
voice, of a peculiarly penetrating quality; still it was low and well-
modulated, like the colour in his cheeks, which gave him his name.

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."

"No, I am not a father. I have some virtue of that. I have spared the
world something, Pete Galbraith."

"You have the Devil's luck; your sins never get YOU into trouble."

A curious fire flashed in the half-breed's eyes, and he said, quietly:
"Yes, I have great luck; but I have my little troubles at times--at
times."

"They're different, though, from this trouble of Val's." There was
something like a fog in the old man's throat.

"Yes, Val was quite foolish, you see. If he had killed a white man--
Pretty Pierre, for instance--well, there would have been a show of
arrest, but he could escape. It was an Injin. The Government cherish
the Injin much in these days. The redskin must be protected. It must be
shown that at Ottawa there is justice. That is droll--quite. Eh, bien!
Val will not try to escape. He waits too long-near twenty-four hours.
Then, it is as you see. . . . You have not told her?" He nodded
towards the door of the sittingroom.

"Nothing. It'll come on Jen soon enough if he doesn't get away, and bad
enough if he does, and can't come back to us. She's fond of him--as fond
of him as a mother. Always was wiser than our Val or me, Jen was. More
sense than a judge, and proud but not too proud, Pierre--not too proud.
She knows the right thing to do, like the Scriptures; and she does it
too. . . . Where did you say he was hid?"

"In the Hollow at Soldier's Knee. He stayed too long at Moose Horn.
Injins carried the news on to Fort Desire. When Val started south for
the Border other Injins followed, and when a halt was made at Soldier's
Knee they pushed across country over to Fort Desire. You see, Val's
horse give out. I rode with him so far. My horse too was broke up.
What was to be done? Well, I knew a ranchman not far from Soldier's
Knee. I told Val to sleep, and I would go on and get the ranchman to
send him a horse, while I come on to you. Then he could push on to the
Border. I saw the ranchman, and he swore to send a horse to Val
to-night. He will keep his word. He knows Val. That was at noon to-
day, and I am here, you see, and you know all. The danger? Ah, my
friend,--the Police Barracks at Archangel's Rise! If word is sent down
there from Fort Desire before Val passes, they will have out a big
patrol, and his chances,--well, you know them, the Riders of the Plains.
But Val, I think will have luck, and get into Montana before they can
stop him. I hope; yes."

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5