“BON!” he said. “BON! De good sun!” And he stretched out his
wasted hands and washed them in the warmth.
Then his gaze fell on the dog, and the old light blazed back in his
eyes. He touched the missionary lightly on the arm. “Mon pere,
dat is one beeg devil, dat Batard. You will bring me one pistol,
so, dat Ah drink de sun in peace.”
And thenceforth for many days he sat in the sun before the cabin
door. He never dozed, and the pistol lay always across his knees.
Batard had a way, the first thing each day, of looking for the
weapon in its wonted place. At sight of it he would lift his lip
faintly in token that he understood, and Leclere would lift his own
lip in an answering grin. One day the missionary took note of the
trick.
“Bless me!” he said. “I really believe the brute comprehends.”
Leclere laughed softly. “Look you, mon pere. Dat w’at Ah now
spik, to dat does he lissen.”
As if in confirmation, Batard just perceptibly wriggled his lone
ear up to catch the sound.
“Ah say ‘keel’.”
Batard growled deep down in his throat, the hair bristled along his
neck, and every muscle went tense and expectant.
“Ah lift de gun, so, like dat.” And suiting action to word, he
sighted the pistol at Batard. Batard, with a single leap,
sideways, landed around the corner of the cabin out of sight.
“Bless me!” he repeated at intervals. Leclere grinned proudly.
“But why does he not run away?”
The Frenchman’s shoulders went up in the racial shrug that means
all things from total ignorance to infinite understanding.
“Then why do you not kill him?”
Again the shoulders went up.
“Mon pere,” he said after a pause, “de taim is not yet. He is one
beeg devil. Some taim Ah break heem, so an’ so, all to leetle
bits. Hey? some taim. BON!”
A day came when Leclere gathered his dogs together and floated down
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72
in a bateau to Forty Mile, and on to the Porcupine, where he took a
commission from the P. C. Company, and went exploring for the
better part of a year. After that he poled up the Koyokuk to
deserted Arctic City, and later came drifting back, from camp to
camp, along the Yukon. And during the long months Batard was well
lessoned. He learned many tortures, and, notably, the torture of
hunger, the torture of thirst, the torture of fire, and, worst of
all, the torture of music.
Like the rest of his kind, he did not enjoy music. It gave him
exquisite anguish, racking him nerve by nerve, and ripping apart
every fibre of his being. It made him howl, long and wolf-life, as
when the wolves bay the stars on frosty nights. He could not help
howling. It was his one weakness in the contest with Leclere, and
it was his shame. Leclere, on the other hand, passionately loved
music–as passionately as he loved strong drink. And when his soul
clamoured for expression, it usually uttered itself in one or the
other of the two ways, and more usually in both ways. And when he
had drunk, his brain a-lilt with unsung song and the devil in him
aroused and rampant, his soul found its supreme utterance in
torturing Batard.
“Now we will haf a leetle museek,” he would say. “Eh? W’at you
t’ink, Batard?”
It was only an old and battered harmonica, tenderly treasured and
patiently repaired; but it was the best that money could buy, and
out of its silver reeds he drew weird vagrant airs that men had
never heard before. Then Batard, dumb of throat, with teeth tight
clenched, would back away, inch by inch, to the farthest cabin
corner. And Leclere, playing, playing, a stout club tucked under
his arm, followed the animal up, inch by inch, step by step, till
there was no further retreat.
At first Batard would crowd himself into the smallest possible
space, grovelling close to the floor; but as the music came nearer
and nearer, he was forced to uprear, his back jammed into the logs,
his fore legs fanning the air as though to beat off the rippling
waves of sound. He still kept his teeth together, but severe
muscular contractions attacked his body, strange twitchings and
jerkings, till he was all a-quiver and writhing in silent torment.
As he lost control, his jaws spasmodically wrenched apart, and deep
throaty vibrations issued forth, too low in the register of sound
for human ear to catch. And then, nostrils distended, eyes
dilated, hair bristling in helpless rage, arose the long wolf howl.
It came with a slurring rush upwards, swelling to a great heart-
breaking burst of sound, and dying away in sadly cadenced woe–then
the next rush upward, octave upon octave; the bursting heart; and
the infinite sorrow and misery, fainting, fading, falling, and
dying slowly away.
It was fit for hell. And Leclere, with fiendish ken, seemed to
divine each particular nerve and heartstring, and with long wails
and tremblings and sobbing minors to make it yield up its last
shred of grief. It was frightful, and for twenty-four hours after,
Batard was nervous and unstrung, starting at common sounds,
tripping over his own shadow, but, withal, vicious and masterful
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with his team-mates. Nor did he show signs of a breaking spirit.
Rather did he grow more grim and taciturn, biding his time with an
inscrutable patience that began to puzzle and weigh upon Leclere.
The dog would lie in the firelight, motionless, for hours, gazing
straight before him at Leclere, and hating him with his bitter
eyes.
Often the man felt that he had bucked against the very essence of
life–the unconquerable essence that swept the hawk down out of the
sky like a feathered thunderbolt, that drove the great grey goose
across the zones, that hurled the spawning salmon through two
thousand miles of boiling Yukon flood. At such times he felt
impelled to–express his own unconquerable essence; and with strong
drink, wild music, and Batard, he indulged in vast orgies, wherein
he pitted his puny strength in the face of things, and challenged
all that was, and had been, and was yet to be.
“Dere is somet’ing dere,” he affirmed, when the rhythmed vagaries
of his mind touched the secret chords of Batard’s being and brought
forth the long lugubrious howl. “Ah pool eet out wid bot’ my
han’s, so, an’ so. Ha! ha! Eet is fonee! Eet is ver’ fonee! De
priest chant, de womans pray, de mans swear, de leetle bird go
peep-peep, Batard, heem go yow-yow–an’ eet is all de ver’ same
t’ing. Ha! ha!”
Father Gautier, a worthy priest, one reproved him with instances of
concrete perdition. He never reproved him again.
“Eet may be so, mon pere,” he made answer. “An’ Ah t’ink Ah go
troo hell a-snappin’, lak de hemlock troo de fire. Eh, mon pere?”
But all bad things come to an end as well as good, and so with
Black Leclere. On the summer low water, in a poling boat, he left
McDougall for Sunrise. He left McDougall in company with Timothy
Brown, and arrived at Sunrise by himself. Further, it was known
that they had quarrelled just previous to pulling out; for the
Lizzie, a wheezy ten-ton stern-wheeler, twenty-four hours behind,
beat Leclere in by three days. And when he did get in, it was with
a clean-drilled bullet-hole through his shoulder muscle, and a tale
of ambush and murder.
A strike had been made at Sunrise, and things had changed
considerably. With the infusion of several hundred gold-seekers, a
deal of whisky, and half-a-dozen equipped gamblers, the missionary
had seen the page of his years of labour with the Indians wiped
clean. When the squaws became preoccupied with cooking beans and
keeping the fire going for the wifeless miners, and the bucks with
swapping their warm furs for black bottles and broken time-pieces,
he took to his bed, said “Bless me” several times, and departed to
his final accounting in a rough-hewn, oblong box. Whereupon the
gamblers moved their roulette and faro tables into the mission
house, and the click of chips and clink of glasses went up from
dawn till dark and to dawn again.
Now Timothy Brown was well beloved among these adventurers of the
North. The one thing against him was his quick temper and ready
fist–a little thing, for which his kind heart and forgiving hand
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74
more than atoned. On the other hand, there was nothing to atone
for Black Leclere. He was “black,” as more than one remembered
deed bore witness, while he was as well hated as the other was
beloved. So the men of Sunrise put an antiseptic dressing on his
shoulder and haled him before Judge Lynch.
It was a simple affair. He had quarrelled with Timothy Brown at