The Flaming Forest | Page 3

not a work of philanthropy. These men cared not whether Jean and
Jacqueline and Pierre and Marie were well-fed or hungry, whether they
lived or died, so far as humanity was concerned. But Paris, Vienna,
London, and the great capitals of the earth must have their furs--and
unless that freight went north, there would be no velvety offerings for
the white shoulders of the world. Christmas windows two years hence
would be bare. A feminine wail of grief would rise to the skies. For
woman must have her furs, and in return for those furs Jean and
Jacqueline and Pierre and Marie must have their freight. So the
pendulum swung, as it had swung for a century or two, touching, on the
one side, luxury, warmth, wealth, and beauty; on the other, cold and
hardship, deep snows and open skies--with that precious freight the
thing between.
And now, in this year before rail and steamboat, the glory of early
summer was at hand, and the wilderness people were coming up to
meet the freight. The Three Rivers--the Athabasca, the Slave, and the
Mackenzie, all joining in one great two-thousand-mile waterway to the
northern sea--were athrill with the wild impulse and beat of life as the
forest people lived it. The Great Father had sent in his treaty money,
and Cree song and Chipewyan chant joined the age-old melodies of
French and half-breed. Countless canoes drove past the slower and
mightier scow brigades; huge York boats with two rows of oars heaved
up and down like the ancient galleys of Rome; tightly woven cribs of
timber, and giant rafts made tip of many cribs were ready for their long
drift into a timberless country. On this two-thousand-mile waterway a
world had gathered. It was the Nile of the northland, and each post and
gathering place along its length was turned into a metropolis, half
savage, archaic, splendid with the strength of red blood, clear eyes, and
souls that read the word of God in wind and tree.
And up and down this mighty waterway of wilderness trade ran the

whispering spirit of song, like the voice of a mighty god heard under
the stars and in the winds.
But it was an hour ago that David Carrigan had vividly pictured these
things to himself close to the big river, and many things may happen in
the sixty minutes that follow any given minute in a man's life. That
hour ago his one great purpose had been to bring in Black Roger
Audemard, alive or dead--Black Roger, the forest fiend who had
destroyed half a dozen lives in a blind passion of vengeance nearly
fifteen years ago. For ten of those fifteen years it had been thought that
Black Roger was dead. But mysterious rumors had lately come out of
the North. He was alive. People had seen him. Fact followed rumor.
His existence became certainty. The Law took up once more his
hazardous trail, and David Carrigan was the messenger it sent.
"Bring him back, alive or dead," were Superintendent McVane's last
words.
And now, thinking of that parting injunction, Carrigan grinned, even as
the sweat of death dampened his face in the heat of the afternoon sun.
For at the end of those sixty minutes that had passed since his midday
pot of tea, the grimly, atrociously unexpected had happened, like a
thunderbolt out of the azure of the sky.

II
Huddled behind a rock which was scarcely larger than his body,
groveling in the white, soft sand like a turtle making a nest for its eggs,
Carrigan told himself this without any reservation. He was, as he kept
repeating to himself for the comfort of his soul, in a deuce of a fix. His
head was bare--simply because a bullet had taken his hat away. His
blond hair was filled with sand. His face was sweating. But his blue
eyes were alight with a grim sort of humor, though he knew that unless
the other fellow's ammunition ran out he was going to die.
For the twentieth time in as many minutes he looked about him. He was

in the center of a flat area of sand. Fifty feet from him the river
murmured gently over yellow bars and a carpet of pebbles. Fifty feet on
the opposite side of him was the cool, green wall of the forest. The
sunshine playing in it seemed like laughter to him now, a whimsical
sort of merriment roused by the sheer effrontery of the joke which fate
had inflicted upon him.
Between the river and the balsam and spruce was only the rock behind
which he was cringing like a rabbit afraid to take to the open. And his
rock was a mere up-jutting of the solid floor of shale that was