The Valley of Silent Men | Page 3

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