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It was a strange tree, weird and black, free of stub or bough for a hundred feet, and from far out on the barrens those who traveled their solitary ways east and west knew that it was a monument shaped by men. Mukee had told Jan its story.
His red face changed to a sickly pallor, and he stood with his thick hands clenched, while Cummins took charge of the dogs and Jan went into the store for something to eat. Mukee and Per-ee returned to the post the next day. Young Williams followed close after them, filled with terror. He had found the plague among the Crees of the Waterfound. Each day added to the gloom at Lac Bain.
But she was beautiful here four hundred miles beyond civilization. Mukee, the half-Cree, had never seen a white woman, for even the factor's wife was part Chippewayan, and no one of the others went down to the edge of the southern wilderness more than once each twelve-month or so.
Mukee had suffered a lynx bite that went deep into the bone, and Cummins' wife had saved his hand. After that the savage in him was enslaved to her like an invisible spirit, and when Jan slipped on his snowshoes to set out into the deadly chaos of the "Beeg Storm" Mukee was ready to follow.
Life stories are sometimes no longer than a single line a sentence, even a phrase. So if one could find out where Sing Lee lives one would have a story perhaps a whole sentence long. "Mukee kai, Sing Lee." A nod of the thin head. "Business good?" Another nod. "Pretty tired, washing, ironing all day, eh?" A nod. "When are you going to put in a laundry machine?" A shake of the thin head.
At that pace he could have followed for hours, losing when the pack took a spurt, gaining when they lagged, an insistent Nemesis just behind when the weighted dogs lay down in their traces. But there was neither the coolness of Mukee nor the cleverness of Jean de Gravois in the manner of Jan's running.
Jan was the happiest youth in the world. It was certain that the little Melisse understood what they were doing, and the word passed from Cummins and Jan to the others at the post, so that it happened frequently during the building operations that Mukee and Per-ee, and even Williams himself, would squat for an hour at a time in the snow near Melisse, marveling at the early knowledge which the great God saw fit to put into a white baby's brain.
As they drew near, the men redoubled their cries, while the girls, tossing their bare arms in the air, exclaimed plaintively, 'Awha! awha! Toby mukee moee! Alas! alas! Toby is killed! In a moment the crowd opened, and disclosed the apparently lifeless body of my companion home between two men, the head hanging heavily against the breast of the foremost.
He had no weapon; but as his hand rested upon the empty knife-sheath at his belt, there came to him a thought of the way in which Mukee had avenged Cummins' wife, and he turned again upon the trail. He no longer touched the low- hanging bushes.
Mukee, the half Cree, was sitting with his elbows on his knees gazing with stoic countenance at this new curiosity who had wandered four hundred miles northward from civilization. Williams, the Hudson's Bay man who claimed to be all white, was staring hard at the red side of the stove, and the factor's son looked silently at Jan.
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