Chapter VIII: The Maniac

Winter is not, perhaps, the best time to introduce a boy to the Far West, fresh from all the cosy comforts of home--at least, if he is a boy of the 'cotton wool' kind. To a boy like Snap the keen air was worth a king's ransom; the forests of snow-laden pines through which the train passed were full of mystery and romance; his eyes ached at night from straining to catch a glimpse of some great beast of the forest amongst their tall stems, or at least a track on the pure snow.

The day upon which Frank and Towzer left him was too full of incident for him to find much time to sorrow after his old friends. The train was passing through a district in which great lakes--unfrozen as yet, except just at the edges--lay amongst scattered rocks and pine forests bent and twisted by the Arctic cold and fierce storms of former winters. Inside the cars all was warmth and comfort, although the gaiety of the travellers was sobered down by the presence amongst them of a poor fellow who had lost his wife and two children in a railway accident a week before this. He was now returning from the rough funeral which had been accorded to them at the station of Boisfort. A strong, gaunt man, his days had been spent as a Hudson Bay runner, and later on as a watcher upon the railway, or manager of Chinese labour. In spite of his harsh training, even his strong nature had succumbed temporarily to the blow from which he was now suffering. His lost family seemed ever before his strained, wild eyes, and the throbbing and rattle of the engine and its cars seemed to beat into his brain and madden him. From time to time he would spring to his feet, clap his hands wildly to his head, and peer out into the snow. Then, moaning, 'No, it's not them, it's not them,' he would sink down again into his seat, limp and lifeless. Snap had been watching the man, fearing he was going mad, until his friend Nares touched him and said, 'Don't keep your eyes on the poor chap like that, maybe it fidgets him.'

Ashamed of what he at once considered an unintentional rudeness on his part, Snap withdrew into another corner of the compartment, and had just wandered off into day-dreams, in which Fairbury and 'the little mother' took a prominent place, when he was recalled to himself by a scream and a shuddering exclamation of horror which seemed to pass all along the compartment. Looking up quickly, he had just time to see a wild figure, hatless and grey-haired, hurl itself from the footboard at the end of the cars into the snow, and to hear a wild cry, 'I am coming, chicks, I am coming.' In spite of air-brakes and patent communicators it was some minutes before the train could be brought up all standing, and the passengers who hurried out to see after the unfortunate suicide had a good many hundred yards to go before they reached the spot at which he threw himself from the train, and when they reached the spot an expression of wonder spread over every face. Although the embankment upon which he alighted was considerably below the level of the train, although the train was travelling at express speed for an American line, there was no dead man to pick up from the snow, no man even with fractured limbs or strained sinews, but just the mark of a falling body, and then the tracks of a running man leading straight away through the silent snows to the lake-edge.

Close to the point at which the man had sprung from the train was a labourer's shanty, just one of those rough wooden structures which the Irish out West set up alongside their labours on the line. Round this, when Snap and Nares came up, was gathered an excited little group of passengers and railway-men.

'Are you sure Madge isn't in the house?' someone asked of a little boy of seven, the Irishman's child.

'No, Madgy ain't in the house; I heerd her hollerin' just when the engine went by; hollerin' as if someone had hurted her badly,' the child added.

'Where's your father, little man?' asked Nares, pushing his way to the front.

'Down the line at the bridge, working; father won't be back till night, and mother's gone this hour or more to take him his dinner.'

Nares turned to the men round him, and, speaking in low, quick tones, said:

'We must follow that poor devil; he is stark mad, and heaven only knows what he will do with the child.'

'With the child! why, you don't mean to say he has got the child?' cried one.

Nares was busy arranging something with the guard and didn't answer, but it was evident that the men agreed with him, and were prepared to obey him.

'Then you'll hand over Mr. Hales to Wharton, my stockman at Rosebud,' Nares said to the guard, 'and tell him to leave a horse at the station shanty for me. I'll be in, most likely, to-morrow.'

'You know this labourer is a relation of Wharton's, boss?' asked one of the railway men.

'No! is he?' was the reply.

'Yes, a nephew, they tell me, or something of that sort. Wharton will be wanting to come and help you, I guess.'

'Well, then, I'll tell you what to do. Don't say anything to my man. Mr. Hales can stay here at the cottage until I come back, and we'll come on together to-morrow. Good-bye.'

The guard shook hands, the crowd moved back to the train, the bell tolled as the cars began to move off, and in another minute Snap and Nares were left with one labourer, named Bromley (who had volunteered to help Nares); a solitary little group, with a crying child and an empty hut as the only signs of life around them, except for those ominous tracks leading away into the silence and the snow.

After some demur it was determined that Snap should be one of the search-party, and that a message should be left with the boy for his father, telling him to follow on Nares' track as fast as possible with food and blankets.

This done, the three started at a swinging trot; first Nares, then Bromley, following the man's tracks, and making the road easier for the boy jogging along in the rear. From the moment of starting the silence of the forest seemed to settle down upon the three. No one spoke; no bird whistled; the bushes stood stiff and frozen; no animal rustled through them; all the little brooks were jagged with frost; the only sound was the regular crunch, crunch of the snow beneath their feet, and the laboured breathing of Bromley, who, though willing enough, was not such a 'stayer' as either Nares or Hales. It was late when the child was stolen, and they had already been some two hours on the trail. The tracks still led steadily on towards the Thompson River, the day was fast darkening and Bromley 'beat.' Nares called a halt and proposed that they should stop where they were until Wharton came up with food and blankets, and then (prepared with these necessaries) follow the madman by starlight.

Just as they were discussing this course of action a rustling in the bush ahead drew Snap's attention. 'There he goes, there he goes,' cried the boy, dashing forward, as with a crash a tall grey form with something in its arms rushed through the forest on the other side of a broad dell by which the party were sitting. If an indistinct shout of warning reached Snap he neither understood nor heeded it. From time to time he saw the hunted man ahead of him, and once he distinctly saw the little girl in his arms. Surely he was gaining on him. At any rate he was leaving his own companions far behind. Even the tough cattleman's frame had no chance against the legs and lungs of a schoolboy of eighteen.

How long Snap ran the madman in view he never knew, but at last he lost him. Panting and tired, he pulled up; climbed first one knoll and then another, and still no sight of the man or of his own comrades. It was now so dark that he could hardly see the tracks in the snow; the forest a few yards from him was dim and indistinct, and every minute the darkness deepened. He shouted. His shout seemed hardly to travel further than his lips, it seemed so faint and feeble. It was for all the world like standing by the seashore and trying to cast a fly on the ocean. It fell at his feet. Again he cried, and this time an answer came, but such an answer! First a laugh, and then a wild eldritch screech. The boy was no coward, but a cold chill crept up to the very roots of his hair, and his heart froze and stood still at the sound. And, after all, it was only Shnena, the night owl, calling to her mate.

Being a level-headed and cool lad, Snap soon realised that he had outrun his friends, and that they had (thanks to the darkness) missed his trail and lost him. He had often read of lonely nights in the forest, and envied the heroes of the story, but somehow he did not care about the reality as much as he had expected. The typical 'leather-stocking,' he remembered, always had matches, made a fire and sometimes a bush shelter, lit a pipe, and ate pemmican. Now Snap felt that, though extremely hot now, he would soon be bitterly cold, but he had no matches, did not know how to build a shelter, had no pemmican, and did not smoke. As for that buffalo robe, of which so much is always made in dear old Fenimore Cooper's books, there might be one within a few miles, but if so its four-footed owner was probably still wearing it. Snap remembered that a trapper who had no matches rubbed bits of wood together until he had got a light by friction. This was a happy thought, and, taking out his knife, he carefully cut a couple of pieces of dry pine from a stump hard by, and then collected as big a bundle as possible of twigs and dead wood, which he deposited on a spot previously cleared of snow. Then he rubbed the wood, and rubbed the wood, and continued to rub the wood, but nothing came of it. Presently he tried a new piece; rub, rub, rub, he went, and a large drop of perspiration dropped off the tip of his nose with a little splash quite audible in the intense stillness. Then he gave it up, voted Fenimore Cooper a fraud, or at any rate came to the conclusion that his receipts for kindling fire were not sufficiently explicit.

For a time he sat still and listened. He has confided to a friend since that he could 'hear the silence.' Certainly he could hear nothing else, unless it were the sudden creaking of some old tree's bough weighted with too much snow. And then his thoughts went after the madman. A thought struck him, and even Snap never fancied that it was the cold alone which made his knees knock together and his teeth rattle so. What if, now that he was alone, the madman should turn the tables and hunt him? Was not that him he saw sneaking over the snow in the dim light of the rising moon? Snap sprang to his feet with a crackle, accounted for by the fact that part of his clothing had frozen to the log on which he had been sitting, and had elected to remain there. Snap put his hand ruefully behind him. It was very cold even with clothes, it would be colder without! However, as he rose the shadow moved rapidly away, taking the semblance of a dog to Snap's eyes as it went. By-and-by a long blood-curdling howl told the boy that the shadow he had seen was sitting somewhere not far off, complaining to the moon that the plump English lad wasn't half dead yet, and looked too big for one poor hungry wolf to tackle all alone. 'Confound these forests,' thought Snap, 'and all the brutes in them, their voices alone are enough to frighten a fellow,' and then he began to wonder if he would soon go to sleep and never wake any more, and hoped, if so, that Nares would find him and send a message home to Fairbury.

At any rate the boy thought, before going to sleep for the last time, he would keep up the practice he had observed all his life, and for a few minutes the hoary pine-trees and the cold, distant stars looked down on an English boy bending his knees to the only power in Heaven or earth to which it is no shame for the bravest and proudest to bend. Like a son to a father he prayed, just asking for what he wanted, and pretty confident that, if it would not be a bad thing for him, he would get it. When he rose to his feet the forest seemed to have put on a more friendly air, the trees didn't look so rigid and funereal, the stars were not so far off. Who knows, perhaps Nature, God's creation, had also heard the boy's prayer to their common Creator.

For hours and hours, it seemed to him, Snap tramped up and down, like a sentry on his beat, beneath the pine at whose foot lay his unlit fire. After a while he began to dream as he walked, for surely it was a dream! Somewhere not far off from him he could hear a human voice, and hear it moreover so distinctly that the words of the song it sang came clearly to his ears. Snap shook himself and pinched himself violently to be sure he was awake, and then stood still again to listen. Yes, there was no mistake at all about it.

Hush-a-by, baby, on the tree-top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock,

crooned the voice, and its effect in the stillness of the night was to frighten Snap more even than Shnena or the wolf. Creeping in the direction from which the sound came, so stealthily that he did not even hear himself move, Snap got at last to a point from which he could see the strange singer. Crouching under a log sat the wretched lunatic, naked to his waist, his grey hair hanging in elf-locks over his eyes, and in his arms a bundle, wrapped round in his own coat and shirt, which the poor fellow rocked as a woman rocks her child, singing the while a snatch of a song which he had heard in happier days sung to his own little ones. There were tears in Snap's eyes as he looked, and he longed to go to the man's help, but he dared not. Alone he would have no strength to compel the lunatic to do what was reasonable, and to talk to him would be idle. At that moment the man looked up and sat listening like a wild beast who hears the hounds on his scent. 'They want to take you too, my darling,' he whispered, and Snap could hear every word as if it had been yelled into his ears, 'but they shan't, the devils! they shan't; we'll die together first!' Muttering and glancing back, the man crawled on hands and knees into the scrub and was gone. Snap rubbed his eyes; it seemed like a dream, so noiselessly did the madman creep away and disappear. As he stood, still staring at the place, Snap heard a bough crack behind him, then another and another, and the tread of men approaching in the snow. In another minute Nares had the boy by the hand, the weary night-watch was over, and a match inserted amongst the twigs sent up a bright flame as cheering as the voice of his friends. Having partially thawed, and eaten as much as he could, Snap told Nares and his two companions what he had just seen, and as morning was just breaking, and active exercise seemed the boy's best chance of ever getting warm again, the four once more took up the trail.

Stooping down over the tracks made by the maniac as he crawled into the scrub, Nares uttered an ejaculation of horror. 'Poor wretch,' he said, 'look at that,' and he pointed to a huge track, which looked half human, half animal, in its monstrous shapelessness. 'It's his hand, frost-bitten and as big as your head,' said Bromley; 'he can't go much further, I'm thinking.' But he did, and it was full day when the pursuers came out upon a bit of prairie and saw in front of them the broad flooded waters of the Thompson River, and a short distance ahead of them a miserable hunted man still staggering on with his load. As he saw him the child's father uttered a cry and dashed to the front. The madman heard it, looked back, and fled wildly towards the river. Madness uses up the life and strength rapidly, no doubt, but the wasting flame burns fiercely while it lasts, and this last effort of the frost-bitten dying man seemed likely to make pursuit hopeless. 'He is going for the river, heaven help the child!' gasped Nares. About four hundred yards before reaching the river, a broad but slow-running watercourse ran parallel to the Thompson. This was frozen over owing to its shallowness and the sluggishness of its waters. Even the Thompson had a thin fringe of ice on its edges. Without pausing, the madman dashed on to the ice of the stream, which swayed and broke beneath his weight. Crash, crash, he went through, first here, then there, but somehow, though the whole surface of the ice rocked, he struggled on hands and knees from one hole to the other, and reached the farther side in safety. But his troubles in crossing had given his pursuers time to close upon him, and as he gained the shore Snap saw the child's father draw a revolver with a curse and fire at his child's would-be murderer, for that the madman meant to plunge into the Thompson with his victim, and so elude his pursuers, seemed now beyond a doubt. For some reason, for which he could not account, Snap's sympathies were with the wretched madman, and without pausing to think he knocked up the Irishman's revolver before he could fire a second shot, and dashed on to the weak and broken ice. 'I never gave it time to let me in,' Snap explained afterwards, and, indeed, with his blood up as it had never been before, and strong with years of Fernhall training, the boy seemed to skim across the ice like a bird.

And now they were on the flat together, with the strong black river ahead. Death the penalty, the child's life the prize. If Snap's friends wished to, they could not get to him soon enough to save him, had the madman turned. Luckily for Snap, the hunted man never looked behind him, but naked, frost-bitten, bleeding, struggled on for his terrible goal. If Fernhall boys could have seen Snap then they would have remembered how that young face, white and set, once struggled through a Loamshire team just at the end of a match, and won the day for Fernhall. Football, unconsciously, was perhaps what the lad was thinking of at the moment, as step by step he gained on his prey, and yard by yard the black river drew nearer. At last it was but thirty yards away, and with a final effort Snap dashed in. 'Take 'em low,' the Fernhall captain had said in old days, 'never above the waist, Snap,' and Snap remembered the words now. With a rush he was alongside, down went his head with a scream that he couldn't repress, his long arms wrapped round the madman's knees, and pursued and pursuer rolled headlong to the ground on the very edge of the angry flood. How long they struggled there Snap didn't know. It was worse than any 'maul in goal' in old days, but, like the bull-dog of his land, once he had his grip, Snap would only loose with life. In vain the madman bit and struck, rolling over and over, shrieking with rage and fear. Hiding his head as much as possible, Snap held on, getting comparatively very few serious injuries, before strong hands dragged his opponent down, and as prairie and river and sky seemed to fade away a kindly voice said 'Thank God, the boy's all right."

When Snap recovered from the swoon which fatigue and hunger, cold and blows, had ended in, he found himself rolled in blankets, under just such a shelter as twelve hours ago he had longed to make for himself; a little yellow-haired girl was sleeping near him, and a huge fire throwing its rosy gleams on both, and on the kindly, bearded face of Nares, the cattleman, busy over a kettle of soup. The unfortunate cause of all their trouble was happier even than Snap. When Nares and Bromley, and the father of the little girl, had come up and overpowered him and released Snap, life seemed almost to leave the poor maniac. Blood was streaming from his side where the first revolver bullet had entered; his hands were swollen and dead to all feeling; his body was frost-bitten, but his mind was happily a blank; and before they could make a fire or do anything for his comfort, a more merciful Friend than they looked down and took the poor fellow to meet 'his chicks' in a kingdom where frost-bite and railway accidents are unknown.