Chapter I

There was a river-driver beyond the Northwest Carry who respected neither moose nor man. Because he was the best river-driver on the West Branch they let him alone until he struck an Indian with a pick-pole.

The Indian’s head was damaged and while he waited for it to heal, he selected his revenge. His revenge was simple and effective. He hunted up the moose-warden and told many lies. Deftly concealed among these lies, however, was a truth that infuriated the warden.

The river-driver, whose name was Skeene, sat on his haunches and sneered when the moose-warden glided into camp. But when he dug out a head and antlers behind a shanty, Skeene picked up his rifle, looked obliquely at the moose-warden, tied his blanket and fry-pan, hoisted his canoe onto his head, and walked away to the southward, still sneering. I don’t know what they said about it in Foxcroft, but Hale, who owned the timber, and who thought he owned Skeene, hunted him up and sent him to work on the new cut-off, hoping the affair might blow over in time for Skeene to drive logs again. But Skeene turned lazy and lined the dead water with traps and set-lines, and when Hale remonstrated, Skeene laughed. Then Hale threatened him and hinted about moose-wardens, and $500 fines, but Skeene thrashed Hale before the whole camp, packed his kit and canoe, and paddled serenely away down the West Branch.

That really began the trouble, for Hale never forgave him. When Skeene started to guide for Henderson on the upper Portage, Hale heard of it and ran him out. That, of course, marked him among the guides in the lake-country, and Skeene perhaps felt the ostracism, for he quietly went to work for Colby on the new sluice that ran from the carry-pond to the lake. Possibly, if they had let him alone, he might have turned out as tame as a moose-bird,—he was only twenty-three,—but Hale remembered, and the Indian remembered, and one day a man came in to the Carry Camp with a 44 bullet in his wrist and an unserved warrant in his pocket. The man was a moose-warden, and the warrant was for Skeene.

When the news spread that Skeene had shot a warden, the guides from Portage to Lily Bay condemned him. Down at Greenville a sheriff and posse boarded the “Katahdin,” and spent several weeks cruising about at public expense. The lake steamboat was comfortable, the food good, and the sheriff and posse were in no hurry to quit. Possibly they expected Skeene to come down to the shore and sit on the rocks; perhaps they fancied he might paddle across their bows in his sleep. Naturally he did neither. When at length somebody suggested that the sheriff and posse take to their canoes, that official steamed back to the foot of the lake in a huff, and presently the rumours of Skeene’s misdoings became scarcely more definite than camp-fire gossip.

Perhaps even then, if they had given him a chance, he might have surrendered and taken his punishment, but they didn’t give him the chance. A warden saw him building a lean-to, on the island that divides the West Branch. The warden waited until dark, crawled in outside the fire, and caught Skeene asleep. That is all the warden recollects, merely that he caught Skeene asleep. What Skeene did to the warden when he awoke, the official cannot remember distinctly.

Three weeks after that, Skeene walked into Kineo store, handling his rifle in a most alarming fashion. He suggested that they place certain provisions and ammunition in his canoe, which lay on the beach below. The three clerks complied with an enthusiasm borne of fright. Twenty minutes later Skeene, in his canoe, was seen making for Moose River. Two guides, just from Lily Bay, refused to fire at him, arguing it was not right to drown a man for stealing pork and powder. The hotel had not yet opened, and the people at the annex objected to a man-hunting trip, so they only notified the sheriff again and secretly wished Skeene in hell.

Of course, at the hotels they denied the very existence of Skeene; but the Bangor “News” printed the story, and people fought shy of Moose River and the lake beyond which is called Red Lake. In vain the guides declared the region safe. It was safe as far as they were concerned. It is not the nature of a guide—that is, a white guide—to inform on or interfere with any man. Skeene let them alone. The Indians, too, paddled about Red Lake when they wanted to. The Indian log-driver, however, stayed away after Skeene had shot a hole in his canoe. The canoe being bark, it was through Providence and a patch of gum that the log-driving half-breed ever paddled out of the mouth of Moose River.

Now if they had not started to hunt Skeene from the Lakes, he would never have troubled anybody, except possibly Hale and the half-breed. He went to Canada for a year, worked at anything that came along, and sent money to Kineo store to pay for his pork and powder. That, of course, won him the guides again. So when home-sickness drove him back to Red Lake, he expected to be let alone. Hale, sluicing at the Northwest Carry, heard he had returned, and started for Red Lake with the log-driving half-breed and six men. Two days later they returned; Hale had a bullet in his leg above the knee and the half-breed carried a similar gift in his fore-arm.

This incident, while relieving the conversational monotony at camp and landing, bothered the sheriff cruelly. He went to Foxcroft where they said unpleasant things to him; he went back to the Landing and they made fun of him.

There was a captain on the lake named Snow,—a white-bearded, mild-eyed giant. When the local paper wanted an item it filled in with, “Extraordinary weather on the Lake in July! Steamboat ‘Red-Deer’ in port with six feet two inches of Snow in her pilot-house!”

The sheriff went to see Snow, and, after a long confab, summoned his posse, boarded the Red-Deer, and left Greenville, as the local paper expressed it, “under sealed orders, bound for Moose River.” Naturally, half a dozen canoes were aboard, some lying bottom upward on the superstructure, some lashed to the rail. The posse carried Winchesters, although no game was in season.

Off the Grey Gull, an island, the little steamboat slowed down and stopped, the canoes were hoisted over the rail and dropped; the posse embarked. The sheriff said good-bye in a voice made loud by nervousness, and the Red-Deer swung about and steamed back to the foot of the lake with six feet two inches of Snow in her pilot-house.

At the mouth of Moose River two more canoes were waiting; Hale sat in one, paddle glistening in the pale spring sunshine; in the other sat the Indian log-driver, nursing the hammer of a rifle.

Below the long ridge the water is nearly dead, although a canoe might drift to the point in twenty-four hours. It was paddling for a mile to the first wing-dam, and there, the sheriff, who led, flung his stern-paddle into the bottom of the canoe, flourished the setting-pole, and stood up. At the same moment a jet of flame leaped from the edge of the wing-dam and a bullet passed through the sheriff’s hat. The amazed official promptly fell overboard, sank, rose, grasped the edge of the canoe, and swamped it, turning the bow-paddler into the river. The swift current landed them on a shoal before the sheriff could shriek more than twice, and they crawled up on a rock, sleek and wet as half drowned flies in a sap-pan.

The other canoes had halted; some of the posse waved their rifles, but nobody fired at the wing-dam except Hale. He banged away as fast as he could pump the breach-lever, and Billy Sebato, the Indian, took to the bushes and lay patiently waiting for a mark, purring with eagerness.

“Jim Skeene, you darned thief!” shouted Hale, “come out from them stones! Jest you come out on to that there wing-dam once!”

Above the rush and gurgle of the river they heard Skeene’s voice: “You let me be or I’ll shoot to kill!”

“Thief! Thief!” yelled Hale, dancing in his seat with anger, until the canoe heeled and almost swamped.

“I ain’t no more thief than you be, Josh Hale!” bawled Skeene, “I paid for them rations and ca’tridges and you know damn well I did!” Before he could add anything, the Indian, Sebato, fired twice.

“If that nigger Sebato don’t quit shootin’ I’ll let loose on all o’ ye!” called Skeene, shaking his rifle above the wing-dam edge. “Git back to your dreen, Josh Hale, I tell you.”

Hale had reloaded his magazine, and now, swinging his setting-pole with one hand, started to push his canoe among the rocks where he could hold it and fire under cover. Skeene evidently saw him for he slid suddenly to the corner of the wing-dam and fired three shots through the canoe, cutting a swale lengthwise at the water’s edge.

“Oh, you sneaky bob-cat!” yelled Hale, white with rage. In another moment he was working cup and sponge to bail his canoe, which swung away on the current and drifted broadside across the sand-bar below, where it settled in two feet of limpid water.

“Now’ll you let me be?” called Skeene. “I hain’t done nothin’ to you. If that there moose-warden wants me let him come and get me. Ain’t you ashamed to go huntin’ a man like a Lucivee? I tell ye I’ll shoot to kill, b’ God I will, at the next man that fires!”

“You dasn’t,” shouted the sheriff from behind his rock; “you ain’t half a man, Jim Skeene!”

“I be,” said Skeene calmly, “but I don’t want no fuss. You keep off’n this river, and you keep off’n this here wing-dam. And you stop sneakin’ along the woods there, Billy Sebato! Git back there! Git back, or I’ll shoot to kill!”

“You’ll hang if you do!” bawled the sheriff.

“Then tell that nigger Indian to git back! Tell him quick! I see him—I—”

Sebato’s rifle cracked, and the shot was repeated by Hale, wading out on the shoal. Then a forked flame flashed from the wing-dam, there came a crash and crackle of dry twigs, and the Indian pitched heavily over the bank into the swirling river.

The echoes of the shots died out among the trees; for a minute the gurgle of the river ripple alone troubled the stillness. A kingfisher wheeled up stream, the sun flashing on his blue wings; a fish soused in a calm pool below the dam. Presently the changed voice of the sheriff broke the silence:

“Jim Skeene, God help you, you’ll swing for this.”

Skeene’s pale face appeared above the dam, but nobody shot at him.

“You drove me to it,” said Skeene. He spoke huskily. “I told him to git back,—I warned him to quit sneakin’ up on me.”

“Come down off’n that wing-dam,” commanded Hale.

“Not for you, Josh Hale,” replied Skeene, “nor not for any man o’ ye! An’ I won’t be took neither. I’m goin’ away to live quiet if they let me.”

He crouched and watched them as they pushed their canoes out into the main channel. The sheriff and Hale advanced to the pool where Sebato lay. A slender fillet of blood, a mere thread hung in the water just below the surface, and stretched out, following the current, floating like a red string.

“Bring them settin’-poles,” said the sheriff soberly, “paddles won’t stand the heft, an’ he’s hefty.” Hale suddenly turned, snarling at the wing-dam; “Jim Skeene, you sneakin’ musk-rat!—” he said; but Skeene was gone when Hale’s bullet stung the rock above.