Adventure, November 1915 — page 116: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

114 and the revelry, to the sensuous contem- plation of whatever design was forming in his aborted mind, and for one hesitating second Lavergne and Masita fathomed each other’s eyes. “Mon Dieu, Francois!’ she faltered. ‘What does he want with a—a priest?” “T can guess,” murmured Lavergne harshly. ‘For what does a priest do but bury or marry or—both? And by Heaven! He shall have a priest. He shall have several priests such as he never dreamed of. Keep a good heart and let your father hear what I have-told you. Go back quickly. I must be afloat before the hound changes his mind or arises in his wrath at my tardi- ness and sends some one else. For that would never do. I go to Ivan Trevor. Keep a good heart, Masita, and listen for the whistle of the curlew. ‘That shall be the sign. Helbaud will make no move till - I return, so, again I say it, keep a good heart!” Lavergne had picked up and launched an eighteen-foot canoe while he spoke, and, laying his paddle across the gunwales, he was away with the shove of a moccasined toe. Even as Masita crossed from the beach to her father in the council-hall, the current, flowing deep and strong after its plunge over the rapids above, whirled Lavergne around the bend below the flat rock-beach. And around that bend, had Helbaud been there to see, the Arctic Fur leader would have marveled at the haste that spurred the man. Lavergne ripped away the flannel shirt that impeded the move- ments of his shoulders, and bare to the waist, he drove the paddle with tremendous drives. oo crowned ridges curved into the flat of a beaver meadow, and the sun, poised on the horizon in the open gap, poured forth across the meadow a flood of carmine light. It painted the rocky shores, bathed the turbulent river and enveloped man and craft in a bloody cloud. Upon Lavergne’s heated face its last feeble rays struck like upspringing flame, for he was writhing in an orgasm of effort and forcing the canoe in long, violent leaps like a horse under the merciless spur. Many a canoe-race he had run in the North with danger as his running-mate. AWAY westward the spruce- Adventure Many a time he had sped with urgent post- messages, with succor in time of accident, with food in time of famine, but never had ‘he hastened as he ‘hastened now. Con- tinually he urged his muscles to quicker action, and continually he cursed the law- less, licentious Helbaud. He feared a change of mind on the part of the Arctic Fur leader, for he was notori- ous for his vacillation and eccentricities. Time might drag on his hands, and Briand Dubawni and Masita be put to the test of his greed and lust before Frangois’s return. Therefore Lavergne shot down the Mani- kuagan with all the velocity that the com- bined force of body and stream could impart. - About him water, shore and sunset sky blended in a radiant panorama, all one vast splash of crimson, and then, quite suddenly, as the sun dropped without warning into the depths of the marshy beaver meadow, the strange, violent colors of the North began to creep in. For a moment the afterglow lay a rose- smeared palette, but the next instant a medley of hues began to mix in a chaotic dream of some fairy-painter’s mind. Am- ber, umber, mauve, magenta, amethyst, saffron and ocher in a hundred different blendings stole through and through the rose-smeared sky, deepening minute by minute to the buffs and purples of advan- cing night. And in the descending shadows the living things of the forest began to advertise their presence. Overhead rasped the swift-dart- ing night-hawk. On either hand, perched somberly against the last faint sunset gleam, the horned owls hooted from the blasted trees. From the surface of the river arose the bull-throated booming of the frogs, punctuated by the incessant com- plaint of the swarming, overgrown, North- ern mosquitoes. A great new world had awakened about Francois, a strange night-world with its denizens going forth upon their business of existence, their quests, their companion- ships, their loves and their hates, but the glamour and fascination of that night-world struck but vaguely upon his consciousness. Speed! Speed! That was his inward cry, and the startled, wing-roaring wild fowl launching skyward ahead of him, the terri- fied moose floundering shorewards from the lily beds, the stunned river trout leaping COMIC OOOKS