Adventure Magazine Cover, April 3, 1918 — page 48: what you’re looking at

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

46 him, the geese went South, the snow fell, and the frost crackled. Her indisposition increased day by day. To the observant Wayne her trouble seemed threefold—the disturbing effect of the straight meat diet, the brooding over the Free-Trade prospects and an apparent canker, heart-longing, for which he could find no reason. Casting about for a reason, his mind turned upon Carlisle. As a magnanimous enemy he had brought her food to the palisades, food which Wayne in a wrath was prone to throw away had it not been for the girl’s actual need. Was he more than a magnanimous enemy? Wayne recalled the intimacy between him and Joan during the earlier part of the canoe journey from Grande Portage, also the fact that, together, they had voyaged the latter part of it without him. — Foreboding entered into him. Perhaps it was not worry, not dangerous diet he had to fear most! Perhaps something else was eating her youthful health away, the con- suming desire of the void spaces of her heart, the emaciating hunger of her soul— a hunger he himself had suffered all these years. “You had better let me send over to Cumberland House for Father Andrews,” he suggested. ‘‘He’s skilled with medi- cines, and no doubt he'll be able to give you something to help you.” “No, father, no, you mustn’t,” she flashed with genuine fire. ‘‘We ask noth- ing of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and if word passes between the posts it must come first from Cumberland House.” STILL her sickness persisted, and Wayne cursed the eternal, nauseat- ing, gorge-raising meat. It was af- rane even his iron self. It was affecting all his men. He had disconcerting visions of scurvy and plague, and he told Mason to see that the men brewed spruce tea and drank it as a preventive. But the men had long been muttering among themselves, brewing a draft of trouble. They grumbled at their fare, grumbled at the spruce tea and when no one was looking threw it in the snow. They had not bargained, they told each other, to live through the Winter eating each day three meals of flesh and flesh alone, all for the sake of the Indians’ trade. They knew that if they went out fifty or Adventure one hundred miles to the Indians’ teepees in their hunting districts and took back what supplies they needed, they would stir the tribes to bloodshed and kill Wayne’s trade and prestige at one stroke, but this they violently threatened to do. Straight meat was all right for Eskimos and pagan In- dians, they stormed, but they had been born in the South! Had Wayne not been so preoccupied with his daughter’s condition, he would have marked the fermentation of discon- tent, the progression of discontent to open mutiny, but he spent most of his time with Joan who, lapsing from her usual vigorous activity, lay listless and tired upon a couch by the fireplace in his council-room. Through the shortening Winter days and the ever-lengthening nights he would sit smoking by her side, staring at the pale face upon the black bearskin couch-robes, racking his brains for a way out of the situation, pleading with her in vain to let him get medicines or send her South. : Mason warned him once that he feared the men might get out of hand, and he promised to look into the matter, but the warning slipped from his mind in the treach- erous fashion things had been slipping of late. He never remembered it till his bri- gade leader stalked in on him and Joan one Wintry dusk with the news that the men had not come back that afternoon from their fuel-gathering. Rudely shaken out of his thinking and brooding, Wayne leaped up, mentally alert, poised at his full height as if scented danger had put him on his guard. “How’s that, Mason?” he demanded. ‘“‘How long have they been away? When’d they leave the post?” “‘Jist at noon, Wayne, and I’m sartinly gittin’ anxious.” “But maybe they’re working late, Mason; maybe they’ve had a brush with Northwest- ers or Hudson’s Bay choppers and are lying low to get in under cover of the dark.” The Missourian shook his head, his weather-wrinkled, alkali-seared face creas- ing deeper in his anxiety. ‘““Mebbe so,”’ he doubted, “‘but thar ain’t the ring of an ax or the spit of a rifle to be heerd. The woods is as still as a cussed vault.” “No noise, eh?” pondered Wayne. “‘That’s suspicious. By the Doom, Mason, if they’re trying to play me tricks, I’ll have GOMIGIOO SCO)