Adventure Magazine Cover, April 3, 1918 — page 68: what you’re looking at

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

66 Athapuscow, foregathering after custom immemorial, spiraling the blazing skies with their camp smokes, filling the balmy air with liquid language that lisped like the moist Spring wind or gurgled like the waters. They were all in, every man upon the trade books, every Hudson’s Bay hunter in the district with their squaws, papooses, dogs and household gods. The only out- post remaining was Wells’ camp on the Seepanock Channel. Wells’ men Carlisle had not drawn in like the others. On the contrary he had added to the Seepanock Channel force, bidding Wells redouble his vigilance with the opening of the stream and giving him explicit orders as to what course he must pursue when the Northwesters came down. Nor was the significance of these prepara- tions lost upon Wayne. They marked, as it were, the breaking of the truce enforced between him and Carlisle by the smallpox outbreak. They loomed upon his concep- tion as a final menace to his interests and he became morose, moody, brooding over Carlisle’s actions and his ancient wrongs, watching for the Free-Trading brigades he hoped to see come driving down the Saskatchewan and grimly waiting for that moment when there would be no further truce and he and Carlisle must decisively settle accounts. THE ice run was practically past. @e@_ Vagrant floes spun by on the turgid = waters, but their very solitary journ- eying told Carlisle that the mighty highway was open. Even back to the tiniest feeders in the foothills of the Rockies the way was clear, and the Northwesters were doubtiess driving down. They might come by day- light or dark, today, tomorrow, there was no telling, but it was well to be pre- pared. . Carlisle went up to the Seepanock Chan- nel and personally posted Wells’ men, both in the-hills across the Saskatchewan and in the low scrub round the channel opening itself. A mile inland the channel had been heavily barricaded as a necessary precau- tion, but no evidence of Hudson’s Bay forces being in possession was visible from the main stream. “Keep out of sight,’ Carlisle adjured Wells. ‘Don’t let them get a glimpse of any of your men. If they enter the chan- nel, rush and hold them till I can get up the Adventure river to help you. If they go by, make sure that it is not a ruse and then follow them on to me as fast as you can.” “Vez, Factor,’ Wells assured him, ‘I zhall make zertain o’ that. You zhall zee!” Carlisle dropped down-stream again be- low the muddle of straggling islands, be- low the scramble of rapids, below the twisted knot of river bends known as the Coiled Snakes to a spit where the Saskatchewan narrowed not a great distance from Cumber- land House. Here the park lands met the ruder forest in a series of rolling bluffs and low plateaus, a bold promontory crowding the river into a twisted, somber chasm. Close by the rim of the chasm and up on the slopes shouldered the jostling spruce, and against these high trees Carlisle sent his men with their axes. To the swinging steel the spruce trees swung and snapped, plunging like the thrown spears of Titans into the river be- neath. ‘They criss-crossed and lodged and jammed, piling trunk on trunk, seineing the vagrant floes that drifted down, form- ing a stubborn wall against the angry roar- ing river. The dammed flood rose a foot, two feet, three feet, but the matted barrier held, while high above Carlisle and his axmen rained down the trunks till the sullen tide, backed ’round the face of the promontory and gave up the fight. Beaten, it slunk out the easier way, over the bank through the Devil’s Elbow, a broad, barren valley that seemed to have been an ancient beaver meadow. Owing to the width of the valley the yellow flood flowed no deeper than a man’s waist, Sweeping in a majestic curve of three miles or more back to the well-nigh drained Saskatchewan’s bed. As the waters rolled ruminatively through, they raised some- thing inch by inch upon their rippling sur- face, a dark line across the molten gold, a triple boom of logs securely roped to giant pines on either benchland. Ralph Wayne heard the axes ringing, saw the Saskatchewan temporarily draining, and ran out’to where Carlisle was at work. He glimpsed the dammed chasm, the boom of logs across the Devil’s Elbow, and his fawn-green eyes blazed with their old inim- ical light into Carlisle’s. “Condemnation! You close the Saskatch- ewan, Carlisle?”’ he exploded. COnniclo@olk< (C@