Adventure Magazine Cover, April 3, 1918 — page 79: what you’re looking at

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

Ambush “Yes, it’s sure to go down now,” proph- esied Wayne, his eyes fixed seer-like, ‘‘and the first wagon-road linking up the East and the West will carve its epitaph.”’ “Sometimes I see a road of my own,” Carlisle confided, ‘‘from the Pays d’en Haut to Hudson’s Bay. Yes, and sometimes I even see the shoals of the bay gouged out and a regular fleet of ships sailing there. It’s going to be as Thompson says, a coun- try bigger than any individual, bigger than any institution, an empire in the end. Furthermore it’s going to be an empire no man can be ashamed of, Wayne. Why not have a hand in its making?” Wayne shook his head disconsolately. “No, I’m going back when we reach Michipicoten, back to the Wyoming Valley. It was unrest drove me out, Carlisle. It’s rest, content, that’s taking me home.” “But you'll come sometimes, come to see her?”’ “Every year in the Spring—when the wanderlust stirs! During the months I won’t see her, I tell you Ill be very lonely, Carlisle. But don’t let her know that. Never a word. Look out—here she comes!”’ She was coming out of the post with Thompson and Andrews and time was sud- _denly telescoped for Carlisle. He beheld her as he had first beheld her that evening she had stepped out of her father’s canoe at Port Charlotte, and as he gazed at her he had the mystic feeling that this was that very moment. There had been no long, hard, danger-ridden months, no bitter blood feud, no deadly rivalry between. Here ghded her swelling-hipped, full- bosomed figure, erect, agile, supple in poise, with the graceful strength in the curves of the limbs, as it had first glided into his con- sciousness. Here shimmered her radiant hair, yellow, wheaten, spun-gold all in one, like the mingling hues of the birchen leaves in Autumn, framing the laughing-eyed, crimson-sprayed, red-lipped face. Only, she wore the clinging champagne- colored dress of silk that she had worn at Andrews’ first open-air service on the shores of Pine Island Lake, the snow-white doe- skin half-moccasins peeping from under- neath, the single jewel at her throat. Carlisle caught his breath deeply as he walked out with Wayne upon the shoreway of the canoe pier, his ermine canoe-robe over his shoulder. On the eastern or harbor arm of the cribwork that extended but 77 halfway back to land he spread the robe for Joan’s feet and stood upon it with her, Wayne at their side, Andrews in front. In the crystal-clear water of the canoe harbor at their feet floated his huge six- fathom craft with the Hudson’s Bay Com- pany’s crimson flag in the bow, his own streaming gonfalon in the stern. His tried crew were poised in their places, Waseyawin in the bow, Missowa in the stern, the two middlemen paired forward, the two others paired aft, their paddle shafts decorated with the gaudy woolen streamers, their bright-beaded moccasins, gay leggins, flam- ing belts and scarfs flashing many hues, their black-haired, fillet-bound heads car- rying the long, graceful, slanting, violent- colored plumes that proclaimed them Fac- tor’s canoemen. Close beside nosed the canoes of the officers, Galt, Drummond, Lewis, Garry, Lea, Jarvis, Hampton, Wells, while behind them the massed brigades covered the entire canoe harbor, the blood-red stars burning upon their warm-yellow bows like the fires upon the beach. Alone by the fires stood Thompson, sole guest of the Northwest Company till pres- ently the Montreal brigades lurking in the woods on either hand took heart to emerge. They had marked the Hudson’s Bay fleet all afloat, marked how things were shaping on the pier and crept out, three hundred and fifty of them, to gather silently ’round on the sandy flat—the giant Pork Eaters, French voyageurs off the Ottawa River and the parishes around, Iroquois Indians, Caughnawaga Indians, the famed rivermen of the Rabiscaws. | C) gathered, for this season their car- nival among the Northmen would not ring, their carousal would not rage, with their songs and their dozssons and their dev- iltry, and for them the code of the law was written farther than the Sault. They stared in wonder while the same priest they had seen in Grande Portage the year before raised his voice from the rude altar of the canoe pier in the spruce-walled, starry-naved temple of the wild. “On the winds of the wilderness and to you dwellers in the wilderness,” he de- claimed, “I publish the banns!’’ Sonorously Andrews’ voice sounded as he went on to complete the ceremony, and A TAMED, voiceless host they GOmiiGsoo SS (C@