CHAPTER I. "THE DRUSES ARE UP!"
"Great Scott, look at her! She's goin' to try and take 'em!" exclaimedOsterhaut, the Jack-of-all-trades at Lebanon.
"She ain't such a fool as all that. Why, no one ever done it alone.Low water, too, when every rock's got its chance at the canoe. But, mygracious, she is goin' to ride 'em!"
Jowett, the horse-dealer, had a sportsman's joy in a daring thing.
"See, old Injun Tekewani's after her! He's calling at her from the bank.He knows. He done it himself years ago when there was rips in the tribean' he had to sew up the tears. He run them Rapids in his canoe--"
"Just as the Druse girl there is doin'--"
"An' he's done what he liked with the Blackfeet ever since."
"But she ain't a chief--what's the use of her doin' it? She's goin'straight for them. She can't turn back now. She couldn't make the bankif she wanted to. She's got to run 'em. Holy smoke, see her wavin' thepaddle at Tekewani! Osterhaut, she's the limit, that petticoat--so quietand shy and don't-look-at-me, too, with eyes like brown diamonds."
"Oh, get out, Jowett; she's all right! She'll make this country sit upsome day-by gorry, she'll make Manitou and Lebanon sit up to-day if sheruns the Carillon Rapids safe!"
"She's runnin' 'em all right, son. She's--by jee, well done, Miss Druse!Well done, I say--well done!" exclaimed Jowett, dancing about and wavinghis arms towards the adventurous girl.
The girl had reached the angry, thrashing waters where the rocks rentand tore into white ribbons the onrushing current, and her first trialhad come on the instant the spitting, raging panthers of foam struck thebow of her canoe. The waters were so low that this course, which shehad made once before with her friend Tekewani the Blackfeet chief,had perils not met on that desperate journey. Her canoe struck a rockslantwise, shuddered and swung round, but by a dexterous stroke shefreed the frail craft. It righted and plunged forward again into freshdeath-traps.
It was these new dangers which had made Tekewani try to warn her fromthe shore--he and the dozen braves with him: but it was characteristicof his race that, after the first warning, when she must play out thegame to the bitter end, he made no further attempt to stop her. TheIndians ran down the river-bank, however, with eyes intent on herheadlong progress, grunting approval as she plunged safely from dangerto danger.
Osterhaut and Jowett became silent, too, and, like the Indians, ranas fast as they could, over fences, through the trees, stumbling andoccasionally cursing, but watching with fascinated eyes this adventuressof the North, taking chances which not one coureur-de-bois orriver-driver in a thousand would take, with a five thousand-dollar prizeas the lure. Why should she do it?
"Women folks are sick darn fools when they git goin'," gasped Osterhautas he ran. "They don't care a split pea what happens when they've gotthe pip. Look at her--my hair's bleachin'."
"She's got the pip all right," stuttered Jowett as he plunged along;"but she's foreign, and they've all got the pip, foreign men and womenboth--but the women go crazy."
"She keeps pretty cool for a crazy loon, that girl. If I owned her,I'd--"
Jowett interrupted impatiently. "You'd do what old man Druse does--you'dlet her be, Osterhaut. What's the good of havin' your own way with onethat's the apple of your eye, if it turns her agin you? You want herto kiss you on the high cheek-bone, but if you go to play thecat-o'-nine-tails round her, the high cheek-bone gets froze. Gol blastit, look at her, son! What are the wild waves saying? They're sayin','This is a surprise, Miss Druse. Not quite ready for ye, Miss Druse.'My, ain't she got the luck of the old devil!"
It seemed so. More than once the canoe half jammed between the rocks,and the stern lifted up by the force of the wild current, but again thepaddle made swift play, and again the cockle-shell swung clear. But nowFleda Druse was no longer on her feet. She knelt, her strong, slimbrown arms bared to the shoulder, her hair blown about her forehead,her daring eyes flashing to left and right, memory of her course at workunder such a strain as few can endure without chaos of mind in the end.A hundred times since the day she had run these Rapids with Tekewani,she had gone over the course in her mind, asleep and awake, forcing herbrain to see again every yard of that watery way; because she knew thatthe day must come when she would make the journey alone. Why she wouldmake it she did not know; she only knew that she would do it some day;and the day had come. For long it had been an obsession with her--asthough some spirit whispered in her ear--"Do you hear the bells ringingat Carillon? Do you hear the river singing towards Carillon? Do yousee the wild birds flying towards Carillon? Do you hear the Rapidscalling--the Rapids of Carillon?"
Night and day since she had braved death with Tekewani, giving him agun, a meerschaum pipe, and ten pounds of beautiful brown "plug" tobaccoas a token of her gratitude--night and day she had heard this spiritmurmuring in her ear, and always the refrain was, "Down the stream toCarillon! Shoot the Rapids of Carillon!"
Why? How should she know? Wherefore should she know? This was of thethings beyond the why of the human mind. Sometimes all our lives, if wekeep our souls young, and see the world as we first saw it with eyes andheart unsoiled, we hear the murmuring of the Other Self, that Selffrom which we separated when we entered this mortal sphere, but whichfollowed us, invisible yet whispering inspiration to us. But sometimeswe only hear It, our own soul's oracle, while yet our years are few,and we have not passed that frontier between innocence and experience,reality and pretence. Pretence it is which drives the Other Self awaywith wailing on its lips. Then we hear It cry in the night when, becauseof the trouble of life, we cannot sleep; or at the play when we arecaught away from ourselves into another air than ours; when music poursaround us like a soft wind from a garden of pomegranates; or when achild asks a question which brings us back to the land where everythingis so true that it can be shouted from the tree-tops.
Why was Fleda Druse tempting death in the Carillon Rapids?
She had heard a whisper as she wandered among the pine-trees there atManitou, and it said simply the one word, "Now!" She knew that she mustdo it; she had driven her canoe out into the resistless current to ridethe Rapids of Carillon. Her Other Self had whispered to her.
Yonder, thousands of miles away in Syria, there were the Hills ofLebanon; and there was one phrase which made every Syrian heart beatfaster, if he were on the march. It was, "The Druses are up!" Whenthat wild tribe took to the saddle to war upon the Caravans and againstauthority, from Lebanon to Palmyra, from Jerusalem to Damascus menlooked anxiously about them and rode hard to refuge.
And here also in the Far North where the River Sagalac ran a wild raceto Carillon, leaving behind the new towns of Lebanon and Manitou, "theDruses were up."
The daughter of Gabriel Druse, the giant, was riding the Rapids of theSagalac. The suspense to her and to those who watched her course--toTekewani and his braves, to Osterhaut and Jowett--could not be long. Itwas a matter of minutes only, in which every second was a miracle andmight be a catastrophe.
From rock to rock, from wild white water to wild white water she sped,now tossing to death as it seemed, now shooting on safely to the nexttest of skill and courage--on, on, till at last there was only onepassage to make before the canoe would plunge into the smooth waterrunning with great swiftness till it almost reached Carillon.
Suddenly, as she neared the last dangerous point, round which she mustswing between jagged and unseen barriers of rock, her sight became foran instant dimmed, as though a cloud passed over her eyes. She had neverfainted in her life, but it seemed to her now that she was hovering onunconsciousness. Commending the will and energy left, she fought theweakness down. It was as though she forced a way through tossing,buffeting shadows; as though she was shaking off from her shouldersshadowy hands which sought to detain her; as though smothering thingskept choking back her breath, and darkness like clouds of wool gatheredabout her face. She was fighting for her life, and for years it seemedto be; though indeed it was only seconds before her will reasserteditself, an
d light broke again upon her way. Even on the verge of thelast ambushed passage her senses came back; but they came with a starkrealization of the peril ahead: it looked out of her eyes as a faceshows itself at the window of a burning building.
Memory shook itself free. It pierced the tumult of waters, found theambushed rocks, and guided the lithe brown arms and hands, so that theswift paddle drove the canoe straight onward, as a fish drives itselfthrough a flume of dragon's teeth beneath the flood. The canoe quiveredfor an instant at the last cataract, then responding to Memory and Will,sped through the hidden chasm, tossed by spray and water, and swept intothe swift current of smooth water below.
Fleda Druse had run the Rapids of Carillon. She could hear the bellsringing for evening service in the Catholic Church of Carillon, andbells-soft, booming bells-were ringing in her own brain. Like muffledsilver these brain-bells were, and she was as one who enters into a deepforest, and hears far away in the boscage the mystic summons offorest deities. Voices from the banks of the river behind called toher--hilarious, approving, agitated voices of her Indian friends, and ofOsterhaut and Jowett, those wild spectators of her adventure: but theywere not wholly real. Only those soft, booming bells in her brain werereal.
Shooting the Rapids of Carillon was the bridge by which she passed fromthe world she had left to this other. Her girlhood was ended--wondering,hovering, unrealizing girlhood. This adventure was the outward sign, therite in the Lodge of Life which passed her from one degree of being toanother.
She was safe; but now as her canoe shot onward to the town of Carillon,her senses again grew faint. Again she felt the buffeting mist, againher face was muffled in smothering folds; again great hands reached outtowards her; again her eyes were drawn into a stupefying darkness; butnow there was no will to fight, no energy to resist. The paddle layinert in her fingers, her head drooped. She slowly raised her head once,twice, as though the call of the exhausted will was heard, but suddenlyit fell heavily upon her breast. For a moment so, and then as the canoeshot forward on a fresh current, the lithe body sank backwards in thecanoe, and lay face upward to the evening sky.
The canoe sped on, but presently it swung round and lay athwart thecurrent, dipping and rolling.
From the banks on either side, the Indians of the Manitou Reservationand the two men from Lebanon called out and hastened on, for they sawthat the girl had collapsed, and they knew only too well that her dangerwas not yet past. The canoe might strike against the piers of the bridgeat Carillon and overturn, or it might be carried to the second cataractbelow the town. They were too far away to save her, but they keptshouting as they ran.
None responded to their call, but that defiance of the last cataract ofthe Rapids of Carillon had been seen by one who, below an eddy on theLebanon side of the river, was steadily stringing upon maple-twigs blackbass and long-nosed pike. As he sat in the shade of the trees, he hadseen the plunge of the canoe into the chasm, and had held his breath inwonder and admiration. Even at that distance he knew who it was. He hadseen Fleda only a few times before, for she was little abroad; but whenhe had seen her he had asked himself what such a face and form weredoing in the Far North. It belonged to Andalusia, to the Carpathians, toSyrian villages.
"The pluck of the very devil!" he had exclaimed, as Fleda's canoe sweptinto the smooth current, free of the dragon's teeth; and as he hadsomething of the devil in himself, she seemed much nearer to him thanthe hundreds of yards of water intervening. Presently, however, he sawher droop and sink away out of sight.
For an instant he did not realize what had happened, and then, withangry self-reproach, he flung the oars into the rowlocks of his skiffand drove down and athwart the stream with long, powerful strokes.
"That's like a woman!" he said to himself as he bent to the oars, andnow and then turned his head to make sure that the canoe was still safe."Do the trick better than a man, and then collapse like a rabbit."
He was Max Ingolby, the financier, contractor, manager of greatinterests, disturber of the peace of slow minds, who had come to Lebanonwith the avowed object of amalgamating three railways, of making theplace the swivel of all the trade and interests of the Western North;but also with the declared intention of uniting Lebanon and Manitou inone municipality, one centre of commercial and industrial power.
Men said he had bitten off more than he could chew, but he had repliedthat his teeth were good, and he would masticate the meal or know thereason why. He was only thirty-three, but his will was like nothing theWest had seen as yet. It was sublime in its confidence, it was free fromconceit, and it knew not the word despair, though once or twice it hadknown defeat.
Men cheered him from the shore as his skiff leaped through the water."It's that blessed Ingolby," said Jowett, who had tried to "do" thefinancier in a horsedeal, and had been done instead, and was now adevout admirer and adherent of the Master Man. "I saw him driving downthere this morning from Lebanon. He's been fishing at Seely's Eddy."
"When Ingolby goes fishing, there's trouble goin' on somewhere and he'sstalkin' it," rejoined Osterhaut. "But, by gol, he's goin' to do thistrump trick first; he's goin' to overhaul her before she gits to thebridge. Look at him swing! Hell, ain't it pretty! There you go, oldIngolby. You're right on it, even when you're fishing."
On the other-the Manitou-shore Tekewani and his braves were lesstalkative, but they were more concerned in the incident than Osterhautand Jowett. They knew little or nothing of Ingolby the hustler, but theyknew more of Fleda Druse and her father than all the people of Lebanonand Manitou put together. Fleda had won old Tekewani's heart when shehad asked him to take her down the Rapids, for the days of adventurefor him and his tribe were over. The adventure shared with this girlhad brought back to the chief the old days when Indian women tannedbearskins and deerskins day in, day out, and made pemmican of thebuffalo-meat; when the years were filled with hunting and war andmigrant journeyings to fresh game-grounds and pastures new.
Danger faced was the one thing which could restore Tekewani'sself-respect, after he had been checked and rebuked before his tribe bythe Indian Commissioner for being drunk. Danger faced had restored it,and Fleda Druse had brought the danger to him as a gift.
If the canoe should crash against the piers of the bridge, if it shoulddrift to the cataract below, if anything should happen to this whitegirl whom he worshipped in his heathen way, nothing could preserve hisself-respect; he would pour ashes on his head and firewater down histhroat.
Suddenly he and his braves stood still. They watched as one would watchan enemy a hundred times stronger than one's self. The white man's skiffwas near the derelict canoe; the bridge was near also. Carillon nowlined the bank of the river with its people. They ran upon the bridge,but not so fast as to reach the place where, in the nick of time,Ingolby got possession of the rolling canoe; where Fleda Druse laywaiting like a princess to be waked by the kiss of destiny.
Only five hundred yards below the bridge was the second cataract, andshe would never have waked if she had been carried into it.
To Ingolby she was as beautiful as a human being could be as she laywith white face upturned, the paddle still in her hand.
"Drowning isn't good enough for her," he said, as he fastened her canoeto his skiff.
"It's been a full day's work," he added; and even in this human crisishe thought of the fish he had caught, of "the big trouble," he had beenthinking out as Osterhaut had said, as well as of the girl that he wassaving.
"I always have luck when I go fishing," he added presently. "I can takeher back to Lebanon," he continued with a quickening look. "She'll beall right in a jiffy. I've got room for her in my buggy--and room forher in any place that belongs to me," he hastened to reflect with acurious, bashful smile.
"It's like a thing in a book," he murmured, as he neared the waitingpeople on the banks of Carillon, and the ringing of the vesper bellscame out to him on the evening air.
"Is she dead?" some one whispered, as eager hands reached out to securehis skiff t
o the bank.
"As dead as I am," he answered with a laugh, and drew Fleda's canoe upalongside his skiff.
He had a strange sensation of new life, as, with delicacy andgentleness, he lifted her up in his strong arms and stepped ashore.