by
S. Carleton
from The Thrill Book, April 1, 1919
“For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ.”
My solitary job in the winter bush was over. But coming back over the high barrens to my metropolitan cabin — three miles from the dizzy centre of the “settlement” comprised of the priest’s house, the Indian agent’s, one trader’s, and a few shacks — it struck me that it was still a far cry to spring.
The morning was bitter; so cold that the water froze in my eyes and the breath in my nostrils, though it was March and there should have been some power in the sun. But it hung, bleak and bleached, over a world of snow, where even the distant spruce belt between me and my cabin stood gray and haggard as I made the shortest cut I could toward it. Once I reached it, I was not far from home; say about twice the distance a man could throw a stone. I am particular, because I have since had reason to measure it. But I was not dreaming of that business then.
I bolted well into the shelter of my belt of spruce trees, stopped to get my pipe lit, and ducked instinctively under the nearest tree. Something metallic and gleaming had arched in the sombre boughs above me like a falling star. Like a star, too, I had not heard it drop, or I would have sworn someone had thrown a knife at me from behind and missed. For half a breath I thought I heard the faint rasp of snowshoes running over the crusted snow of the barrens I had just left. I had seen no one there, but that said nothing, for between the cold and haste I had never looked anywhere but before my nose. I wheeled to peer through the thick spruces that shut me in like a fence, and laughed outright. For even as I turned my silly illusion had explained itself.
The knife that had sheered across my snow-dazzled eyes had been nothing but an icicle, and there was certainly no one running away, for my assailant was before me. There was a squaw crouching under the snow-clogged spruces between me and the barrens, among a mess of tree icicles fallen on the snow. I guessed she had tried to attract my attention by throwing one at me, and then changed her mind about it, for she crouched oddly motionless on her hands and knees in the ice-spattered snow, as if she did not think she could be seen. Her face was turned from me, yet all the same I recognized her.
“Why, it’s Anne Labrador; Labrador’s wife!” I thought, astounded. Labrador was the Indian chief in my district, but he and Anne and their two little children lived forty miles off, in a camp they never left except to look after their line of traps and their fur caches. I dropped in to see them whenever I was over their way, and took some sugar and stuff for their funny brown babies, who could just lisp my name. “Kwa, Anne,” I shouted in Indian. “What was that you threw at me just now? And where’s Labrador and the children?”
Anne neither moved nor answered. I might have been my fancy that she stared detachedly into the spruces in front of her as though she would have drawn my gaze after hers, but there was certainly an extraordinary stiff and bloodless look about her. For a moment I could almost have doubted that it was Anne. She wore no silver clasp of rank as a chief’s wife in the blue shawl over her breast; she had not spoken; and she was not even looking at me. I made no step toward her, though she was not fifty feet off. I did not turn my head and stare where her eyes seemed to be staring, but I saw nothing, and when I glanced back again she was gone. She must have shifted as stealthily as a wolf to have vanished like that into the blue shadows beside her, and the stupid tension of wonder that had held me snapped and left me angry. It was Anne without doubt, and this was no way for her to behave.
“Stop these fool tricks!” I called out. “Come down to my cabin if you want to see me. It’s too cold to hand around here.” And it was, for as I strode angrily after the woman I was shivering, and I shivered even when I brought up against an impenetrable thicket of brush that showed no sign of her. As I checked, something pricked my ankle viciously, but I was too preoccupied over Anne’s idiotic disappearance even to stoop and see if a jagged stick had torn my new leggings. However she had managed it in the deep snow, she was gone, with no more trail than a stone in water; though I might have persevered in looking for her tracks if I had not felt I was being evaded. I turned down the short cut that landed me at my own woodpile, and as I kicked the snow off my leggings against it I was unwarrantably upset. Anne and her husband were old friends of mine, and for her to play hide and seek with me struck me as a very poor joke. My cabin felt colder than outside when I went into it; the fire would not burn, and I had mislaid my tobacco. Altogether the day went so crooked with me that it was with no feeling of surprise that I saw Lazier, the Indian agent, walk in that afternoon on an unasked visit.
“Things seem cut in the piece today!” I thought savagely, for he was the one man in the district for whom I had no use. He had never been in my house before, and I could not see why he had come now. It was absurd to say he wanted to hear my news. I said I had been in the bush and heard no voice but my own for a month, which was strictly true. For Anne Labrador had certainly not spoken to me that morning, and in any case I had forgotten her.
“You’re a lonely man, Devlin, but if there is any news they say you are sure to hear it,” Lazier assented dryly. I don’t know why it struck me that he had come to find out something; there was no curiosity in his face, and it might have been by accident that his eyes searched my bare room. But I was not sorry when he suddenly said he must be going, if I saw less than ever why he had seen fit to come all the way from the settlement on such a day.
I was colder than ever, and the setting sun beat up from the snow in an intolerable glitter of colour as I watched him walk away from my door. The track he left across my clearing lay dead and blue between the crusted drifts of gold and rose and crimson, and it pleased me to think it the spirit and image of the way the man trod this world.
“Well, deliver me from any dealings with him!” said I, and banged my door.
I may as well set down why I hated Lazier. He farmed his wretched Indians. They never saw half of their government allowance; he was always sniffing out their poor quarrels, and our district was getting a bad name. If a man took out a knife he was a murderer, if he borrowed an axe he was a thief, and Lazier confiscated his flour enough to catch him out on it, even if there had been any one but the settlement priest and myself who cared. He had once tried to drag me into his thief catching, and I was so angry at the memory that I forgot to throw any wood on my fire, and neither troubled to light my lamp nor to close the shutters of my window. It was with a start that I saw my fire was out, and the new moon shining in on me. I stood up to close my shutter, and saw more than the moon.
Lazier had come back, and at the sight of him I knew I had guessed right that afternoon. He had come to find out something, and when it was clear that I did not know it had returned to discover it for himself. I opened my door in a soundless, inch-wide crack, and stood waiting to tell him it was no good, that I would give no liars nor mischief brewers the run of my house, and I must have stood ten minutes before I saw he was not coming near my house, was not thinking of me at all. He was looking for something in the snow. Sometimes he went on all fours to it; then he peered among the snow-choked spruces; then prowled into my clearing again and pounced at one place and nothing in the snow. It was not a pleasant sight as he flitted in and out of the silent bush between me and the clean new moon, yet sheer curiosity kept me from shouting to know what he wanted in my clearing. But whatever it was, I thought suddenly that he must have found it, for he stood still and so unconscious of me that I heard him laugh with relief before he vanished into the bush at a round trot for the settlement. I stared after him, raging that I had missed ordering him off my place for the second time that day. It was the cold on my face through the door crack that brought me to my senses and the knowledge that I was making a fool of myself; if the man had lost anything in the afternoon he had a perfect right to come and look for it in the evening, only I did not believe he had lost anything. It swept over me with a sudden trouble, and with no earthly reason, that it was a strange track he looked for, where no feet but his or mine had passed that day! I hunted uselessly for that or anything else he might have been looking for, and ended flatly enough at my woodpile to gather bark to rekindle my forgotten fire. Going back into my dark house with the bark under my arm, I though something fell from it with a ring like metal, but it wasn’t till I knelt in the heartening leap of a four-foot blaze that I turned to look, and I kept on looking.
The thing at my feet was not what Lazier had lost. The only Indian property he owned was a crooked knife with a round handle of a kind never used in our district. And on my floor lay what never would have been given to him, and even he would not have dared to take: a squaw’s niskaman, or clasp of rank. They are slightly convex disks of native silver with a round hole in the middle, through which the two ends of a shawl are pushed and secured by a hinged pin the size of a two-inch nail, but flattened to the point of a dagger. Held in a woman’s hand, with the pine, upright, the clasp would give a nasty wound, but I never heard of one being used a weapon. The clasp of captain’s wife in an Indian tribe is perforated in a design of which the motive is a long diamond, and is pretty enough — but this was no badge of a captain’s wife! It was the clasp of a chief’s wife, three inches in diameter, but cut in circles and half circles; dear to the owner as her honour, and as hard to steal. More than that, it was a clasp I knew, for I had often handled it.
“Anne Labrador’s!” said I.I remembered irrelevantly, and with a curious stare, how Anne’s two children had been wont to finger it where it shone on her breast. “She must have lost it before it I met her this morning! But why on earth hasn’t she come to look for it?”
The dull silver of the thing held my eyes where it lay on the floor. I reached for it, wondering if I could be mistaken in it, and saw on it the symbol writing Labrador himself had taught me how to read. There was only one character, in angles and uprights, that might have represented either a three-branched candlestick or a devil, if I had not known it stood for a long word that means “my soul.” Anne Labrador’s own hand had cut it there, and I knew the meaning she set to it. Oddly enough, it occurred to me for the first time that it was a terrible meaning. And then I grinned at my own foolishness, since, while Anne was alive, the sign writing on her clasp meant nothing at all. For the superstition is this:
To cut the symbol of your own soul on your dearest belonging is to make it possible — if you so please, or happen to have earthly business a dead body cannot finish for you — that your spirit can enter into that belonging when you die and put life into it till it can go where it chooses and work out the desire of the dead. Anne Labrador believed it, for she had often told me so. She never let her silver clasp out of her sight, either, which made it the more unaccountable for it to have been lying on my woodpile. If she had lost it, why had she not told me when I met her in the morning? I wondered what could be wrong with the woman to make her prowl round my cabin in secret and run away when I spoke to her, but it is no use wondering where Indians are concerned, even though you know best. I put the clasp away till Anne chose to come to her senses and ask about it, and it was at that minute that the knock felt on my door.
“She’s come now,” I thought crossly, for I wanted to go to bed. But it was not Anne I opened the door on. It was an Indian, not a squaw, who brushed past me and stumbled over to my fire without speech or leave. I had words on my tongue till I saw the set of his mouth, and that the moccasins on his feet were frayed through. Even when he was fed he sat without speaking till I asked what he wanted of me, for he was an Indian whom I knew. “Nothing,” he answered in English. “We come for the priest. Very bad news we bring. Our chief is killed.”
“What chief?” I asked stupidly. “Where?”
“Labrador — over there where he camps!”
“Labrador?” Anne’s husband?” I stood like a fool, thinking that it was no wonder Anne had not had the heart to speak to me that morning.
The Indian nodded, muttering: “That man who spies says his woman killed him,” and I knew he meant Lazier. He rose, staggering with the words that tore out of him in the Indian tongue he had used before: “She is my sister, my sister that is younger than I, and he will hang her to a rope when he finds her. He says he saw her running from her dead, without her rank clasp that she threw away when she — she was a chief’s wife no longer! He says she left her little children to the wolves that they might not weigh down her feet; he has their shawls all torn, and bloody! He says if she did not kill her man why did she run? And where are the children? He says her rank clasp, that was her honour, she has thrown away into the snow!”
“Anne killed Labrador — and left the children! I don’t believe it, nor the rest of the stuff about her clasp and running away.” I began scornfully, and stopped, remembering Anne as she had knelt in the snow that morning without the children I had never known her to leave, Anne’s rank clasp that lay in my pocket. I dared not speak of either. I turned on her brother instead. “Why do you come to me?”
“Too-ok,” he returned vacantly. (The word is an expression used by an Indian when he does not know or will not say.) “I could walk no longer to the priest, and I saw your house.”
My mind spun like a wheel. To the best of my belief, Anne, innocent or guilty, was hidden close by my very clearing; she had certainly left her clasp in it, for there was no other way it could have come there; but I was afraid to say so, even to her brother, till I knew the rights of the story. Neither then nor till long after did I remember the shining thing I had seen arc over my head in the spruce trees that I thought was an icicle Anne had thrown at me, though even then I should have known better. Two other thoughts held me in a cold grip — the little bloodstained shawls of two children left to the wolves and the unostentatious return of Lazier to quarter my clearing in the moonlight for a track. I turned on Anne’s brother again: “Why does Lazier say Anne killed her husband? Has he found her?”
“He looks for her; she is as good as found.” He stared before him dully. “I ran a long way round that he might not know I came to the priest for help. But what can the priest do?”
“Go and see!” But it stuck in my throat, remembering Anne’s silence as she crouched alone in the snow. What could any man do, if what that silence said were true? I stopped the Indian as he turned.
“Tell me all you know first!”
“All I saw,” he changed the verb to a literal one, “was Labrador lying dead, very lonely in his house. And the little children’s shawls the man found. My sister no one saw.”
“No one will!” But I did not think it. I had seen her already, and Lazier had ways of his own in the district. He had used them to get Michail Paul hanged when we all knew he was crazy, and the sheriff was his led captain.
I put Anne’s brother out on his way to the priest, and came back with my mind spinning harder than ever. If Anne had not thrown away her clasp, which was equivalent to throwing away her rank and her people, why was it in my pocket? Unless she had killed her man, why had she crouched and run from me? And, above all, in God’s name, what had happened to her little children? But there I knew in my soul furiously that Lazier was a liar. Anne was a passionately good mother; she would have fought to the death before she left her children to the wolves. That was some explanation of that, somewhere, though all the rest was beyond me. But what was not beyond me was that it was a killing night for a woman to be out who dared not light a fire, and that even if she had killed Labrador my house could shelter her. It had sheltered worse. But though I scoured the night till my blood chilled in me I could not find Anne.
There was no sense in tearing out to her camp to look for her children; the whole settlement would be doing that. And Lazier told me so when he came in for an insolent half hour next morning, carrying a baby’s torn shawl that turned my stomach. I did not throw him out of my house for the sole reason that while he was in it he could not be hunting my spruces for Anne. But I was furiously certain he had wormed out that her brother had been to me before he went to the priest, and had come up on the chance that I would let out what the priest would hide. I expected Anne to be caught any minute, somewhere close to my clearing, and Lazier to haul me into witnessing against her; how I did not know, but somehow. Only those were not all the reasons that made me steal out of my shack the second Lazier had left me for the village and the sheriff and make a swift and devious departure into the tenantless barrens north of me. The others were an errand of my own, though I knew it was more like a crazy obsession, and a black certainty that sooner or later Lazier would find Anne’s clasp in my possession. It was in my pocket all the time he talked to me that morning, and I knew what he would have thought if he had guessed it, which only luck had stopped. Therefore, before I crept out of my own house like a thief and before dinner I hid the clasp.
Ten miles south of the camp where Labrador had been killed lay a district where he had always run a line of traps and kept a fur cache or two. A huge green meteorite marked its boundary, and with that crazy obsession of my own in my head I snowshoed all day to get there, and at sunset saw my landmark of the green boulder shining like an emerald under the rose-coloured sky.
“Praise be!” said I, for I had enough walking; but it was something else, too. My real errand to the place was nothing on earth but a hunt for Anne’s children who without rhyme or reason were in my head day and night with their little brown fingers that had burrowed in my pockets for sugar and their friendly, confident eyes. I knew they had been killed by the wolves and that it was useless to look for them, yet something inside me said passionately that I had to look for them, and that if there were any chance of finding them alive it was out here — by the green rock.
I had a perfectly unfounded certainty that Anne had taken her children with her when she fled, that even her iron strength would be exhausted by carrying and dragging the two little things till she must have stopped here by the green rock, and nowhere else, to make a fire and feed them, and more, hide them in some makeshift camp where they might still be alive. And when I say all that was a crazy obsession it was, for my own eyes had seen Lazier carrying the babies’ torn and bloodstained shawls that were all the wolves had left. But crazy or not, I was so set on the thing that I was certain of seeing Anne’s camp, built against the other side of the rock, with Anne’s children inside it, waiting for me by the dead ashes of her camp fire.
I rounded the green boulder, and checked with shock. There was no camp; there were no children. But the thing that really downed me was that I saw just the dead camp-fire ashes I had expected, only they had not been Anne’s, but a white man’s! The wide pile of half-burned wood said that; and Indian makes as small a pile as he can. Some stray trapper had been here not two days ago, but Anne — Anne had never been here, never made any camp, and the story the children’s shawls had told was true.
I felt like a flat fool, but I felt sick, too. I was hurrying to blot out the deadly unexpectedness of those ashes with my own fire when I saw something shining in their blackness. I sweated as I looked at it, as a horse breaks out in the stable. Anne Labrador’s clasp lay by that dead fire, and I had left that clasp safely stowed in my own house!
I explained the thing to myself slowly and out loud, because I was ashamed to feel as I did about it.
“You must have put something else in the hole at the back of the chimney! This has been in your pocket all the time and dropped out as you stooped to make your fire. Or else it’s some other squaw’s clasp that has been lost here!”
But I stammered on the lie. There was no other clasp of a chief’s wife among the Indians, and I knew well that I was this one I had carried in from my wood pile and hidden later from Lazier. I had no desire to touch the thing, but in spite of myself I looked for the three-branched candlestick on the back of it that meant the soul of Anne Labrador. It was there! And it shone too blood red in my new firelight for a thing I had left hidden at home. The incredible thought that shook me was that if Anne, dead, could send her soul into the thing, Anne, alive, might also be able to make it sentient, intelligent; that it had got out of the hole in my chimney to follow me like a hunting dog; and that the quest it hounded me on was the search for Anne’s children! I had about given that up, and I had no mind to be goaded to it afresh by superstition or coincidence. I shut my eyes and pitched the clasp away from me into the spruce trees in front of my fire and the green rock. And I breathed easier when it was gone.
But the thing in my head was not so easily switched off. Though I made a scratch camp for myself, I could not rest.
All night long, I dreamed of those two Indian children, dreamed till I woke myself, certain I heard them crying. I knew it was nonsense and that there was nothing for miles but the silence of bitter cold, yet with the first gleam of daylight, I started to tramp onward again in my fool’s quest for them. Anne might have made a map in some other place and left them in it, though it was not a likely expenditure of time for a woman who was fleeing for her life. But tramp as I might I could find no Indian camp nor a sign of one, and suddenly in the middle of the morning, I jerked up where I toiled through thickets and behind boulders. There again, in the snow at my feet, was the silver clasp!
In the sunlight I was ashamed of my last night’s nonsense about it. But all the same I could not see how I had thrown it miles away from those dead ashes under my fire. I wondered if Anne could possibly have managed to rummage the thing out of my house after I left, and have followed me in hopes of help; afraid to call to me, but dropping the clasp to show me she was near at hand, and picking it up when I threw it away, or, for all I knew, flung it at her, for the spruces were thick. And suddenly I realized my thoughts were once more the thoughts of a fool. Anne had no share in the business; it was my own hand that had pitched the clasp where it lay. All my tramping of the morning had been merely a circle back to the place where I had slept. The spruces round me were the spruces I had camped in front of the night before; I could see the green meteorite gleam through them as I stared.
It was stupidity fit for a man who had never seen the back country before. I was thankful no one would ever know about it. But as I was back at the green rock I would eat my dinner there, and then go home, in spite of Lazier. I had found no missing children, and never would, and I was sick of Anne and the whole business. I put her clasp in my pocket for no better reason than that it seemed wasted trouble to throw it away any more, and sat down in the lee of the rock to build a new cooking fire, and, with the match in my hand to light it, I saw paralysed. Somewhere nearing me, I heard the creak of snow under snow under snowshoes, heard men’s voices.
The match burned out in my hand.
“Who’s in God’s world?” I wondered, and suddenly I knew. Anne must really have followed me out from my shack, and men were on Anne’s trail. I peered out from behind the green rock as a man peers when he is afraid, and my mind stopped in me as a jar stops a clock. Lazier was coming toward me with the sheriff and two trappers!
What possessed me I don’t know. Not fifty Laziers could have dragged me into the hunting of Anne, but I was in a panic. I tore her clasp out of my pocket and flung it into the spruce thicket behind me, as I had flung it before, and once more I did not look to see where it went. The action took the blood from my heart, the rigidity from my mind. I knew instantly that I had been a fool to throw away the clasp, but I dared not go for it. I turned and walked out to meet Lazier.
He stopped dead, at sight of me, with a face of the most appalling and blankest rage I ever saw. There was absolutely no expression in his eyes, and they seemed suddenly to have no pattern in the irises.
“You fool, Devlin,” he swore before I could speak. “Get out of this and come home! That squaw’s not here, if that’s why you came. And you couldn’t help her, if she was.”
“I’d have a try at it,” said I in a passion. “I believe it’s all a pack of lies about her!” But Lazier did not see fit to answer me. He made a sharp sign to the sheriff and the trappers to stay where they were, and moved round the green rock to my unkindled fire, looking at me with those eyes. “Come home,” he said under his breath and furiously. “Can’t you see I came out to warn you that the sheriff’s after you — that he thinks you’re hiding the woman?” He swung round at a stir behind him and saw the two trappers moving toward the spruce thicket. “Sit down where you are! You don’t want to go for wood; Devlin’s got a fire built here that we can eat by before we go back again,” he shouted, and swung round on me again. “Can’t you see I came to warn you” he repeated, so low that his lips barely moved.
“Why?” No more trenchant answer came to my tongue, for over Lazier’s shoulder I could see the two trappers. They were no led captains like the sheriff; they were walking over to the spruces coolly, as though Lazier had never shouted at them, only I knew it was no firewood they were after. One, or both, of them had seen the silver clasp flash as I threw it behind me, and meant to find out what I had flung away.
I knew just what they would think when they found it, but there was nothing that I could do about it. I knelt down at Lazier’s feet and lit my cooking fire, but before the lowest chip had kindled, the trappers’ voices sent me flying into the spruces, and the instant I stood in them I knew I had thrown the silver clasp to the right place at last. For I was looking at Anne Labrador. She was on all fours on the crusted snow, stark on her hands and knees, exactly as I thought I had seen her two days ago and thirty miles away. Even now I could not believe I had not seen her, though my intelligence said it was impossible and that she must have been dead all of two days where she crouched now. A round lump under her shawl broke the smoothness of it between her shoulders, but none of us looked to see what it was, and none of us spoke. I did not, because I could see the woman’s face as I did not see it in my spruces, also the shining of silver in the snow below her breast. I was all abroad as to how I had ever flung her clasp so truly. And as I thought it, I forgot the clasp, Anne, everything.
“My soul,” I yelled. “The children!” I leaped, galvanized, to what might have been the muffled whine of a dying hare.
It was close by, at my very side, that I found them, and so far my crazy obsession had been just plain common sense. Only they were in no makeshift camp, but piled over with rocks in one of Labrador’s fur catches that I must have passed twice that very morning and been too big a fool to think of searching, even with a child’s cry in my ears all the night before. They were hungry and pitiful enough, but alive; even almost as warm among the smelling pelts that all but filled their poor expedient of safety as when they had been packed in by their dead mother outside. All their little clothes were on them, except the torn shawls with which Lazier had sickened me, and their mother’s thick blue cloth petticoat was round them both. The forlorn things wailed as they clutched me, their one familiar friend among the strange men round them. A trapper raced to my fire to boil up biscuits and hot water to feed them, the other two stood and swore — inappropriately. But the sheriff laid a sudden stolid hand on my arm, and nodded backward at Anne Labrador.
“Poor soul, poor soul!” he said, and it was the first time I ever heard kindness off his tongue. “She done her best to save them!”
“Soul!” Lazier broke in sharply. “Why do you say soul?” He had stood aloof through all the fuss about the children, and at his sneering voice the five-year-old I held opened its eyes on him and jerked in my arms.
“Keep him ’way!” it yelled. “Keep him ’way! Him hit my father — make my mother run!”
A trapper gave a flashlight glance at me. Neither of us spoke.
Lazier said contemptuously: “The child’s demented!” He walked toward it from where he stood before the body of Anne Labrador, and slipped as he passed the rank clasp lying on the snow. He put out a hand to save himself, but none of us realized that it was he who had screamed out like an animal till he rolled in the snow like one, with Ann Labrador’s clasp sticking fast to his palm. I saw the dagger pin of it showing through the back of his hand before he tore the thing out.
“How’s that devil soul clasp here?” he screamed. “I don’t see how it’s here!! I threw it away after I caught her here that night, running to tell the priest I’d done for Labrador. I caught her here. After that there was no running! She knelt down!”
I was knocked dead silent, though I knew a little of the babbling collapse of the nerves that comes with a wound through the very middle of a man’s palm.
But the sheriff blazed out. “Lazier!” he shouted, furious. “Lazier!”
But Lazier was past shouting at. He stood staring at Anne’s clasp lying where it had dropped when he tore it from his hand, a spot of concentrated white sunlight on the snow, stood staring as if he were hypnotized, and spoke as the hypnotized speak.
“She knelt down,” he repeated. “She said her soul would live — she would make me fear her soul!” Her body did not matter. But I lit a fire by the green rock and stayed there till she was quiet. It was midnight when I started for home. I didn’t know the children —”
I saw him wrench himself to lie, saw him stand powerless, unable to do it, his eyes still glued to the shining silver clasp at his feet.
“Anyway, she’d buried them,” he said gratingly. “I found their shawls, that she’d forgotten. They got blood on them somehow, and I thought of that about the wolves. I found that clasp too, stuck on my sleeve when I was passing Devlin’s, and I threw it away — on the edge of the barrens. Afterward I was afraid I’d thrown it into his clearing and he’d find it. I went there twice that day to make certain he hadn’t though I never could have thrown the thing that far over his spruce trees.”
No one knew that better than I did, but it was not by any will of my own that I remembered the shape I had called by the name of Anne Labrador. Yet that could not have thrown the clasp on my woodpile, where I must find it, when I failed at the bidding of its eyes! For a dazed half minute I wondered if it were true that a bit of beaten silver with the soul sign on it could take life from its dead owner and go where it pleased, if it were the clasp itself that had found its way to my woodpile. I looked up and saw Lazier’s face.
“Lazier and I!” my mind flashed with cold, sane relief. “It was just Lazier and I who moved the thing from start to finish.”
For, of course, it was!
Standing in my spruces that cold morning, I had really heard the drag of running feet on snowshoes over the open barrens, and I knew now it was Lazier - who had just thrown away the clasp in the metallic flash I had seen arc among my trees. And it was I myself who unwittingly carried it to my woodpile by its long pin that had pricked my ankle and stuck in my leggings till I kicked the snow off them against my stacked wood. For the rest, I put the clasp in my chimney — right enough, only once more its pin had caught in my clothing, this time in the back of my sleeve, as I withdrew my arm; and from my sleeve it had dropped on the ashes of the fire Lazier had kindled by the green rock while he waited for a woman to die. As for my finding it again this very morning it would have been a wonder if I had not, since I had merely circled back to the green rock, as I explained before. Every circumstance about the clasp was quite simple; there was nothing supernatural about any of them, and once more my eyes fell on Anne Labrador, kneeling inhumanly, stiff and bloodless, in the snow, finger for finger as I had thought I saw her kneeling in my own spruces, thirty miles from the children I had just found. The memory would have brought me up with a round turn, but in that same half second my mind came down on the truth like a hammer on a nail.
“By —” I swore aloud. “There was nothing supernatural in that, either!”
Nor was there. I suppose even a poor squaw, dying agonized for her helpless children, could think hard enough of the only man who could save them to bring her image before that man’s mind. Anyway, Anne had brought hers before mine, and I knew it, though I suppose telepathic vision would have been the right term. It had taken twelve hours to get me, but it had got me. I took off my cap to the splendid soul of a dead mother, and looked away to see Lazier still talking and the sheriff holding his arm.
“Stop it, Lazier!” he shouted. “You dunno what you’re saying!”
“I’m saying I was afraid of the clasp and the writing on it,” Lazier returned evenly, as if he were reading out of a book. “I know it’s an Indian lie that life goes into a thing you cut the soul sign on, but I was afraid of it all the same, and that Devlin had it.” He spoke exactly as if I were not there. “I had to keep near him to feel safe. That was why I followed him out here. I thought —”
The dazzle off Anne’s clasp made the sheriff blink. He put out an absent foot and kicked it aside into the shadow of a spruce bush. It lay there dull and dead as a slice of lead, and Lazier’s speech broke off short, as if he had suddenly realized his own voice and the sense of what it said. I don’t know why I stood silent. I had no pity for the man.
“You’re crazy!” the sheriff burst out at him. “You’re talking foolishness! Nobody killed this woman. She’s just dead.” He wrenched away Anne’s frozen down shawl, and recoiled in a kind of electrified dumbness. The round lump under it, which had broken its smoothness between the squaw’s shoulders, was the round handle of Lazier’s crooked Indian knife — the one such knife in the district. The sheriff gaped at it, missed Lazier’s suddenly intelligent scowl at him, and spoke like a fool: “Why, that’s yours, Lazier!”
Lazier made no answer. He looked at me, at Anne’s children in my arms, at the changed, inimical faces of his two trappers, at the sheriff, then at Anne Labrador. There were six of us alive, and one dead, who knew the thing that he had done, and I saw him weigh his chances of slipping free of it. He had them; the sheriff was his satellite, the country wide. Whether he would have taken them or not I cannot say. I do say he did not mean to do the thing he did. He always carried his gun cocked, and in the side pocket of his coat. He slid his hand into his pocket now, and I guessed he was going to hand his gun over to the sheriff ostentatiously and make a play for injured innocence — and time — with me and the trappers, for he was no lightning gunman who could have shot us all up. If he had looked at us things might perhaps have been different, but his eyes were on the snow beyond him, where he stood a little turned away from us, and his hand and his gun came out of his pocket just as the wheeling sunlight pierced the spruce bush behind him and once more smote Anne Labrador’s silver clasp into a burning star where the sheriff had kicked it aside. The blinding dazzle of it flashed fair into Lazier’s eyes. He jerked sharply away from the stabbing white light, the hand at his side flew up, and his gun snapped off like a whip, with the muzzle jammed upward under his chin, against the soft of his throat. That was all there was to it, except that he dropped full length like a tree drops beside Anne Labrador, with his own bullet clean through his brain.
“Lazier!” yelled the sheriff. He knelt over him, incredulous in spite of everything; knelt with his eyes goggling, a led captain still. “He’s shot himself,” he said fatuously. “He’s dead! He — it ain’t true what he was telling us, is it?” He couldn’t have killed Labrador and then An —” He recoiled on the name, pointing to the crouching figure that did not look as if it had ever had one. “And then her for fear she’d tell, and left little children to starve in a fur cache to cover it! And what’d he mean about the clasp and bein’ afraid?”
I looked at the rank clasp, with the sign that meant the soul of Anne Labrador carved deep on it.
“I don’t know,” I said. But I did know that it was the clasp alone that had made Lazier betray himself with his own lips; that — accident, coincidence, or whatever you like to call it — it was also nothing other than a simple sun glint on it that had made his flung up hand close convulsively on the trigger of his gun, and that it was by no intention of mine that I had brought it from its cache in the back of my chimney nor pitched it to the very place where Anne Labrador had died.
“Can you see what he meant ’bout bein’ afraid of the clasp?” the sheriff yapped again.
I said nothing. It was not his business, nor any man’s, that I was afraid of it, too. The vision of Anne Labrador over in my spruces was a simple thing, and the mere wireless of one mind in tune with another. But the thought I could not fight down — in spite of all my plain knowledge that it was just Lazier and I who had carried the clasp from the green rock and back again — was that it had been Anne’s ordinary, beaten-silver tank clasp that had really done the desire of a dead mother for her lost and starving children — I left out the rest — and used me for its tool
I was thankful, of course, to have found the children. But as I turned to carry them to the nearest shelter, I had once more no desire to touch that silver clasp of a chief’s wife. It was a trapper who fastened it where it belonged on the dead breast of Anne Labrador.