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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Ancient Highway," James Oliver Curwood weaves a rich tapestry of adventure and introspection set against the backdrop of the untamed wilderness. This novel captures the essence of the American landscape, revealing a profound connection between nature and the human spirit. Curwood's evocative prose and vivid imagery draw readers into the depths of the forests and rivers, while themes of exploration, survival, and self-discovery permeate the narrative. As characters traverse the ancient pathways forged by time, they grapple with both internal and external conflicts, showcasing Curwood's ability to merge adventure with deeper philosophical musings. James Oliver Curwood was a prolific writer and fervent conservationist whose love for nature profoundly influenced his work. Born in 1878, his experiences as a hunter and outdoorsman in the Canadian wilderness enriched his storytelling, facilitating a genuine portrayal of nature rarely seen in literature of his time. Curwood's commitment to capturing the beauty and complexity of the natural world reflects a larger cultural movement towards conservation and appreciation of the environment during the early 20th century. For readers yearning for an immersive experience that transcends mere storytelling, "The Ancient Highway" is a compelling exploration of adventure and self. Curwood's masterful narrative will resonate with those who seek a deeper understanding of humanity's relationship with the wild. This book is a must-read for enthusiasts of nature writing, adventure, and those intrigued by the philosophical undercurrents of early American literature. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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The Ancient Highway
Table of Contents
Introduction
Between the tug of civilization and the call of the wild, The Ancient Highway follows lives driven onto an older road than maps can mark—the human crossing between duty and desire. James Oliver Curwood, famed for tales of endurance and moral testing, shapes that road into a story where personal loyalty contends with harsh landscapes and harder choices. The novel’s very title suggests movement along a path worn by generations, a journey that is at once geographic and inward. Readers meet characters pressed by fate toward encounters that ask what must be kept, what may be risked, and what cannot be abandoned when the trail narrows.
As a work of adventure infused with romance, the novel belongs to the frontier tradition that Curwood popularized for mass audiences. First appearing during the 1920s, it reflects an era when American and Canadian wilderness narratives drew readers seeking both escape and moral clarity. Its action unfolds amid remote country and isolated settlements where scarcity sharpens decisions and reputations travel faster than formal law. Within this frame, Curwood balances suspense with tenderness, letting landscape pressure the heart as much as the body. The result is a concise, propulsive narrative that situates private dilemmas against elemental weather, distance, and the wary watchfulness of strangers.
The premise is simple and evocative without requiring foreknowledge. A traveler bound by an older obligation takes to the trail, and a woman whose expectations were formed elsewhere finds herself drawn into the same orbit; the path they share becomes a testing ground for trust. Early chapters establish pursuit and evasion, rough camps and wary conversations, with danger near enough to quicken decisions but not reduce people to types. The novel’s initial turns revolve around whether promises to the past can withstand the claims of the present. What begins as a journey of necessity steadily deepens into a reckoning with identity, choice, and belonging.
Curwood’s voice is direct and unpretentious, built of clean sentences, crisp dialogue, and passages that pause to regard light, water, snow, and silence with quiet intensity. The pace is swift, yet the book invites attention to gesture and small acts of care that mark trust’s slow formation. Readers will notice an old-fashioned but sincere sentimentality yoked to taut episodes of pursuit, concealment, and negotiation. The tone remains earnest and compassionate even when danger closes in, resisting cynicism while acknowledging real costs. Throughout, the narrative favors moral clarity without didacticism, allowing weather, fatigue, and risk to reveal character more persuasively than speeches could.
Several themes stand out with persistent resonance. The contest between law and justice appears whenever formal authority meets frontier necessity, asking what fairness requires when rules lag behind circumstance. Civilization and wilderness are less enemies than interlocutors, each exposing the other’s limits and possibilities. The ancient highway itself operates as image and argument: a track of tradition, memory, and instinct that people follow long before they can explain why. Courage here is patient, cumulative, and shared, emerging from companionship as much as individual heroics. Love, when it arrives, is not a thunderbolt but a discipline, directing movement through uncertainty rather than eclipsing it.
These concerns speak clearly to contemporary readers living amid rapid change and contested obligations. The book’s attention to stewardship and interdependence anticipates current environmental conversations, insisting that landscapes are not mere backdrops but partners in every choice. Its portrayal of strength—measured by restraint, reliability, and care—offers a counterweight to brittle postures of dominance. The story also models how trust is built across difference in places where resources are thin and time is short, a lesson equally at home in crowded cities and quiet towns. In an age of instant messages and constant tracking, it restores the drama of delay, distance, and faith.
Approached today, The Ancient Highway feels like a compact atlas of moral travel, a map of crossings where allegiance, affection, and necessity converge. It is a representative gateway into Curwood’s body of outdoor fiction, carrying his hallmark blend of grit, scenic immediacy, and humane resolve. Without leaning on nostalgia, it reminds us that speed rarely substitutes for purpose and that character is revealed in how one keeps going. Readers who take this road will find action enough to quicken the pulse and quietness enough to enlarge reflection. The book endures because its questions are perennial, and the path it traces is still walked.
Synopsis
James Oliver Curwood’s The Ancient Highway unfolds as a wilderness adventure shaped by an old trail that predates the novel’s characters and seems to guide their choices. The story begins with a traveler compelled onto this age-worn route, where rivers, portages, and forest corridors form a continuous path through the North. Curwood sets a steady pace, establishing the physical tests of distance, weather, and solitude while hinting at moral tests to come. The trail itself acts as a living presence, a reminder that others passed before and will follow after, and the protagonist’s first steps mark a departure from the familiar into demanding country.
Early chapters trace movement from known settlements toward increasingly remote country, where outposts thin and the sounds of the wild replace human noise. Signs on the trail—abandoned camps, old blaze marks, a canoe’s faint scar along a landing—suggest other lives in parallel, some benevolent, some dangerous. Curwood uses practical details of travel to anchor the narrative: the weight of gear, the discipline of food stores, the vigilance for changing skies. The plot turns on choices at forks both literal and figurative, establishing a conflict between personal conscience and the expediencies of survival and trade.
At a pivotal juncture, the traveler’s path converges with another figure whose fate is bound to the same road. Necessity forges cooperation—first cautious, then interdependent—as shared hardship clarifies character. Gradually, backstories surface in fragments, revealing obligations that extend beyond immediate safety. Curwood balances camaraderie with an undercurrent of secrecy; the wilderness compresses time and distances, intensifying every decision. What begins as partnership becomes a test of loyalty against pressure from unseen forces, and the ancient highway, with its long memory, frames their growing bond as part of something older than either of them.
Opposition gathers through human adversaries and the impersonal bite of the land. Curwood places the pair between competing claims: the lure of quick profit and domination versus restraint, responsibility, and respect for the country. Pursuit and evasion sequences tighten the plot without exhausting it, while small acts—sharing a fire, reading weather off treetops, sparing a creature—define moral boundaries. The conflict does not reduce to good and evil alone; it circles questions of rightful use, promise-keeping, and the cost of breaking from precedent. The road’s history becomes a silent witness, measuring motives against the long flow of travelers.
A crisis deep in the backcountry shifts the narrative from flight to endurance. Illness, injury, or sudden scarcity forces new calculations, and Curwood emphasizes ingenuity over spectacle. The ancient highway becomes both map and metaphor: a line through danger and an inheritance of accumulated knowledge. Moments of quiet—stars over a frozen reach, wind dragging along spruce—reveal how close the protagonists stand to the limits of their strength. Trust, now earned, guides the next steps. Their situation narrows the options to a few decisive moves that must balance safety with the imperatives that first set them on the trail.
In the approach to resolution, competing truths surface, and revelations reframe earlier events without overturning the story’s restraint. Curwood orchestrates a confrontation that requires judgment as much as courage, leaving room for mercy and accountability. The characters weigh what they owe to each other, to absent companions, and to the land whose hazards shaped them. Outcomes remain aligned with the novel’s ethics: that strength unmoored from responsibility corrodes, and that belonging demands more than possession. The closing movement returns to the highway’s continuity, where departures become arrivals for those who will follow, and choices echo farther than intended.
Within Curwood’s early twentieth-century adventure tradition, The Ancient Highway endures for its fusion of brisk narrative, elemental setting, and questions that outlast the journey: What claims does the land make on those who cross it? How should power be used where law is thin and consequences are wide? The novel reflects Curwood’s broader reputation for northern romances that respect the wild while probing human motives. Its restraint with revelation keeps the final turns intact, yet its images—a worn portage, a river bend, a fire at dusk—linger. The book’s broader significance lies in treating travel as inheritance, obligation, and measure of character.
Historical Context
Published in 1925, The Ancient Highway by American novelist James Oliver Curwood (1878–1927) arrived in a decade of mass-market adventure fiction and rapid social change. Curwood, one of the United States’ best-selling authors of his day, built his reputation on northern romances set in the Canadian and Alaskan wilderness. He wrote many later works from his turreted studio, “Curwood Castle,” completed in 1922 at Owosso, Michigan. His novels commonly appeared first in widely read magazines before book publication, reaching audiences attuned to rugged tales of endurance, love, and law on the frontier during the Roaring Twenties’ urbanizing, consumer-oriented culture.
Curwood’s northern settings drew on real institutions shaping life above the 49th parallel. The Hudson’s Bay Company, chartered in 1670, still operated far-flung trading posts, mediating exchange of fur, provisions, and news. The Royal North-West Mounted Police, created in 1873 to assert Canadian law across the prairies and the North, merged in 1920 with the Dominion Police to form the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. By the mid-1920s the RCMP patrolled the Yukon and Northwest Territories, providing policing, customs, and rescue services from isolated detachments. These frameworks of trade and authority underpin the novel’s emphasis on order, obligation, and survival in sparsely governed spaces.
Late nineteenth‑century resource rushes had left a durable imprint on the Far North. The Klondike Gold Rush (1896–1899) transformed the Yukon’s Dawson City into a transient metropolis, forged supply routes over the Chilkoot and White passes, and crowded the Yukon River with sternwheelers. Subsequent stampedes rippled into Alaska, including Nome after 1899. When the booms faded, trails, caches, and river highways remained, supporting trappers, mail carriers, and small traders. Long before these rushes, Indigenous peoples—among them Dene, Cree, and Inuit communities—maintained networks of portages and winter trails. Curwood’s narrative world emerges from this layered geography of ancient paths adapted to modern pursuits.
Travel and communication in the early twentieth‑century North were slow, seasonal, and perilous. Winter movement relied on snowshoes and dog teams; summer on canoes, bateaux, and, where possible, sternwheelers along major rivers. Railways reached staging points, but deep northern interiors lacked roads. Telegraph lines extended irregularly, and mail often moved by sled. Civil aviation began to touch the subarctic in the 1920s, yet bush flying was nascent and weatherbound. Such constraints made distance, isolation, and timing decisive facts of life. The Ancient Highway draws dramatic tension from these realities, where decisions carry physical risk and landscapes impose limits on ambition and justice.
Law and governance in the circumpolar frontier operated with lean personnel and wide jurisdictions. RCMP and earlier RNWMP patrols traveled hundreds of miles by sled to investigate crimes, deliver mail, collect customs, and regulate the liquor trade. Magistrates convened hearings in trading posts or detachment offices, sometimes months after an event. On the American side, the Territory of Alaska (established 1912) functioned under federal oversight with U.S. marshals and judges stationed far apart. This institutional sparseness, documented in official reports and patrol diaries, informs Curwood’s plots of duty and accountability, where character and reputation often carry as much weight as statute.
The northern economy that Curwood depicts stood at the crossroads of tradition and modern markets. The centuries‑old fur trade persisted, with companies purchasing pelts of beaver, marten, mink, and fox, while the early 1920s witnessed a speculative craze for silver fox pelts and fox‑farming ventures. Mineral exploration continued in the Yukon and Alaska following the Klondike era, though on a smaller scale. Governments expanded game regulations and licensed trapping to manage dwindling stocks, consistent with a wider North American trend toward wildlife oversight after 1900. Against this backdrop, the novel’s conflicts echo tensions between subsistence, profit, and the ethics of extraction.
Curwood’s authorial perspective was shaped by the conservation movement’s rise. After years of northern travel and hunting, he publicly embraced wildlife protection, championing sanctuaries and stricter game laws in Michigan during the 1920s. Across the continent, institutions advanced similar aims: the U.S. National Park Service formed in 1916, and Canada created Wood Buffalo National Park in 1922 to protect the wood bison. Predator bounties, common earlier, increasingly faced criticism from scientists and advocates. Curwood’s late novels often portray animals with agency and dignity, reflecting a shift from conquest to stewardship—a tone that tempers adventure with moral inquiry into humanity’s place in wild ecosystems.
Popular publishing and cinema amplified Curwood’s reach and context for The Ancient Highway. His stories commonly appeared in high‑circulation magazines before hardcovers, and numerous Curwood titles became silent films in the 1910s and 1920s, situating him alongside Jack London in a thriving market for northern adventure. Readers in the Roaring Twenties—amid urban growth, automobiles, and electrification—sought narratives that celebrated endurance, loyalty, and elemental justice outside modern bustle. The novel participates in that cultural conversation, affirming frontier virtues while scrutinizing exploitation and haste. In doing so, it mirrors its era’s ambivalence toward progress, proposing the wilderness as both test and corrective.
The Ancient Highway
CHAPTER I
Clifton Brant believed himself to be only one of innumerable flying grains of human dust in a world gone mad[1q]. And among these grains he knew himself to be a misfit. For which reason he was walking the wide highway from Brantford Town[1] in Ontario to the ancient city of Quebec on the St. Lawrence, an unimportant matter of seven hundred miles or so, not counting the distance he would travel in crossing and recrossing the road on the way.
In the scale with which he was measuring life at the present moment time had no specific value for him, just as his objective was neither far nor near. People passed him, smothering him in the dust of their thirty and forty and fifty miles an hour, and wondered who he was. There was something picturesque about him, and worth remembering. He was, without shouting or advertising the fact, an adventurer. People sensed that quality about him after they had left him behind in a cloud of dirt. He caught their attention even as they bore down upon him—his lithe, khaki-clad form, the clean, free swing of his shoulders which bore a worn knapsack, his easy stride, as if he had walked from the beginning of the world—and then, as they passed him, the quick, flashing gray of his eyes, the debonair wave of his hand, a smile, a nod—and someone would ask, "Who do you think that man could be?"
"Out of a job and hoofing it to the next town," one would submit.
"An ex-soldier, by his walk," another would suggest.
"Or one of those walking idiots out on a week's vacation"—this from a man who curled up and snapped whenever his wife asked a question about another man.
And behind them, spitting out their dust, Clifton Brant wondered what life could hold for people who went through it always on four wheels questing out its beauties at a-mile-a-minute speed.
The golden sun was hanging low behind the spires and maple-clad hills of Brantford Town when he swung from the main highway into a road that angled southward. It was a modest and inconspicuous little road, slanting downward as it ran, carpeted with soft dust and winding between cool and shadowy thickets of bushes and trees in which the birds were beginning their evening song.
A thickening came into Clifton's throat and his heart beat a little faster as he looked ahead of him, for it was more than twenty years ago that his feet had last traveled this way. He was sixteen then, and barefooted. And time had been kind to the little road, he thought. The velvety dust was the same, and he caught himself looking for the imprints of his naked feet as he waded through it; and the trees were the same, seeming not to have grown in those twenty years, and the thickets of his boyhood sprang up one by one, with the big rocks between—only the rocks seemed smaller now than when he was a boy, and the hollows seemed a bit less steep, and the Big Woods, still uncut, held less of their old mystery and fearsomeness in the shadowing depths of sunset. A smile crept gently over his face, and in that smile were the pathos and joyous grief of reminiscence, of precious memories rising in his path and of faded years stirring with life again.
Verging on forty, he felt his boyhood was only yesterday. He was foolish, he told himself, to allow things to come back to him so vividly. And he had been unwise to return at all to this little road and its hallowed past. He had not thought it would hurt quite so much, or that such a vast and encompassing loneliness would descend upon him.
Almost as if a danger might lie in his path he paused hesitatingly at the top of a little hill which in childhood had been a big hill to him, and made his way through a fringe of thick brush and over a rail fence. The birds twittered about him. A yellow-breasted chat scolded him and a kingbird sent up a warning cry or two. Then he heard the twitter of swallows and caught the shiny flash of their wings over the clearing which lay just beyond the fence. A lump rose in his throat. It was as if the same swallows he had known and envied and loved as a boy were there still, dipping and shooting and sweeping the air as they cast about for their suppers among the insects that rose up from the earth at sunset. And there, just a little way ahead, was what he had once called home.
He was not ashamed of tears, in spite of the fact that he had passed through searing fires and had seen much that is hard for a man to look upon. He could not keep them back from his eyes and he did not try to wipe them away.
The old home was a ruin. Fire had gutted it and its walls of flat stones picked up from slate and sandstone ledges had fallen in. One end wall stood triumphant above the desolation, and this was the end which held the big fireplace chimney. He was born on a cold winter night when a fire had roared in that chimney. And before it he had dreamed his first dreams of conquest and adventure in the wonderful world which reached for such illimitable distances about him.
He went nearer and walked slowly about this ghost of a habitation which had once been home. He was surprised at its smallness. He had always carried with him the impression that this first and only home of his had been little less than a castle, at least three times as large as it now appeared to be. He chuckled, though he did not feel happy. Childhood memories were funny things. They were best left alone if one did not want to feel real grief. And what had been the inside of the house was pathetically small, now that he measured it with the eyes of a man.
The whole was overgrown with creeping vines and bushes. There were blackberry and dewberry vines with green fruit; bitter-sweet had tangled itself among the stones; wild cucumbers festooned one side of the chimney, and long grass had grown up quickly to cover the scars of dissolution. And other life was there. A pair of thrushes hopped about unafraid of him. A golden humming-bird flashed in and dipped at the honey-sweet hearts of red clover blooms. A yellow warbler dared to sing and the swallows were using the old chimney for a home.
Over near the fence he heard a red squirrel chatter, and the sound drew his eyes. There had always been a red squirrel in the old hollow oak near the fence, usually a family of them. The oak had changed amazingly, Clifton thought. He had remembered it as the biggest tree that had ever painted a picture of itself in his brain; now it was a most ordinary oak, not nearly as large as some he had seen up the road. His father had made him a swing in that tree, and his mother had played with him a thousand times in its shade.
His eyes turned from the tree, and suddenly his heart gave a queer jump.
For a moment his sensation was almost one of shock. Half a stone's throw away was a huge boulder from under which had always bubbled the icy water of a spring. Near this spring, looking at him, stood a boy—a boy and a dog. And this boy, as Clifton remembered himself, was the boy who had played about and drunk at that same spring a quarter of a century ago.
He was a pale, slim, rather pathetic-looking object who seemed to have grown mostly to legs. He had on the same old hat, too, a straw hat with a ragged brim and a broken crown; and his knee pants were too short, as Clifton's had always been, and were of the blue overall stuff which he could remember as clearly as he remembered Bim, his dog, who was buried down at the edge of the woods. And it seemed to Clifton the dog, as well as the boy, had come like an apparition out of the past. For it was a "hound-dog," a mongrel, just as loyal old Bim had been; a yellowish dog with loppy ears, big joints and over-grown feet and a clublike tail in which every joint was a knot.
Clifton saw all this as he drew nearer, smiling at them. The boy did not move, but remained staring, holding tightly to a stick, while the dog's big, lank body pressed closer to him, as if to protect him. Then, at close range, Clifton observed other things. The beast's ribs were as prominent as the knots in his tail, and in his eyes and attitude was a hungry look. The boy, too, was thinner than he should have been. His waist was ragged. The bottoms of his pants were in frayed tatters. He had blue eyes, wide-open, straight, strangely old but beautiful blue eyes, in a face which was too white and which was troubled with the same hungry look that was in the dog's.
"Hello, you and your dog," greeted Clifton, with a comradely grin. "Is the water still running?"
"Sure," replied the boy. "It always runs. We keep it dug out—me an' Bim."
"You and—who?"
"Bim. That's my dog, here."
Slowly Clifton took off his pack. "You and—Bim!" he repeated. "And your name doesn't happen to be Cliff, does it?—and your nickname Skinny?"
The boy eyed him wonderingly. "No. My name is Joe. What you carrying in that bag?"
"And where did you find that name—Bim—for your pup?" asked Clifton.
"Down there in a beech tree. It's cut deep in with a knife. An' there's figgers, but they've faded out. That's a funny-lookin' bag you got!"
Clifton turned away a moment. He could see the big beech tree under whose sheltering arms he had dug Bim's grave, and where he had worked the whole of one Sunday afternoon in carving his comrade's epitaph. His mother had helped him, and had comforted him when he cried. He was ten then, so it must have been twenty-eight years ago.
"Dear God, but life is even less than a dream," he whispered to himself.
The boy was inspecting his pack.
"What you got in this bag?" he demanded again. "It looks like a sojer[2]'s bag."
"It is," said Clifton.
The boy's blue eyes widened.
"You a sojer?"
"I was."
"An' you—you've killed people?"
"I'm afraid so, Joe."
For several seconds the boy held his breath. Bim was cautiously smelling the stranger, and Clifton laid a hand caressingly on his head. "Hello, Bim, old comrade. Are you glad I've come back?"
The mongrel licked his hand and wagged his knotty tail.
"What do you mean—come back?" asked the boy. "You been here before?"
"Sure," replied Clifton. "I used to live in that pile of stones when I was a boy, Joe. It was a house then. I was born there. And I had a dog named Bim. He died, and I buried him under the old beech tree down there, and carved his name in the trunk. This isn't your spring. It's mine!"
He tried to laugh as he knelt down to drink. But there was a choking in his heart that seemed to have taken away his thirst. When he got up the boy had tossed his old hat on the ground beside the pack. He was tow-headed, with freckles in his pale skin.
"What you got in this here bag?" he asked again.
An inspiration came to Clifton.
"I've got—supper," he said. "Do you suppose your folks will mind if you stay here and eat with me—you and Bim?"
A look of surprise, and then of pleasure, came into the boy's face.
"We'll stay," he said.
"But your folks? I don't want to get you and Bim into trouble. When I was a kid and wasn't home at supper time my father used to go to those big lilac bushes you see out there, and break off a switch—"
"I ain't got any folks," interrupted Joe hastily, as if to settle any possible objection the stranger might have. "We'll like as not get it anyway, if old Tooker is home, won't we, Bim?"—turning to his dog.
Bim wagged his tail affirmatively, but his hungry eyes did not leave the pack which the man was slowly opening.
"No folks?" queried Clifton softly. "Why not?"
"Dead, I guess. Old Tooker says I was wished on 'im. Mis' Tooker ain't so bad, but she's bad enough. They both hate Bim. He never goes home but just hangs around in the edge of the woods waiting for me. I get him what I can to eat an' we hunt the rest. That's a dandy kit, ain't it?"
Clifton was undoing his aluminum cooking outfit—a skillet, coffee pail, plates, cups, knives and forks—and paused for a moment with a brown parcel in his hand. Bim grew suddenly stiff-legged and thrust out his long neck to get a sniff of it.
"Meat!" exclaimed the boy. "Bim knows it. He can smell meat a mile away—meat an' chickens. Watch out or he'll lam it!"
"You mean—"
"Grab it. He's quick on meat an' chickens, Bim is!"
Clifton drew out two big onions, a link of bologna, half a loaf of bread made into buttered sandwiches, four oranges and a glass of marmalade. This stock, with a pound and a half of fresh beef ground into hamburger, he had planned as sufficient for both his supper and breakfast. The bologna was an emergency asset.
He smiled up at Joe, whose eyes had grown larger and rounder with each additional appearance of food. He had a hand gripped firmly in the folds of loose hide on Bim's neck.
"Look out for your bolony!" he gasped. "Bim's awful quick!"
Clifton held out a pack-strap. "Better tie Bim up until we're ready," he advised. "This bologna is especially for Bim, but we'll make him wait and eat with us like a gentleman. Heigh-ho! Now for some wood, Joe. We're going to have a great feast!"
He stood up, and for a moment watched Joe as he dragged the reluctant Bim to a near-by tree. And in this moment he became conscious of an amazing change in himself. The loneliness which had oppressed him all that day of his "home-coming" was gone. Tragedy and pain had crushed him a few minutes ago when he had looked upon the crumbled and overgrown ruin of what had once been his home, the shrine forever hallowed by the presence of mother, father, his dog—and boyhood. In those minutes he had felt and seen only the melancholy ghosts of dissolution and death, of broken dreams, of grief and the emptiness of life.
Now in the strange and swift reaction which swept through him he saw about him a sweet and wondrous beauty. There was no longer gloom or a suffocating heaviness weighing down his heart. The thrushes were singing their praise of the glorious sunset in the western sky. In the oak tree the red squirrel and his mate were scampering in play. Out of the woods came a low, familiar drone of life; a catbird offered up its incomparable melody from a thicket near the rail fence, and he sensed a new joyousness of greeting in the softer, lower twittering of the swallows skimming over his head. His heart beat a little faster. He raised his head and drank more deeply of the cool air of evening, and suddenly it came to him that the great and glorious nature which was his god had made itself a tenant here and lay like a benediction upon all that had ever been.
And then the truth pressed upon him as his eyes went back to the boy and the dog.
They had made this change for him!
He began to whistle as he gathered dry sticks of wood. The boy ran back and helped, his eyes shining and his voice a-tremble with the thrill of his wonderful adventure, while Bim settled back on his haunches after one mournful howl and waited like a stoic.
A thin white spiral of smoke rose in the sunset.
And in their new comradeship the boy became the inquisitor.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Clifton Brant. You may call me Uncle Cliff."
"You got a dog?"
"Yes. You took my old Bim's name so I'm half owner in your Bim."
They peeled and cut up the onions. Water simmered in the coffee pail. The skillet grew hot and thick patties of hamburger sizzled as they were dropped into it.
"You got any folks here?"
"I'm like you, Joe. I haven't any folks anywhere."
"Whadda you do?"
"Oh, I just sort of wander round. I'm what they call a—an adventurer."
"What's that?"
"Can you read, Joe?"
"I'm in the sixth grade. They make old Tooker send me to school."
"Ever read a pirate story?"
"You bet!"
"Well, a pirate is an adventurer."
The boy gave a sudden gasp.
"Gee whiz, are you a pirate?"
"A—sort of one," laughed Clifton.
"An' you kill people?"
"All adventurers don't kill people, Joe. Some of them just pretty near kill people, and then let them go."
The boy did not know the meaning of the steely flash which came for a moment into Clifton's eyes.
"You goin' to stay here?" he whispered worshipfully.
"No. I'm going on tomorrow."
A blue jay screamed in the oak. Bim howled again. For a space the boy no longer smelled the delicious aroma of frying hamburger and onions.
"Why don't you stay?" he asked. "What you goin' on for?"
Clifton laughed. He leaned over and took the boy's thin face between his two hands. Even with the laugh the steely glitter was not yet gone out of his eyes.
"I'm on my way to collect a debt of a million dollars, Joe," he said. "I've been on my way for a long time, and now I'm almost there. That's why I can't stay. Understand?"
The boy nodded. "I guess so," he said. "Can I bring Bim now?"
CHAPTER II
West of Brantford Town the sun sank behind maple hills as they ate.
Clifton was hungry, but he held his appetite in leash as he watched the boy and the dog, yet appeared not to notice them at all. For the boy's hunger was a thing that made him think of starvation, and Bim swallowed chunks of bologna with gulping sounds that emanated from the very depths of his being. Quite frankly Joe confided that he tried to smuggle to Bim a part of the food which was given him each day at old Tooker's.
"When we have milk an' boiled meal Bim goes pretty hungry because I can't sneak that in my pockets," he added.
"Who is Tooker, and what does he do?"
"He's just Tooker, an' I never see him do much of anything. Riley's boy told me once that his dad said Tooker peddled likker to the Indians on the reservation. When I asked Tooker if he did he whaled the life out of me an' told me if I didn't lick Riley's kid the next time I saw him he'd whale me ag'in. I tried it, but I couldn't lick Slippy Riley. He licked me. An' then old Tooker whaled me until Bim run in from the woods an' took a chunk out of his leg. Looky here—"
He bent over and pulled up his ragged waist. His thin white back was streaked with the scars of a lash.
"He did that day before yesterday because Bim and me come on him way down in the swampiest part of Bumble's Holler cooking something in a queer-lookin' kettle over a fire."
"The devil!" said Clifton.
He changed the subject, and after a little the boy leaned back with a deep sigh, his hands on his stomach.
"I'm full," he said. "An' I guess Bim is, too. Want me to wash the dishes?"
They leaned together over the little pool and scrubbed the dishes with white sand, then dried them in the air. The last red glow of sunset was fading away when they climbed the rail fence and struck the soft white dust of the road.
The boy's face was filled with a grave anxiety as they walked down the road side by side.
"Where you goin' tonight?" he asked.
"As far as the little church and the cemetery."
"The old Indian church?"
"Yes."
"I'm goin' that far. Tooker's is the second house beyond."
He waited a moment, and his hand touched Clifton's arm timidly.
"You got anybody there—dead ones, I mean?"
"My mother, Joe."
"You ain't an Indian?"
"A part of me. My mother's grandmother was a Mohawk princess. She is buried there, too."
A silence fell upon them. The boy's bare feet made soft little pattering sounds in the thick dust, and behind them came Bim, so that looking back Clifton saw a trail which was very much like his own of many years ago. Twilight was falling and shadows were growing deeper in the thickets, and pale gloom descended like a veil upon the land about them. In the grass at the roadsides crickets chirped, and ahead and behind them tree-toads called their half-hearted promises of rain.
It was that part of evening which Clifton loved, yet in its stillness and peace was an unspeakable loneliness for him, and this loneliness seemed to fall upon the boy. A small hand gripped his sleeve and Clifton's fingers closed about it. For a little while longer they did not speak. A pair of night-hawks gave their musical calls over their heads, and from a long distance came the soft tolling of a bell. Then a rabbit scurried down the road like a torpedo shooting through the dust, and with a sudden wail Bim took after it.
The boy's fingers tightened. Ahead of them a darker glow grew in the twilight where the patch of maples and evergreens marked the churchyard.
"I'm sorry you're goin' on tomorrow," said Joe, and his voice seemed very faint and tired. "I wish we was goin' with you—Bim and me."
"I wish you were," said Clifton.
They came to the high bank where the church stood and the evergreens grew. And here, at the beginning of the worn foot-path which led up to the picket fence and the old-fashioned gate, Clifton stopped.
"You ain't goin' to stop here—now?" whispered Joe, with eyes that grew big in the dusk. "It's dark!"
"Adventurers aren't afraid of the dark," Clifton laughed softly, "or of graves. I'm going to sleep in the churchyard tonight. They're beautiful, Joe—churchyards, I mean. Everybody's your friend, there."
"Ugh!" shuddered the boy. "Bim—Bim—where you goin'?" The dog had moved away, but came back and snuggled close to his master's legs.
"You'd better run along now," urged Clifton. "I'll stand here until you are well down the road. Maybe—in the morning—I'll happen to see you again. Good night!"
"Good night!"
The boy drew away, and as he went it seemed to Clifton that something dragged itself out of him to accompany this ragged and barefoot youngster of the highway. Half a dozen times before he disappeared in the gloom Joe turned and looked back, and when at last the twilight swallowed him, with Bim trailing at his heels, Clifton went slowly up the little path and passed through the open gate.
He wondered, as he paused inside the gate, what the world would think of him if it could know what he was doing tonight. Would it call him a little mad? Or would it put him down as a sentimental fool in a day and age which had lost its sentiment? For surely it would not understand a man in his normal senses coming to sleep among the dead.
It still lacked a few minutes of darkness and he could make out the little cemetery quite clearly, with its crumbling gray headstones and the old board church. He knew there was no change, for this place never changed. It had not changed in nearly two hundred years. He went to the front of the church and looked up. There, indistinct in the dusk, was the time-worn tablet whose words he had learned by heart in boyhood, telling the occasional passer-by that this was the first church built in Ontario, and that it was erected by His Gracious Majesty King George the Third for his "children," the people of the Iroquois nation. It was Indian then. It was Indian now. In the plot of ground about him slept the dust of hundreds.
He took off his knapsack and hung it on the end of a box-like rack at the corner of the church. In the rack was a cracked bronze bell, and on the bell was the same ancient date as above. He had often played on it with sticks when a boy. Now he tapped it with his knuckles and found its melody still there.
He sat down and waited for the moon.
And now, it seemed to him, his mother came in the softness of the evening and sat beside him near the old bell.
The moon came up. It rose in the clear, where the trees thinned out. In their play his mother and he had had a lot of fun with the moon. It had been very much alive for them, and when dressed up in its various poses and humors they had given it different names. Sometimes it was a very gentlemanly old moon, with a stiff collar and a tilted chin; at others it was a Man out for Fun, with a cock-sure look in his eye. But best of all they had loved their Man in the Moon when he had the mumps. And it was the Mumpy Moon that came up tonight, with a head askew and one cheek swollen, as if he had been trampled under a cart and horse. But always, when the Man in the Moon had the mumps, he also had a jolly smile in his broad, fat face and a merry twinkle in his eyes.
"And when you are sick or things are going wrong you must always remember the Man in the Moon when he has the mumps," the mother had impressed upon Clifton. "It is then, when he is feeling very badly, that he laughs at us and winks. That is what the brave old moon does, and all brave men do the same."
Clifton remembered. He remembered so vividly that a strange thrill ran through him as he stood up to watch the transformation which the moon was making in the darkness and shadows about him. Objects began to take form and the trees grew out of night. Light played on the old bell and crept warmly over the church. It fell on the iron grating and stone tomb of Thayendanegea[3]—of Joseph Brant, the Mohawk, greatest of the Iroquois. He saw the earth slowly taking new form on all sides of him, rising in little mounds that were marked with old and crumbling stones. And there were mounds and little hollows from which even the dust of stone had been eaten away by the centuries. Here were drama, romance, adventure and unspeakable tragedy—here where the last and the greatest of the chivalry of the Six Nations lay buried in a refuge given them by an English king when their blood-soaked empire was lost south of the friendly Canadas.
And they were his mother's people, and his people. He had always been proud of that. And the memory which came back to him so vividly now was of another night when his mother and he had watched the moon light up this acre of silence just as it was doing now. Their dead was what they had called these sleeping ones. His mother had known their tragic history and the stories and legends that reached back a hundred years beyond that; and she had told him they were so many here they slept one above another, and sometimes in twos and threes and with arms and shoulders touching—forgotten and nameless ones, buried even before King George built his church or ever a white man had come this way.
He passed out among them, and over him came a strange sense of restfulness and peace, as if he had reached home after a long and arduous struggle. He did not feel again the thickening in his throat or the tightening at his heart when he stood at last beside the spot where his mother lay. That had passed, and his emotion was one of gladness and a sort of exultation. It had taken him many years to achieve this moment, and he was amazed at the tranquillity which became almost instantly a part of it.
In a little while he spread out his blanket and sat down and then he lighted his pipe and began to smoke. The incongruity of it all did not strike him. He had sat and slept with the dead when they were above the ground and it did not embarrass him to be with them when they were a part of it. The thought that remained with him was that he had been traveling in a circle for twenty-two years and had at last come back to the starting point.
He was rather disturbed by the fact that he soon surrendered to the desire to stretch himself flat on his back with his pneumatic pillow under his head. It was his quixotic notion that the act was a selfish one. But he was tired, and the carpet of cedar needles under his blanket was soft to lie upon. Occasionally he closed his eyes as he looked up at the sky. The stars made him think of the tree-toads and the falseness of their prophecy. And he wondered if Joe had another whipping to his credit, and if old man Tooker was down in Bumble's Hollow cooking something in a queer-looking kettle over a fire.
Tomorrow he might look into it, for he knew that very spot where Tooker would undoubtedly hide.
Then, he planned sleepily, he would go on and collect his million dollars.
He smiled, and his eyes grew heavier. On that adventure the spirit of Molly Brant would go with him. For this she had waited, as he had waited, and they would collect the debt together.
And when it was over—
The wise-eyed old owl in the thick evergreen tops above him knew when he slept. The bird hooted softly and drifted out into the moonlight and away to its open hunting-fields. The night grew cooler and the aroma of the earth lay heavier as the hours passed. Overhead the moon climbed higher and began its descent into the west. The owl returned and croaked from the belfry tower. Darkness followed moonlight as the crickets and katydids hushed their cries, and out of the east crept dawn.
In that dawn Clifton dreamed. He stood with his mother in the cemetery, and he was a boy again. And Molly Brant was as he had so often seen her at his father's side, with her dark eyes afire with love and laughter and her long hair in a girlish braid down her back. They were alone, hand in hand, and suddenly all about them the earth began giving up its dead.
Chieftains rose to salute them and warriors sprang up so swiftly that very soon it was beyond his power to count them. They were in war-paint and feathers and ready for battle, and behind them, gathered in a great circle, were countless women and children. And in his dream Clifton saw that his mother and he were the center of this gathering host, and that his mother stood with her hand raised above her head, as if she were princess of them all.
The chieftains advanced toward them one by one, and he knew them as they came—first Red Jacket the eloquent young Seneca, with his eternal plea for peace with the white men on his lips; then Cornplanter, the terror of the Mohawk settlements, fierce and implacable, and Peter Martin the Oneida, and after them—tall and calm and splendid in his power—Joseph Brant, the Mohawk, chief of all the Iroquois nation. And they bent their heads to his mother!
And then Thayendanegea began to speak.
"Tomorrow you seek vengeance," he said. "It is well. The Iroquois go with you!"
"You will find strife and death and unhappiness," interposed the peaceful Seneca. "The hatchet is rusty. Let it remain so."
"Only cowards like the backsliding Oneidas fear those three things," boomed the Mohawk in a voice that rolled like the deep beating of a drum.
"The Senecas are not cowards—yet I fear."
"I am an Oneida—and I do not fear," said Peter Martin.
In his dream Clifton saw a sudden break in the circle of warriors as an Indian girl ran through and knelt at the feet of his mother. It seemed she had run fast or far, for she could scarcely speak as she raised her bare arms. His mother bent down to her so that she could hear her whispered words, and in those few moments Clifton heard his own name spoken.
Then his mother stood erect, and faced the chiefs.
"Tomorrow we go," she said, and a murmur of approbation came from all except the Seneca, who stooped sadly to gather up a handful of earth and throw it westward over his shoulder.
A part of the earth struck Clifton in the face. It was soft and warm. And in that moment he saw a strange and amazing transformation in the girl kneeling at his mother's feet. She was no longer Indian, but a white girl, and she was looking straight at him with laughter on her lips and in her eyes. He felt himself grow uncomfortable and tried to wipe the wet dirt from his face, but no sooner did he remove it from one spot than it came back on another, and the greater effort he made the more amused she seemed to be.
In sudden rage he turned upon Red Jacket and found the Seneca gone. The Indian host was melting away and the going of the last of it was like the dissolution of shadow before swift dawn. He turned again, and his mother had disappeared. Only the girl and he were left, and it seemed to him this impertinent young person disfigured her pretty nose in making faces at him as she faded away, like the others, into nothingness.
A fresh bit of the warm, soft dirt struck Clifton on the cheek and roused him to a comprehension of other phenomena. He found himself suddenly lying flat on his back with his eyes wide open and he could see tree tops with the filtering gold of sunlight in them. A bird was singing.
Then appeared a grotesque head between him and the light above and Bim's warm and friendly tongue caressed him again.
He sat up.
"The deuce take me if it wasn't a perfectly ripping dream," he said; and then added, "Good morning, Bim!"
CHAPTER III
Clifton rose and stretched himself as Bim wagged his tail and contorted his loosely jointed body in greeting. It was at least an hour after his usual waking time. The sun was above the horizon, the birds were wide awake, and he heard the rattle of wagon wheels up the road and a distant voice calling cattle. He was pleased as he laid a friendly hand on Bim's homely head and looked about him[2q]. He could not remember a more restful night or a more interesting one and he was filled with a deep appreciation of the thoughtfulness which had inspired the dog's early visit. That was the way with dogs. They never forgot a courtesy. And that was one of the many reasons why he loved them more than all men and respected them more than most.
Dreams were remarkable things, he told himself, as the sun began finding its way in under the trees. For over there, as surely as he lived, was the very spot where the Indian maiden who had turned into a white girl had knelt at his mother's feet, and down that path which led toward the gate she had backed away from him at last, taunting him with her laughter. For a moment he almost fancied he could see Red Jacket's footprints[4] in the bare patch of earth where he had stooped to fill his hand with dirt.
His vision went no farther. At the foot of the spruce tree his eyes fell upon a huddled, crumpled figure which he instantly recognized as Joe. The boy had fallen asleep with his back against the tree and had drooped forward until his head rested between his knees. His ragged hat had rolled away from him and his pale, thin hands were filled with the brown needles as if he had clutched at them in his last moment of wakefulness. There was something pathetically and tragically forlorn about him—in the droop of his slight shoulders, the raggedness of the wretched clothing that covered him, the brown thinness of his legs, the way his thick blond hair fell over his naked knees.
The smile that had been on Clifton's lips died away and the humor in his eyes lost itself in a gathering cloud. He drew nearer and looked down. On the back of the boy's bared neck was a black and blue mark, and one of the sleeves of his waist was torn to the shoulder. For half a minute Clifton made no effort to draw in a deep breath.
