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The Pilot Of Belle Amour
by
Behind it all lay his secret. There came one day a man who discovered it.
It was Pierre, the half-breed adventurer. There was no point in all the wild northland which Pierre had not touched. He loved it as he loved the game of life. He never said so of it, but he never said so of the game of life, and he played it with a deep subterranean joy. He had had his way with the musk-ox in the Arctic Circle; with the white bear at the foot of Alaskan Hills; with the seal in Baffin’s Bay; with the puma on the slope of the Pacific; and now at last he had come upon the trail of Labrador. Its sternness, its moodiness pleased him. He smiled at it the comprehending smile of the man who has fingered the nerves and the heart of men and things. As a traveller, wandering through a prison, looks upon its grim cells and dungeons with the eye of unembarrassed freedom, finding no direful significance in the clank of its iron, so Pierre travelled down with a handful of Indians through the hard fastnesses of that country, and, at last, alone, came upon the bay of Belle Amour.
There was in him some antique touch of refinement and temperament which, in all his evil days and deeds and moments of shy nobility, could find its way into the souls of men with whom the world had had an awkward hour. He was a man of little speech, but he had that rare persuasive penetration which unlocked the doors of trouble, despair, and tragedy. Men who would never have confessed to a priest confessed to him. In his every fibre was the granite of the Indian nature, which looked upon punishment with stoic satisfaction.
In the heart of Labrador he had heard of Gaspard, and had travelled to that point in the compass where he could find him. One day when the sun was fighting hard to make a pathway of light in front of Gaspard’s hut, Pierre rounded a corner of the cliff and fronted Gaspard as he sat there, his eyes idling gloomily with the sea. They said little to each other–in new lands hospitality has not need of speech. When Gaspard and Pierre looked each other in the eyes they knew that one word between them was as a hundred with other men. The heart knows its confessor, and the confessor knows the shadowed eye that broods upon some ghostly secret; and when these are face to face there comes a merciless concision of understanding.
“From where away?” said Gaspard, as he handed some tobacco to Pierre.
“From Hudson’s Bay, down the Red Wolf Plains, along the hills, across the coast country, here.”
“Why?” Gaspard eyed Pierre’s small kit with curiosity; then flung up a piercing, furtive look. Pierre shrugged his shoulders.
“Adventure, adventure,” he answered. “The land”–he pointed north, west, and east–“is all mine. I am the citizen of every village and every camp of the great north.”
The old man turned his head towards a spot up the shore of Belle Amour, before he turned to Pierre again, with a strange look, and said: “Where do you go?”
Pierre followed his gaze to that point in the shore, felt the undercurrent of vague meaning in his voice, guessed what was his cue, and said: “Somewhere, sometime; but now only Belle Amour. I have had a long travel. I have found an open door. I will stay–if you please–hein? If you please?”
Gaspard brooded. “It is lonely,” he replied. “This day it is all bright; the sun shines and the little gay waves crinkle to the shore. But, mon Dieu! sometimes it is all black and ugly with storm. The waves come grinding, booming in along the gridiron rocks”–he smiled a grim smile–“break through the teeth of the reefs, and split with a roar of hell upon the cliff. And all the time, and all the time,”–his voice got low with a kind of devilish joy,–“there is a finger–Jesu! you should see that finger of the devil stretch up from the bowels of the earth, waiting, waiting for something to come out of the storm. And then–and then you can hear a wild laugh come out of the land, come up from the sea, come down from the sky–all waiting, waiting for something! No, no, you would not stay here.”