It was like the deadly undertow of the maelstroms in the spring floods.  It was there, unseen—­silent as death.  And this thought, blinding them to all else, insensating them to all emotions but that of vengeance, was thought of Josephine.

John Adare himself seemed possessed of a strange madness.  He said no word to Jean or Philip.  Hour after hour he strode ahead, until it seemed that tendons must snap and legs give way under the strain.  Not once did he stop for rest until, hours later, they reached the summit of a ridge, and he pointed far off into the plain below.  They could see the smoke rising up from the Devil’s Nest.  A breath like a great sigh swept through the band.

And now, silently, there slipped away behind a rock Kaskisoon and his Indians.  From under his blanket-coat the chief brought forth the thing that had bulged there, a tom-tom.  Philip and the waiting men heard then the low Te-dum—­Te-dum—­Te-dum of it, as Kaskisoon turned his face first to the east and then the west, north and then south, calling upon Iskootawapoo to come from out of the valley of Silent Men and lead them to triumph.  And the waiting men were silent—­deadly silent—­as they listened.  For they knew that the low Te-dum was the call to death.  Their hands gripped harder at the barrels of their guns, and when Kaskisoon and his braves came from behind the rock they faced the smoke above the Devil’s Nest, wiped their eyes to see more clearly, and followed John Adare down into the plain.

And to other ears than their own the medicine-drum had carried the Song of Death.  Down in the thick spruce of the plain a man on the trail of a caribou had heard.  He looked up, and on the cap of the ridge he saw.  He was old in the ways and the unwritten laws of the North, and like a deer he turned and sped back unseen in the direction of the Devil’s Nest.  And as the avengers came down into the plain Kaskisoon chanted in a low monotone: 

    Our fathers—­come! 
    Come from out of the valley. 
    Guide us—­for to-day we fight,
    And the winds whisper of death!

And those who heard did not laugh.  Father George crossed himself, and muttered something that might have been a prayer.  For in this hour Kaskisoon’s God was very near.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Many years before, Thoreau had named his aerie stronghold the Eagle’s Nest.  The brown-faced people of the trails had changed it to Devil’s Nest.  It was not built like the posts, on level ground and easy of access.  Its northern wall rose sheer up with the wall of Eagle Chasm, with a torrent two hundred feet below that rumbled and roared like distant thunder when the spring floods came.  John Adare knew that this chasm worked its purpose.  Somewhere in it were the liquor caches which the police never found when they came that way on their occasional patrols.  On the east and south sides of the Nest was an open, rough and rocky, filled with jagged outcrops of boulders and patches of bush; behind it the thick forest grew up to the very walls.