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KINGS IN EXILE
KINGS IN EXILE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO “The Gray Master.” KINGS IN EXILE BY CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS AUTHOR OF “THE BACKWOODSMEN,” ETC. ILLUSTRATED New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1912 All rights reserved Copyright by Perry, Mason & Co. (1907), The Curtis Publishing Co. (1908-1909), The Associated Sunday Magazines (1908), The Red Book Magazine (190
48 minute read
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Last Bull
Last Bull
That was what two grim old sachems of the Dacotahs had dubbed him; and though his official title, on the lists of the Zoölogical Park, was “Kaiser,” the new and more significant name had promptly supplanted it. The Park authorities—people of imagination and of sentiment, as must all be who would deal successfully with wild animals—had felt at once that the name aptly embodied the tragedies and the romantic memories of his all-but-vanished race. They had felt, too, that the two old braves who had
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CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
The white, scarred face of the mountain looked straight east, over a vast basin of tumbled, lesser hills, dim black forests, and steel-blue loops of a far-winding water. Here and there long, level strata of pallid mist seemed to support themselves on the tree-tops, their edges fading off into the startling transparency that comes upon the air with the first of dawn. But that was in the lower world. Up on the solitary summit of White Face the daybreak had arrived. The jagged crest of the peak sho
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
“King’s kind of ugly to-night, seems to me; better keep yer eyes peeled!” said Andy Hansen, the assistant trainer, the big, yellow-haired Swede who knew not fear. Neither did he know impatience or irritability; and so all the animals, as a rule, were on their good behavior under his calm, masterful, blue eye. Yet he was tactful with the beasts, and given to humoring their moods as far as convenient without ever letting them guess it. “Oh, you go chase yourself, Andy!” replied Signor Tomaso, the
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CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
The show was touring the larger towns of the Northwest. On the following day it started, leaving Tomaso behind in hospital, with a shattered shoulder and bitter wrath in his heart. At the next town, Hansen took Tomaso’s place, but, for two reasons, with a sadly maimed performance. He had not yet acquired sufficient control of the animals to dare all Tomaso’s acts; and the troupe was lacking some of its most important performers. The proud white goat was dead. The bear, the wolf, and one of the l
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CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
From the cold spring lakes and sombre deeps of spruce forest, over which the bald granite peak of Old Saugamauk kept endless guard, came reports of a moose of more than royal stature, whose antlers beggared all records for symmetry and spread. From a home-coming lumber cruiser here, a wandering Indian there, the word came straggling in, till the settlements about the lower reaches of the river began to believe there might be some truth behind the wild tales. Then—for it was autumn, the season of
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
For the next two years the fame of the great moose kept growing, adding to itself various wonders and extravagances till it assumed almost the dimensions of a myth. Sportsmen came from all over the world in the hope of bagging those unparalleled antlers. They shot moose, caribou, deer, and bear, and went away disappointed only in one regard. But at last they began to swear that the giant was a mere fiction of the New Brunswick guides, designed to lure the hunters. The guides, therefore, began to
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CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
After this ignominy, for days the King was submissive, with the sullen numbness of despair. Life for him became a succession of stunning shocks and roaring change. He would be put into strange box-prisons, which would straightway begin to rush terribly through the world with a voice of thunder. Through the cracks in the box he would watch trees and fields and hills race by in madness of flight. He would be taken out of the box, and murmuring crowds would gape at him till the black mane along his
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CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
Why he was so much bigger, more powerful, and more implacably savage than the other members of the gray, spectral pack, which had appeared suddenly from the north to terrorize their lone and scattered clearings, the settlers of the lower Quah-Davic Valley could not guess. Those who were of French descent among them, and full of the old Acadian superstitions, explained it simply enough by saying he was a loup-garou , or “wer-wolf,” and resigned themselves to the impossibility of contending agains
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
During the strenuous and dangerous weeks while Kane was gaoler to his dreaded captive, his respect for the grim beast’s tameless spirit by no means diminished; but he had no shadow of misgiving as to the future to which he destined his victim. He felt that in sending the incomparable wolf to the gardens, where he would be well cared for, and at the same time an educative influence, he was being both just and kind. And it was with feelings of unmixed delight that he received a formal resolution o
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CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
To Jim Horner it seemed as if the great, white-headed eagle was in some way the uttered word of the mountain and the lake—of the lofty, solitary, granite-crested peak, and of the deep, solitary water at its base. As his canoe raced down the last mad rapid, and seemed to snatch breath again as it floated out upon the still water of the lake, Jim would rest his paddle across the gunwales and look upward expectantly. First his keen, far-sighted, gray eyes would sweep the blue arc of sky, in search
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
The ledge on which he had found refuge was apparently an isolated one, about fifty or sixty feet in length, and vanishing into the face of the sheer cliff at either end. It had a width of perhaps twenty-five feet; and its surface, fairly level, held some soil in its rocky hollows. Two or three dark-green seedling firs, a slim young silver birch, a patch or two of wind-beaten grass, and some clumps of harebells, azure as the clear sky overhead, softened the bareness of this tiny, high-flung terra
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CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
Two or three years later, it fell in Horner’s way to visit a great city, many hundreds of miles from the gray peak of “Old Baldy.” He was in charge of an exhibit of canoes, snowshoes, and other typical products of his forest-loving countrymen. In his first morning of leisure, his feet turned almost instinctively to the wooded gardens wherein the city kept strange captives, untamed exiles of the wilderness, irreconcilable aliens of fur and hide and feather, for the crowds to gape at through their
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CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
In the sheltered Caribbean cove the water was warm as milk, green and clear as liquid beryl, and shot through with shimmering sun. Under that stimulating yet mitigated radiance the bottom of the cove was astir with strange life, grotesque in form, but brilliant as jewels or flowers. Long, shining weeds, red, yellow, amber, purple, and olive, waved sinuously among the weed-like sea-anemones which outshone them in colored sheen. Fantastic pink-and-orange crabs sidled awkwardly but nimbly this way
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
Left to himself, the furious prisoner by and by disentangled himself from the meshes of the net, and composed himself as well as he could in his straitened quarters. Then for days and days thereafter there was nothing but tossing and tumbling, blind feeding, and uncomprehended distress; till at last his prison was turned upside down and he was dropped unceremoniously into a great tank of glass and enamel that glowed with soft light. Bewildered though he was, he took in his surroundings in an ins
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CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
An iron coast, bleak, black, and desolate, without harborage for so much as a catboat for leagues to north or south. A coast so pitiless, so lashed forever by the long, sullen rollers of the North Atlantic, so tormented by the shifting and treacherous currents of the tide between its chains of outlying rocky islets, that no ship ever ventured willingly within miles of its uncompromising menace. A coast so little favored by summer that even in glowing August the sun could reach it seldom through
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
As it happened, Miss Libby was a child of decided views. One of the most decided of her views proved to be that a seal pup, with very little voice and that little by no means melodious, was no substitute for a canary. She refused to look at the Pup at all, until her father, much disappointed, assured her that she should have a canary also without further delay. And even then, though she could not remain quite indifferent to the Pup’s soft eyes and confiding friendliness, she never developed any
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CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
Toward the end of April there came a great change in the Pup’s affairs. Primarily, the change was in Captain Ephraim’s. Promoted to the command of a smart schooner engaged in cod-fishing on the Grand Banks, he sold his cottage at Eastport and removed his family to Gloucester, Massachusetts. At the same time, recognizing with many a pang that a city like Gloucester was no place for him to keep a seal in, he sold the Pup, at a most consoling price indeed, to the agent of an English animal trainer.
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CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
Not, like his grim ancestors for a thousand generations, in some dark cave of the hills was he whelped, but in a narrow iron cage littered with straw. Two brothers and a sister made at the same time a like inauspicious entrance upon an alien and fettered existence. And because their silent, untamable mother loved too savagely the hereditary freedom of her race to endure the thought of bearing her young into a life of bondage, she would have killed them mercifully, even while their blind baby mou
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
The settlers around the skirts of Lost Mountain were puzzled and indignant. For six weeks their indignation had been growing, and the mystery seemed no nearer a solution. Something was slaughtering their sheep—something that knew its business and slaughtered with dreadful efficiency. Several honest dogs fell under suspicion, not because there was anything whatever against their reputations, but simply because they had the misfortune to be big enough and strong enough to kill a sheep if they want
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CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
“There ain’t no denying but what you give us a great show, Job,” said the barkeeper, with that air of patronage which befits the man who presides over and autocratically controls the varied activities of a saloon in a Canadian lumber town. “It is a good show!” assented Job Toomey, modestly. He leaned up against the bar in orthodox fashion, just as if his order had been “whiskey fer mine!” but being a really great animal trainer, whose eye must be always clear and his nerve always steady as a roc
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The Duel on the Trail
The Duel on the Trail
White and soft over the wide, sloping upland lay the snow, marked across with the zigzag gray lines of the fences, and spotted here and there with little clumps of woods or patches of bushy pasture. The sky above was white as the earth below, being mantled with snow-laden cloud not yet ready to spill its feathery burden on the world. One little farm-house, far down the valley, served but to emphasize the spacious emptiness of the silent winter landscape. Out from one of the snow-streaked thicket
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