Ethel Brill - The Secret Cache - An Adventure and Mystery Story for Boys

“I cannot return to Montreal just yet, Monsieur Cadotte,” Hugh said at last. “This letter is from my half-brother.” He paused in embarrassment.

Cadotte nodded and waited for the boy to go on. The trader knew that Jean Beaupré had an Indian wife, and supposed that Hugh had known it also. Part Indian himself, Cadotte could never have understood the lad’s amazement and consternation at learning now, for the first time, of his half-brother.

“My father,” Hugh went on, “bade Blaise, my half-brother, tell me to – come to the Kaministikwia and meet Blaise there. He wished me to – to make my brother’s acquaintance and – and receive from him – something my father left me,” he concluded lamely.

Cadotte was regarding Hugh keenly. The boy’s embarrassed manner was enough to make him suspect that Hugh was not telling the truth. Cadotte shrugged his shoulders. “It may be difficult to send you in that direction. If you were an experienced canoeman, but you are not and – ”

“But I must go,” Hugh broke in. “My father bade me, and you wouldn’t have me disobey his last command. Can’t I go in the Otter ? I still have some of the money my aunt gave me. If I am not sailor enough to work my way, I can pay for my passage.”

“Eh bien, we will see what can be done,” Cadotte replied more kindly. Perhaps the lad’s earnestness and distress had convinced him that Hugh had some more urgent reason than a mere boyish desire for adventure, for making the trip. “I will see if matters can be arranged.”

His mind awhirl with conflicting thoughts and feelings, Hugh Beaupré left Cadotte. The preceding autumn Hugh had come from Montreal to the Sault de Ste. Marie. Very reluctantly his aunt had let him go to be with his father in the western wilderness for a year or two of that rough, adventurous life. Hugh’s Scotch mother had died when he was less than a year old, nearly sixteen years before the opening of this story. His French father, a restless man of venturesome spirit, had left the child with the mother’s sister, and had taken to the woods, the then untamed wilderness of the upper Great Lakes and the country beyond. In fifteen years he had been to Montreal to see his son but three times. During each brief stay, his stories of the west had been eagerly listened to by the growing boy. On his father’s last visit to civilization, Hugh had begged to be allowed to go back to Lake Superior with him. The elder Beaupré, thinking the lad too young, had put him off. He had consented, however, to his son’s joining him at the Sault de Ste. Marie a year from the following autumn, when Hugh would be sixteen.

Delayed by bad weather, the boy had arrived at the meeting place late, only to find that his father had not been seen at the Sault since his brief stop on his return from Montreal the year before. The disappointed lad tried to wait patiently, but the elder Beaupré did not come or send any message. At last, word arrived that he had left the Grand Portage, at the other end of Lake Superior, some weeks before, not to come to the Sault but to go in the opposite direction to his winter trading ground west of the lake. There was no chance for Hugh to follow, even had he known just where his father intended to winter. By another trader going west and by a Northwest Company messenger, the boy sent letters, hoping that in some manner they might reach Jean Beaupré. All winter Hugh had remained at the Sault waiting for some reply, but none of any sort had come until the arrival of the strange packet he was now carrying in his hand. This message from his younger brother seemed to prove that his father must have received at least one of Hugh’s letters. Otherwise he would not have known that his elder son was at the Sault. But there was no explanation of Jean Beaupré’s failure to meet the boy there.

Hugh was grieved to learn of his parent’s death, but he could not feel the deep sorrow that would have overwhelmed him at the loss of an intimately known and well loved father. Jean Beaupré was almost a stranger to his older son. Hugh remembered seeing him but the three times and receiving but one letter from him. Indeed he was little more than a casual acquaintance whose tales of adventure had kindled a boy’s imagination. It was scarcely possible that Hugh’s grief could be deep, and, for the time being, it was overshadowed by other feelings. He had been suddenly plunged, it seemed, into a strange and unexpected adventure, which filled his mind to the exclusion of all else.

He must find some way to reach the Kaministikwia River, there to join his newly discovered Indian brother in a search for the wrecked bateau and its cargo of pelts. Of that half-brother Hugh had never heard before. He could not but feel a sense of resentment that there should be such a person. The boy had been brought up to believe that his father had loved his bonny Scotch wife devotedly, and that it was his inconsolable grief at her death that had driven him to the wilderness. It seemed, however, that he must have consoled himself rather quickly with an Indian squaw. Surely the lad who had written the letter must be well grown, not many years younger than Hugh himself.

As he walked slowly along the river bank, Hugh turned the bark packet over and over in his hand, and wondered about the half-breed boy who was to be his comrade in adventure. Attekonse had not spent his whole life in the woods, that was evident. Somewhere he had received an education, had learned to write French readily and in a good hand. Perhaps his father had taught him, thought Hugh, but quickly dismissed that suggestion. He doubted if the restless Jean Beaupré would have had the patience, even if he had had the knowledge and ability to teach his young son to write French so well.

Uncertain what he ought to do next, the puzzled boy wandered along, glancing now and then at the canoes engaged in the white-fishing below the rapids. That daring sport had lost its interest for him. At the outskirts of an Indian village, where he was obliged to beat off with a stick a pack of snarling, wolf-like dogs, he turned and went back the way he had come, still pondering over the birch bark letter.

Presently he caught sight once more of Baptiste’s scarlet cap. No message from Cadotte had brought the simple fellow this time, merely his own curiosity. Hugh was quite willing to answer Baptiste’s questions so far as he could without betraying too much. Seated in a sheltered, sunny spot on an outcrop of rock at the river’s edge, he told of his father’s death. Then, suddenly, he resolved to ask the good-natured Canadian’s help.

“Baptiste, I am in a difficulty. My half-brother who wrote this,” – Hugh touched the bark packet – “bids me join him at the Kaministikwia. It was my father’s last command that I should go there and meet this Blaise or Little Caribou, as he calls himself. We are to divide the things father left for us.”

“There is an inheritance then?” questioned Baptiste, interested at once.

“Nothing that amounts to much, I fancy,” the lad replied with an assumption of carelessness; “some personal belongings, a few pelts perhaps. For some reason he wished Blaise and me to meet and divide them. It is a long journey for such a matter.”

“Ah, but a dying father’s command!” cried Baptiste. “You must not disobey that. To disregard the wishes of the dead is a grievous sin, and would surely bring you misfortune.”

“True, but what can I do, Baptiste? Monsieur Cadotte doesn’t feel greatly inclined to help me. He wishes me to return to Montreal. How then am I to find an opportunity to go to the Kaministikwia?”

Baptiste took a long, thoughtful pull at his pipe, then removed it from his mouth. “There is the sloop Otter ,” he suggested.