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

“Well, at any rate the old manitos haven’t troubled us,” Hugh commented.

Again Baptiste shrugged. “We have not disturbed their copper, and – we are not away from the place yet.”

The inspection of the wreck did not take many minutes. When Baptiste made his report, the Captain agreed with him that the boat had probably drifted away from some camp or trading post on the mainland, and had been driven into the cleft in a storm. As nothing of interest had been found in the wreck, he ordered Baptiste and Hugh to make speed back to camp.

By night the reloading was finished and everything made ready for an early start. After sunset, the mate, adventuring up the bay, shot a yearling moose. The crew of the Otter feasted and, to celebrate the completion of the work on the sloop, danced to Baptiste’s fiddle. From the ridges beyond and above the camp, the brush wolves yelped in response to the music.

Baptiste’s half superstitious, half humorous forebodings of what the island spirits might do to the crew of the Otter came to nothing, but Captain Bennett’s prophecy of a change of wind proved correct. The next day dawned fair with a light south breeze that made it possible for the sloop to sail out of harbor. She passed safely through the narrower part of the bay. Then, to avoid running close to the towering rocks which had first appeared to her Captain through the falling snow, he steered across towards the less formidable appearing northwest shore. That shore proved to be a low, narrow, wooded, rock ridge running out into the lake. When he reached the tip of the point, he found it necessary to go on some distance to the northeast to round a long reef. The dangerous reef passed, he set his course northwest towards the dim and distant Sleeping Giant, the eastern headland of Thunder Bay.

To the relief of Hugh Beaupré, the last part of the voyage was made in good time and without disaster. The boy looked with interest and some awe at the towering, forest-clad form of Thunder Cape, a mountain top rising from the water. On the other hand, as the Otter entered the great bay, were the scarcely less impressive heights of the Isle du Paté, called to-day, in translation of the French name, Pie Island. Hugh asked Baptiste how the island got its name and learned that it was due to some fancied resemblance of the round, steep-sided western peak to a French paté or pastry.

By the time the sloop was well into Thunder Bay, the wind, as if to speed her on her way, had shifted to southeast. Clouds were gathering and rain threatened as she crossed to the western shore, to the mouth of the Kaministikwia. The river, flowing from the west, discharges through three channels, forming a low, triangular delta. The north channel is the principal mouth, and there the sloop entered, making her way about a mile up-stream to the New Fort of the Northwest Company.

From the organization of the Northwest Fur Company down to a short time before the opening of this story, the trading post at the Grand Portage, south of the Pigeon River, and about forty miles by water to the southwest of the Kaministikwia, had been the chief station and headquarters of the company. The ground where the Grand Portage post stood became a part of the United States when the treaty of peace after the Revolution established the Pigeon River as the boundary line between the United States and the British possessions. Though the Northwest Company was a Canadian organization, it retained its headquarters south of the Pigeon River through the last decade of the eighteenth century. In the early years of the nineteenth, however, when the United States government proposed to levy a tax on all English furs passing through United States territory, the company headquarters was removed to Canadian soil. Near the mouth of the Kaministikwia River on Thunder Bay was built the New Fort, later to be known as Fort William after William McGillivray, head of the company.

The Northwest Fur Company’s chief post was bustling with activity. The New Fort itself, a stockaded enclosure, had been completed the year before, but work on the log buildings within the walls was still going on. Quarters for the agents, clerks and various employees, storehouses, and other buildings were under construction or receiving finishing touches. When the sloop Otter came in sight, however, work ceased suddenly. Log cabin builders threw down their axes, saws and hammers, masons dropped their trowels, brick makers left the kilns that were turning out bricks for chimneys and ovens, the clerks broke off their bartering with Indians and half-breed trappers, and all ran down to the riverside. There they mingled with the wild looking men, squaws and children who swarmed from the camps of the voyageurs and Indians. When the Otter drew up against the north bank of the channel, the whole population, permanent and temporary, was on hand to greet the first ship of the season.

From the deck of the sloop, Hugh Beaupré looked on with eager eyes. It was not so much of the picturesqueness and novelty of the scene, however, as of his own private affairs that he was thinking. Anxiously he scanned the crowd of white men, half-breeds and Indians, wondering which one of the black-haired, deerskin-clad, half-grown lads, who slipped so nimbly between their elders into the front ranks, was his half-brother. Many of the crowd, old and young, white and red, came aboard, but none sought out Hugh. He concluded that Blaise was either not there or was waiting for him to go ashore.

Hugh soon had an opportunity to leave the ship. He had feared that he might be more closely questioned by Captain Bennett or by some of the crew about what he intended to do at the Kaministikwia, and was relieved to reach shore without having to dodge the curiosity of his companions. Only Baptiste asked him where he expected to meet his brother. Hugh replied truthfully that he did not know.

Unobtrusively, calling as little attention to himself as possible, the boy made his way through the crowd, but not towards the New Fort. No doubt the Fort, with all its busy activity in its wilderness surroundings, was worth seeing, but he did not choose to visit the place for fear someone might ask his business there. He was keenly aware that his business was likely to be, not with the Old Northwest Company, but with its rival, the New Northwest Company, sometimes called in derision the X Y Company. In a quandary where to look for his unknown brother, he wandered about aimlessly for a time, avoiding rather than seeking companionship.

The ground about the New Fort was low and swampy, with thick woods of evergreens, birch and poplar wherever the land had not been cleared for building or burned over through carelessness. Away from the river bank and the Fort, the place was not cheerful or encouraging to a lonely boy on that chill spring day. The sky was gray and lowering, the wind cold, the distance shrouded in fog, the air heavy with the earthy smell of damp, spongy soil and sodden, last year’s leaves. Hugh had looked forward with eager anticipation to his arrival at the Kaministikwia, but now all things seemed to combine to make him low spirited and lonely.

That the X Y Company had a trading post somewhere near the New Fort Hugh knew, but he had no idea which way to go, and he did not wish to inquire. At last he turned by chance into a narrow path that led through the woods up-river. He was walking slowly, so wrapped in his own not very pleasant thoughts as to be scarcely conscious of his surroundings, when a voice sounded close at his shoulder. It was a low, soft voice, pronouncing his own name, “Hugh Beaupré,” with an intonation that was not English.

Startled, Hugh whirled about, his hand on the sheathed knife that was his only weapon. Facing him in the narrow trail stood a slender lad of less than his own height, clad in a voyageur’s blanket coat over the deerskin tunic and leggings of the woods and with a scarlet handkerchief bound about his head instead of a cap. His dark features were unmistakably Indian in form, but from under the straight, black brows shone hazel eyes that struck Hugh with a sense of familiarity. They were the eyes of his father, Jean Beaupré, the bright, unforgettable eyes that had been the most notable feature of the elder Beaupré’s face.