Northern Lights
by Gilbert Parker · English · Gutenberg #26905 · 627,151 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Northern Lights
Author: Gilbert Parker
Release date: October 12, 2008 [eBook #26905]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NORTHERN LIGHTS ***
Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[Illustration: BUT NOW HE HEARD A VOICE ABOVE HIM. IT WAS
HER VOICE See page 353 ]
NORTHERN LIGHTS
BY
GILBERT PARKER
ILLUSTRATED
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMIX
Books by
GILBERT PARKER
Northern Lights. Illustrated Post 8vo $1.50
The Weavers. Illustrated Post 8vo 1.50
The Right of Way. Illustrated Post 8vo 1.50
A Ladder of Swords. Illustrated Post 8vo 1.50
Pierre and His People.
Mrs. Falchion.
The Trespasser.
The Translation of a Savage.
The Trail of the Sword.
When Valmond Came to Pontiac.
An Adventurer of the North.
The Seats of the Mighty.
The Pomp of the Lavilettes.
The Battle of the Strong.
The Lane that Had No Turning.
Donovan Pasha.
Old Quebec (In collaboration with C. G. Bryan).
Round the Compass in Australia.
A Lover's Diary.
Embers (Private Publication only).
Copyright, 1909, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
All rights reserved.
Published September, 1909.
TO
ISHBEL, COUNTESS OF ABERDEEN
A TRUE FRIEND
OF THE GREAT DOMINION
NOTE
The tales in this book belong to two different epochs in the life of the
Far West. The first five are reminiscent of "border days and deeds"--of
days before the great railway was built which changed a waste into a
fertile field of civilization. The remaining stories cover the period
passed since the Royal Northwest Mounted Police and the Pullman Car first
startled the early pioneer, and sent him into the land of the farther
North or drew him into the quiet circle of civic routine and humdrum
occupation.
G. P.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
A Lodge in the Wilderness 1
Once at Red Man's River 21
The Stroke of the Hour 38
Buckmaster's Boy 57
To-Morrow 72
Qu'appelle 94
The Stake and the Plumb-Line 118
When the Swallows Homeward Fly 160
George's Wife 174
Marcile 196
A Man, a Famine, and a Heathen Boy 216
The Healing Springs and the Pioneers 234
The Little Widow of Jansen 253
Watching The Rise of Orion 272
The Error of the Day 295
The Whisperer 314
As Deep as the Sea 334
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
BUT NOW HE HEARD A VOICE ABOVE HIM. IT WAS
HER VOICE Frontispiece
THE BIRD SHE HEARD IN THE NIGHT WAS
CALLING IN HIS EARS NOW 14
THE START ON THE NORTH TRAIL 36
SHE SWAYED AND FELL FAINTING AT THE
FEET OF BA'TISTE 56
LITTLE BY LITTLE THEY DREW TO THE EDGE
OF THE ROCK 70
"THEY SHOT ME AN' HURT ME" 74
"PAULINE," HE SAID, FEEBLY, AND
FAINTED IN HER ARMS 114
THE OLD MAN SHOOK HIS HEAD. THOUGH
NOT WITH UNDERSTANDING 166
GEORGE'S WIFE 184
THEN HAD HAPPENED THE REAL EVENT OF
HIS LIFE 198
THE FAITH HEALER 236
"AS PURTY A WOMAN, TOO--AS PURTY AND
AS STRAIGHT BEWHILES" 256
"IF YOU KILL ME, YOU WILL NEVER GET
AWAY FROM KOWATIN ALIVE" 312
FOR MINUTES THE STRUGGLE CONTINUED 332
"OH, ISN'T IT ALL WORTH LIVING?"
SHE SAID 342
NORTHERN LIGHTS
A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS
"Hai-yai, so bright a day, so clear!" said Mitiahwe as she entered the big
lodge and laid upon a wide, low couch, covered with soft skins, the fur of
a grizzly which had fallen to her man's rifle. "_Hai-yai_, I wish it would
last forever--so sweet!" she added, smoothing the fur lingeringly and
showing her teeth in a smile.
"There will come a great storm, Mitiahwe. See, the birds go south so
soon," responded a deep voice from a corner by the doorway.
The young Indian wife turned quickly, and, in a defiant, fantastic
mood--or was it the inward cry against an impending fate, the tragic
future of those who will not see, because to see is to suffer?--she made
some quaint, odd motions of the body which belonged to a mysterious dance
of her tribe, and, with flashing eyes, challenged the comely old woman
seated on a pile of deer-skins.
"It is morning, and the day will last forever," she said, nonchalantly,
but her eyes suddenly took on a far-away look, half apprehensive, half
wondering. The birds were indeed going south very soon, yet had there ever
been so exquisite an autumn as this, had her man ever had so wonderful a
trade, her man with the brown hair, blue eyes, and fair, strong face?
"The birds go south, but the hunters and buffalo still go north," Mitiahwe
urged, searchingly, looking hard at her mother--Oanita, the Swift Wing.
"My dream said that the winter will be dark and lonely, that the ice will
be thick, the snow deep, and that many hearts will be sick because of the
black days and the hunger that sickens the heart," answered Swift Wing.
Mitiahwe looked into Swift Wing's dark eyes, and an anger came upon her.
"The hearts of cowards will freeze," she rejoined, "and to those that will
not see the sun the world will be dark," she added. Then suddenly she
remembered to whom she was speaking, and a flood of feeling ran through
her; for Swift Wing had cherished her like a fledgling in the nest till
her young white man came from "down East." Her heart had leaped up at
sight of him, and she had turned to him from all the young men of her
tribe, waiting in a kind of mist till he, at last, had spoken to her
mother, and then one evening, her shawl over her head, she had come along
to his lodge.
A thousand times as the four years passed by she had thought how good it
was that she had become his wife--the young white man's wife, rather than
the wife of Breaking Rock, son of White Buffalo, the chief, who had four
hundred horses and a face that would have made winter and sour days for
her. Now and then Breaking Rock came and stood before the lodge, a
distance off, and stayed there hour after hour, and once or twice he came
when her man was with her; but nothing could be done, for earth and air
and space were common to them all, and there was no offence in Breaking
Rock gazing at the lodge where Mitiahwe lived. Yet it seemed as though
Breaking Rock was waiting--waiting and hoping. That was the impression
made upon all who saw him, and even old White Buffalo, the chief, shook
his head gloomily when he saw Breaking Rock, his son, staring at the big
lodge which was so full of happiness, and so full also of many luxuries
never before seen at a trading-post on the Koonee River. The father of
Mitiahwe had been chief, but because his three sons had been killed in
battle the chieftainship had come to White Buffalo, who was of the same
blood and family. There were those who said that Mitiahwe should have been
chieftainess; but neither she nor her mother would ever listen to this,
and so White Buffalo and the tribe loved Mitiahwe because of her modesty
and goodness. She was even more to White Buffalo than Breaking Rock, and
he had been glad that Dingan the white man--Long Hand he was called--had
taken Mitiahwe for his woman. Yet behind this gladness of White Buffalo,
and that of Swift Wing, and behind the silent watchfulness of Breaking
Rock, there was a thought which must ever come when a white man mates with
an Indian maid, without priest or preacher, or writing, or book, or bond.
Yet four years had gone; and all the tribe, and all who came and went,
half-breeds, traders, and other tribes, remarked how happy was the white
man with his Indian wife. They never saw anything but light in the eyes of
Mitiahwe, nor did the old women of the tribe who scanned her face as she
came and went, and watched and waited too for what never came--not even
after four years.
Mitiahwe had been so happy that she had not really missed what never came;
though the desire to have something in her arms which was part of them
both had flushed up in her veins at times, and made her restless till her
man had come home again. Then she had forgotten the unseen for the seen,
and was happy that they two were alone together--that was the joy of it
all, so much alone together; for Swift Wing did not live with them, and,
like Breaking Rock, she watched her daughter's life, standing afar off,
since it was the unwritten law of the tribe that the wife's mother must
not cross the path or enter the home of her daughter's husband. But at
last Dingan had broken through this custom, and insisted that Swift Wing
should be with her daughter when he was away from home, as now on this
wonderful autumn morning, when Mitiahwe had been singing to the Sun, to
which she prayed for her man and for everlasting days with him.
She had spoken angrily but now, because her soul sharply resented the
challenge to her happiness which her mother had been making. It was her
own eyes that refused to see the cloud which the sage and bereaved woman
had seen and conveyed in images and figures of speech natural to the
Indian mind.
"_Hai-yai_," she said now, with a strange, touching sigh breathing in the
words, "you are right, my mother, and a dream is a dream; also, if it be
dreamed three times, then is it to be followed, and it is true. You have
lived long, and your dreams are of the Sun and the Spirit." She shook a
little as she laid her hand on a buckskin coat of her man hanging by the
lodge door; then she steadied herself again, and gazed earnestly into her
mother's eyes. "Have all your dreams come true, my mother?" she asked,
with a hungering heart.
"There was the dream that came out of the dark five times, when your
father went against the Crees, and was wounded, and crawled away into the
hills, and all our warriors fled--they were but a handful, and the Crees
like a young forest in number! I went with my dream, and found him after
many days, and it was after that you were born, my youngest and my last.
There was also"--her eyes almost closed, and the needle and thread she
held lay still in her lap--"when two of your brothers were killed in the
drive of the buffalo. Did I not see it all in my dream, and follow after
them to take them to my heart? And when your sister was carried off, was
it not my dream which saw the trail, so that we brought her back again to
die in peace, her eyes seeing the Lodge whither she was going, open to
her, and the Sun, the Father, giving her light and promise--for she had
wounded herself to die that the thief who stole her should leave her to
herself! Behold, my daughter, these dreams have I had, and others; and I
have lived long and have seen the bright day break into storm, and the
herds flee into the far hills where none could follow, and hunger come,
and--"
"_Hai-yo_, see, the birds flying south," said the girl, with a gesture
toward the cloudless sky. "Never since I lived have they gone south so
soon." Again she shuddered slightly, then she spoke slowly: "I also have
dreamed, and I will follow my dream. I dreamed"--she knelt down beside her
mother and rested her hands in her mother's lap--"I dreamed that there was
a wall of hills dark and heavy and far away, and that whenever my eyes
looked at them they burned with tears; and yet I looked and looked, till
my heart was like lead in my breast; and I turned from them to the rivers
and the plains that I loved. But a voice kept calling to me, 'Come, come!
Beyond the hills is a happy land. The trail is hard, and your feet will
bleed, but beyond is the happy land.' And I would not go for the voice
that spoke, and at last there came an old man in my dream and spoke to me
kindly, and said, 'Come with me, and I will show thee the way over the
hills to the Lodge where thou shalt find what thou hast lost!' And I said
to him, 'I have lost nothing'; and I would not go. Twice I dreamed this
dream, and twice the old man came, and three times I dreamed it; and then
I spoke angrily to him, as but now I did to thee; and behold he changed
before my eyes, and I saw that he was now become--" She stopped short, and
buried her face in her hands for a moment, then recovered herself.
"Breaking Rock it was I saw before me, and I cried out and fled. Then I
waked with a cry, but my man was beside me, and his arm was round my neck;
and this dream, is it not a foolish dream, my mother?"
The old woman sat silent, clasping the hands of her daughter firmly, and
looking out of the wide doorway toward the trees that fringed the river;
and presently, as she looked, her face changed and grew pinched all at
once, and Mitiahwe, looking at her, turned a startled face toward the
river also.
"Breaking Rock!" she said, in alarm, and got to her feet quickly.
Breaking Rock stood for a moment looking toward the lodge, then came
slowly forward to them. Never in all the four years had he approached this
lodge of Mitiahwe, who, the daughter of a chief, should have married
himself, the son of a chief! Slowly, but with long, slouching stride,
Breaking Rock came nearer. The two women watched him without speaking.
Instinctively they knew that he brought news, that something had happened;
yet Mitiahwe felt at her belt for what no Indian girl would be without;
and this one was a gift from her man on the anniversary of the day she
first came to his lodge.
Breaking Rock was at the door now, his beady eyes fixed on Mitiahwe's, his
figure jerked to its full height, which made him, even then, two inches
less than Long Hand. He spoke in a loud voice:
"The last boat this year goes down the river to-morrow. Long Hand, your
man, is going to his people. He will not come back. He has had enough of
the Blackfoot woman. You will see him no more." He waved a hand to the
sky. "The birds are going south. A hard winter is coming quick. You will
be alone. Breaking Rock is rich. He has five hundred horses. Your man is
going to his own people. Let him go. He is no man. It is four years, and
still there are but two in your lodge. How!"
He swung on his heel with a chuckle in his throat, for he thought he had
said a good thing, and that in truth he was worth twenty white men. His
quick ear caught a movement behind him, however, and he saw the girl
spring from the lodge-door, something flashing from her belt. But now the
mother's arms were round her, with cries of protest, and Breaking Rock,
with another laugh, slipped away softly toward the river.
"That is good," he muttered. "She will kill him, perhaps, when she goes to
him. She will go, but he will not stay. I have heard."
As he disappeared among the trees, Mitiahwe disengaged herself from her
mother's arms, went slowly back into the lodge, and sat down on the great
couch where for so many moons she had lain with her man beside her.
Her mother watched her closely, though she moved about doing little
things. She was trying to think what she would have done if such a thing
had happened to her, if her man had been going to leave her. She assumed
that Dingan would leave Mitiahwe, for he would hear the voices of his
people calling far away, even as the red man who went East into the great
cities heard the prairies and the mountains and the rivers and his own
people calling, and came back, and put off the clothes of civilization,
and donned his buckskins again, and sat in the Medicine Man's tent, and
heard the spirits speak to him through the mist and smoke of the sacred
fire. When Swift Wing first gave her daughter to the white man she foresaw
the danger now at hand, but this was the tribute of the lower race to the
higher, and--who could tell? White men had left their Indian wives, but
had come back again, and forever renounced the life of their own nations,
and become great chiefs, teaching useful things to their adopted people,
bringing up their children as tribesmen--bringing up their children! There
it was, the thing which called them back, the bright-eyed children, with
the color of the brown prairie in their faces, and their brains so sharp
and strong. But here was no child to call Dingan back, only the eloquent,
brave, sweet face of Mitiahwe..... If he went! Would he go? Was he going?
And now that Mitiahwe had been told that he would go, what would she do?
In her belt was--but, no, that would be worse than all, and she would lose
Mitiahwe, her last child, as she had lost so many others. What would she
herself do if she were in Mitiahwe's place? Ah, she would make him stay
somehow--by truth or by falsehood; by the whispered story in the long
night; by her head upon his knee before the lodge-fire, and her eyes fixed
on his, luring him, as the dream lures the dreamer into the far trail, to
find the Sun's hunting-ground, where the plains are filled with the deer
and the buffalo and the wild horse; by the smell of the cooking-pot and
the favorite spiced drink in the morning; by the child that ran to him
with his bow and arrows and the cry of the hunter--but there was no child;
she had forgotten. She was always recalling her own happy early life with
her man, and the clean-faced papooses that crowded round his knee--one
wife and many children, and the old Harvester of the Years reaping them so
fast, till the children stood up as tall as their father and chief. That
was long ago, and she had had her share--twenty-five years of happiness;
but Mitiahwe had had only four. She looked at Mitiahwe, standing still for
a moment like one rapt, then suddenly she gave a little cry. Something had
come into her mind, some solution of the problem, and she ran and stooped
over the girl and put both hands on her head.
"Mitiahwe, heart's blood of mine," she said, "the birds go south, but they
return. What matter if they go so soon, if they return soon. If the Sun
wills that the winter be dark, and he sends the Coldmaker to close the
rivers and drive the wild ones far from the arrow and the gun, yet he may
be sorry, and send a second summer--has it not been so, and the Coldmaker
has hurried away--away! The birds go south, but they will return,
Mitiahwe."
"I heard a cry in the night while my man slept," Mitiahwe answered,
looking straight before her, "and it was like the cry of a bird--calling,
calling, calling."
"But he did not hear--he was asleep beside Mitiahwe. If he did not wake,
surely it was good-luck. Thy breath upon his face kept him sleeping.
Surely it was good-luck to Mitiahwe that he did not hear."
She was smiling a little now, for she had thought of a thing which would,
perhaps, keep the man here in this lodge in the wilderness; but the time
to speak of it was not yet. She must wait and see.
Suddenly Mitiahwe got to her feet with a spring, and a light in her eyes.
"_Hai-yai!_" she said with plaintive smiling, ran to a corner of the
lodge, and from a leather bag drew forth a horseshoe and looked at it,
murmuring to herself.
The old woman gazed at her wonderingly. "What is it, Mitiahwe?" she
asked.
"It is good-luck. So my man has said. It is the way of his people. It is
put over the door, and if a dream come it is a good dream; and if a bad
thing come, it will not enter; and if the heart prays for a thing hid from
all the world, then it brings good-luck. _Hai-yai!_ I will put it over the
door, and then--" All at once her hand dropped to her side, as though some
terrible thought had come to her, and, sinking to the floor, she rocked
her body backward and forward for a time, sobbing. But presently she got
to her feet again, and, going to the door of the lodge, fastened the
horseshoe above it with a great needle and a string of buckskin.
"O great Sun," she prayed, "have pity on me and save me. I cannot live
alone. I am only a Blackfoot wife; I am not blood of his blood. Give, O
great One, blood of his blood, bone of his bone, soul of his soul, that he
will say, 'This is mine, body of my body,' and he will hear the cry and
will stay. O great Sun, pity me!"
The old woman's heart beat faster as she listened. The same thought was in
the mind of both. If there were but a child, bone of his bone, then
perhaps he would not go; or, if he went, then surely he would return when
he heard his papoose calling in the lodge in the wilderness.
As Mitiahwe turned to her, a strange burning light in her eyes, Swift Wing
said: "It is good. The white man's Medicine for a white man's wife. But if
there were the red man's Medicine too--"
"What is the red man's Medicine?" asked the young wife, as she smoothed
her hair, put a string of bright beads around her neck, and wound a red
sash round her waist.
The old woman shook her head, a curious, half-mystic light in her eyes,
her body drawn up to its full height, as though waiting for something. "It
is an old Medicine. It is of winters ago as many as the hairs of the head.
I have forgotten almost, but it was a great Medicine when there were no
white men in the land. And so it was that to every woman's breast there
hung a papoose, and every woman had her man, and the red men were like
leaves in the forest--but it was a winter of winters ago, and the Medicine
Men have forgotten; and thou hast no child! When Long Hand comes, what
will Mitiahwe say to him?"
Mitiahwe's eyes were determined, her face was set, she flushed deeply,
then the color fled. "What my mother would say, I will say. Shall the
white man's Medicine fail? If I wish it, then it will be so; and I will
say so."
"But if the white man's Medicine fail?" Swift Wing made a gesture toward
the door where the horseshoe hung. "It is Medicine for a white man, will
it be Medicine for an Indian?"
"Am I not a white man's wife?"
"But if there were the Sun Medicine also, the Medicine of the days long
ago?"
"Tell me. If you remember--_Kai!_ but you do remember--I see it in your
face. Tell me, and I will make that Medicine also, my mother."
"To-morrow, if I remember it--I will think, and if I remember it,
to-morrow I will tell you, my heart's blood. Maybe my dream will come to
me and tell me. Then, even after all these years a papoose--"
"But the boat will go at dawn to-morrow, and if he go also--"
"Mitiahwe is young, her body is warm, her eyes are bright, the songs she
sings, her tongue--if these keep him not, and the Voice calls him still to
go, then still Mitiahwe shall whisper, and tell him--"
"_Hai-yo_--hush," said the girl, and trembled a little, and put both hands
on her mother's mouth.
For a moment she stood so, then with an exclamation suddenly turned and
ran through the doorway, and sped toward the river, and into the path
which would take her to the post, where her man traded with the Indians
and had made much money during the past six years, so that he could have
had a thousand horses and ten lodges like that she had just left. The
distance between the lodge and the post was no more than a mile, but
Mitiahwe made a detour, and approached it from behind, where she could not
be seen. Darkness was gathering now, and she could see the glimmer of the
light of lamps through the windows, and as the doors opened and shut. No
one had seen her approach, and she stole through a door which was open at
the rear of the warehousing room, and went quickly to another door leading
into the shop. There was a crack through which she could see, and she
could hear all that was said. As she came she had seen Indians gliding
through the woods with their purchases, and now the shop was clearing
fast, in response to the urging of Dingan and his partner, a Scotch
half-breed. It was evident that Dingan was at once abstracted and
excited.
Presently only two visitors were left--a French half-breed called
Lablache, a swaggering, vicious fellow, and the captain of the steamer
_Ste. Anne_, which was to make its last trip south in the morning--even
now it would have to break its way through the young ice.
Dingan's partner dropped a bar across the door of the shop, and the four
men gathered about the fire. For a time no one spoke. At last the captain
of the _Ste. Anne_ said: "It's a great chance, Dingan. You'll be in
civilization again, and in a rising town of white people--Groise'll be a
city in five years, and you can grow up and grow rich with the place. The
Company asked me to lay it all before you, and Lablache here will buy out
your share of the business, at whatever your partner and you prove it's
worth. You're young; you've got everything before you. You've made a name
out here for being the best trader west of the Great Lakes, and now's your
time. It's none of my affair, of course, but I like to carry through what
I'm set to do, and the Company said, 'You bring Dingan back with you. The
place is waiting for him, and it can't wait longer than the last boat
down.' You're ready to step in when he steps out, ain't you, Lablache?"
Lablache shook back his long hair, and rolled about in his pride. "I give
him cash for his share to-night--some one is behin' me, _sacre_, yes! It
is worth so much, I pay and step in--I take the place over. I take half
the business here, and I work with Dingan's partner. I take your horses,
Dingan, I take your lodge, I take all in your lodge--_everyt'ing_."
His eyes glistened, and a red spot came to each cheek as he leaned
forward. At his last word Dingan, who had been standing abstractedly
listening as it were, swung round on him with a muttered oath, and the
skin of his face appeared to tighten. Watching through the crack of the
door, Mitiahwe saw the look she knew well, though it had never been turned
on her, and her heart beat faster. It was a look that came into Dingan's
face whenever Breaking Rock crossed his path, or when one or two other
names were mentioned in his presence, for they were names of men who had
spoken of Mitiahwe lightly, and had attempted to be jocular about her.
As Mitiahwe looked at him, now unknown to himself, she was conscious of
what that last word of Lablache's meant. _Everyt'ing_ meant herself.
Lablache--who had neither the good qualities of the white man nor the
Indian, but who had the brains of the one and the subtlety of the other,
and whose only virtue was that he was a successful trader, though he
looked like a mere woodsman, with rings in his ears, gayly decorated
buckskin coat and moccasins, and a furtive smile always on his lips!
_Everyt'ing!_ Her blood ran cold at the thought of dropping the
lodge-curtain upon this man and herself alone. For no other man than
Dingan had her blood run faster, and he had made her life blossom. She had
seen in many a half-breed's and in many an Indian's face the look which
was now in that of Lablache, and her fingers gripped softly the thing in
her belt that had flashed out on Breaking Rock such a short while ago. As
she looked, it seemed for a moment as though Dingan would open the door
and throw Lablache out, for in quick reflection his eyes ran from the man
to the wooden bar across the door.
"You'll talk of the shop, and the shop only, Lablache," he said, grimly.
"I'm not huckstering my home, and I'd choose the buyer if I was selling.
My lodge ain't to be bought, nor _anything_ in it--not even the broom to
keep it clean of any half-breeds that'd enter it without leave."
There was malice in the words, but there was greater malice in the tone,
and Lablache, who was bent on getting the business, swallowed his ugly
wrath, and determined that, if he got the business, he would get the lodge
also in due time; for Dingan, if he went, would not take the lodge--or the
woman--with him; and Dingan was not fool enough to stay when he could go
to Groise to a sure fortune.
The captain of the _Ste. Anne_ again spoke. "There's another thing the
Company said, Dingan. You needn't go to Groise, not at once. You can take
a month and visit your folks down East, and lay in a stock of
home-feelings before you settle down at Groise for good. They was fair
when I put it to them that you'd mebbe want to do that. 'You tell Dingan,'
they said, 'that he can have the month glad and grateful, and a free
ticket on the railway back and forth. He can have it at once,' they
said."
Watching, Mitiahwe could see her man's face brighten, and take on a look
of longing at this suggestion; and it seemed to her that the bird she
heard in the night was calling in his ears now. Her eyes went blind for a
moment.
"The game is with you, Dingan. All the cards are in your hands; you'll
never get such another chance again; and you're only thirty," said the
captain.
[Illustration: THE BIRD SHE HEARD IN THE NIGHT WAS CALLING IN HIS
EARS NOW]
"I wish they'd ask me," said Dingan's partner, with a sigh, as he looked
at Lablache. "I want my chance bad, though we've done well here--good
gosh, yes, all through Dingan."
"The winters, they go queeck in Groise," said Lablache. "It is life all
the time, trade all the time, plenty to do and see--and a _bon fortune_ to
make, bagosh!"
"Your old home was in Nova Scotia, wasn't it, Dingan?" asked the captain,
in a low voice. "I kem from Connecticut, and I was East to my village las'
year. It was good, seein' all my old friends again; but I kem back
content, I kem back full of home-feelin's and content. You'll like the
trip, Dingan. It'll do you good."
Dingan drew himself up with a start. "All right. I guess I'll do it. Let's
figure up again," he said to his partner, with a reckless air.
With a smothered cry Mitiahwe turned and fled into the darkness, and back
to the lodge. The lodge was empty. She threw herself upon the great couch
in an agony of despair.
A half-hour went by. Then she rose, and began to prepare supper. Her face
was aflame, her manner was determined, and once or twice her hand went to
her belt, as though to assure herself of something.
Never had the lodge looked so bright and cheerful; never had she prepared
so appetizing a supper; never had the great couch seemed so soft and rich
with furs, so homelike and so inviting after a long day's work. Never had
Mitiahwe seemed so good to look at, so graceful and alert and
refined--suffering does its work even in the wild woods, with "wild
people." Never had the lodge such an air of welcome and peace and home as
to-night; and so Dingan thought as he drew aside the wide curtains of
deerskin and entered.
Mitiahwe was bending over the fire, and appeared not to hear him.
"Mitiahwe," he said, gently. She was singing to herself, to an Indian air,
the words of a song Dingan had taught her:
"Open the door: cold is the night, and my feet are heavy,
Heap up the fire, scatter upon it the cones and the scented
leaves;
Spread the soft robe on the couch for the chief that
returns,
Bring forth the cup of remembrance--"
It was like a low recitative, and it had a plaintive cadence, as of a dove
that mourned.
"Mitiahwe," he said, in a louder voice, but with a break in it, too; for
it all rushed upon him, all that she had been to him--all that had made
the great West glow with life, made the air sweeter, the grass greener,
the trees more companionable and human: who it was that had given the
waste places a voice. Yet--yet, there were his own people in the East,
there was another life waiting for him, there was the life of ambition and
wealth, and, and home--and children.
His eyes were misty as she turned to him with a little cry of surprise,
how much natural and how much assumed--for she had heard him enter--it
would have been hard to say. She was a woman, and therefore the daughter
of pretence even when most real. He caught her by both arms as she shyly
but eagerly came to him. "Good girl, good little girl," he said. He looked
round him. "Well, I've never seen our lodge look nicer than it does
to-night; and the fire, and the pot on the fire, and the smell of the
pine-cones, and the cedar-boughs, and the skins, and--"
"And everything," she said, with a queer little laugh, as she moved away
again to turn the steaks on the fire.
Everything! He started at the word. It was so strange that she should use
it by accident, when but a little while ago he had been ready to choke the
wind out of a man's body for using it concerning herself.
It stunned him for a moment, for the West, and the life apart from the
world of cities, had given him superstition, like that of the Indians,
whose life he had made his own.
Herself!--to leave her here, who had been so much to him? As true as the
sun she worshipped, her eyes had never lingered on another man since she
came to his lodge; and, to her mind, she was as truly sacredly married to
him as though a thousand priests had spoken, or a thousand Medicine Men
had made their incantations. She was his woman and he was her man. As he
chatted to her, telling her of much that he had done that day, and
wondering how he could tell her of _all_ he had done, he kept looking
round the lodge, his eye resting on this or that; and everything had its
own personal history, had become part of their lodge-life, because it had
a use as between him and her, and not a conventional domestic place. Every
skin, every utensil, every pitcher and bowl and pot and curtain had been
with them at one time or another when it became of importance and renowned
in the story of their days and deeds.
How could he break it to her--that he was going to visit his own people,
and that she must be alone with her mother all winter, to await his return
in the spring? His return? As he watched her sitting beside him, helping
him to his favorite dish, the close, companionable trust and gentleness of
her, her exquisite cleanness and grace in his eyes, he asked himself if,
after all, it was not true that he would return in the spring. The years
had passed without his seriously thinking of this inevitable day. He had
put it off and off, content to live each hour as it came and take no real
thought for the future; and yet, behind all was the warning fact that he
must go one day, and that Mitiahwe could not go with him. Her mother must
have known that when she let Mitiahwe come to him. Of course; and, after
all, she would find another mate, a better mate, one of her own people.
But her hand was in his now, and it was small and very warm, and suddenly
he shook with anger at the thought of one like Breaking Rock taking her to
his wigwam; or Lablache--this roused him to an inward fury; and Mitiahwe
saw and guessed the struggle that was going on in him, and she leaned her
head against his shoulder, and once she raised his hand to her lips, and
said, "My chief!"
Then his face cleared again, and she got him his pipe and filled it, and
held a coal to light it; and, as the smoke curled up, and he leaned back
contentedly for the moment, she went to the door, drew open the curtains,
and, stepping outside, raised her eyes to the horseshoe. Then she said
softly to the sky: "O Sun, great Father, have pity on me, for I love him,
and would keep him. And give me bone of his bone, and one to nurse at my
breast that is of him. O Sun, pity me this night, and be near me when I
speak to him, and hear what I say."
"What are you doing out there, Mitiahwe?" Dingan cried; and when she
entered again he beckoned her to him. "What was it you were saying? Who
were you speaking to?" he asked. "I heard your voice."
"I was thanking the Sun for his goodness to me. I was speaking for the
thing that is in my heart, that is life of my life," she added, vaguely.
"Well, I have something to say to you, little girl," he said, with an
effort.
She remained erect before him waiting for the blow--outwardly calm,
inwardly crying out in pain. "Do you think you could stand a little
parting?" he asked, reaching out and touching her shoulder.
"I have been alone before--for five days," she answered, quietly.
"But it must be longer this time."
"How long?" she asked, with eyes fixed on his. "If it is more than a week,
I will go too."
"It is longer than a month," he said.
"Then I will go."
"I am going to see my people," he faltered.
"By the _Ste. Anne_?"
He nodded. "It is the last chance this year; but I will come back--in the
spring."
As he said it he saw her shrink, and his heart smote him. Four years such
as few men ever spent, and all the luck had been with him, and the West
had got into his bones! The quiet, starry nights, the wonderful days, the
hunt, the long journeys, the life free of care, and the warm lodge; and,
here, the great couch--ah, the cheek pressed to his, the lips that
whispered at his ear, the smooth arm round his neck. It all rushed upon
him now. His people! His people in the East, who had thwarted his youth,
vexed and cramped him, saw only evil in his widening desires, and threw
him over when he came out West--the scallywag, they called him, who had
never wronged a man--or a woman? Never--wronged--a--woman? The question
sprang to his lips now. Suddenly he saw it all in a new light. White or
brown or red, this heart and soul and body before him were all his, sacred
to him; he was in very truth her "chief."
Untutored as she was, she read him, felt what was going on in him. She saw
the tears spring to his eyes. Then, coming close to him, she said, softly,
slowly: "I must go with you if you go, because you must be with me
when--Oh, _hai-yai_, my chief, shall we go from here? Here in this lodge
wilt thou be with thine own people--thine own, thou and I--_and thine to
come_." The great passion in her heart made the lie seem very truth.
With a cry he got to his feet, and stood staring at her for a moment,
scarcely comprehending; then suddenly he clasped her in his arms.
"Mitiahwe--Mitiahwe, oh, my little girl!" he cried. "You and me--and our
own--our own people!" Kissing her, he drew her down beside him on the
couch. "Tell me again--is it so at last?" he said, and she whispered in
his ear once more.
In the middle of the night he said to her, "Some day, perhaps, we will go
East--some day, perhaps."
"But now?" she asked, softly.
"Not now--not if I know it," he answered. "I've got my heart nailed to the
door of this lodge."
As he slept she got quietly out, and, going to the door of the lodge,
reached up a hand and touched the horseshoe.
"Be good Medicine to me," she said. Then she prayed. "O Sun, pity me, that
it may be as I have said to him. Oh, pity me, great Father!"
In the days to come Swift Wing said that it was her Medicine--when her
hand was burned to the wrist in the dark ritual she had performed with the
Medicine Man the night that Mitiahwe fought for her man; but Mitiahwe said
it was her Medicine, the horseshoe, which brought one of Dingan's own
people to the lodge--a little girl with Mitiahwe's eyes and form and her
father's face. Truth has many mysteries, and the faith of the woman was
great; and so it was that, to the long end, Mitiahwe kept her man. But
truly she was altogether a woman, and had good-fortune.
ONCE AT RED MAN'S RIVER
"It's got to be settled to-night, Nance, This game is up here, up forever.
The redcoat police from Ottawa are coming, and they'll soon be roostin' in
this post, the Injuns are goin', the buffaloes are most gone, and the fur
trade's dead in these parts. D'ye see?"
The woman did not answer the big, broad-shouldered man bending over her,
but remained looking into the fire with wide, abstracted eyes, and a face
somewhat set.
"You and your brother Bantry's got to go. This store ain't worth a cent
now. The Hudson's Bay Company'll come along with the redcoats, and they'll
set up a nice little Sunday-school business here for what they call
'agricultural settlers.' There'll be a railway, and the Yankees'll send up
their marshals to work with the redcoats on the border, and--"
"And the days of smuggling will be over," put in the girl, in a low voice.
"No more bull-whackers and mule-skinners 'whooping-it up'; no more
Blackfeet and Piegans drinking alcohol and water, and cutting one
anothers' throats. A nice, quiet time coming on the border Abe, eh?"
The man looked at her queerly. She was not prone to sarcasm, she had not
been given to sentimentalism in the past; she had taken the border-life as
it was, had looked it straight between the eyes. She had lived up to it,
or down to it, without any fuss, as good as any man in any phase of the
life, and the only white woman in this whole West country. It was not in
the words, but in the tone, that Abe Hawley found something unusual and
defamatory.
"Why, gol darn it, Nance, what's got into you? You bin a man out West, as
good a pioneer as ever was on the border. But now you don't sound friendly
to what's been the game out here, and to all of us that've been risking
our lives to get a livin'."
"What did I say?" asked the girl, unmoved.
"It ain't what you said, it's the sound o' your voice."
"You don't know my voice, Abe. It ain't always the same. You ain't always
about; you don't always hear it."
He caught her arm suddenly. "No, but I want to hear it always. I want to
be always where you are, Nance. That's what's got to be settled
to-day--to-night."
"Oh, it's got to be settled to-night!" said the girl, meditatively,
kicking nervously at a log on the fire. "It takes two to settle a thing
like that, and there's only one says it's got to be settled. Maybe it
takes more than two--or three--to settle a thing like that." Now she
laughed mirthlessly.
The man started, and his face flushed with anger; then he put a hand on
himself, drew a step back, and watched her.
"_One_ can settle a thing, if there's a dozen in it. You see, Nance, you
and Bantry've got to close out. He's fixing it up to-night over at
Dingan's Drive, and you can't go it alone when you quit this place. Now,
it's this way: you can go West with Bantry, or you can go North with me.
Away North there's buffalo and deer, and game a-plenty, up along the
Saskatchewan, and farther up on the Peace River. It's going to be all
right up there for half a lifetime, and we can have it in our own way yet.
There'll be no smuggling, but there'll be trading, and land to get; and,
mebbe, there'd be no need of smuggling, for we can make it, I know
how--good white whiskey--and we'll still have this free life for our own.
I can't make up my mind to settle down to a clean collar and going to
church on Sundays, and all that. And the West's in your bones, too. You
look like the West--"
The girl's face brightened with pleasure, and she gazed at him steadily.
"You got its beauty and its freshness, and you got its heat and cold--"
She saw the tobacco-juice stain at the corners of his mouth, she became
conscious of the slight odor of spirits in the air, and the light in her
face lowered in intensity.
"You got the ways of the deer in your walk, the song o' the birds in your
voice; and you're going North with me, Nance, for I bin talkin' to you
stiddy four years. It's a long time to wait on the chance, for there's
always _women_ to be got, same as others have done--men like Dingan with
Injun girls, and men like Tobey with half-breeds. But I ain't bin lookin'
that way. I bin lookin' only toward you." He laughed eagerly, and lifted a
tin cup of whiskey standing on a table near. "I'm lookin' toward you now,
Nance. Your health and mine together. It's got to be settled now. You got
to go to the 'Cific Coast with Bantry, or North with me."
The girl jerked a shoulder and frowned a little. He seemed so sure of
himself.
"Or South with Nick Pringle, or East with someone else," she said,
quizzically. "There's always four quarters to the compass, even when Abe
Hawley thinks he owns the world and has a mortgage on eternity. I'm not
going West with Bantry, but there's three other points that's open."
With an oath the man caught her by the shoulders, and swung her round to
face him. He was swelling with anger. "You--Nick Pringle, that trading
cheat, that gambler! After four years, I--"
"Let go my shoulders," she said, quietly. "I'm not your property. Go and
get some Piegan girl to bully. Keep your hands off. I'm not a bronco for
you to bit and bridle. You've got no rights. You--" Suddenly she relented,
seeing the look in his face, and realizing that, after all, it was a
tribute to herself that she could keep him for four years and rouse him to
such fury. "But yes, Abe," she added, "you have some rights. We've been
good friends all these years, and you've been all right out here. You said
some nice things about me just now, and I liked it, even if it was as if
you'd learned it out of a book. I've got no po'try in me; I'm plain
homespun. I'm a sapling, I'm not any prairie-flower, but I like when I
like, and I like a lot when I like. I'm a bit of hickory, I'm not a
prairie-flower--"
"Who said you was a prairie-flower? Did I? Who's talking about
prairie-flowers--"
He stopped suddenly, turned round at the sound of a footstep behind him,
and saw, standing in a doorway leading to another room, a man who was
digging his knuckles into his eyes and stifling a yawn. He was a
refined-looking stripling of not more than twenty-four, not tall, but
well-made, and with an air of breeding, intensified rather than hidden by
his rough clothes.
"Je-rick-ety! How long have I slept?" he said, blinking at the two beside
the fire. "How long?" he added, with a flutter of anxiety in his tone.
"I said I'd wake you," said the girl, coming forward. "You needn't have
worried."
"I don't worry," answered the young man. "I dreamed myself awake, I
suppose. I got dreaming of redcoats and U. S. marshals, and an ambush in
the Barfleur Coulee, and--" He saw a secret, warning gesture from the
girl, and laughed, then turned to Abe and looked him in the face. "Oh, I
know him! Abe Hawley's all O.K.--I've seen him over at Dingan's Drive.
Honor among rogues. We're all in it. How goes it--all right?" he added,
carelessly, to Hawley, and took a step forward, as though to shake hands.
Seeing the forbidding look by which he was met, however, he turned to the
girl again, as Hawley muttered something they could not hear.
"What time is it?" he asked.
"It's nine o'clock," answered the girl, her eyes watching his every
movement, her face alive.
"Then the moon's up almost?"
"It'll be up in an hour."
"Jerickety! Then I've got to get ready." He turned to the other room again
and entered.
"College pup!" said Hawley, under his breath, savagely. "Why didn't you
tell me he was here?"
"Was it any of your business, Abe?" she rejoined, quietly.
"Hiding him away here--"
"Hiding? Who's been hiding him? He's doing what you've done. He's
smuggling--the last lot for the traders over by Dingan's Drive. He'll get
it there by morning. He has as much right here as you. What's got into
you, Abe?"
"What does he know about the business? Why, he's a college man from the
East. I've heard o' him. Ain't got no more sense for this life than a
dicky-bird. White-faced college pup! What's he doing out here? If you're a
friend o' his, you'd better look after him. He's green."
"He's going East again," she said, "and if I don't go West with Bantry, or
South over to Montana with Nick Pringle, _or North_--"
"Nance!" His eyes burned, his lips quivered.
She looked at him and wondered at the power she had over this bully of the
border, who had his own way with most people, and was one of the most
daring fighters, hunters, and smugglers in the country. He was cool, hard,
and well in hand in his daily life, and yet, where she was concerned,
"went all to pieces," as some one else had said about himself to her.
She was not without the wiles and tact of her sex. "You go now, and come
back, Abe," she said, in a soft voice. "Come back in an hour. Come back
then, and I'll tell you which way I'm going from here."
He was all right again. "It's with you, Nance," he said, eagerly. "I bin
waiting four years."
As he closed the door behind him the "college pup" entered the room again.
"Oh, Abe's gone!" he said, excitedly. "I hoped you'd get rid of the old
rip-roarer. I wanted to be alone with you for a while. I don't really need
to start yet. With the full moon I can do it before daylight." Then, with
quick warmth, "Ah, Nancy, Nancy, you're a flower--the flower of all the
prairies," he added, catching her hand and laughing into her eyes.
She flushed, and for a moment seemed almost bewildered. His boldness,
joined to an air of insinuation and understanding, had influenced her
greatly from the first moment they had met, two months ago, as he was
going South on his smuggling enterprise. The easy way in which he had
talked to her, the extraordinary sense he seemed to have of what was going
on in her mind, the confidential meaning in voice and tone and words had,
somehow, opened up a side of her nature hitherto unexplored. She had
talked with him freely then, for it was only when he left her that he said
what he instinctively knew she would remember till they met again. His
quick comments, his indirect but acute questions, his exciting and
alluring reminiscences of the East, his subtle yet seemingly frank
compliments, had only stimulated a new capacity in her, evoked comparisons
of this delicate-looking, fine-faced gentleman with the men of the West by
whom she was surrounded. But later he appeared to stumble into expressions
of admiration for her, as though he was carried off his feet and had been
stunned by her charm. He had done it all like a master. He had not said
that she was beautiful--she knew she was not--but that she was wonderful
and fascinating, and with "something about her" he had never seen in all
his life: like her own prairies, thrilling, inspiring, and adorable. His
first look at her had seemed full of amazement. She had noticed that, and
thought it meant only that he was surprised to find a white girl out here
among smugglers, hunters, squaw-men, and Indians. But he said that the
first look at her had made him feel things, feel life and women different
from ever before; and he had never seen any one like her, nor a face with
so much in it. It was all very brilliantly done.
"You make me want to live," he had said, and she, with no knowledge of the
nuances of language, had taken it literally, and had asked him if it had
been his wish to die; and he had responded to her mistaken interpretation
of his meaning, saying that he had had such sorrow he had not wanted to
live. As he said it his face looked, in truth, overcome by some deep,
inward care; so that there came a sort of feeling she had never had so far
for any man--that he ought to have some one to look after him. This was
the first real stirring of the maternal and protective spirit in her
toward men, though it had shown itself amply enough regarding animals and
birds. He had said he had not wanted to live, and yet he had come out West
in order to try and live, to cure the trouble that had started in his
lungs. The Eastern doctors had told him that the rough, out-door life
would cure him, or nothing would, and he had vanished from the college
walls and the pleasant purlieus of learning and fashion into the wilds. He
had not lied directly to her when he said that he had had deep trouble;
but he had given the impression that he was suffering from wrongs which
had broken his spirit and ruined his health. Wrongs there certainly had
been in his life, by whomever committed.
Two months ago he had left this girl with her mind full of memories of
what he had said to her, and there was something in the sound of the
slight cough following his farewell words which had haunted her ever
since. Her tremendous health and energy, the fire of life burning so
brightly in her, reached out toward this man living on so narrow a margin
of force, with no reserve for any extra strain, with just enough for each
day's use and no more. Four hours before he had come again with his team
of four mules and an Indian youth, having covered forty miles since his
last stage. She was at the door, and saw him coming while he was yet a
long distance off. Some instinct had told her to watch that afternoon, for
she knew of his intended return and of his dangerous enterprise. The
Indians had trailed south and east, the traders had disappeared with them,
her brother Bantry had gone up and over to Dingan's Drive, and, save for a
few loiterers and last hangers-on, she was alone with what must soon be a
deserted post; its walls, its great enclosed yard, and its gun-platforms
(for it had been fortified) left for law and order to enter upon, in the
persons of the red-coated watchmen of the law.
Out of the South, from over the border, bringing the last great smuggled
load of whiskey which was to be handed over at Dingan's Drive, and then
floated on Red Man's River to settlements up North, came the "college
pup," Kelly Lambton, worn out, dazed with fatigue, but smiling too, for a
woman's face was ever a tonic to his blood since he was big enough to move
in life for himself. It needed courage--or recklessness--to run the border
now; for, as Abe Hawley had said, the American marshals were on the
pounce, the red-coated mounted police were coming west from Ottawa, and
word had winged its way along the prairie that these redcoats were only a
few score miles away, and might be at Fort Stay-Awhile at any moment. The
trail to Dingan's Drive lay past it. Through Barfleur Coulee, athwart a
great, open stretch of country, along a wooded belt, and then, suddenly,
over a ridge, Dingan's Drive and Red Man's River would be reached.
The Government had a mind to make an example, if necessary, by killing
some smugglers in conflict, and the United States marshals had been goaded
by vanity and anger at one or two escapes "to have something for their
money," as they said. That, in their language, meant, "to let the red
run," and Kelly Lambton had none too much blood to lose.
He looked very pale and beaten as he held Nance Machell's hands now, and
called her a prairie-flower, as he had done when he left her two months
before. On his arrival, but now he had said little, for he saw that she
was glad to see him, and he was dead for sleep, after thirty-six hours of
ceaseless travel and watching and danger. Now, with the most perilous part
of his journey still before him, and worn physically as he was, his blood
was running faster as he looked into the girl's face, and something in her
abundant force and bounding life drew him to her. Such vitality in a man
like Abe Hawley would have angered him almost, as it did a little time
ago, when Abe was there; but possessed by the girl, it roused in him a
hunger to draw from the well of her perfect health, from the unused vigor
of her being, something for himself. The touch of her hands warmed him. In
the fulness of her life, in the strong eloquence of face and form, he
forgot she was not beautiful. The lightness passed from his words, and his
face became eager.
"Flower, yes, the flower of the life of the West--that's what I mean," he
said. "You are like an army marching. When I look at you, my blood runs
faster. I want to march too. When I hold your hand I feel that life's
worth living--I want to do things."
She drew her hand away rather awkwardly. She had not now that command of
herself which had ever been easy with the men of the West, except,
perhaps, with Abe Hawley when--
But with an attempt, only half-meant, to turn the topic, she said: "You
must be starting if you want to get through to-night. If the redcoats
catch you this side of Barfleur Coulee, or in the Coulee itself, you'll
stand no chance. I heard they was only thirty miles north this afternoon.
Maybe they'll come straight on here to-night, instead of camping. If they
have news of your coming, they might. You can't tell."
"You're right." He caught her hand again. "I've got to be going now. But
Nance--Nance--Nancy, I want to stay here, here with you; or to take you
with me."
She drew back. "What do you mean?" she asked. "Take me with
you--me--where?"
"East--away down East."
Her brain throbbed, her pulses beat so hard. She scarcely knew what to
say, did not know what she said. "Why do you do this kind of thing? Why do
you smuggle?" she asked. "You wasn't brought up to this."
"To get this load of stuff through is life and death to me," he answered.
"I've made six thousand dollars out here. That's enough to start me again
in the East, where I lost everything. But I've got to have six hundred
dollars clear for the travel--railways and things; and I'm having this
last run to get it. Then I've finished with the West, I guess. My health's
better; the lung is closed up, I've only got a little cough now and again,
and I'm off East. I don't want to go alone." He suddenly caught her in his
arms. "I want you--you, to go with me, Nancy--Nance!"
Her brain swam. To leave the West behind, to go East to a new life full of
pleasant things, as this man's wife! Her great heart rose, and suddenly
the mother in her as well as the woman in her was captured by his wooing.
She had never known what it was to be wooed like this.
She was about to answer when there came a sharp knock at the door leading
from the back yard, and Lambton's Indian lad entered. "The soldier--he
come--many. I go over the ridge, I see. They come quick here," he said.
Nance gave a startled cry, and Lambton turned to the other room for his
pistols, overcoat, and cap, when there was the sound of horses' hoofs, the
door suddenly opened, and an officer stepped inside.
"You're wanted for smuggling, Lambton," he said, brusquely. "Don't stir!"
In his hand was a revolver.
"Oh, bosh! Prove it," answered the young man, pale and startled, but cool
in speech and action.
"We'll prove it all right. The stuff is hereabouts."
The girl said something to the officer in the Chinook language. She saw he
did not understand. Then she spoke quickly to Lambton in the same tongue.
"Keep him here a bit," she said. "His men haven't come yet. Your outfit is
well hid. I'll see if I can get away with it before they find it. They'll
follow, and bring you with them, that's sure. So if I have luck and get
through, we'll meet at Dingan's Drive."
Lambton's face brightened. He quickly gave her a few directions in
Chinook, and told her what to do at Dingan's if she got there first. Then
she was gone.
The officer did not understand what Nance had said, but he realized that,
whatever she intended to do, she had an advantage over him. With an
unnecessary courage he had ridden on alone to make his capture, and, as it
proved, without prudence. He had got his man, but he had not got the
smuggled whiskey and alcohol he had come to seize. There was no time to be
lost. The girl had gone before he realized it. What had she said to the
prisoner? He was foolish enough to ask Lambton, and Lambton replied
coolly: "She said she'd get you some supper, but she guessed it would have
to be cold--What's your name? Are you a colonel, or a captain, or only a
principal private?"
"I am Captain MacFee, Lambton. And you'll now bring me where your outfit
is. March!"
The pistol was still in his hand, and he had a determined look in his eye.
Lambton saw it. He was aware of how much power lay in the threatening face
before him, and how eager that power was to make itself felt, and provide
"Examples"; but he took his chances.
"I'll march all right," he answered; "but I'll march to where you tell me.
You can't have it both ways. You can take me, because you've found me, and
you can take my outfit, too, when you've found it; but I'm not doing your
work, not if I know it."
There was a blaze of anger in the eyes of the officer, and it looked for
an instant as though something of the lawlessness of the border was going
to mark the first step of the Law in the Wilderness, but he bethought
himself in time, and said, quietly, yet in a voice which Lambton knew he
must heed:
"Put on your things--quick."
When this was accomplished, and MacFee had secured the smuggler's pistols,
he said again, "March, Lambton!"
Lambton marched through the moonlit night toward the troop of men who had
come to set up the flag of order in the plains and hills, and as he went
his keen ear heard his own mules galloping away down toward the Barfleur
Coulee. His heart thumped in his breast. This girl, this prairie-flower,
was doing this for him, was risking her life, was breaking the law for
him. If she got through, and handed over the whiskey to those who were
waiting for it, and it got bundled into the boats going North before the
redcoats reached Dingan's Drive, it would be as fine a performance as the
West had ever seen; and he would be six hundred dollars to the good. He
listened to the mules galloping, till the sounds had died into the
distance, but he saw now that his captor had heard too, and that the
pursuit would be desperate.
A half-hour later it began, with MacFee at the head and a dozen troopers
pounding behind, weary, hungry, bad-tempered, ready to exact payment for
their hardships and discouragement.
They had not gone a dozen miles when a shouting horseman rode furiously on
them from behind. They turned with carbines cocked, but it was Abe Hawley
who cursed them, flung his fingers in their faces, and rode on harder and
harder. Abe had got the news from one of Nancy's half-breeds, and, with
the devil raging in his heart, had entered on the chase. His spirit was up
against them all: against the Law represented by the troopers camped at
Fort Stay-Awhile, against the troopers and their captain speeding after
Nancy Machell--his Nance, who was risking her life and freedom for the
hated, pale-faced smuggler riding between the troopers; and his spirit was
up against Nance herself.
Nance had said to him, "Come back in an hour," and he had come back to
find her gone. She had broken her word. She had deceived him. She had
thrown the four years of his waiting to the winds, and a savage lust was
in his heart, which would not be appeased till he had done some evil thing
to some one.
The girl and the Indian lad were pounding through the night with ears
strained to listen for hoof-beats coming after, with eyes searching
forward into the trail for swollen creeks and direful obstructions.
Through Barfleur Coulee it was a terrible march, for there was no road,
and again and again they were nearly overturned, while wolves hovered in
their path, ready to reap a midnight harvest. But once in the open again,
with the full moonlight on their trail, the girl's spirits rose. If she
could do this thing for the man who had looked into her eyes as no one had
ever done, what a finish to her days in the West! For they were finished,
finished forever, and she was going--she was going East; not West with
Bantry, nor South with Nick Pringle, nor North with Abe Hawley--ah, Abe
Hawley! He had been a good friend, he had a great heart, he was the best
man of all the Western men she had known; but another man had come from
the East, a man who had roused something in her never felt before, a man
who had said she was wonderful; and he needed some one to take good care
of him, to make him love life again. Abe would have been all right if
Lambton had never come, and she had meant to marry Abe in the end; but it
was different now, and Abe must get over it. Yet she had told Abe to come
back in an hour. He was sure to do it; and, when he had done it, and found
her gone on this errand, what would he do? She knew what he would do. He
would hurt someone. He would follow, too. But at Dingan's Drive, if she
reached it before the troopers and before Abe, and did the thing she had
set out to do; and because no whiskey could be found, Lambton must go
free; and they all stood there together, what would be the end? Abe would
be terrible; but she was going East, not North, and, when the time came
she would face it and put things right somehow.
The night seemed endless to her fixed and anxious eyes and mind, yet dawn
came, and there had fallen no sound of hoof-beats on her ear. The ridge
above Dingan's Drive was reached and covered, but yet there was no sign of
her pursuers. At Red Man's River she delivered her load of contraband to
the traders waiting for it, and saw it loaded into the boats and disappear
beyond the wooded bend above Dingan's.
Then she collapsed into the arms of her brother Bantry, and was carried,
fainting, into Dingan's Lodge.
A half-hour later MacFee and his troopers and Lambton came. MacFee grimly
searched the post and the shore, but he saw by the looks of all that he
had been foiled. He had no proof of anything, and Lambton must go free.
"You've fooled us," he said to Nance, sourly, yet with a kind of
admiration, too. "Through you, they got away with it. But I wouldn't try
it again, if I were you."
"Once is enough," answered the girl, laconically, as Lambton, set free,
caught both her hands in his and whispered in her ear.
MacFee turned to the others. "You'd better drop this kind of thing," he
said. "I mean business." They saw the troopers by the horses, and nodded.
"Well, we was about quit of it anyhow," said Bantry. "We've had all we
want out here."
A loud laugh went up, and it was still ringing when there burst into the
group, out of the trail, Abe Hawley, on foot.
He looked round the group savagely till his eyes rested on Nance and
Lambton. "I'm last in," he said, in a hoarse voice. "My horse broke its
leg cutting across to get here before her--" He waved a hand toward Nance.
"It's best stickin' to old trails, not tryin' new ones." His eyes were
full of hate as he looked at Lambton. "I'm keeping to old trails. I'm for
goin' North, far up, where these two-dollar-a-day and hash-and-clothes
people ain't come yet." He made a contemptuous gesture toward MacFee and
his troopers. "I'm goin' North--" He took a step forward and fixed his
bloodshot eyes on Nance. "I say I'm goin' North. You comin' with me,
Nance?" He took off his cap to her.
He was haggard, his buckskins were torn, his hair was dishevelled, and he
limped a little; but he was a massive and striking figure, and MacFee
watched him closely, for there was that in his eyes which meant trouble.
"You said, 'Come back in an hour,' Nance, and I come back, as I said I
would," he went on. "You didn't stand to your word. I've come to git it.
I'm goin' North, Nance, and I bin waitin' for four years for you to go
with me. Are you comin'?"
His voice was quiet, but it had a choking kind of sound, and it struck
strangely in the ears of all. MacFee came nearer.
"Are you comin' with me, Nance, dear?"
She reached a hand toward Lambton, and he took it, but she did not speak.
Something in Abe's eyes overwhelmed her--something she had never seen
before, and it seemed to stifle speech in her. Lambton spoke instead.
"She's going East with me," he said. "That's settled."
MacFee started. Then he caught Abe's arm. "Wait!" he said, peremptorily.
"Wait one minute."
There was something in his voice which held Abe back for the instant.
[Illustration: THE START ON THE NORTH TRAIL]
"You say she is going East with you," MacFee said sharply to Lambton.
"What for?" He fastened Lambton with his eyes, and Lambton quailed. "Have
you told her you've got a wife--down East? I've got your history, Lambton.
Have you told her that you've got a wife you married when you were at
college--and as good a girl as ever lived?"
It had come with terrible suddenness even to Lambton, and he was too dazed
to make any reply. With a cry of shame and anger, Nancy started back.
Growling with rage and hate, Abe Hawley sprang toward Lambton, but the
master of the troopers stepped between.
No one could tell who moved first, or who first made the suggestion, for
the minds of all were the same, and the general purpose was instantaneous;
but in the fraction of a minute Lambton, under menace, was on his hands
and knees crawling to the riverside. Watchful, but not interfering, the
master of the troopers saw him set adrift in a canoe without a paddle,
while he was pelted with mud from the shore.
* * * * *
The next morning at sunrise Abe Hawley and the girl he had waited for so
long started on the North trail together, MacFee, master of the troopers
and justice of the peace, handing over the marriage lines.
THE STROKE OF THE HOUR
"They won't come to-night--sure."
The girl looked again toward the west, where, here and there, bare poles,
or branches of trees, or slips of underbrush, marked a road made across
the plains through the snow. The sun was going down golden red, folding up
the sky a wide, soft curtain of pink and mauve and deep purple merging
into the fathomless blue, where already the stars were beginning to
quiver. The house stood on the edge of a little forest, which had boldly
asserted itself in the wide flatness. At this point in the west the
prairie merged into an undulating territory, where hill and wood rolled
away from the banks of the Saskatchewan, making another England in beauty.
The forest was a sort of advance-post of that land of beauty.
Yet there was beauty, too, on this prairie, though there was nothing to
the east but snow and the forest so far as eye could see. Nobility and
peace and power brooded over the white world.
As the girl looked, it seemed as though the bosom of the land rose and
fell. She had felt this vibrating life beat beneath the frozen surface.
Now, as she gazed, she smiled sadly to herself, with drooping eyelids
looking out from beneath strong brows.
"I know you--I know you," she said, aloud. "You've got to take your toll.
And when you're lying asleep like that, or pretending to, you reach
up--and kill. And yet you can be kind--ah, but you can be kind and
beautiful! But you must have your toll one way or t'other." She sighed and
paused; then, after a moment, looking along the trail--"I don't expect
they'll come to-night, and mebbe not to-morrow, if--if they stay for
_that_."
Her eyes closed, she shivered a little. Her lips drew tight, and her face
seemed suddenly to get thinner. "But dad wouldn't--no, he couldn't, not
considerin'--" Again she shut her eyes in pain.
Her face was now turned from the western road by which she had expected
her travellers, and toward the east, where already the snow was taking on
a faint bluish tint, a reflection of the sky deepening toward night in
that half-circle of the horizon. Distant and a little bleak and cheerless
the half-circle was looking now.
"No one--not for two weeks," she said, in comment on the eastern trail,
which was so little frequented in winter, and this year had been less
travelled than ever. "It would be nice to have a neighbor," she added, as
she faced the west and the sinking sun again. "I get so lonely--just
minutes I get lonely. But it's them minutes that seem to count more than
all the rest when they come. I expect that's it--we don't live in months
and years, but just in minutes. It doesn't take long for an earthquake to
do its work--it's seconds then.... P'r'aps dad won't even come to-morrow,"
she added, as she laid her hand on the latch. "It never seemed so long
before, not even when he's been away a week." She laughed bitterly. "Even
bad company's better than no company at all. Sure. And Mickey has been
here always when dad's been away past times. Mickey was a fool, but he was
company; and mebbe he'd have been better company if he'd been more of a
scamp and less a fool. I dunno, but I really think he would. Bad company
doesn't put you off so."
There was a scratching at the inside of the door. "My, if I didn't forget
Shako," she said, "and he dying for a run!"
She opened the door quickly, and out jumped a Russian dog of almost full
breed, with big, soft eyes like those of his mistress, and with the air of
the north in every motion--like his mistress also.
"Come, Shako, a run--a run!"
An instant after she was flying off on a path toward the woods, her short
skirts flying and showing limbs as graceful and shapely as those of any
woman of that world of social grace which she had never seen; for she was
a prairie girl through and through, born on the plains and fed on its
scanty fare--scanty as to variety, at least. Backward and forward they
ran, the girl shouting like a child of ten--she was twenty-three--her eyes
flashing, her fine white teeth showing, her hands thrown up in sheer
excess of animal life, her hair blowing about her face--brown, strong
hair, wavy and plentiful.
Fine creature as she was, her finest features were her eyes and her hands.
The eyes might have been found in the most savage places; the hands,
however, only could have come through breeding. She had got them honestly;
for her mother was descended from an old family of the French province.
That was why she had the name of Loisette--and had a touch of distinction.
It was the strain of the patrician in the full blood of the peasant; but
it gave her something which made her what she was--what she had been since
a child, noticeable and besought, sometimes beloved. It was too strong a
nature to compel love often, but it never failed to compel admiration. Not
greatly a creature of words, she had become moody of late; and even now,
alive with light and feeling and animal life, she suddenly stopped her
romp and run, and called the dog to her.
"Heel, Shako!" she said, and made for the door of the little house, which
looked so snug and homelike. She paused before she came to the door, to
watch the smoke curling up from the chimney straight as a column, for
there was not a breath of air stirring. The sun was almost gone, and the
strong bluish light was settling on everything, giving even the green
spruce-trees a curious burnished tone.
_Swish! Thud!_ She faced the woods quickly. It was only a sound that she
had heard how many hundreds of times! It was the snow slipping from some
broad branch of the fir-trees to the ground. Yet she started now.
Something was on her mind, agitating her senses, affecting her
self-control.
"I'll be jumping out of my boots when the fire snaps, or the frost cracks
the ice, next," she said, aloud, contemptuously. "I dunno what's the
matter with me. I feel as if some one was hiding somewhere ready to pop
out on me. I haven't never felt like that before."
She had formed the habit of talking to herself, for it had seemed at
first, as she was left alone when her father went trapping or upon
journeys for the Government, that by-and-by she would start at the sound
of her own voice if she didn't think aloud. So she was given to soliloquy,
defying the old belief that people who talked to themselves were going
mad. She laughed at that. She said that birds sang to themselves and
didn't go mad, and crickets chirruped, and frogs croaked, and owls hooted,
and she would talk and not go crazy either. So she talked to herself and
to Shako when she was alone.
How quiet it was inside when her light supper was eaten--bread and beans
and pea-soup; she had got this from her French mother. Now she sat, her
elbows on her knees, her chin on her hands, looking into the fire. Shako
was at her feet upon the great musk-ox rug, which her father had got on
one of his hunting trips in the Athabasca country years ago. It belonged
as she belonged. It breathed of the life of the north-land, for the
timbers of the hut were hewn cedar; the rough chimney, the seats, and the
shelves on which a few books made a fair show beside the bright tins and
the scanty crockery, were of pine; and the horned heads of deer and wapiti
made pegs for coats and caps, and rests for guns and rifles. It was a
place of comfort; it had an air of well-to-do thrift, even as the girl's
dress, though plain, was made of good, sound stuff, gray, with a touch of
dark red to match the auburn of her hair.
A book lay open in her lap, but she had scarcely tried to read it. She had
put it down after a few moments fixed upon it. It had sent her thoughts
off into a world where her life had played a part too big for books, too
deep for the plummet of any save those who had lived through the storm of
life's trials; and life when it is bitter to the young is bitter with an
agony the old never know. At last she spoke to herself.
"She knows now! Now she knows what it is, how it feels--your heart like
red-hot coals, and something in your head that's like a turnscrew, and you
want to die and can't, for you've got to live and suffer!"
Again she was quiet, and only the dog's heavy breathing, the snap of the
fire, or the crack of a timber in the deadly frost broke the silence.
Inside it was warm and bright and homelike; outside it was twenty degrees
below zero, and like some vast tomb where life itself was congealed, and
only the white stars, low, twinkling, and quizzical, lived--a life of
sharp corrosion, not of fire.
Suddenly she raised her head and listened. The dog did the same. None but
those whose lives are lived in lonely places can be so acute, so sensitive
to sound. It was a feeling delicate and intense, the whole nature getting
the vibration. You could have heard nothing, had you been there; none but
one who was of the wide spaces could have done so. But the dog and the
woman felt, and both strained toward the window. Again they heard, and
started to their feet. It was far, far away, and still you could not have
heard; but now they heard clearly--a cry in the night, a cry of pain and
despair. The girl ran to the window and pulled aside the bearskin curtain
which had completely shut out the light. Then she stirred the fire, threw
a log upon it, snuffed the candles, hastily put on her moccasins, fur
coat, wool cap, and gloves, and went to the door quickly, the dog at her
heels. Opening it, she stepped out into the night.
"_Qui va la?_ Who is it? Where?" she called, and strained toward the west.
She thought it might be her father or Mickey the hired man, or both.
The answer came from the east, out of the homeless, neighborless, empty
east--a cry, louder now. There were only stars, and the night was dark,
though not deep dark. She sped along the prairie road as fast as she
could, once or twice stopping to call aloud. In answer to her calls the
voice sounded nearer and nearer. Now suddenly she left the trail and bore
away northward. At last the voice was very near. Presently a figure
appeared ahead, staggering toward her.
"_Qui va la?_ Who is it?" she asked.
"Ba'tiste Caron," was the reply in English, in a faint voice. She was
beside him in an instant.
"What has happened? Why are you off the trail?" she said, and supported
him.
"My Injun stoled my dogs and run off," he replied. "I run after. Then,
when I am to come to the trail"--he paused to find the English word, and
could not--"_encore_ to this trail I no can. So. Ah, _bon Dieu_, it has so
awful!" He swayed and would have fallen, but she caught him, bore him up.
She was so strong, and he was as slight as a girl, though tall.
"When was that?" she asked.
"Two nights ago," he answered, and swayed.
"Wait," she said, and pulled a flask from her pocket. "Drink
this--quick!"
He raised it to his lips, but her hand was still on it, and she only let
him take a little. Then she drew it away, though she had almost to use
force, he was so eager for it. Now she took a biscuit from her pocket.
"Eat; then some more brandy, after," she urged. "Come on; it's not far.
See, there's the light," she added, cheerily, raising her head toward the
hut.
"I saw it just when I have fall down--it safe me. I sit down to die--like
that! But it safe me, that light--so. Ah, _bon Dieu_, it was so far, and I
want eat so!"
Already he had swallowed the biscuit.
"When did you eat last?" she asked, as she urged him on.
"Two nights--except for one leetla piece of bread--I fin' it in my pocket.
_Grace!_ I have travel so far. _Jesu_, I think it ees ten thousan' miles,
I go. But I mus' go on, I mus' go--_certainement_."
The light came nearer and nearer. His footsteps quickened, though he
staggered now and then, and went like a horse that has run its race, but
is driven upon its course again, going heavily with mouth open and head
thrown forward and down.
"But I mus' to get there, an' you--you will to help me, eh?"
Again he swayed, but her strong arm held him up. As they ran on, in a kind
of dog-trot, her hand firm upon his arm--he seemed not to notice it--she
became conscious, though it was half dark, of what sort of man she had
saved. He was about her own age, perhaps a year or two older, with little,
if any, hair upon his face, save a slight mustache. His eyes, deep sunken
as they were, she made out were black, and the face, though drawn and
famished, had a handsome look. Presently she gave him another sip of
brandy, and he quickened his steps, speaking to himself the while.
"I haf to do it--if I lif. It is to go, go, go, till I get."
Now they came to the hut where the firelight flickered on the window-pane;
the door was flung open, and, as he stumbled on the threshold, she helped
him into the warm room. She almost pushed him over to the fire.
Divested of his outer coat, muffler, cap, and leggings, he sat on a bench
before the fire, his eyes wandering from the girl to the flames, and his
hands clasping and unclasping between his knees. His eyes dilating with
hunger, he watched her preparations for his supper; and when at last--and
she had been but a moment--it was placed before him, his head swam, and he
turned faint with the stress of his longing. He would have swallowed a
basin of pea-soup at a draught, but she stopped him, holding the basin
till she thought he might venture again. Then came cold beans, and some
meat which she toasted at the fire and laid upon his plate. They had not
spoken since first entering the house, when tears had shone in his eyes,
and he had said:
"You have safe--ah, you have safe me, and so I will do it yet by help _bon
Dieu_--yes."
The meal was done at last, and he sat with a great dish of tea beside him,
and his pipe alight.
"What time, if please?" he asked. "I t'ink nine hour, but no sure."
"It is near nine," she said. She hastily tidied up the table after his
meal, and then came and sat in her chair over against the wall of the rude
fireplace.
"Nine--dat is good. The moon rise at 'leven; den I go. I go on," he said,
"if you show me de queeck way."
"You go on--how can you go on?" she asked, almost sharply.
"Will you not to show me?" he asked.
"Show you what?" she asked, abruptly.
"The queeck way to Askatoon," he said, as though surprised that she should
ask. "They say me if I get here you will tell me queeck way to Askatoon.
Time, he go so fas', an' I have loose a day an' a night, an' I mus' get
Askatoon if I lif--I mus' get dere in time. It is all safe to de stroke of
de hour, _mais_, after, it is--_bon Dieu_!--it is hell then. Who shall
forgif me--no!"
"The stroke of the hour--the stroke of the hour!" It beat into her brain.
Were they both thinking of the same thing now?
"You will show me queeck way. I mus' be Askatoon in two days, or it is all
over," he almost moaned. "Is no man here--I forget dat name, my head go
round like a wheel; but I know dis place, an' de good God, He help me fin'
my way to where I call out, _bien sur_. Dat man's name I have forget."
"My father's name is John Alroyd," she answered, absently, for there were
hammering at her brain the words, "_The stroke of the hour._"
"Ah, now I get--yes. An' your name, it is Loisette Alroy--ah, I have it in
my mind now--Loisette. I not forget dat name, I not forget you--no."
"Why do you want to go the 'quick' way to Askatoon?" she asked.
He puffed a moment at his pipe before he answered her. Presently he said,
holding out his pipe, "You not like smoke, mebbe?"
She shook her head in negation, making an impatient gesture.
"I forget ask you," he said. "Dat journee make me forget. When Injun Jo,
he leave me with the dogs, an' I wake up all alone, an' not know my
way--not like Jo, I think I die, it is so bad, so _terrible_ in my head.
Not'ing but snow, not'ing. But dere is de sun; it shine. It say to me,
'Wake up, Ba'tiste; it will be all right bime-bye.' But all time I t'ink I
go mad, for I mus' get Askatoon before--_dat_."
She started. Had she not used the same word in thinking of Askatoon.
"_That_," she had said.
"Why do you want to go the 'quick' way to Askatoon?" she asked again, her
face pale, her foot beating the floor impatiently.
"To save him before _dat_!" he answered, as though she knew of what he was
speaking and thinking.
"What is _that_?" she asked. She knew now, surely, but she must ask it
nevertheless.
"Dat hanging--of Haman," he answered. He nodded to himself. Then he took
to gazing into the fire. His lips moved as though talking to himself, and
the hand that held the pipe lay forgotten on his knee.
"What have you to do with Haman?" she asked, slowly, her eyes burning.
"I want safe him--I mus' give him free." He tapped his breast. "It is here
to mak' him free." He still tapped his breast.
For a moment she stood frozen still, her face thin and drawn and white;
then suddenly the blood rushed back into her face, and a red storm raged
in her eyes.
She thought of the sister, younger than herself, whom Rube Haman had
married and driven to her grave within a year--the sweet Lucy, with the
name of her father's mother. Lucy had been all English in face and tongue,
a flower of the west, driven to darkness by this horse-dealing brute, who,
before he was arrested and tried for murder, was about to marry Kate
Wimper. Kate Wimper had stolen him from Lucy before Lucy's first and only
child was born, the child that could not survive the warm mother-life
withdrawn, and so had gone down the valley whither the broken-hearted
mother had fled. It was Kate Wimper, who, before that, had waylaid the one
man for whom she herself had ever cared, and drawn him from her side by
such attractions as she herself would keep for an honest wife, if such she
ever chanced to be. An honest wife she would have been had Kate Wimper not
crossed the straight path of her life. The man she had loved was gone to
his end also, reckless and hopeless, after he had thrown away his chance
of a lifetime with Loisette Alroyd. There had been left behind this girl,
to whom tragedy had come too young, who drank humiliation with a heart as
proud as ever straightly set its course through crooked ways.
It had hurt her, twisted her nature a little, given a fountain of
bitterness to her soul, which welled up and flooded her life sometimes. It
had given her face no sourness, but it put a shadow into her eyes.
She had been glad when Haman was condemned for murder, for she believed he
had committed it, and ten times hanging could not compensate for that dear
life gone from their sight--Lucy, the pride of her father's heart. She was
glad when Haman was condemned, because of the woman who had stolen him
from Lucy, because of that other man, her lover, gone out of her own life.
The new hardness in her rejoiced that now the woman, if she had any heart
at all, must have it bowed down by this supreme humiliation and wrung by
the ugly tragedy of the hempen rope.
And now this man before her, this man with a boy's face, with the dark,
luminous eyes, whom she had saved from the frozen plains, he had that in
his breast which would free Haman, so he had said. A fury had its birth in
her at that moment. Something seemed to seize her brain and master it,
something so big that it held all her faculties in perfect control, and
she felt herself in an atmosphere where all life moved round her
mechanically, she herself the only sentient thing, so much greater than
all she saw, or all that she realized by her subconscious self. Everything
in the world seemed small. How calm it was even with the fury within!
"Tell me," she said, quietly--"tell me how you are able to save Haman?"
"He not kill Wakely. It is my brudder Fadette dat kill and get away. Haman
he is drunk, and everyt'ing seem to say Haman he did it, an' every one
know Haman is not friend to Wakely. So the juree say he must be hanging.
But my brudder he go to die with hawful bad cold queeck, an' he send for
the priest an' for me, an' tell all. I go to Governor with the priest, an'
Governor gif me dat writing here." He tapped his breast, then took out a
wallet and showed the paper to her. "It is life of dat Haman, _voici_! And
so I safe him for my brudder. Dat was a bad boy, Fadette. He was bad all
time since he was a baby, an' I t'ink him pretty lucky to die on his bed,
an' get absolve, and go to purgatore. If he not have luck like dat he go
to hell, an' stay there."
He sighed, and put the wallet back in his breast carefully, his eyes half
shut with weariness, his handsome face drawn and thin, his limbs lax with
fatigue.
"If I get Askatoon before de time for _dat_, I be happy in my heart, for
dat brudder off mine he get out of purgatore bime-bye, I t'ink."
His eyes were almost shut, but he drew himself together with a great
effort, and added desperately: "No sleep. If I sleep it is all smash. Man
say me I can get Askatoon by dat time from here, if I go queeck way across
lak'--it is all froze now, dat lak'--an' down dat Foxtail Hills. Is it so,
ma'm'selle?"
"By the 'quick' way if you can make it in time," she said; "but it is no
way for the stranger to go. There are always bad spots on the ice--it is
not safe. You could not find your way."
"I mus' get dere in time," he said, desperately.
"You can't do it--alone," she said. "Do you want to risk all and lose?"
He frowned in self-suppression. "Long way, I no can get dere in time?" he
asked.
She thought a moment. "No; it can't be done by the long way. But there is
another way--a third trail, the trail the Gover'ment men made a year ago
when they came to survey. It is a good trail. It is blazed in the woods
and staked on the plains. You cannot miss. But--but there is so little
time." She looked at the clock on the wall. "You cannot leave here much
before sunrise, and--"
"I will leef when de moon rise, at eleven," he interjected.
"You have had no sleep for two nights, and no food. You can't last it
out," she said, calmly.
The deliberate look on his face deepened to stubbornness.
"It is my vow to my brudder--he is in purgatore. An' I mus' do it," he
rejoined, with an emphasis there was no mistaking. "You can show me dat
way?"
She went to a drawer and took out a piece of paper. Then, with a point of
blackened stick, as he watched her and listened, she swiftly drew his
route for him.
"Yes, I get it in my head," he said. "I go dat way, but I wish--I wish it
was dat queeck way. I have no fear, not'ing. I go w'en dat moon rise--I
go, _bien sur._"
"You must sleep, then, while I get some food for you." She pointed to a
couch in a corner. "I will wake you when the moon rises."
For the first time he seemed to realize her, for a moment to leave the
thing which consumed him, and put his mind upon her.
"You not happy--you not like me here?" he asked, simply; then added,
quickly, "I am not bad man like me brudder--no."
Her eyes rested on him for a moment as though realizing him, while some
thought was working in her mind behind.
"No, you are not a bad man," she said. "Men and women are equal on the
plains. You have no fear--I have no fear."
He glanced at the rifles on the walls, then back at her. "My mudder, she
was good woman. I am glad she did not lif to know what Fadette do." His
eyes drank her in for a minute, then he said: "I go sleep now, t'ank
you--till moontime."
In a moment his deep breathing filled the room, the only sound save for
the fire within and the frost outside.
Time went on. The night deepened.
* * * * *
Loisette sat beside the fire, but her body was half-turned from it toward
the man on the sofa. She was not agitated outwardly, but within there was
that fire which burns up life and hope and all the things that come
between us and great issues. It had burned up everything in her except one
thought, one powerful motive. She had been deeply wronged, and justice had
been about to give "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." But the
man lying there had come to sweep away the scaffolding of justice--he had
come for that.
Perhaps he might arrive at Askatoon before the stroke of the hour, but
still he would be too late, for in her pocket now was the Governor's
reprieve. The man had slept soundly. His wallet was still in his breast;
but the reprieve was with her.
If he left without discovering his loss, and got well on his way, and
discovered it then, it would be too late. If he returned--she only saw one
step before her, she would wait for that, and deal with it when it came.
She was thinking of Lucy, of her own lover ruined and gone. She was calm
in her madness.
At the first light of the moon she roused him. She had put food into his
fur-coat pocket, and after he had drunk a bowl of hot pea-soup, while she
told him his course again, she opened the door, and he passed out into the
night. He started forward without a word, but came back again and caught
her hand.
"_Pardon_," he said; "I go forget everyt'ing except _dat_. But I t'ink
what you do for me, it is better than all my life. _Bien sur_, I will come
again, when I get my mind to myself. Ah, but you are beautibul," he said,
"an' you not happy. Well, I come again--yes, _a Dieu._"
He was gone into the night, with the moon silvering the sky, and the
steely frost eating into the sentient life of this northern world. Inside
the house, with the bearskin blind dropped at the window again, and the
fire blazing high, Loisette sat with the Governor's reprieve in her hand.
Looking at it, she wondered why it had been given to Ba'tiste Caron and
not to a police-officer. Ah yes, it was plain--Ba'tiste was a woodsman and
plainsman, and could go far more safely than a constable, and faster.
Ba'tiste had reason for going fast, and he would travel night and day--he
was travelling night and day indeed. And now Ba'tiste might get there, but
the reprieve would not. He would not be able to stop the hanging of
Haman--the hanging of Rube Haman.
A change came over her. Her eyes blazed, her breast heaved now. She had
been so quiet, so cold and still. But life seemed moving in her once
again. The woman, Kate Wimper, who had helped to send two people to their
graves, would now drink the dregs of shame, if she was capable of
shame--would be robbed of her happiness, if so be she loved Rube Haman.
She stood up, as though to put the paper in the fire, but paused suddenly
at one thought--_Rube Haman was innocent of murder._
Even so, he was not innocent of Lucy's misery and death, or the death of
the little one who only opened its eyes to the light for an instant, and
then went into the dark again. But truly she was justified! When Haman was
gone things would go on just the same--and she had been so bitter, her
heart had been pierced as with a knife these past three years. Again she
held out her hand to the fire, but suddenly she gave a little cry and put
her hand to her head. There was Ba'tiste!
What was Ba'tiste to her? Nothing--nothing at all. She had saved his
life--even if she wronged Ba'tiste, her debt would be paid. No, she would
not think of Ba'tiste. Yet she did not put the paper in the fire, but in
the pocket of her dress. Then she went to her room, leaving the door open.
The bed was opposite the fire, and, as she lay there--she did not take off
her clothes, she knew not why--she could see the flames. She closed her
eyes but could not sleep, and more than once when she opened them she
thought she saw Ba'tiste sitting there as he had sat hours before. Why did
Ba'tiste haunt her so? What was it he had said in his broken English as he
went away?--that he would come back; that she was "beautibul."
All at once as she lay still, her head throbbing, her feet and hands icy
cold, she sat up listening.
"Ah--again!" she cried. She sprang from her bed, rushed to the door, and
strained her eyes into the silver night. She called into the icy void,
"_Qui va la?_ Who goes?"
She leaned forward, her hand at her ear, but no sound came in reply. Once
more she called, but nothing answered. The night was all light and frost
and silence.
She had only heard, in her own brain, the iteration of Ba'tiste's calling.
Would he reach Askatoon in time? she wondered, as she shut the door. Why
had she not gone with him and attempted the shorter way--the quick way, he
had called it? All at once the truth came back upon her, stirring her now.
It would do no good for Ba'tiste to arrive in time. He might plead to them
all and tell the truth about the reprieve, but it would not avail--Rube
Haman would hang. That did not matter--even though he was innocent; but
Ba'tiste's brother would be so long in purgatory. And even that would not
matter; but she would hurt Ba'tiste--Ba'tiste--Ba'tiste! And Ba'tiste he
would know that she--and he had called her "beautibul"--that she had--
With a cry she suddenly clothed herself for travel. She put some food and
drink in a leather bag and slung them over her shoulder. Then she dropped
on a knee and wrote a note to her father, tears falling from her eyes. She
heaped wood on the fire and moved toward the door. All at once she turned
to the crucifix on the wall which had belonged to her mother, and, though
she had followed her father's Protestant religion, she kissed the feet of
the sacred figure.
"Oh, Christ, have mercy on me, and bring me safe to my journey's end--in
time," she said, breathlessly; then she went softly to the door, leaving
the dog behind.
It opened, closed, and the night swallowed her. Like a ghost she sped the
quick way to Askatoon. She was six hours behind Ba'tiste, and, going hard
all the time, it was doubtful if she could get there before the fatal
hour.
On the trail Ba'tiste had taken there were two huts where he could rest,
and he had carried his blanket slung on his shoulder. The way she went
gave no shelter save the trees and caves which had been used to _cache_
buffalo meat and hides in old days. But beyond this there was danger in
travelling by night, for the springs beneath the ice of the three lakes
she must cross made it weak and rotten even in the fiercest weather, and
what would no doubt have been death to Ba'tiste would be peril at least to
her. Why had she not gone with him?
"He had in his face what was in Lucy's," she said to herself, as she sped
on. "She was fine like him, ready to break her heart for those she cared
for. My, if she had seen him first instead of--"
She stopped short, for the ice gave way to her foot, and she only sprang
back in time to save herself. But she trotted on, mile after mile, the
dog-trot of the Indian, head bent forward, toeing in, breathing steadily
but sharply.
The morning came, noon, then a fall of snow and a keen wind, and despair
in her heart; but she had passed the danger-spots, and now, if the storm
did not overwhelm her, she might get to Askatoon in time. In the midst of
the storm she came to one of the caves of which she had known. Here was
wood for a fire, and here she ate, and in weariness unspeakable fell
asleep. When she waked it was near sundown, the storm had ceased, and, as
on the night before, the sky was stained with color and drowned in
splendor.
"I will do it--I will do it, Ba'tiste!" she called, and laughed aloud into
the sunset. She had battled with herself all the way, and she had
conquered. Right was right, and Rube Haman must not be hung for what he
did not do. Her heart hardened whenever she thought of the woman, but
softened again when she thought of Ba'tiste, who had to suffer for the
deed of a brother in "purgatore." Once again the night and its silence and
loneliness followed her, the only living thing near the trail till long
after midnight. After that, as she knew, there were houses here and there
where she might have rested, but she pushed on unceasing.
At daybreak she fell in with a settler going to Askatoon with his dogs.
Seeing how exhausted she was, he made her ride a few miles upon his
sledge; then she sped on ahead again till she came to the borders of
Askatoon.
People were already in the streets, and all were tending one way. She
stopped and asked the time. It was within a quarter of an hour of the time
when Haman was to pay another's penalty. She spurred herself on, and came
to the jail blind with fatigue. As she neared the jail she saw her father
and Mickey. In amazement her father hailed her, but she would not stop.
She was admitted to the prison on explaining that she had a reprieve.
Entering a room filled with excited people, she heard a cry.
It came from Ba'tiste. He had arrived but ten minutes before, and, in the
Sheriff's presence, had discovered his loss. He had appealed in vain.
But now, as he saw the girl, he gave a shout of joy which pierced the
hearts of all.
"Ah, you haf it! Say you haf it, or it is no use--he mus' hang.
Spik--spik! Ah, my brudder--it is to do him right! Ah, Loisette--_bon
Dieu, merci!_"
For answer she placed the reprieve in the hands of the Sheriff. Then she
swayed and fell fainting at the feet of Ba'tiste.
She had come at the stroke of the hour.
When she left for her home again the Sheriff kissed her.
And that was not the only time he kissed her. He did it again six months
later, at the beginning of the harvest, when she and Ba'tiste Caron
started off on the long trail of life together. None but Ba'tiste knew the
truth about the loss of the reprieve, and to him she was "beautibul" just
the same, and greatly to be desired.
[Illustration: SHE SWAYED AND FELL FAINTING AT THE FEET OF BA'TISTE]
BUCKMASTER'S BOY
"I bin waitin' for him, an' I'll git him ef it takes all winter. I'll get
him--plumb."
The speaker smoothed the barrel of his rifle with mittened hand, which
had, however, a trigger-finger free. With black eyebrows twitching over
sunken gray eyes, he looked doggedly down the frosty valley from the ledge
of high rock where he sat. The face was rough and weather-beaten, with the
deep tan got in the open life of a land of much sun and little cloud, and
he had a beard which, untrimmed and growing wild, made him look ten years
older than he was.
"I bin waitin' a durn while," the mountain-man added, and got to his feet
slowly, drawing himself out to six and a half feet of burly manhood. The
shoulders were, however, a little stooped, and the head was thrust forward
with an eager, watchful look--a habit become a physical characteristic.
Presently he caught sight of a hawk sailing southward along the peaks of
the white icebound mountains above, on which the sun shone with such sharp
insistence, making sky and mountain of a piece in deep purity and serene
stillness.
"That hawk's seen him, mebbe," he said, after a moment. "I bet it went up
higher when it got him in its eye. Ef it'd only speak and tell me where he
is--ef he's a day, or two days, or ten days north."
Suddenly his eyes blazed and his mouth opened in superstitious amazement,
for the hawk stopped almost directly overhead at a great height, and swept
round in a circle many times, waveringly, uncertainly. At last it resumed
its flight southward, sliding down the mountains like a winged star.
The mountaineer watched it with a dazed expression for a moment longer,
then both hands clutched the rifle and half swung it to position
involuntarily.
"It's seen him, and it stopped to say so. It's seen him, I tell you, an'
I'll git him. Ef it's an hour, or a day, or a week, it's all the same. I'm
here watchin', waitin' dead on to him, the poison skunk!"
The person to whom he had been speaking now rose from the pile of cedar
boughs where he had been sitting, stretched his arms up, then shook
himself into place, as does a dog after sleep. He stood for a minute
looking at the mountaineer with a reflective yet a furtively sardonic
look. He was not above five feet nine inches in height, and he was slim
and neat; and though his buckskin coat and breeches were worn and even
frayed in spots, he had an air of some distinction and of concentrated
force. It was a face that men turned to look at twice and shook their
heads in doubt afterward--a handsome, worn, secretive face, in as perfect
control as the strings of an instrument under the bow of a great artist.
It was the face of a man without purpose in life beyond the
moment--watchful, careful, remorselessly determined, an adventurer's
asset, the dial-plate of a hidden machinery.
Now he took the handsome meerschaum pipe from his mouth, from which he had
been puffing smoke slowly, and said in a cold, yet quiet voice, "How long
you been waitin', Buck?"
"A month. He's overdue near that. He always comes down to winter at Fort
o' Comfort, with his string of half-breeds, an' Injuns, an' the dogs."
"No chance to get him at the Fort?"
"It ain't so certain. They'd guess what I was doin' there. It's surer
here. He's got to come down the trail, an' when I spot him by the Juniper
clump"--he jerked an arm toward a spot almost a mile farther up the
valley--"I kin scoot up the underbrush a bit and git him--plumb. I could
do it from here, sure, but I don't want no mistake. Once only, jest one
shot, that's all I want, Sinnet."
He bit off a small piece of tobacco from a black plug Sinnet offered him,
and chewed it with nervous fierceness, his eyebrows working, as he looked
at the other eagerly. Deadly as his purpose was, and grim and unvarying as
his vigil had been, the loneliness had told on him, and he had grown
hungry for a human face and human companionship. Why Sinnet had come he
had not thought to inquire. Why Sinnet should be going north instead of
south had not occurred to him. He only realized that Sinnet was not the
man he was waiting for with murder in his heart; and all that mattered to
him in life was the coming of his victim down the trail. He had welcomed
Sinnet with a sullen eagerness, and had told him in short, detached
sentences the dark story of a wrong and a waiting revenge, which brought a
slight flush to Sinnet's pale face and awakened a curious light in his
eyes.
"Is that your shack--that where you shake down?" Sinnet said, pointing
toward a lean-to in the fir-trees to trees to the right.
"That's it. I sleep there. It's straight on to the Juniper clump, the
front door is." He laughed viciously, grimly. "Outside or inside, I'm on
to the Juniper clump. Walk into the parlor?" he added, and drew open a
rough-made door, so covered with green cedar boughs that it seemed of a
piece with the surrounding underbrush and trees. Indeed, the little hut
was so constructed that it could not be distinguished from the woods even
a short distance away.
"Can't have a fire, I suppose?" Sinnet asked.
"Not daytimes. Smoke 'd give me away if he suspicioned me," answered the
mountaineer. "I don't take no chances. Never can tell."
"Water?" asked Sinnet, as though interested in the surroundings, while all
the time he was eying the mountaineer furtively--as it were, prying to the
inner man, or measuring the strength of the outer man. He lighted a fresh
pipe and seated himself on a rough bench beside the table in the middle of
the room, and leaned on his elbows, watching.
The mountaineer laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh to hear. "Listen," he
said. "You bin a long time out West. You bin in the mountains a good
while. Listen."
There was silence. Sinnet listened intently. He heard the faint drip,
drip, drip of water, and looked steadily at the back wall of the room.
"There--rock?" he said, and jerked his head toward the sound.
"You got good ears," answered the other, and drew aside a blanket which
hung on the back wall of the room. A wooden trough was disclosed hanging
under a ledge of rock, and water dripped into it softly, slowly.
"Almost providential, that rock," remarked Sinnet. "You've got your well
at your back door. Food--but you can't go far, and keep your eye on the
Bend too," he nodded toward the door, beyond which lay the frost-touched
valley in the early morning light of autumn.
"Plenty of black squirrels and pigeons come here on account of the springs
like this one, and I get 'em with a bow and arrow. I didn't call myself
Robin Hood and Daniel Boone not for nothin' when I was knee-high to a
grasshopper." He drew from a rough cupboard some cold game, and put it on
the table, with some scones and a pannikin of water. Then he brought out a
small jug of whiskey and placed it beside his visitor. They began to eat.
"How d'ye cook without fire?" asked Sinnet.
"Fire's all right at nights. He'd never camp 'twixt here an' Juniper Bend
at night. The next camp's six miles north from here. He'd only come down
the valley daytimes. I studied it all out, and it's a dead sure thing.
From daylight till dusk I'm on to him--I got the trail in my eye."
He showed his teeth like a wild dog, as his look swept the valley. There
was something almost revolting in his concentrated ferocity.
Sinnet's eyes half closed as he watched the mountaineer, and the long,
scraggy hands and whipcord neck seemed to interest him greatly. He looked
at his own slim, brown hands with a half smile, and it was almost as cruel
as the laugh of the other. Yet it had, too, a knowledge and an
understanding which gave it humanity.
"You're sure he did it?" Sinnet asked, presently, after drinking a very
small portion of liquor, and tossing some water from the pannikin after
it. "You're sure Greevy killed your boy, Buck?"
"My name's Buckmaster, ain't it--Jim Buckmaster? Don't I know my own name?
It's as sure as that. My boy said it was Greevy when he was dying. He told
Bill Ricketts so, and Bill told me afore he went East. Bill didn't want to
tell, but he said it was fair I should know, for my boy never did nobody
any harm--an' Greevy's livin' on! But I'll git him. Right's right."
"Wouldn't it be better for the law to hang him if you've got the proof,
Buck? A year or so in jail, an' a long time to think over what's going
round his neck on the scaffold--wouldn't that suit you, if you've got the
proof?"
A rigid, savage look came into Buckmaster's face.
"I ain't lettin' no judge and jury do my business. I'm for certain sure,
not for _p'r'aps_! An' I want to do it myself. Clint was only twenty. Like
boys we was together. I was eighteen when I married, an' he come when
_she_ went--jest a year--jest a year. An' ever since then we lived
together, him an' me, an' shot together, an' trapped together, an' went
gold-washin' together on the Cariboo, an' eat out of the same dish, an'
slept under the same blanket, and jawed together nights--ever since he was
five, when old Mother Lablache had got him into pants, an' he was fit to
take the trail."
The old man stopped a minute, his whipcord neck swelling, his lips
twitching. He brought a fist down on the table with a bang. "The biggest
little rip he was, as full of fun as a squirrel, an' never a smile--jest
his eyes dancin', an' more sense than a judge. He laid hold o' me, that
cub did--it was like his mother and himself together; an' the years
flowin' in an' peterin' out, an' him gettin' older, an' always jest the
same. Always on rock-bottom, always bright as a dollar, an' we livin' at
Black Nose Lake, layin' up cash agin' the time we was to go South, an' set
up a house along the railway, an' him to git married. I was for his
gittin' married same as me, when we had enough cash. I use to think of
that when he was ten, and when he was eighteen I spoke to him about it;
but he wouldn't listen--jest laughed at me. You remember how Clint used to
laugh, sort of low and teasin' like--you remember that laugh o' Clint's,
don't you?"
Sinnet's face was toward the valley and Juniper Bend, but he slowly turned
his head and looked at Buckmaster strangely out of his half-shut eyes. He
took the pipe from his mouth slowly.
"I can hear it now," he answered, slowly. "I hear it often, Buck."
The old man gripped his arm so suddenly that Sinnet was startled--in so
far as anything could startle any one who had lived a life of chance and
danger and accident--and his face grew a shade paler; but he did not move,
and Buckmaster's hand tightened convulsively.
"You liked him, an' he liked you; he first learnt poker off you, Sinnet.
He thought you was a tough, but he didn't mind that no more than I did. It
ain't for us to say what we're goin' to be, not always. Things in life git
stronger than we are. You was a tough, but who's goin' to judge you? I
ain't; for Clint took to you, Sinnet, an' he never went wrong in his
thinkin'. God! he was wife an' child to me--an' he's dead--dead--dead!"
The man's grief was a painful thing to see. His hands gripped the table,
while his body shook with sobs, though his eyes gave forth no tears. It
was an inward convulsion, which gave his face the look of unrelieved
tragedy and suffering--Laocoon struggling with the serpents of sorrow and
hatred which were strangling him.
"Dead an' gone," he repeated, as he swayed to and fro, and the table
quivered in his grasp. Presently, however, as though arrested by a
thought, he peered out of the doorway toward Juniper Bend. "That hawk seen
him--it seen him. He's comin', I know it, an' I'll git him--plumb." He had
the mystery and imagination of the mountain-dweller.
The rifle lay against the wall behind him, and he turned and touched it
almost caressingly. "I ain't let go like this since he was killed, Sinnet.
It don't do. I got to keep myself stiddy to do the trick when the minute
comes. At first I usen't to sleep at nights, thinkin' of Clint, an'
missin' him, an' I got shaky and no good. So I put a cinch on myself, an'
got to sleepin' again--from the full dusk to dawn, for Greevy wouldn't
take the trail at night. I've kept stiddy." He held out his hand as though
to show that it was firm and steady, but it trembled with the emotion
which had conquered him. He saw it, and shook his head angrily.
"It was seein' you, Sinnet. It burst me. I ain't seen no one to speak to
in a month, an' with you sittin' there, it was like Clint an' me cuttin'
and comin' again off the loaf an' the knuckle-bone of ven'son."
Sinnet ran a long finger slowly across his lips, and seemed meditating
what he should say to the mountaineer. At length he spoke, looking into
Buckmaster's face: "What was the story Ricketts told you? What did your
boy tell Ricketts? I've heard, too, about it, and that's why I asked you
if you had proofs that Greevy killed Clint. Of course, Clint should know,
and if he told Ricketts, that's pretty straight; but I'd like to know if
what I heard tallies with what Ricketts heard from Clint. P'r'aps it'd
ease your mind a bit to tell it. I'll watch the Bend--don't you trouble
about that. You can't do these two things at one time. I'll watch for
Greevy; you give me Clint's story to Ricketts. I guess you know I'm
feelin' for you, an' if I was in your place I'd shoot the man that killed
Clint, if it took ten years. I'd have his heart's blood--all of it.
Whether Greevy was in the right or in the wrong, I'd have him--_plumb_."
Buckmaster was moved. He gave a fierce exclamation and made a gesture of
cruelty. "Clint right or wrong? There ain't no question of that. My boy
wasn't the kind to be in the wrong. What did he ever do but what was
right? If Clint was in the wrong I'd kill Greevy jest the same, for Greevy
robbed him of all the years that was before him--only a sapling he was,
an' all his growin' to do, all his branches to widen an' his roots to
spread. But that don't enter in it, his bein' in the wrong. It was a
quarrel, and Clint never did Greevy any harm. It was a quarrel over cards,
an' Greevy was drunk, an' followed Clint out into the prairie in the night
and shot him like a coyote. Clint hadn't no chance, an' he jest lay there
on the ground till morning, when Ricketts and Steve Joicey found him. An'
Clint told Ricketts who it was."
"Why didn't Ricketts tell it right out at once?" asked Sinnet.
"Greevy was his own cousin--it was in the family, an' he kept thinkin' of
Greevy's gal, Em'ly. Her--what'll it matter to her? She'll get married, an
she'll forgit. I know her, a gal that's got no deep feelin' like Clint had
for me. But because of her Ricketts didn't speak for a year. Then he
couldn't stand it any longer, an' he told me--seein' how I suffered, an'
everybody hidin' their suspicions from me, an' me up here out o' the way,
an' no account. That was the feelin' among 'em: What was the good of
making things worse? They wasn't thinkin' of the boy or of Jim Buckmaster,
his father. They was thinkin' of Greevy's gal--to save her trouble."
Sinnet's face was turned toward Juniper Bend, and the eyes were fixed, as
it were, on a still more distant object--a dark, brooding, inscrutable
look.
"Was that all Ricketts told you, Buck?" The voice was very quiet, but it
had a suggestive note.
"That's all Clint told Bill before he died. That was enough."
There was a moment's pause, and then, puffing out long clouds of smoke,
and in a tone of curious detachment, as though he were telling something
that he saw now in the far distance, or as a spectator of a battle from a
far vantage-point might report to a blind man standing near, Sinnet said:
"P'r'aps Ricketts didn't know the whole story; p'r'aps Clint didn't know
it all to tell him; p'r'aps Clint didn't remember it all. P'r'aps he
didn't remember anything except that he and Greevy quarrelled, and that
Greevy and he shot at each other in the prairie. He'd only be thinking of
the thing that mattered most to him--that his life was over, an' that a
man had put a bullet in him, an'--"
Buckmaster tried to interrupt him, but he waved a hand impatiently, and
continued: "As I say, maybe he didn't remember everything; he had been
drinkin' a bit himself, Clint had. He wasn't used to liquor, and couldn't
stand much. Greevy was drunk, too, and gone off his head with rage. He
always gets drunk when he first comes south to spend the winter with his
girl Em'ly." He paused a moment, then went on a little more quickly.
"Greevy was proud of her--couldn't even bear her being crossed in any way;
and she has a quick temper, and if she quarrelled with anybody Greevy
quarrelled too."
"I don't want to know anything about her," broke in Buckmaster, roughly.
"She isn't in this thing. I'm goin' to get Greevy. I bin waitin' for him,
an' I'll git him."
"You're going to kill the man that killed your boy, if you can, Buck; but
I'm telling my story in my own way. You told Rickett's story; I'll tell
what I've heard. And before you kill Greevy you ought to know all there is
that anybody else knows--or suspicions about it."
"I know enough. Greevy done it, an' I'm here."
With no apparent coherence and relevancy Sinnet continued, but his voice
was not so even as before. "Em'ly was a girl that wasn't twice alike. She
was changeable. First it was one, then it was another, and she didn't seem
to be able to fix her mind. But that didn't prevent her leadin' men on.
She wasn't changeable, though, about her father. She was to him what your
boy was to you. There she was like you, ready to give everything up for
her father."
"I tell y' I don't want to hear about her," said Buckmaster, getting to
his feet and setting his jaws. "You needn't talk to me about her. She'll
git over it. I'll never git over what Greevy done to me or to Clint--jest
twenty, jest twenty! I got my work to do."
He took his gun from the wall, slung it into the hollow of his arm, and
turned to look up the valley through the open doorway.
The morning was sparkling with life--the life and vigor which a touch of
frost gives to the autumn world in a country where the blood tingles to
the dry, sweet sting of the air. Beautiful, and spacious, and buoyant, and
lonely, the valley and the mountains seemed waiting, like a new-born
world, to be peopled by man. It was as though all had been made ready for
him--the birds whistling and singing in the trees, the whisk of the
squirrels leaping from bough to bough, the peremptory sound of the
woodpecker's beak against the bole of a tree, the rustle of the leaves as
a wood-hen ran past--a waiting, virgin world.
Its beauty and its wonderful dignity had no appeal to Buckmaster. His eyes
and mind were fixed on a deed which would stain the virgin wild with the
ancient crime that sent the first marauder on human life into the
wilderness.
As Buckmaster's figure darkened the doorway Sinnet seemed to waken as from
a dream, and he got swiftly to his feet. "Wait--you wait, Buck. You've got
to hear all. You haven't heard my story yet. Wait, I tell you."
His voice was so sharp and insistent, so changed, that Buckmaster turned
from the doorway and came back into the room.
"What's the use of my hearin'? You want me not to kill Greevy, because of
that gal. What's she to me?"
"Nothing to you, Buck, but Clint was everything to her."
The mountaineer stood like one petrified.
"What's that--what's that you say? It's a damn lie!"
"It wasn't cards--the quarrel, not the real quarrel. Greevy found Clint
kissing her. Greevy wanted her to marry Gatineau, the lumber-king. That
was the quarrel."
A snarl was on the face of Buckmaster. "Then she'll not be sorry when I
git him. It took Clint from her as well as from me." He turned to the door
again.
"But, wait, Buck, wait one minute and hear--"
He was interrupted by a low, exultant growl, and he saw Buckmaster's rifle
clutched as a hunter, stooping, clutches his gun to fire on his prey.
"Quick, the spy-glass!" he flung back at Sinnet. "It's him, but I'll make
sure."
Sinnet caught the telescope from the nails where it hung, and looked out
toward Juniper Bend. "It's Greevy--and his girl, and the half-breeds," he
said, with a note in his voice that almost seemed agitation, and yet few
had ever seen Sinnet agitated. "Em'ly must have gone up the trail in the
night."
"It's my turn now," the mountaineer said, hoarsely, and, stooping, slid
away quickly into the undergrowth.
Sinnet followed, keeping near him, neither speaking. For a half mile they
hastened on, and now and then Buckmaster drew aside the bushes, and looked
up the valley, to keep Greevy and his _bois brulees_ in his eye. Just so
had he and his son and Sinnet stalked the wapiti and the red deer along
these mountains; but this was a man that Buckmaster was stalking now, with
none of the joy of the sport which had been his since a lad; only the
malice of the avenger. The lust of a mountain feud was on him; he was
pursuing the price of blood.
At last Buckmaster stopped at a ledge of rock just above the trail. Greevy
would pass below, within three hundred yards of his rifle. He turned to
Sinnet with cold and savage eyes. "You go back," he said. "It's my
business. I don't want you to see. You don't want to see, then you won't
know, and you won't need to lie. You said that the man that killed Clint
ought to die. He's going to die, but it's none o' your business. I want to
be alone. In a minute he'll be where I kin git him--plumb. You go,
Sinnet--right off. It's my business."
There was a strange, desperate look in Sinnet's face; it was as hard as
stone, but his eyes had a light of battle in them.
"It's my business right enough, Buck," he said, "and you're not going to
kill Greevy. That girl of his has lost her lover, your boy. It's broke her
heart almost, and there's no use making her an orphan too. She can't stand
it. She's had enough. You leave her father alone--you hear me, let up!" He
stepped between Buckmaster and the ledge of rock from which the
mountaineer was to take aim.
There was a terrible look in Buckmaster's face. He raised his
single-barrelled rifle, as though he would shoot Sinnet; but, at the
moment, he remembered that a shot would warn Greevy, and that he might not
have time to reload. He laid his rifle against a tree swiftly.
"Git away from here," he said, with a strange rattle in his throat. "Git
away quick; he'll be down past here in a minute."
Sinnet pulled himself together as he saw Buckmaster snatch at a great
clasp-knife in his belt. He jumped and caught Buckmaster's wrist in a grip
like a vise.
"Greevy didn't kill him, Buck," he said. But the mountaineer was gone mad,
and did not grasp the meaning of the words. He twined his left arm round
the neck of Sinnet, and the struggle began, he fighting to free Sinnet's
hand from his wrist, to break Sinnet's neck. He did not realize what he
was doing. He only knew that this man stood between him and the murderer
of his boy, and all the ancient forces of barbarism were alive in him.
Little by little they drew to the edge of the rock, from which there was a
sheer drop of two hundred feet. Sinnet fought like a panther for safety,
but no sane man's strength could withstand the demoniacal energy that bent
and crushed him. Sinnet felt his strength giving. Then he said, in a
hoarse whisper: "Greevy didn't kill him. I killed him, and--"
At that moment he was borne to the ground with a hand on his throat, and
an instant after the knife went home.
Buckmaster got to his feet and looked at his victim for an instant, dazed
and wild; then he sprang for his gun. As he did so the words that Sinnet
had said as they struggled rang in his ears, "_Greevy didn't kill him; I
killed him_!"
He gave a low cry and turned back toward Sinnet, who lay in a pool of
blood.
Sinnet was speaking. He went and stooped over him.
[Illustration: LITTLE BY LITTLE THEY DREW TO THE EDGE OF THE ROCK]
"Em'ly threw me over for Clint," the voice said, huskily, "and I followed
to have it out with Clint. So did Greevy, but Greevy was drunk. I saw them
meet. I was hid. I saw that Clint would kill Greevy, and I fired. I was
off my head--I'd never cared for any woman before, and Greevy was her
father. Clint was off his head too. He had called me names that day--a
cardsharp, and a liar, and a thief, and a skunk, he called me, and I hated
him just then. Greevy fired twice--wide. He didn't know but what he killed
Clint, but he didn't. I did. So I tried to stop you, Buck--"
Life was going fast, and speech failed him; but he opened his eyes again
and whispered: "I didn't want to die, Buck. I am only thirty-five, and
it's too soon; but it had to be. Don't look that way, Buck. You got the
man that killed him--plumb. But Em'ly didn't play fair with me--made a
fool of me, the only time in my life I ever cared for a woman. You leave
Greevy alone, Buck, and tell Em'ly for me I wouldn't let you kill her
father."
"You--Sinnet--you, you done it! Why, he'd have fought for you. You--done
it--to him--to Clint!"
Now that the blood-feud had been satisfied, a great change came over the
mountaineer. He had done his work, and the thirst for vengeance was gone.
Greevy he had hated, but this man had been with him in many a winter's
hunt. His brain could hardly grasp the tragedy--it had all been too
sudden.
Suddenly he stooped down. "Sinnet," he said, "ef there was a woman in it,
that makes all the difference. Sinnet, ef--"
But Sinnet was gone upon a long trail that led into an illimitable
wilderness. With a moan the old man ran to the ledge of rock. Greevy and
his girl were below.
"When there's a woman in it--!" he said, in a voice of helplessness and
misery, and watched her till she disappeared from view. Then he turned,
and, lifting up in his arms the man he had killed, carried him into the
deeper woods.
TO-MORROW
I
"My, nothing's the matter with the world to-day! It's so good it almost
hurts."
She raised her head from the white petticoat she was ironing, and gazed
out of the doorway and down the valley with a warm light in her eyes and a
glowing face. The snow-tipped mountains far above and away, the
fir-covered, cedar-ranged foothills, and, lower down, the wonderful maple
and ash woods, with their hundred autumn tints, all merging to one soft,
red tone, the roar of the stream tumbling down the ravine from the
heights, the air that braced the nerves like wine--it all seemed to be
part of her, the passion of life corresponding to the passion of living in
her.
After watching the scene dreamily for a moment, she turned and laid the
iron she had been using upon the hot stove near. Taking up another, she
touched it with a moistened finger to test the heat, and, leaning above
the table again, passed it over the linen for a few moments, smiling at
something that was in her mind. Presently she held the petticoat up,
turned it round, then hung it in front of her, eying it with critical
pleasure.
"_To-morrow!_" she said, nodding at it. "You won't be seen, I suppose, but
_I'll_ know you're nice enough for a queen--and that's enough to know."
She blushed a little, as though some one had heard her words and was
looking at her, then she carefully laid the petticoat over the back of a
chair. "No queen's got one whiter, if I do say it," she continued, tossing
her head.
In that, at any rate, she was right, for the water of the mountain springs
was pure, the air was clear, and the sun was clarifying; and little
ornamented or frilled as it was, the petticoat was exquisitely soft and
delicate. It would have appealed to more eyes than a woman's.
"To-morrow!" She nodded at it again and turned again to the bright world
outside. With arms raised and hands resting against the timbers of the
doorway, she stood dreaming. A flock of pigeons passed with a whir not far
away, and skirted the woods making down the valley. She watched their
flight abstractedly, yet with a subconscious sense of pleasure. Life--they
were Life, eager, buoyant, belonging to this wild region, where still the
heart could feel so much at home, where the great world was missed so
little.
Suddenly, as she gazed, a shot rang out down the valley, and two of the
pigeons came tumbling to the ground, a stray feather floating after. With
a startled exclamation she took a step forward. Her brain became confused
and disturbed. She had looked out on Eden, and it had been ravaged before
her eyes. She had been thinking of to-morrow, and this vast prospect of
beauty and serenity had been part of the pageant in which it moved. Not
the valley alone had been marauded, but that "To-morrow," and all it meant
to her.
Instantly the valley had become clouded over for her, its glory and its
grace despoiled. She turned back to the room where the white petticoat lay
upon the chair, but stopped with a little cry of alarm.
A man was standing in the centre of the room. He had entered stealthily by
the back door, and had waited for her to turn round. He was haggard and
travel-stained, and there was a feverish light in his eyes. His fingers
trembled as they adjusted his belt, which seemed too large for him.
Mechanically he buckled it tighter.
"You're Jenny Long, ain't you?" he asked. "I beg pardon for sneakin' in
like this, but they're after me, some ranchers and a constable--one o' the
Riders of the Plains. I've been tryin' to make this house all day. You're
Jenny Long, ain't you?"
She had plenty of courage, and, after the first instant of shock, she had
herself in hand. She had quickly observed his condition, had marked the
candor of the eye and the decision and character of the face, and doubt of
him found no place in her mind. She had the keen observation of the
dweller in lonely places, where every traveller has the potentialities of
a foe, while the door of hospitality is opened to him after the custom of
the wilds. Year in, year out, since she was a little girl and came to live
here with her Uncle Sanger when her father died--her mother had gone
before she could speak--travellers had halted at this door, going North or
coming South, had had bite and sup, and bed, maybe, and had passed on,
most of them never to be seen again. More than that, too, there had been
moments of peril, such as when, alone, she had faced two wood-thieves with
a revolver, as they were taking her mountain-pony with them, and herself
had made them "hands-up," and had marched them into a prospector's camp
five miles away.
She had no doubt about the man before her. Whatever he had done, it was
nothing dirty or mean--of that she was sure.
"Yes, I'm Jenny Long," she answered. "What have you done? What are they
after you for?"
[Illustration: "THEY SHOT ME AN' HURT ME"]
"Oh! to-morrow," he answered--"to-morrow I got to git to Bindon. It's life
or death. I come from prospecting two hundred miles up North. I done it in
two days and a half. My horse dropped dead--I'm near dead myself. I tried
to borrow another horse up at Clancey's, and at Scotton's Drive, but they
didn't know me, and they bounced me. So I borrowed a horse off Weigall's
paddock, to make for here--to you. I didn't mean to keep that horse. Hell,
I'm no horse-stealer! But I couldn't explain to them, except that I had to
git to Bindon to save a man's life. If people laugh in your face, it's no
use explainin'. I took a roan from Weigall's, and they got after me. 'Bout
six miles up they shot at me an' hurt me."
She saw that one arm hung limp at his side and that his wrist was wound
with a red bandana.
She started forward. "Are you hurt bad? Can I bind it up or wash it for
you? I've got plenty of hot water here, and it's bad letting a wound get
stale."
He shook his head. "I washed the hole clean in the creek below. I doubled
on them. I had to go down past your place here, and then work back to be
rid of them. But there's no telling when they'll drop onto the game, and
come back for me. My only chance was to git to you. Even if I had a horse,
I couldn't make Bindon in time. It's two days round the gorge by trail. A
horse is no use now--I lost too much time since last night. I can't git to
Bindon to-morrow in time, if I ride the trail."
"The river?" she asked, abruptly.
"It's the only way. It cuts off fifty mile. That's why I come to you."
She frowned a little, her face became troubled, and her glance fell on his
arm nervously. "What've I got to do with it?" she asked, almost sharply.
"Even if this was all right"--he touched the wounded arm--"I couldn't take
the rapids in a canoe. I don't know them, an' it would be sure death.
That's not the worst, for there's a man at Bindon would lose his
life--p'r'aps twenty men--I dunno; but one man sure. To-morrow, it's go or
stay with him. He was good--Lord, but he was good!--to my little gal years
back. She'd only been married to me a year when he saved her, riskin' his
own life. No one else had the pluck. My little gal, only twenty she was,
an' pretty as a picture, an' me fifty miles away when the fire broke out
in the hotel where she was. He'd have gone down to hell for a friend, an'
he saved my little gal. I had her for five years after that. That's why I
got to git to Bindon to-morrow. If I don't, I don't want to see to-morrow.
I got to go down the river to-night."
She knew what he was going to ask her. She knew he was thinking what all
the North knew, that she was the first person to take the Dog Nose Rapids
in a canoe, down the great river scarce a stone's-throw from her door; and
that she had done it in safety many times. Not in all the West and North
were there a half dozen people who could take a canoe to Bindon, and they
were not here. She knew that he meant to ask her to paddle him down the
swift stream, with its murderous rocks, to Bindon. She glanced at the
white petticoat on the chair, and her lips tightened. To-morrow--to-morrow
was as much to her here as it would be to this man before her, or the man
he would save at Bindon.
"What do you want?" she asked, hardening her heart.
"Can't you see? I want you to hide me here till to-night. There's a full
moon, an' it would be as plain goin' as by day. They told me about you up
North, and I said to myself, 'If I git to Jenny Long, an' tell her about
my friend at Bindon, an' my little gal, she'll take me down to Bindon in
time.' My little gal would have paid her own debt if she'd ever had the
chance. She didn't--she's lying up on Mazy Mountain. But one woman'll do a
lot for the sake of another woman. Say, you'll do it, won't you? If I
don't git there by to-morrow noon, it's no good."
She would not answer. He was asking more than he knew. Why should she be
sacrificed? Was it her duty to pay the "little gal's debt," to save the
man at Bindon? To-morrow was to be the great day in her own life. The one
man in all the world was coming to marry her to-morrow. After four years'
waiting, after a bitter quarrel in which both had been to blame, he was
coming from the mining town of Selby to marry her to-morrow.
"What will happen? Why will your friend lose his life if you don't get to
Bindon?"
"By noon to-morrow, by twelve o'clock noon; that's the plot; that's what
they've schemed. Three days ago, I heard. I got a man free from trouble
North--he was no good, but I thought he ought to have another chance, and
I got him free. He told me of what was to be done at Bindon. There'd been
a strike in the mine, an' my friend had took it in hand with
knuckle-dusters on. He isn't the kind to fell a tree with a jack-knife.
Then three of the strikers that had been turned away--they was the
ringleaders--they laid a plan that'd make the devil sick. They've put a
machine in the mine, an' timed it, an' it'll go off when my friend comes
out of the mine at noon to-morrow."
Her face was pale now, and her eyes had a look of pain and horror. Her
man--him that she was to marry--was the head of a mine also at Selby,
forty miles beyond Bindon, and the horrible plot came home to her with
piercing significance.
"Without a second's warning," he urged, "to go like that, the man that was
so good to my little gal, an' me with a chance to save him, an' others
too, p'r'aps. You won't let it be. Say, I'm pinnin' my faith to you.
I'm--"
Suddenly he swayed. She caught him, held him, and lowered him gently in a
chair. Presently he opened his eyes. "It's want o' food, I suppose," he
said. "If you've got a bit of bread and meat--I must keep up."
She went to a cupboard, but suddenly turned toward him again. Her ears had
caught a sound outside in the underbrush. He had heard also, and he half
staggered to his feet.
"Quick--in here!" she said, and, opening a door, pushed him inside. "Lie
down on my bed, and I'll bring you vittles as quick as I can," she added.
Then she shut the door, turned to the ironing-board, and took up the iron,
as the figure of a man darkened the doorway.
"Hello, Jinny, fixin' up for to-morrow?" the man said, stepping inside,
with a rifle under his arm and some pigeons in his hand.
She nodded and gave him an impatient, scrutinizing glance. His face had a
fatuous kind of smile.
"Been celebrating the pigeons?" she asked, dryly, jerking her head toward
the two birds, which she had seen drop from her Eden skies a short time
before.
"I only had one swig of whiskey, honest Injun!" he answered. "I s'pose I
might have waited till to-morrow, but I was dead-beat. I got a bear over
by the Ten-mile Reach, and I was tired. I ain't so young as I used to be,
and, anyhow, what's the good? What's ahead of me? You're going to git
married to-morrow after all these years we bin together, and you're going
down to Selby from the mountains, where I won't see you, not once in a
blue moon. Only that old trollop, Mother Massy, to look after me."
"Come down to Selby and live there. You'll be welcome by Jake and me."
He stood his gun in the corner and, swinging the pigeons in his hand,
said: "Me live out of the mountains! Don't you know better than that? I
couldn't breathe, and I wouldn't want to breathe. I've got my shack here,
I got my fur business, and they're still fond of whiskey up North!" He
chuckled to himself, as he thought of the illicit still farther up the
mountain behind them. "I make enough to live on, and I've put a few
dollars by, though I won't have so many after to-morrow, after I've given
you a little pile, Jinny."
"P'r'aps there won't be any _to-morrow_, as you expect," she said,
slowly.
The old man started. "What! you and Jake ain't quarrelled again? You ain't
broke it off at the last moment, same as before? You ain't had a letter
from Jake?" He looked at the white petticoat on the chair-back, and shook
his head in bewilderment.
"I've had no letter," she answered. "I've had no letter from Selby for a
month. It was all settled then, and there was no good writing, when he was
coming to-morrow with the minister and the license. Who do you think'd be
postman from Selby here? It must have cost him ten dollars to send the
last letter."
"Then what's the matter? I don't understand," the old man urged,
querulously. He did not want her to marry and leave him, but he wanted no
more troubles; he did not relish being asked awkward questions by every
mountaineer he met as to why Jenny Long didn't marry Jake Lawson.
"There's only one way that I can be married to-morrow," she said, at last,
"and that's by you taking a man down the Dog Nose Rapids to Bindon
to-night."
He dropped the pigeons on the floor, dumfounded. "What in--"
He stopped short, in sheer incapacity to go further. Jenny had not always
been easy to understand, but she was wholly incomprehensible now.
She picked up the pigeons and was about to speak, but she glanced at the
bedroom door, where her exhausted visitor had stretched himself on her
bed, and beckoned her uncle to another room.
"There's a plate of vittles ready for you in there," she said. "I'll tell
you as you eat."
He followed her into the little living-room adorned by the trophies of his
earlier achievements with gun and rifle, and sat down at the table, where
some food lay covered by a clean white cloth.
"No one'll ever look after me as you've done, Jinny," he said, as he
lifted the cloth and saw the palatable dish ready for him. Then he
remembered again about to-morrow and the Dog Nose Rapids.
"What's it all about, Jinny? What's that about my canoeing a man down to
Bindon?"
"Eat, uncle," she said, more softly than she had yet spoken, for his words
about her care of him had brought a moisture to her eyes. "I'll be back in
a minute and tell you all about it."
"Well, it's about took away my appetite," he said. "I feel a kind of
sinking." He took from his pocket a bottle, poured some of its contents
into a tin cup, and drank it off.
"No, I suppose you couldn't take a man down to Bindon," she said, as she
saw his hand trembling on the cup. Then she turned and entered the other
room again. Going to the cupboard, she hastily heaped a plate with food,
and, taking a dipper of water from a pail near by, she entered her bedroom
hastily and placed what she had brought on a small table, as her visitor
rose slowly from the bed.
He was about to speak, but she made a protesting gesture.
"I can't tell you anything yet," she said.
"Who was it come?" he asked.
"My uncle--I'm going to tell him."
"The men after me may git here any minute," he urged, anxiously.
"They'd not be coming into my room," she answered, flushing slightly.
"Can't you hide me down by the river till we start?" he asked, his eyes
eagerly searching her face. He was assuming that she would take him down
the river; but she gave no sign.
"I've got to see if he'll take you first?" she answered.
"He--your uncle, Tom Sanger? He drinks, I've heard. He'd never git to
Bindon."
She did not reply directly to his words. "I'll come back and tell you.
There's a place you could hide by the river where no one could ever find
you," she said, and left the room.
As she stepped out, she saw the old man standing in the doorway of the
other room. His face was petrified with amazement.
"Who you got in that room, Jinny? What man you got in that room? I heard a
man's voice. Is it because o' him that you bin talkin' about no weddin'
to-morrow? Is it one o' the others come back, puttin' you off Jake
again?"
Her eyes flashed fire at his first words, and her breast heaved with
anger, but suddenly she became composed again and motioned him to a
chair.
"You eat, and I'll tell you all about it, Uncle Tom," she said, and,
seating herself at the table also, she told him the story of the man who
must go to Bindon.
When she had finished, the old man blinked at her for a minute without
speaking, then he said, slowly: "I heard something 'bout trouble down at
Bindon yisterday from a Hudson's Bay man goin' North, but I didn't take it
in. You've got a lot o' sense, Jinny, an' if you think he's tellin' the
truth, why, it goes; but it's as big a mixup as a lariat in a steer's
horns. You've got to hide him sure, whoever he is, for I wouldn't hand an
Eskimo over, if I'd taken him in my home once; we're mountain people. A
man ought to be hung for horse-stealin', but this was different. He was
doing it to save a man's life, an' that man at Bindon was good to his
little gal, an' she's dead."
He moved his head from side to side with the air of a sentimental
philosopher. He had all the vanity of a man who had been a success in a
small, shrewd, culpable way--had he not evaded the law for thirty years
with his whiskey-still?
"I know how he felt," he continued. "When Betsy died--we was only four
years married--I could have crawled into a knot-hole an' died there. You
got to save him, Jinny, but"--he came suddenly to his feet--"he ain't safe
here. They might come any minute, if they've got back on his trail. I'll
take him up the gorge. You know where."
"You sit still, Uncle Tom," she rejoined. "Leave him where he is a minute.
There's things must be settled first. They ain't going to look for him in
my bedroom, be they?"
The old man chuckled. "I'd like to see 'em at it. You got a temper, Jinny;
and you got a pistol, too, eh?" He chuckled again. "As good a shot as any
in the mountains. I can see you darin' 'em to come on. But what if Jake
come, and he found a man in your bedroom"--he wiped the tears of laughter
from his eyes--"why, Jinny--"
He stopped short, for there was anger in her face. "I don't want to hear
any more of that. I do what I want to do," she snapped out.
"Well, well, you always done what you wanted; but we got to git him up the
hills, till it's sure they're out o' the mountains and gone back. It'll be
days, mebbe."
"Uncle Tom, you've took too much to drink," she answered. "You don't
remember he's got to be at Bindon by to-morrow noon. He's got to save his
friend by then."
"Pshaw! Who's going to take him down the river to-night? You're goin' to
be married to-morrow. If you like, you can give him the canoe. It'll never
come back, nor him neither!"
"You've been down with me," she responded, suggestively. "And you went
down once by yourself."
He shook his head. "I ain't been so well this summer. My sight ain't what
it was. I can't stand the racket as I once could. 'Pears to me I'm gettin'
old. No, I couldn't take them rapids, Jinny, not for one frozen minute."
She looked at him with trouble in her eyes, and her face lost some of its
color. She was fighting back the inevitable, even as its shadow fell upon
her. "You wouldn't want a man to die, if you could save him, Uncle
Tom--blown up, sent to Kingdom Come without any warning at all; and
perhaps he's got them that love him--and the world so beautiful."
"Well, it ain't nice dyin' in the summer, when it's all sun, and there's
plenty everywhere; but there's no one to go down the river with him.
What's his name?"
Her struggle was over. She had urged him, but in very truth she was urging
herself all the time, bringing herself to the axe of sacrifice.
"His name's Dingley. I'm going down the river with him--down to Bindon."
The old man's mouth opened in blank amazement. His eyes blinked
helplessly.
"What you talkin' about, Jinny? Jake's comin' up with the minister, an'
you're goin' to be married at noon to-morrow."
"I'm takin' him"--she jerked her head toward the room where Dingley
was--"down Dog Nose Rapids to-night. He's risked his life for his friend,
thinkin' of her that's dead an' gone, and a man's life is a man's life. If
it was Jake's life in danger, what 'd I think of a woman that could save
him, and didn't?"
"Onct you broke off with Jake Lawson--the day before you was to be
married; an' it's took years to make up an' agree again to be spliced. If
Jake comes here to-morrow, and you ain't here, what do you think he'll do?
The neighbors are comin' for fifty miles round, two is comin' up a hundred
miles, and you can't--Jinny, you can't do it. I bin sick of answerin'
questions all these years 'bout you and Jake, an' I ain't goin' through it
again. I've told more lies than there's straws in a tick."
She flamed out. "Then take him down the river yourself--a man to do a
man's work. Are you afeard to take the risk?"
He held out his hands slowly and looked at them. They shook a little.
"Yes, Jinny," he said, sadly, "I'm afeard. I ain't what I was. I made a
mistake, Jinny. I've took too much whiskey. I'm older than I ought to be.
I oughtn't never to have had a whiskey-still, an' I wouldn't have drunk so
much. I got money--money for you, Jinny, for you an' Jake, but I've lost
what I'll never git back. I'm afeard to go down the river with him. I'd go
smash in the Dog Nose Rapids. I got no nerve. I can't hunt the grizzly any
more, nor the puma, Jinny. I got to keep to common shootin', now and
henceforth, amen! No, I'd go smash in Dog Nose Rapids."
She caught his hands impulsively. "Don't you fret, Uncle Tom. You've bin a
good uncle to me, and you've bin a good friend, and you ain't the first
that's found whiskey too much for him. You ain't got an enemy in the
mountains. Why, I've got two or three--"
"Shucks! Women--only women whose beaux left 'em to follow after you.
That's nothing, an' they'll be your friends fast enough after you're
married to-morrow."
"I ain't going to be married to-morrow. I'm going down to Bindon to-night.
If Jake's mad, then it's all over, and there'll be more trouble among the
women up here."
By this time they had entered the other room. The old man saw the white
petticoat on the chair. "No woman in the mountains ever had a petticoat
like that, Jinny. It'd make a dress, it's that pretty an' neat. Golly! I'd
like to see it on you, with the blue skirt over, and just hitched up a
little."
"Oh, shut up--shut up!" she said, in sudden anger, and caught up the
petticoat as though she would put it away; but presently she laid it down
again and smoothed it with quick, nervous fingers. "Can't you talk sense
and leave my clothes alone? If Jake comes, and I'm not here, and he wants
to make a fuss, and spoil everything, and won't wait, you give him this
petticoat. You put it in his arms. I bet you'll have the laugh on him.
He's got a temper."
"So've you, Jinny, dear, so've you," said the old man, laughing. "You're
goin' to have your own way, same as ever--same as ever."
II
A moon of exquisite whiteness silvering the world, making shadows on the
water as though it were sunlight and the daytime, giving a spectral look
to the endless array of poplar trees on the banks, glittering on the foam
of the rapids. The spangling stars made the arch of the sky like some
gorgeous chancel in a cathedral as vast as life and time. Like the day
which was ended, in which the mountain-girl had found a taste of Eden, it
seemed too sacred for mortal strife. Now and again there came the note of
a night-bird, the croak of a frog from the shore; but the serene stillness
and beauty of the primeval North was over all.
For two hours after sunset it had all been silent and brooding, and then
two figures appeared on the bank of the great river. A canoe was softly
and hastily pushed out from its hidden shelter under the overhanging bank,
and was noiselessly paddled out to mid-stream, dropping down the current
meanwhile.
It was Jenny Long and the man who must get to Bindon. They had waited till
nine o'clock, when the moon was high and full, to venture forth. Then
Dingley had dropped from her bedroom window, had joined her under the
trees, and they had sped away, while the man's hunters, who had come
suddenly, and before Jenny could get him away into the woods, were
carousing inside. These had tracked their man back to Tom Sanger's house,
and at first they were incredulous that Jenny and her uncle had not seen
him. They had prepared to search the house, and one had laid his finger on
the latch of her bedroom door; but she had flared out with such anger
that, mindful of the supper she had already begun to prepare for them,
they had desisted, and the whiskey-jug which the old man brought out
distracted their attention.
One of their number, known as the Man from Clancey's had, however, been
outside when Dingley had dropped from the window, and had seen him from a
distance. He had not given the alarm, but had followed, to make the
capture by himself. But Jenny had heard the stir of life behind them, and
had made a sharp detour, so that they had reached the shore and were out
in mid-stream before their tracker got to the river. Then he called to
them to return, but Jenny only bent a little lower and paddled on, guiding
the canoe toward the safe-channel through the first small rapids leading
to the great Dog Nose Rapids.
A rifle-shot rang out, and a bullet "pinged" over the water and splintered
the side of the canoe where Dingley sat. He looked calmly back, and saw
the rifle raised again, but did not stir, in spite of Jenny's warning to
lie down.
"He'll not fire on you so long as he can draw a bead on me," he said,
quietly.
Again a shot rang out, and the bullet sang past his head.
"If he hits me, you go straight on to Bindon," he continued. "Never mind
about me. Go to the Snowdrop Mine. Get there by twelve o'clock, and warn
them. Don't stop a second for me--"
Suddenly three shots rang out in succession--Tom Sanger's house had
emptied itself on the bank of the river--and Dingley gave a sharp
exclamation.
"They've hit me, but it's the same arm as before," he growled. "They got
no right to fire at me. It's not the law. Don't stop," he added, quickly,
as he saw her half turn round.
Now there were loud voices on the shore. Old Tom Sanger was threatening to
shoot the first man that fired again, and he would have kept his word.
"Who you firin' at?" he shouted. "That's my niece, Jinny Long, an' you let
that boat alone. This ain't the land o' lynch law. Dingley ain't escaped
from gaol. You got no right to fire at him."
"No one ever went down Dog Nose Rapids at night," said the Man from
Clancey's, whose shot had got Dingley's arm. "There ain't a chance of them
doing it. No one's ever done it."
The two were in the roaring rapids now, and the canoe was jumping through
the foam like a race-horse. The keen eyes on the bank watched the canoe
till it was lost in the half-gloom below the first rapids, and then they
went slowly back to Tom Sanger's house.
"So there'll be no wedding to-morrow," said the Man from Clancey's.
"Funerals, more likely," drawled another.
"Jinny Long's in that canoe, an' she ginerally does what she wants to,"
said Tom Sanger, sagely.
"Well, we done our best, and now I hope they'll get to Bindon," said
another.
Sanger passed the jug to him freely. Then they sat down and talked of the
people who had been drowned in Dog Nose Rapids, and of the last wedding in
the mountains.
III
It was as the Man from Clancey's had said, no one had ever gone down Dog
Nose Rapids in the night-time, and probably no one but Jenny Long would
have ventured it. Dingley had had no idea what a perilous task had been
set his rescuer. It was only when the angry roar of the great rapids
floated up-stream to them, increasing in volume till they could see the
terror of tumbling waters just below, and the canoe shot forward like a
snake through the swift, smooth current which would sweep them into the
vast caldron, that he realized the terrible hazard of the enterprise.
The moon was directly overhead when they drew upon the race of rocks and
fighting water and foam. On either side only the shadowed shore, forsaken
by the races which had hunted and roamed and ravaged here--not a light,
nor any sign of life, or the friendliness of human presence to make their
isolation less complete, their danger, as it were, shared by
fellow-mortals. Bright as the moon was, it was not bright enough for
perfect pilotage. Never in the history of white men had these rapids been
ridden at night-time. As they sped down the flume of the deep,
irresistible current, and were launched into the trouble of rocks and
water, Jenny realized how great their peril was, and how different the
track of the waters looked at night-time from daytime. Outlines seemed
merged, rocks did not look the same, whirlpools had a different vortex,
islands of stone had a new configuration. As they sped on, lurching,
jumping, piercing a broken wall of wave and spray like a torpedo, shooting
an almost sheer fall, she came to rely on a sense of intuition rather than
memory, for night had transformed the waters.
Not a sound escaped either. The man kept his eyes fixed on the woman; the
woman scanned the dreadful pathway with eyes deep-set and burning,
resolute, vigilant, and yet defiant, too, as though she had been trapped
into this track of danger, and was fighting without great hope, but with
the temerity and nonchalance of despair. Her arms were bare to the
shoulder almost, and her face was again and again drenched, but second
succeeded second, minute followed minute in a struggle which might well
turn a man's hair gray, and now, at last--how many hours was it since they
had been cast into this den of roaring waters?--at last, suddenly, over a
large fall, and here smooth waters again, smooth and untroubled, and
strong and deep. Then, and only then, did a word escape either; but the
man had passed through torture and unavailing regret, for he realized that
he had had no right to bring this girl into such a fight. It was not _her_
friend who was in danger at Bindon. Her life had been risked without due
warrant. "I didn't know, or I wouldn't have asked it," he said, in a low
voice. "Lord, but you are a wonder--to take that hurdle for no one that
belonged to you, and to do it as you've done it. This country will rise to
you." He looked back on the raging rapids far behind, and he shuddered.
"It was a close call, and no mistake. We must have been within a foot of
down-you-go fifty times. But it's all right now, if we can last it out and
git there." Again he glanced back, then turned to the girl. "It makes me
pretty sick to look at it," he continued. "I bin through a lot, but that's
as sharp practice as I want."
"Come here and let me bind up your arm," she answered. "They hit you--the
sneaks! Are you bleeding much?"
He came near her carefully, as she got the big canoe out of the current
into quieter water. She whipped the scarf from about her neck, and with
his knife ripped up the seam of his sleeve. Her face was alive with the
joy of conflict and elated with triumph. Her eyes were shining. She bathed
the wound--the bullet had passed clean through the fleshy part of the
arm--and then carefully tied the scarf round it over her handkerchief.
"I guess it's as good as a man could do it," she said, at last.
"As good as any doctor," he rejoined.
"I wasn't talking of your arm," she said.
"Course not. Excuse me. You was talkin' of them rapids, and I've got to
say there ain't a man that could have done it and come through like you. I
guess the man that marries you'll get more than his share of luck."
"I want none of that," she said, sharply, and picked up her paddle again,
her eyes flashing anger.
He took a pistol from his pocket and offered it to her. "I didn't mean any
harm by what I said. Take this if you think I won't know how to behave
myself," he urged.
She flung up her head a little. "I knew what I was doing before I
started," she said. "Put it away. How far is it, and can we do it in
time?"
"If you can hold out, we can do it; but it means going all night and all
morning; and it ain't dawn yet, by a long shot."
* * * * *
Dawn came at last, and the mist of early morning, and the imperious and
dispelling sun; and with mouthfuls of food as they drifted on, the two
fixed their eyes on the horizon beyond which lay Bindon. And now it seemed
to the girl as though this race to save a life, or many lives, was the one
thing in existence. _To-morrow_ was to-day, and the white petticoat was
lying in the little house in the mountains, and her wedding was an
interminable distance off, so had this adventure drawn her into its risks
and toils and haggard exhaustion.
Eight, nine, ten, eleven o'clock came, and then they saw signs of
settlement. Houses appeared here and there upon the banks, and now and
then a horseman watched them from the shore, but they could not pause.
Bindon--Bindon--Bindon--the Snowdrop Mine at Bindon, and a death-dealing
machine timed to do its deadly work, were before the eyes of the two
_voyageurs_.
Half-past eleven, and the town of Bindon was just beyond them. A quarter
to twelve, and they had run their canoe into the bank beyond which were
the smokestacks and chimneys of the mine. Bindon was peacefully pursuing
its way, though here and there were little groups of strikers who had not
resumed work.
Dingley and the girl scrambled up the bank. Trembling with fatigue, they
hastened on. The man drew ahead of her, for she had paddled for fifteen
hours, practically without ceasing, and the ground seemed to rise up at
her. But she would not let him stop.
He hurried on, reached the mine, and entered, shouting the name of his
friend. It was seven minutes to twelve.
A moment later, a half-dozen men came rushing from that portion of the
mine where Dingley had been told the machine was placed, and at their head
was Lawson, the man he had come to save.
The girl hastened on to meet them, but she grew faint and leaned against a
tree, scarce conscious. She was roused by voices.
"No, it wasn't me, it wasn't me that done it; it was a girl. Here she
is--Jenny Long! You got to thank her, Jake."
Jake! Jake! The girl awakened to full understanding now. Jake--what Jake?
She looked, then stumbled forward with a cry.
"Jake--it was my Jake!" she faltered.
The mine-boss caught her in his arms.
"You, Jenny! It's you that's saved me!"
Suddenly there was a rumble as of thunder, and a cloud of dust and stone
rose from the Snowdrop Mine.
The mine-boss tightened his arm round the girl's waist. "That's what I
missed, through him and you, Jenny," he said.
"What was you doing here, and not at Selby, Jake?" she asked.
"They sent for me--to stop the trouble here."
"But what about our wedding to-day?" she asked, with a frown.
"A man went from here with a letter to you three days ago," he said,
"asking you to come down here and be married. I suppose he got drunk, or
had an accident, and didn't reach you. It had to be. I was needed
here--couldn't tell what would happen."
"It has happened out all right," said Dingley, "and this'll be the end of
it. You got them miners solid now. The strikers'll eat humble pie after
to-day."
"We'll be married to-day, just the same," the mine-boss said, as he gave
some brandy to the girl.
But the girl shook her head. She was thinking of a white petticoat in a
little house in the mountains.
"I'm not going to be married to-day," she said, decisively.
"Well, to-morrow," said the mine-boss.
But the girl shook her head again. "To-day is to-morrow," she answered.
"You can wait, Jake. I'm going back home to be married."
QU'APPELLE
(_Who calls?_)
"But I'm white; I'm not an Indian. My father was a white man. I've been
brought up as a white girl. I've had a white girl's schooling."
Her eyes flashed as she sprang to her feet and walked up and down the room
for a moment, then stood still, facing her mother--a dark-faced,
pock-marked woman, with heavy, somnolent eyes--and waited for her to
speak. The reply came slowly and sullenly:
"I am a Blackfoot woman. I lived on the Muskwat River among the braves for
thirty years. I have killed buffalo. I have seen battles. Men, too, I have
killed when they came to steal our horses and crept in on our lodges in
the night--the Crees! I am a Blackfoot. You are the daughter of a
Blackfoot woman. No medicine can cure that. Sit down. You have no sense.
You are not white. They will not have you. Sit down."
The girl's handsome face flushed; she threw up her hands in an agony of
protest. A dreadful anger was in her panting breast, but she could not
speak. She seemed to choke with excess of feeling. For an instant she
stood still, trembling with agitation, then she sat down suddenly on a
great couch covered with soft deer-skins and buffalo robes. There was deep
in her the habit of obedience to this sombre but striking woman. She had
been ruled firmly, almost oppressively, and she had not yet revolted.
Seated on the couch, she gazed out of the window at the flying snow, her
brain too much on fire for thought, passion beating like a pulse in all
her lithe and graceful young body, which had known the storms of life and
time for only twenty years.
The wind shrieked and the snow swept past in clouds of blinding drift,
completely hiding from sight the town below them, whose civilization had
built itself many habitations and was making roads and streets on the
green-brown plain, where herds of buffalo had stamped and streamed and
thundered not long ago. The town was a mile and a half away, and these two
were alone in a great circle of storm, one of them battling against a
tempest which might yet overtake her, against which she had set her face
ever since she could remember; though it had only come to violence since
her father died two years before--a careless, strong, wilful white man,
who had lived the Indian life for many years, but had been swallowed at
last by the great wave of civilization streaming westward and northward,
wiping out the game and the Indian, and overwhelming the rough, fighting,
hunting, pioneer life. Joel Renton had made money, by good luck chiefly,
having held land here and there which he had got for nothing, and had then
almost forgotten about it, and, when reminded of it, still held on to it
with that defiant stubbornness which often possesses improvident and
careless natures. He had never had any real business instinct, and to
swagger a little over the land he held and to treat offers of purchase
with contempt was the loud assertion of a capacity he did not possess. So
it was that stubborn vanity, beneath which was his angry protest against
the prejudice felt by the new people of the West for the white pioneer who
married an Indian and lived the Indian life--so it was that this gave him
competence and a comfortable home after the old trader had been driven out
by the railway and the shopkeeper. With the first land he sold he sent his
daughter away to school in a town farther east and south, where she had
been brought in touch with a life that at once cramped and attracted her;
where, too, she had felt the first chill of racial ostracism, and had
proudly fought it to the end, her weapons being talent, industry, and a
hot, defiant ambition.
There had been three years of bitter, almost half-sullen, struggle,
lightened by one sweet friendship with a girl whose face she had since
drawn in a hundred different poses on stray pieces of paper, on the walls
of the big, well-lighted attic to which she retreated for hours every day,
when she was not abroad on the prairies, riding the Indian pony that her
uncle the Piegan Chief, Ice Breaker, had given her years before. Three
years of struggle, and then her father had died, and the refuge for her
vexed, defiant heart was gone. While he lived she could affirm the rights
of a white man's daughter, the rights of the daughter of a pioneer who had
helped to make the West; and her pride in him had given a glow to her
cheek and a spring to her step which drew every eye. In the chief street
of Portage la Drome men would stop their trafficking and women nudge one
another when she passed, and wherever she went she stirred interest,
excited admiration, or aroused prejudice--but the prejudice did not matter
so long as her father, Joel Renton, lived. Whatever his faults, and they
were many--sometimes he drank too much, and swore a great deal, and
bullied and stormed--she blinked at them all, for he was of the conquering
race, a white man who had slept in white sheets and eaten off white
tablecloths, and used a knife and fork, since he was born; and the women
of his people had had soft petticoats and fine stockings, and silk gowns
for festal days, and feathered hats of velvet, and shoes of polished
leather, always and always, back through many generations. She had held
her head high, for she was of his women, of the women of his people, with
all their rights and all their claims. She had held it high till that
stormy day--just such a day as this, with the surf of snow breaking
against the house--when they carried him in out of the wild turmoil and
snow, laying him on the couch where she now sat, and her head fell on his
lifeless breast, and she cried out to him in vain to come back to her.
Before the world her head was still held high, but in the attic-room, and
out on the prairies far away, where only the coyote or the prairie hen
saw, her head drooped, and her eyes grew heavy with pain and sombre
protest. Once in an agony of loneliness, and cruelly hurt by a conspicuous
slight put upon her at the Portage by the wife of the Reeve of the town,
who had daughters twain of pure white blood got from behind the bar of a
saloon in Winnipeg, she had thrown open her window at night, with the
frost below zero, and stood in her thin nightdress, craving the death
which she hoped the cold would give her soon. It had not availed, however,
and once again she had ridden out in a blizzard to die, but had come upon
a man lost in the snow, and her own misery had passed from her, and her
heart, full of the blood of plainsmen, had done for another what it would
not do for itself. The Indian in her had, with strange, sure instinct,
found its way to Portage la Drome, the man, with both hands and one foot
frozen, on her pony, she walking at his side, only conscious that she had
saved one, not two lives that day.
Here was another such day, here again was the storm in her heart which had
driven her into the plains that other time, and here again was that
tempest of white death outside.
_"You have no sense. You are not white. They will not have you. Sit
down_--" The words had fallen on her ears with a cold, deadly smother.
There came a chill upon her which stilled the wild pulses in her, which
suddenly robbed the eyes of their brightness and gave a drawn look to the
face.
"You are not white. They will not have you, Pauline." The Indian mother
repeated the words after a moment, her eyes grown still more gloomy; for
in her, too, there was a dark tide of passion moving. In all the outlived
years this girl had ever turned to the white father rather than to her,
and she had been left more and more alone. Her man had been kind to her,
and she had been a faithful wife, but she had resented the natural
instinct of her half-breed child, almost white herself and with the
feelings and ways of the whites, to turn always to her father, as though
to a superior guide, to a higher influence and authority. Was not she
herself the descendant of Blackfoot and Piegan chiefs through generations
of rulers and warriors? Was there not Piegan and Blackfoot blood in the
girl's veins? Must only the white man's blood be reckoned when they made
up their daily account and balanced the books of their lives, credit and
debtor--misunderstanding and kind act, neglect and tenderness, reproof and
praise, gentleness and impulse, anger and caress--to be set down in the
everlasting record? Why must the Indian always give way--Indian habits,
Indian desires, the Indian way of doing things, the Indian point of view,
Indian food, Indian medicine? Was it all bad, and only that which belonged
to white life good?
"Look at your face in the glass, Pauline," she added, at last. "You are
good-looking, but it isn't the good looks of the whites. The lodge of a
chieftainess is the place for you. There you would have praise and honor;
among the whites you are only a half-breed. What is the good? Let us go
back to the life out there beyond the Muskwat River--up beyond. There is
hunting still, a little, and the world is quiet, and nothing troubles.
Only the wild dog barks at night, or the wolf sniffs at the door, and all
day there is singing. Somewhere out beyond the Muskwat the feasts go on,
and the old men build the great fires, and tell tales, and call the wind
out of the north, and make the thunder speak; and the young men ride to
the hunt or go out to battle, and build lodges for the daughters of the
tribe; and each man has his woman, and each woman has in her breast the
honor of the tribe, and the little ones fill the lodge with laughter. Like
a pocket of deerskin is every house, warm and small and full of good
things. _Hai-yai_, what is this life to that! There you will be head and
chief of all, for there is money enough for a thousand horses; and your
father was a white man, and these are the days when the white man rules.
Like clouds before the sun are the races of men, and one race rises and
another falls. Here you are not first, but last; and the child of the
white father and mother, though they be as the dirt that flies from a
horse's heels, it is before you. Your mother is a Blackfoot."
As the woman spoke slowly and with many pauses, the girl's mood changed,
and there came into her eyes a strange, dark look deeper than anger. She
listened with a sudden patience which stilled the agitation in her breast
and gave a little touch of rigidity to her figure. Her eyes withdrew from
the wild storm without and gravely settled on her mother's face, and with
the Indian woman's last words understanding pierced, but did not dispel,
the sombre and ominous look in her eyes.
There was silence for a moment, and then she spoke almost as evenly as her
mother had done.
"I will tell you everything. You are my mother, and I love you; but you
will not see the truth. When my father took you from the lodges and
brought you here, it was the end of the Indian life. It was for you to go
on with him, but you would not go. I was young, but I saw, and I said that
in all things I would go with him. I did not know that it would be hard,
but at school, at the very first, I began to understand. There was only
one, a French girl--I loved her--a girl who said to me, 'You are as white
as I am, as any one, and your heart is the same, and you are beautiful.'
Yes, Manette said I was beautiful."
She paused a moment, a misty, far-away look came into her eyes, her
fingers clasped and unclasped, and she added:
"And her brother, Julien--he was older--when he came to visit Manette he
spoke to me as though I was all white, and was good to me. I have never
forgotten, never. It was five years ago, but I remember him. He was tall
and strong, and as good as Manette--as good as Manette. I loved Manette,
but she suffered for me, for I was not like the others, and my ways were
different--then. I had lived up there on the Warais among the lodges, and
I had not seen things--only from my father, and he did so much in an
Indian way. So I was sick at heart, and sometimes I wanted to die; and
once--But there was Manette, and she would laugh and sing, and we would
play together, and I would speak French and she would speak English, and I
learned from her to forget the Indian ways. What were they to me? I had
loved them when I was of them, but I came on to a better life. The Indian
life is to the white life as the parfleche pouch to--to this." She laid
her hand upon a purse of delicate silver mesh hanging at her waist. "When
your eyes are opened you must go on, you cannot stop. There is no going
back. When you have read of all there is in the white man's world, when
you have seen, then there is no returning. You may end it all, if you
wish, in the snow, in the river, but there is no returning. The lodge of a
chief--ah, if my father had heard you say that--!"
The Indian woman shifted heavily in her chair, then shrank away from the
look fixed on her. Once or twice she made as if she would speak, but sank
down in the great chair, helpless and dismayed.
"The lodge of a chief!" the girl continued, in a low, bitter voice. "What
is the lodge of a chief? A smoky fire, a pot, a bed of skins--_aih-yi_! If
the lodges of the Indians were millions, and I could be head of all, and
rule the land, yet would I rather be a white girl in the hut of her white
man, struggling for daily bread among the people who sweep the buffalo
out, but open up the land with the plough, and make a thousand live where
one lived before. It is peace you want, my mother, peace and solitude, in
which the soul goes to sleep. Your days of hope are over, and you want to
drowse by the fire. I want to see the white man's cities grow, and the
armies coming over the hill with the ploughs and the reapers and the
mowers, and the wheels and the belts and engines of the great factories,
and the white woman's life spreading everywhere; for I am a white man's
daughter. I can't be both Indian and white. I will not be like the sun
when the shadow cuts across it and the land grows dark. I will not be
half-breed. I will be white or I will be Indian; and I will be white,
white only. My heart is white, my tongue is white, I think, I feel, as
white people think and feel. What they wish, I wish; as they live, I live;
as white women dress, I dress."
She involuntarily drew up the dark-red skirt she wore, showing a white
petticoat and a pair of fine stockings on an ankle as shapely as she had
ever seen among all the white women she knew. She drew herself up with
pride, and her body had a grace and ease which the white woman's
convention had not cramped.
Yet, with all her protests, no one would have thought her English. She
might have been Spanish, or Italian, or Roumanian, or Slav, though nothing
of her Indian blood showed in purely Indian characteristics, and something
sparkled in her, gave a radiance to her face and figure which the storm
and struggle in her did not smother. The white women of Portage la Drome
were too blind, too prejudiced, to see all that she really was, and
admiring white men could do little, for Pauline would have nothing to do
with them till the women met her absolutely as an equal; and from the
other half-breeds, who intermarried with one another and were content to
take a lower place than the pure whites, she held aloof, save when any of
them was ill or in trouble. Then she recognized the claim of race, and
came to their doors with pity and soft impulses to help them. French and
Scotch and English half-breeds, as they were, they understood how she was
making a fight for all who were half-Indian, half-white, and watched her
with a furtive devotion, acknowledging her superior place, and proud of
it.
"I will not stay here," said the Indian mother, with sullen stubbornness.
"I will go back beyond the Warais. My life is my own life, and I will do
what I like with it."
The girl started, but became composed again on the instant. "Is your life
all your own, mother?" she asked. "I did not come into the world of my own
will. If I had I would have come all white or all Indian. I am your
daughter, and I am here, good or bad--is your life all your own?"
"You can marry and stay here, when I go. You are twenty. I had my man,
your father, when I was seventeen. You can marry. There are men. You have
money. They will marry you--and forget the rest."
With a cry of rage and misery the girl sprang to her feet and started
forward, but stopped suddenly at sound of a hasty knocking and a voice
asking admittance. An instant later, a huge, bearded, broad-shouldered man
stepped inside, shaking himself free of the snow, laughing half-sheepishly
as he did so, and laying his fur cap and gloves with exaggerated care on
the wide window-sill.
"John Alloway," said the Indian woman, in a voice of welcome and with a
brightening eye, for it would seem as though he came in answer to her
words of a few moments before. With a mother's instinct she had divined at
once the reason for the visit, though no warning thought crossed the mind
of the girl, who placed a chair for their visitor with a heartiness which
was real--was not this the white man she had saved from death in the snow
a year ago? Her heart was soft toward the life she had kept in the world.
She smiled at him, all the anger gone from her eyes, and there was almost
a touch of tender anxiety in her voice as she said:
"What brought you out in this blizzard? It wasn't safe. It doesn't seem
possible you got here from the Portage."
The huge ranchman and auctioneer laughed cheerily. "Once lost, twice get
there," he exclaimed, with a quizzical toss of the head, thinking he had
said a good thing. "It's a year ago to the very day that I was lost out
back"--he jerked a thumb over his shoulder--"and you picked me up and
brought me in; and what was I to do but come out on the anniversary and
say thank you? I'd fixed up all year to come to you, and I wasn't to be
stopped, 'cause it was like the day we first met, old Coldmaker hitting
the world with his whips of frost, and shaking his ragged blankets of snow
over the wild West."
"Just such a day," said the Indian woman, after a pause. Pauline remained
silent, placing a little bottle of cordial before their visitor, with
which he presently regaled himself, raising his glass with an air.
"Many happy returns to us both!" he said, and threw the liqueur down his
throat, smacked his lips, and drew his hand down his great mustache and
beard, like some vast animal washing its face with its paw. Smiling, and
yet not at ease, he looked at the two women and nodded his head
encouragingly, but whether the encouragement was for himself or for them
he could not have told.
His last words, however, had altered the situation. The girl had caught at
a suggestion in them which startled her. This rough, white plainsman was
come to make love to her, and to say--what? He was at once awkward and
confident, afraid of her, of her refinement, grace, beauty, and education,
and yet confident in the advantage of his position, a white man bending to
a half-breed girl. He was not conscious of the condescension and majesty
of his demeanor, but it was there, and his untutored words and ways must
make it all too apparent to the girl. The revelation of the moment made
her at once triumphant and humiliated. This white man had come to make
love to her, that was apparent; but that he, ungrammatical, crude, and
rough, should think he had but to put out his hand, and she in whom every
subtle emotion and influence had delicate response, whose words and ways
were as far removed from his as day from night, would fly to him, brought
the flush of indignation to her cheek. She responded to his toast with a
pleasant nod, however, and said:
"But if you will keep coming in such wild storms, there will not be many
anniversaries." Laughing, she poured out another glass of liqueur for
him.
"Well, now, p'r'aps you're right, and so the only thing to do is not to
keep coming, but to stay--stay right where _you_ are."
The Indian woman could not see her daughter's face, which was turned to
the fire, but she herself smiled at John Alloway, and nodded her head
approvingly. Here was the cure for her own trouble and loneliness. Pauline
and she, who lived in different worlds, and yet were tied to each other by
circumstances they could not control, would each work out her own destiny
after her own nature, since John Alloway had come a-wooing. She would go
back on the Warais, and Pauline would remain at the Portage, a white woman
with her white man. She would go back to the smoky fires in the huddled
lodges; to the venison stew and the snake dance; to the feasts of the
medicine-men, and the long sleeps in the summer days, and the winter's
tales, and be at rest among her own people; and Pauline would have revenge
of the wife of the prancing Reeve, and perhaps the people would forget who
her mother was.
With these thoughts flying through her sluggish mind, she rose and moved
heavily from the room, with a parting look of encouragement at Alloway, as
though to say, a man that is bold is surest.
With her back to the man, Pauline watched her mother leave the room, saw
the look she gave Alloway. When the door was closed she turned and looked
Alloway in the eyes.
"How old are you?" she asked, suddenly.
He stirred in his seat nervously. "Why, fifty, about," he answered, with
confusion.
"Then you'll be wise not to go looking for anniversaries in blizzards,
when they're few at the best," she said, with a gentle and dangerous
smile.
"Fifty--why, I'm as young as most men of thirty," he responded, with an
uncertain laugh. "I'd have come here to-day if it had been snowing
pitchforks and chain-lightning. I made up my mind I would. You saved my
life, that's dead sure; and I'd be down among the moles if it wasn't for
you and that Piegan pony of yours. Piegan ponies are wonders in a
storm--seem to know their way by instinct. You, too--why, I bin on the
plains all my life, and was no better than a baby that day; but you--why,
you had Piegan in you--why, yes--"
He stopped short for a moment, checked by the look in her face, then went
blindly on: "And you've got Blackfoot in you, too; and you just felt your
way through the tornado and over the blind prairie like a bird reaching
for the hills. It was as easy to you as picking out a maverick in a bunch
of steers to me. But I never could make out what you was doing on the
prairie that terrible day. I've thought of it a hundred times. What was
you doing, if it ain't cheek to ask?"
"I was trying to lose a life," she answered, quietly, her eyes dwelling on
his face, yet not seeing him; for it all came back on her, the agony which
had driven her out into the tempest to be lost evermore.
He laughed. "Well now, that's good," he said; "that's what they call
speaking sarcastic. You was out to save, and not to lose, a life; that was
proved to the satisfaction of the court." He paused and chuckled to
himself, thinking he had been witty, and continued: "And I was that court,
and my judgment was that the debt of that life you saved had to be paid to
you within one calendar year, with interest at the usual per cent. for
mortgages on good security. That was my judgment, and there's no appeal
from it. I am the great Justinian in this case!"
"Did you ever save anybody's life?" she asked, putting the bottle of
cordial away, as he filled his glass for the third time.
"Twice certain, and once divided the honors," he answered, pleased at the
question.
"And did you expect to get any pay, with or without interest?" she added.
"Me! I never thought of it again. But yes--by gol, I did! One case was
funny, as funny can be. It was Ricky Wharton over on the Muskwat River. I
saved his life right enough, and he came to me a year after and said, 'You
saved my life, now what are you going to do with it? I'm stony broke. I
owe a hundred dollars, and I wouldn't be owing it if you hadn't saved my
life. When you saved it I was five hundred to the good, and I'd have left
that much behind me. Now I'm on the rocks, because you insisted on saving
my life; and you just got to take care of me.' I 'insisted'! Well, that
knocked me silly, and I took him on--blame me, if I didn't keep Ricky a
whole year, till he went north looking for gold. Get pay?--why, I _paid_!
Saving life has its responsibilities, little gal."
"You can't save life without running some risk yourself, not as a rule,
can you?" she said, shrinking from his familiarity.
"Not as a rule," he replied. "You took on a bit of risk with me, you and
your Piegan pony."
"Oh, I was young," she responded, leaning over the table and drawing faces
on a piece of paper before her. "I could take more risks, I was only
nineteen!"
"I don't catch on," he rejoined. "If it's sixteen or--"
"Or fifty," she interposed.
"What difference does it make? If you're done for, it's the same at
nineteen as fifty, and _vicey-versey_."
"No, it's not the same," she answered. "You leave so much more that you
want to keep, when you go at fifty."
"Well, I dunno. I never thought of that."
"There's all that has belonged to you. You've been married, and have
children, haven't you?"
He started, frowned, then straightened himself. "I got one girl--she's
East with her grandmother," he said, jerkily.
"That's what I said; there's more to leave behind at fifty," she replied,
a red spot on each cheek. She was not looking at him, but at the face of a
man on the paper before her--a young man with abundant hair, a strong
chin, and big, eloquent eyes; and all around his face she had drawn the
face of a girl many times, and beneath the faces of both she was writing
_Manette and Julien_.
The water was getting too deep for John Alloway. He floundered toward the
shore. "I'm no good at words," he said--"no good at argyment; but I've got
a gift for stories--round the fire of a night, with a pipe and tin basin
of tea; so I'm not going to try and match you. You've had a good education
down at Winnipeg. Took every prize, they say, and led the school, though
there was plenty of fuss because they let you do it, and let you stay
there, being half-Indian. You never heard what was going on outside, I
s'pose. It didn't matter, for you won out. Blamed foolishness, trying to
draw the line between red and white that way. Of course, it's the women
always, always the women, striking out for all-white or nothing. Down
there at Portage they've treated you mean, mean as dirt. The Reeve's
wife--well, we'll fix that up all right. I guess John Alloway ain't to be
bluffed. He knows too much, and they all know he knows enough. When John
Alloway, 32 Main Street, with a ranch on the Katanay, says, 'We're coming,
Mr. and Mrs. John Alloway is coming,' they'll get out their cards
_visite_, I guess."
Pauline's head bent lower, and she seemed laboriously etching lines into
the faces before her--Manette and Julien, Julien and Manette; and there
came into her eyes the youth and light and gayety of the days when Julien
came of an afternoon and the riverside rang with laughter--the dearest,
lightest days she had ever spent.
The man of fifty went on, seeing nothing but a girl over whom he was
presently going to throw the lasso of his affection and take her home with
him, yielding and glad, a white man and his half-breed girl--but such a
half-breed!
"I seen enough of the way some of them women treated you," he continued,
"and I sez to myself, Her turn next. There's a way out, I sez, and John
Alloway pays his debts. When the anniversary comes round I'll put things
right, I sez to myself. She saved my life, and she shall have the rest of
it, if she'll take it, and will give a receipt in full, and open a new
account in the name of John and Pauline Alloway. Catch it? See--Pauline?"
Slowly she got to her feet. There was a look in her eyes such as had been
in her mother's a little while before, but a hundred times intensified, a
look that belonged to the flood and flow of generations of Indian life,
yet controlled in her by the order and understanding of centuries of white
men's lives, the pervasive, dominating power of race.
For an instant she kept her eyes toward the window. The storm had suddenly
ceased, and a glimmer of sunset light was breaking over the distant wastes
of snow.
"You want to pay a debt you think you owe," she said, in a strange,
lustreless voice, turning to him at last. "Well, you have paid it. You
have given me a book to read which I will keep always. And I give you a
receipt in full for your debt."
"I don't know about any book," he answered, dazedly. "I want to marry you
right away."
"I am sorry, but it is not necessary," she replied, suggestively. Her face
was very pale now.
"But I want to. It ain't a debt. That was only a way of putting it. I want
to make you my wife. I got some position, and I can make the West sit up
and look at you and be glad."
Suddenly her anger flared out, low and vivid and fierce, but her words
were slow and measured. "There is no reason why I should marry you--not
one. You offer me marriage as a prince might give a penny to a beggar. If
my mother were not an Indian woman, you would not have taken it all as a
matter of course. But my father was a white man, and I am a white man's
daughter, and I would rather marry an Indian, who would think me the best
thing there was in the light of the sun, than marry you. Had I been pure
white you would not have been so sure; you would have asked, not offered.
I am not obliged to you. You ought to go to no woman as you came to me.
See, the storm has stopped. You will be quite safe going back now. The
snow will be deep, perhaps, but it is not far."
She went to the window, got his cap and gloves, and handed them to him. He
took them, dumbfounded and overcome.
"Say, I ain't done it right, mebbe, but I meant well, and I'd be good to
you and proud of you, and I'd love you better than anything I ever saw,"
he said, shamefacedly, but eagerly and honestly, too.
"Ah, you should have said those last words first," she answered.
"I say them now."
"They come too late; but they would have been too late in any case," she
added. "Still, I am glad you said them."
She opened the door for him.
"I made a mistake," he urged, humbly. "I understand better now. I never
had any schoolin'."
"Oh, it isn't that," she answered, gently. "Good-bye."
Suddenly he turned. "You're right--it couldn't ever be," he said.
"You're--you're great. And I owe you my life still!"
He stepped out into the biting air.
For a moment Pauline stood motionless in the middle of the room, her gaze
fixed upon the door which had just closed; then, with a wild gesture of
misery and despair, she threw herself upon the couch in a passionate
outburst of weeping. Sobs shook her from head to foot, and her hands,
clenched above her head, twitched convulsively.
Presently the door opened and her mother looked in eagerly. At what she
saw her face darkened and hardened for an instant, but then the girl's
utter abandonment of grief and agony convinced and conquered her. Some
glimmer of the true understanding of the problem which Pauline represented
got into her heart and drove the sullen selfishness from her face and eyes
and mind. She came over heavily and, sinking upon her knees, swept an arm
around the girl's shoulder. She realized what had happened, and probably
this was the first time in her life that she had ever come by instinct to
a revelation of her daughter's mind or of the faithful meaning of
incidents of their lives.
"You said no to John Alloway," she murmured.
Defiance and protest spoke in the swift gesture of the girl's hands. "You
think because he was white that I'd drop into his arms! No--no--no!"
"You did right, little one."
The sobs suddenly stopped, and the girl seemed to listen with all her
body. There was something in her Indian mother's voice she had never heard
before--at least, not since she was a little child and swung in a deerskin
hammock in a tamarac-tree by Renton's Lodge, where the chiefs met and the
West paused to rest on its onward march. Something of the accents of the
voice that crooned to her then was in the woman's tones now.
"He offered it like a lump of sugar to a bird--I know. He didn't know that
you have great blood--yes, but it is true. My man's grandfather, he was of
the blood of the kings of England. My man had the proof. And for a
thousand years my people have been chiefs. There is no blood in all the
West like yours. My heart was heavy, and dark thoughts came to me, because
my man is gone, and the life is not my life, and I am only an Indian woman
from the Warais, and my heart goes out there always now. But some great
Medicine has been poured into my heart. As I stood at the door and saw you
lying there, I called to the Sun. 'O great Spirit,' I said, 'help me to
understand, for this girl is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, and
Evil has come between us!' And the Sun Spirit poured the Medicine into my
spirit, and there is no cloud between us now. It has passed away, and I
see. Little white one, the white life is the only life, and I will live it
with you till a white man comes and gives you a white man's home. But not
John Alloway. Shall the crow nest with the oriole?"
As the woman spoke with slow, measured voice full of the cadences of a
heart revealing itself, the girl's breath at first seemed to stop, so
still she lay; then, as the true understanding of the words came to her,
she panted with excitement, her breast heaved, and the blood flushed her
face. When the slow voice ceased, and the room became still, she lay quiet
for a moment, letting the new thing find secure lodgment in her thought;
then, suddenly, she raised herself and threw her arms round her mother in
a passion of affection.
"Lalika! O mother Lalika!" she said, tenderly, and kissed her again and
again. Not since she was a little girl, long before they left the Warais,
had she called her mother by her Indian name, which her father had
humorously taught her to do in those far-off happy days by the beautiful,
singing river and the exquisite woods, when, with a bow and arrow, she had
ranged, a young Diana who slew only with love.
"Lalika, mother Lalika, it is like the old, old times," she added, softly.
"Ah, it does not matter now, for you understand!"
"I do not understand altogether," murmured the Indian woman, gently. "I am
not white, and there is a different way of thinking; but I will hold your
hand, and we will live the white life together."
Cheek to cheek they saw the darkness come, and afterwards the silver moon
steal up over a frozen world, in which the air bit like steel and braced
the heart like wine. Then, at last, before it was nine o'clock, after her
custom, the Indian woman went to bed, leaving her daughter brooding
peacefully by the fire.
For a long time Pauline sat with hands clasped in her lap, her gaze on the
tossing flames, in her heart and mind a new feeling of strength and
purpose. The way before her was not clear, she saw no further than this
day, and all that it had brought; yet she was as one that has crossed a
direful flood and finds herself on a strange shore in an unknown country,
with the twilight about her, yet with so much of danger passed that there
was only the thought of the moment's safety round her, the camp-fire to be
lit, and the bed to be made under the friendly trees and stars.
For a half-hour she sat so, and then, suddenly, she raised her head
listening, leaning toward the
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