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God's Country—And the Woman

by James Oliver Curwood · English · Gutenberg #4585 · 399,083 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: God's Country—And the Woman

Author: James Oliver Curwood


        
Release date: October 1, 2003 [eBook #4585]
                Most recently updated: November 8, 2025

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GOD'S COUNTRY—AND THE WOMAN ***




God's Country--And the Woman

By James Oliver Curwood

Author of "The Honor of the Big Snows," "Philip Steele," Etc.



CHAPTER ONE


Philip Weyman's buoyancy of heart was in face of the fact that he
had but recently looked upon Radisson's unpleasant death, and that
he was still in a country where the water flowed north. He laughed
and he sang. His heart bubbled over with cheer. He talked to
himself frankly and without embarrassment, asked himself
questions, answered them, discussed the beauties of nature and the
possibilities of storm as if there were three or four of him
instead of one.

At the top end of the world a man becomes a multiple being--if he
is white. Two years along the rim of the Arctic had taught Philip
the science by which a man may become acquainted with himself, and
in moments like the present, when both his mental and physical
spirits overflowed, he even went so far as to attempt poor
Radisson's "La Belle Marie" in the Frenchman's heavy basso,
something between a dog's sullen growl and the low rumble of
distant thunder. It made him cough. And then he laughed again,
scanning the narrowing sweep of the lake ahead of him.

He felt like a boy, and he chuckled as he thought of the definite
reason for it. For twenty-three months he had been like a piece of
rubber stretched to a tension--sometimes almost to the snapping
point. Now had come the reaction, and he was going HOME. Home! It
was that one word that caused a shadow to flit over his face, and
only once or twice had he forgotten and let it slip between his
lips. At least he was returning to civilization--getting AWAY from
the everlasting drone of breaking ice and the clack-clack tongue
of the Eskimo.

With the stub of a pencil Philip had figured out on a bit of paper
about where he was that morning. The whalebone hut of his last
Arctic camp was eight hundred miles due north. Fort Churchill,
over on Hudson's Bay, was four hundred miles to the east, and Fort
Resolution, on the Great Slave, was four hundred miles to the
west. On his map he had drawn a heavy circle about Prince Albert,
six hundred miles to the south. That was the nearest line of rail.
Six days back Radisson had died after a mouth's struggle with that
terrible thing they called "le mort rouge," or the Red Death.
Since then Philip had pointed his canoe straight UP the Dubawnt
waterways, and was a hundred and twenty miles nearer to
civilization. He had been through these waterways twice before,
and he knew that there was not a white man within a hundred and
fifty miles of him. And as for a white woman--

Weyman stopped his paddling where there was no current, and leaned
back in his canoe for a breathing space, and to fill his pipe. A
WHITE WOMAN! Would he stare at her like a fool when he saw her
again for the first time? Eighteen months ago he had seen a white
woman over at Fort Churchill--the English clerk's wife, thirty,
with a sprinkle of gray in her blond hair, and pale blue eyes.
Fresh from the Garden of Eden, he had wondered why the half-dozen
white men over there regarded her as they did. Long ago, in the
maddening gloom of the Arctic night, he had learned to understand.
At Fond du Lac, when Weyman had first come up into the forest
country, he had said to the factor: "It's glorious! It's God's
Country!" And the factor had turned his tired, empty eyes upon him
with the words: "It was--before SHE went. But no country is God's
Country without a woman," and then he took Philip to the lonely
grave under a huge lob-stick spruce, and told him in a few words
how one woman had made life for him. Even then Philip could not
fully understand. But he did now.

He resumed his paddling, his gray eyes alert. His aloneness and
the bigness of the world in which, so far as he knew, he was the
only human atom, did not weigh heavily upon him. He loved this
bigness and emptiness and the glory of solitude. It was middle
autumn, and close to noon of a day unmarred by cloud above, and
warm with sunlight. He was following close to the west shore of
the lake. The opposite shore was a mile away. He was so near to
the rock-lined beach that he could hear the soft throat-cries of
the moose-birds. And what he saw, so far as his eyes could see in
all directions, was "God's Country"--a glory of colour that was
like a great master painting. The birch had turned to red and
gold. From out of the rocks rose trees that were great crimson
splashes of mountain-ash berries framed against the dark lustre of
balsam and cedar and spruce.

Without reason, Philip was listening again to the quiet lifeless
words of Jasper, the factor over at Fond du Lac, as he described
the day when he and his young wife first came up through the
wonderland of the North. "No country is God's Country without a
woman!" He found the words running in an unpleasant monotone
through his brain. He had made up his mind that he would strike
Fond du Lac on his way down, for Jasper's words and the hopeless
picture he had made that day beside the little cross under the
spruce had made them brothers in a strange sort of way. Besides,
Jasper would furnish him with a couple of Indians, and a sledge
and dogs if the snows came early.

In a break between the rocks Philip saw a white strip of sand, and
turned his canoe in to shore. He had been paddling since five
o'clock, and in the six hours had made eighteen miles. Yet he felt
no fatigue as he stood up and stretched himself. He remembered how
different it had been four years ago when Hill, the Hudson's Bay
Company's man down at Prince Albert, had looked him over with
skeptical and uneasy eyes, encouraging him with the words: "You're
going to a funeral, young man, and it's your own. You won't make
God's House, much less Hudson's Bay!"

Weyman laughed joyously.

"Fooled 'em--fooled 'em all!" he told himself. "We'll wager a
dollar to a doughnut that we're the toughest looking specimen that
ever drifted down from Coronation Gulf, or any other gulf. A
DOUGHNUT! I'd trade a gold nugget as big as my fist for a doughnut
or a piece of pie right this minute. Doughnuts an' pie--real old
pumpkin pie--an' cranberry sauce, 'n' POTATOES! Good Lord, and
they're only six hundred miles away, carloads of 'em!"

He began to whistle as he pulled his rubber dunnage sack out of
the canoe. Suddenly he stopped, his eyes staring at the smooth
white floor of sand. A bear had been there before him, and quite
recently. Weyman had killed fresh meat the day before, but the
instinct of the naturalist and the woodsman kept him from singing
or whistling, two things which he was very much inclined to do on
this particular day. He had no suspicion that a bear which he was
destined never to see had become the greatest factor in his life.
He was philosopher enough to appreciate the value and importance
of little things, but the bear track did not keep him silent
because he regarded it as significant, because he wanted to kill.
He would have welcomed it to dinner, and would have talked to it
were it as affable and good-mannered as the big pop-eyed moose-
birds that were already flirting about near him.

He emptied a half of the contents of the rubber sack out on the
sand and made a selection for dinner, and he chuckled in his big
happiness as he saw how attenuated his list of supplies was
becoming. There was still a quarter of a pound of tea, no sugar,
no coffee, half a dozen pounds of flour, twenty-seven prunes
jealously guarded in a piece of narwhal skin, a little salt and
pepper mixed, and fresh caribou meat.

"It's a lovely day, and we'll have a treat for dinner," he
informed himself. "No need of starving. We'll have a real feast.
I'll cook SEVEN prunes instead of five!"

He built a small fire, hung two small pots over it, selected his
prunes, and measured out a tablespoonful of black tea. In the
respite he had while the water heated he dug a small mirror out of
the sack and looked at himself. His long, untrimmed hair was
blond, and the inch of stubble on his face was brick red. There
were tiny creases at the corners of his eyes, caused by the
blistering sleet and cold wind of the Arctic coast. He grimaced as
he studied himself. Then his face lighted up with sudden
inspiration.

"I've got it!" he exclaimed. "I need a shave! We'll use the prune
water."

From the rubber bag he fished out his razor, a nubbin of soap, and
a towel. For fifteen minutes after that he sat cross-legged on the
sand, with the mirror on a rock, and worked. When he had finished
he inspected himself closely.

"You're not half bad," he concluded, and he spoke seriously now.
"Four years ago when you started up here you were thirty--and you
looked forty. Now you're thirty-four, and if it wasn't for the
snow lines in your eyes I'd say you were a day or two younger.
That's pretty good."

He had washed his face and was drying it with the towel when a
sound made him look over beyond the rocks. It was the crackling
sound made by a dead stick stepped upon, or a sapling broken down.
Either meant the bear.

Dropping the towel, he unbuttoned the flap to the holster of his
revolver, took a peep to see how long he could leave the water
before it would boil, and stepped cautiously in the direction of
the sound. A dozen paces beyond the bulwark of rocks he came upon
a fairly well-worn moose trail; surveying its direction from the
top of a boulder, he made up his mind that the bear was dining on
mountain-ash berries where he saw one of the huge crimson splashes
of the fruit a hundred yards away.

He went on quietly. Under the big ash tree there was no sign of a
feast, recent or old. He proceeded, the trail turning almost at
right angles from the ash tree, as if about to bury itself in the
deeper forest. His exploratory instinct led him on for another
hundred yards, when the trail swung once more to the left. He
heard the swift trickling run of water among rocks, and again a
sound. But his mind did not associate the sound which he heard
this time with the one made by the bear. It was not the breaking
of a stick or the snapping of brush. It was more a part of the
musical water-sound itself, a strange key struck once to interrupt
the monotone of a rushing stream.

Over a gray hog-back of limestone Philip climbed to look down into
a little valley of smooth-washed boulders and age-crumbled rock
through which the stream picked its way. He descended to the white
margin of sand and turned sharply to the right, where a little
pool had formed at the base of a huge rock. And there he stopped,
his heart in his throat, every fibre in his body charged with a
sudden electrical thrill at what he beheld. For a moment he was
powerless to move. He stood--and stared.

At the edge of the pool twenty steps from him was kneeling a
woman. Her back was toward him, and in that moment she was as
motionless as the rock that towered over her. Along with the
rippling drone of the stream, without reason on his part--without
time for thought-there leaped through his amazed brain the words
of Jasper, the factor, and he knew that he was looking upon the
miracle that makes "God's Country"--a white woman!

The sun shone down upon her bare head. Over her slightly bent
shoulders swept a glory of unbound hair that rippled to the sand.
Black tresses, even velvety as the crow's wing, might have meant
Cree or half-breed. But this at which he stared--all that he saw
of her--was the brown and gold of the autumnal tintings that had
painted pictures for him that day.

Slowly she raised her head, as if something had given her warning
of a presence behind, and as she hesitated in that birdlike,
listening poise a breath of wind from the little valley stirred
her hair in a shimmering veil that caught a hundred fires of the
sun. And then, as he crushed back his first impulse to cry out, to
speak to her, she rose erect beside the pool, her back still to
him, and hidden to the hips in her glorious hair.

Her movement revealed a towel partly spread out on the sand, and a
comb, a brush, and a small toilet bag. Philip did not see these.
She was turning, slowly, scanning the rocks beyond the valley.

Like a thing carven out of stone he stood, still speechless, still
staring, when she faced him.





CHAPTER TWO


A face like that into which Philip looked might have come to him
from out of some dream of paradise. It was a girl's face. Eyes of
the pure blue of the sky above met his own. Her lips were a little
parted and a little laughing. Before he had uttered a word, before
he could rise out of the stupidity of his wonder, the change came.
A fear that he could not have forgotten if he had lived through a
dozen centuries leaped into the lovely eyes. The half-laughing
lips grew tense with terror. Quick as the flash of powder there
had come into her face a look that was not that of one merely
startled. It was fear--horror--a great, gripping thing that for an
instant seemed to crush the life from her soul. In another moment
it was gone, and she swayed back against the face of the rock,
clutching a hand at her breast.

"My God, how I frightened you!" gasped Philip.

"Yes, you frightened me," she said.

Her white throat was bare, and he could see the throb of it as she
made a strong effort to speak steadily. Her eyes did not leave
him. As he advanced a step he saw that unconsciously she cringed
closer to the rock.

"You are not afraid--now?" he asked. "I wouldn't have frightened
you for the world. And sooner than hurt you I'd--I'd kill myself.
I just stumbled here by accident. And I haven't seen a white
woman--for two years. So I stared--stared--and stood there like a
fool."

Relief shot into her eyes at his words.

"Two years? What do you mean?"

"I've been up along the rim of h--I mean the Arctic, on a
government wild-goose chase," he explained. "And I'm just coming
down."

"You're from the North?"

There was an eager emphasis in her question.

"Yes. Straight from Coronation Gulf. I ran ashore to cook a mess
of prunes. While the water was boiling I came down here after a
bear, and found YOU! My name is Philip Weyman; I haven't even an
Indian with me, and there are three things in the world I'd trade
that name for just now: One is pie, another is doughnuts, and the
third--"

She brushed back her hair, and the fear went from her eyes as she
looked at him.

"And the third?" she asked.

"Is the answer to a question," he finished. "How do YOU happen to
be here, six hundred miles from anywhere?"

She stepped out from the rock. And now he saw that she was almost
as tall as himself, and that she was as slim as a reed and as
beautifully poised as the wild narcissus that sways like music to
every call of the wind. She had tucked up her sleeves, baring her
round white arms close to the shoulders, and as she looked
steadily at him before answering his question she flung back the
shining masses of her hair and began to braid it. Her fear for him
was entirely gone. She was calm. And there was something in the
manner of her quiet and soul-deep study of him that held back
other words which he might have spoken.

In those few moments she had taken her place in his life. She
stood before him like a goddess, tall and slender and unafraid,
her head a gold-brown aureole, her face filled with a purity, a
beauty, and a STRENGTH that made him look at her speechless,
waiting for the sound of her voice. In her look there was neither
boldness nor suspicion. Her eyes were clear, deep pools of velvety
blue that defied him to lie to her, He felt that under those eyes
he could have knelt down upon the sand and emptied his soul of its
secrets for their inspection.

"It is not very strange that I should be here" she said at last.
"I have always lived here. It is my home."

"Yes, I believe that," breathed Philip. "It is the last thing in
the world that one would believe--but I do; I believe it.
Something--I don't know what--told me that you belonged to this
world as you stood there beside the rock. But I don't understand.
A thousand miles from a city--and you! It's unreal. It's almost
like the dreams I've been dreaming during the past eighteen
months, and the visions I've seen during that long, maddening
night up on the coast, when for five months we didn't see a glow
of the sun. But--you understand--it's hard to comprehend."

From her he glanced swiftly over the rocks of the coulee, as if
expecting to see some sign of the home she had spoken of, or at
least of some other human presence. She understood his questioning
look. "I am alone," she said.

The quality of her voice startled him more then her words. There
was a deeper, darker glow in her eyes as she watched their effect
upon him. She swept out a gleaming white arm, still moist with the
water of the pool, taking in the wide, autumn-tinted spaces about
them.

"I am alone," she repeated, still keeping her eyes on his face.
"Entirely alone. That is why you startled me--why I was afraid.
This is my hiding-place, and I thought--"

He saw that she had spoken words that she would have recalled. She
hesitated. Her lips trembled. In that moment of suspense a little
gray ermine dislodged a stone from the rock ridge above them, and
at the sound of it as it struck behind her the girl gave a start,
and a quick flash of the old fear leaped for an instant into her
face. And now Philip beheld something in her which he had been too
bewildered and wonder-struck to observe before. Her first terror
had been so acute that he had failed to see what remained after
her fright had passed. But it was clear to him now, and the look
that came into his own face told her that he had made the
discovery.

The beauty of her face, her eyes, her hair--the wonder of her
presence six hundred miles from civilization--had held him
spellbound. He had seen only the deep lustre and the wonderful
blue of her eyes. Now he saw that those eyes, exquisite in their
loveliness, were haunted by something which she was struggling to
fight back--a questing, hunted look that burned there steadily,
and of which he was not the cause. A deep-seated grief, a terror
far back, shone through the forced calmness with which she was
speaking to him. He knew that she was fighting with herself, that
the nervously twitching fingers at her breast told more than her
lips had confessed. He stepped nearer to her and held out a hand,
and when he spoke his voice was vibrant with the thing that made
men respect him and women have faith in him.

"Tell me--what you started to say," he entreated quietly. "This is
your hiding-place, and you thought--what? I think that I can
guess. You thought that I was some one else, whom you have reason
to fear."

She did not answer. It was as if she had not yet completely
measured him. Her eyes told him that. They were not looking AT
him, but INTO him. And they were softly beautiful as wood violets.
He found himself looking steadily into them--close, so close that
he could have reached out and touched her. Slowly there came over
them a filmy softness. And then, marvellously, he saw the tears
gathering, as dew might gather over the sweet petals of a flower.
And still for a moment she did not speak. There came a little
quiver at her throat, and she caught herself with a quick, soft
breath.

"Yes, I thought you were some one else--whom I fear," she said
then. "But why should I tell you? You are from down there, from
what you please to call civilization. I should distrust you
because of that. So why--why should I tell you?"

In an instant Philip was at her side. In his rough, storm-beaten
hand he caught the white fingers that trembled at her breast. And
there was something about him now that made her completely
unafraid.

"Why?" he asked. "Listen, and I will tell you. Four years ago I
came up into this country from down there--the world they call
Civilization. I came up with every ideal and every dream I ever
had broken and crushed. And up here I found God's Country. I found
new ideals and new dreams. I am going back with them. But they can
never be broken as the others were--because--now--I have found
something that will make them live. And that something is YOU!
Don't let my words startle you. I mean them to be as pure as the
sun that shines over our heads. If I leave you now--if I never see
you again--you will have filled this wonderful world for me. And
if I could do something to prove this--to make you happier--why,
I'd thank God for having sent me ashore to cook a mess of prunes."

He released her hand, and stepped back from her.

"That is why you should tell me," he finished.

A swift change had come into her eyes and face. She was breathing
quickly. He saw the sudden throbbing of her throat. A flush of
colour had mounted into her cheeks. Her lips were parted, her eyes
shone like stars.

"You would do a great deal for me?" she questioned breathlessly.
"A great deal--and like--A MAN?"

"Yes."

"A MAN--one of God's men?" she repeated.

He bowed his head.

Slowly, so slowly that she scarcely seemed to move, she drew
nearer to him.

"And when you had done this you would be willing to go away, to
promise never to see me again, to ask no reward? You would swear
that?"

Her hand touched his arm. Her breath came tense and fast as she
waited for him to answer. "If you wished it, yes," he said.

"I almost believe," he heard, as if she were speaking the words to
herself. She turned to him again, and something of faith, of hope
transfigured her face.

"Return to your fire and your prunes," she said quickly, and the
sunlight of a smile passed over her lips. "Then, half an hour from
now, come up the coulee to the turn in the rocks. You will find me
there."

She bent quickly and picked up the little bag and the brush from
the sand. Without looking at him again she sped swiftly beyond the
big rock, and Philip's last vision of her was the radiant glory of
her hair as it rippled cloudlike behind her in the sunlight.





CHAPTER THREE


That he had actually passed through the experience of the last few
minutes, that it was a reality and not some beautiful phantasm of
the red and gold world which again lay quiet and lifeless about
him, Philip could scarcely convince himself as he made his way
back to the canoe and the fire. The discovery of this girl, buried
six hundred miles in a wilderness that was almost a terra
incognita to the white man, was sufficient to bewilder him. And
only now, as he kicked the burning embers from under the pails,
and looked at his watch to time himself, did he begin to realize
that he had not sensed a hundredth part of the miracle of it.

Now that he was alone, question after question leapt unanswered
through his mind, and every vein in his body throbbed with strange
excitement. Not for an instant did he doubt what she had said.
This world--the forests about him, the lakes, the blue skies
above, were her home. And yet, struggling vainly for a solution of
the mystery, he told himself in the next breath that this could
not be possible. Her voice had revealed nothing of the wilderness
--except in its sweetness. Not a break had marred the purity of
her speech. She had risen before him like the queen of some
wonderful kingdom, and not like a forest girl. And in her face he
had seen the soul of one who had looked upon the world as the
world lived outside of its forest walls. Yet he believed her. This
was her home. Her hair, her eyes, the flowerlike lithesomeness of
her beautiful body--and something more, something that he could
not see but which he could FEEL in her presence, told him that
this was so. This wonder-world about him was her home. But why--
how?

He seated himself on a rock, holding the open watch in his hand.
Of one thing he was sure. She was oppressed by a strange fear. It
was not the fear of being alone, of being lost, of some happen-
chance peril that she might fancy was threatening her. It was a
deeper, bigger thing than that. And she had confessed to him--not
wholly, but enough to make him know--that this fear was of man. He
felt at this thought a little thrill of joy, of undefinable
exultation. He sprang from the rock and went down to the shore of
the lake, scanning its surface with eager, challenging eyes. In
these moments he forgot that civilization was waiting for him,
that for eighteen months he had been struggling between life and
death at the naked and barbarous end of the earth. All at once, in
the space of a few minutes, his world had shrunken until it held
but two things for him--the autumn-tinted forests, and the girl.
Beyond these he thought of nothing except the minutes that were
dragging like thirty weights of lead.

As the hand of his watch marked off the twenty-fifth of the
prescribed thirty he turned his steps in the direction of the
pool. He half expected that she would be there when he came over
the ridge of rock. But she had not returned. He looked up the
coulee, end then at the firm white sand close to the water. The
imprints of her feet were there--small, narrow imprints of a
heeled shoe. Unconsciously he smiled, for no other reason than
that each surprise he encountered was a new delight to him. A
forest girl as he had known them would have worn moccasins--six
hundred miles from civilization.

As he was about to leap across the narrow neck of the pool he
noticed a white object almost buried in the dry sand, and picked
it up. It was a handkerchief; and this, too, was a surprise. He
had not particularly noticed her dress, except that it was soft
and clinging blue. The handkerchief he looked at more closely. It
was of fine linen with a border of lace, and so soft that he could
have hidden it in the palm of his hand. From it rose a faint,
sweet scent of the wild rock violet. He knew that it was rock
violet, because more than once he had crushed the blossoms between
his hands. He thrust the bit of fabric in the breast of his
flannel shirt, and walked swiftly up the coulee.

A hundred yards above him the stream turned abruptly, and here a
strip of forest meadow grew to the water's edge. He sprang up the
low bank, and stood face to face with the girl.

She had heard his approach, and was waiting for him, a little
smile of welcome on her lips. She had completed her toilet. She
had braided her wonderful hair, and it was gathered in a heavy,
shimmering coronet about her head. There was a flutter of lace at
her throat, and little fluffs of it at her wrists. She was more
beautiful, more than ever like the queen of a kingdom as she stood
before him now. And she was alone. He saw that in his first swift
glance.

"You didn't eat the prunes?" she asked, and for the first time he
saw a bit of laughter in her eyes.

"No--I--I kicked the fire from under them," he said.

He caught the significance of her words, and her sudden sidewise
gesture. A short distance from them was a small tent, and on the
grass in front of the tent was spread a white cloth, on which was
a meal such as he had not looked upon for two years.

"I am glad," she said, and again her eyes met his with their glow
of friendly humour. "They might have spoiled your appetite, and I
have made up my mind that I want you to have dinner with me. I
can't offer you pie or doughnuts. But I have a home-made fruit
cake, and a pot of jam that I made myself. Will you join me?"

They sat down, with the feast between them, and the girl leaned
over to turn him a cup of tea from a pot that was already made and
waiting. Her lovely head was near him, and he stared with hungry
adoration at the thick, shining braids, and the soft white contour
of her cheek and neck. She leaned back suddenly, and caught him.
The words that were on her lips remained unspoken. The laughter
went from her eyes. In a hot wave the blood flushed his own face.

"Forgive me if I do anything you don't understand," he begged.
"For weeks past I have been wondering how I would act when I met
white people again. Perhaps you can't understand. But eighteen
months up there--eighteen months without the sound of a white
woman's voice, without a glimpse of her face, with only dreams to
live on--will make me queer for a time. Can't you understand--a
little?"

"A great deal," she replied so quickly that she put him at ease
again. "Back there I couldn't quite believe you. I am beginning to
now. You are honest. But let us not talk of ourselves until after
dinner. Do you like the cake?"

She had given him a piece as large as his fist, and he bit off the
end of it.

"Delicious!" he cried instantly. "Think of it--nothing but
bannock, bannock, bannock for two years, and only six ounces of
that a day for the last six months! Do you care if I eat the whole
of it--the cake, I mean?"

Seriously she began cutting the remainder of the cake into
quarters.

"It would be one of the biggest compliments you could pay me," she
said. "But won't you have some boiled tongue with it, a little
canned lobster, a pickle--"

"Pickles!" he interrupted. "Just cake and pickles--please! I've
dreamed of pickles up there. I've had 'em come to me at night as
big as mountains, and one night I dreamed of chasing a pickle with
legs for hours, and when at last I caught up with the thing it had
turned into an iceberg. Please let me have just pickles and cake!"

Behind the lightness of his words she saw the truth--the craving
of famine. Ashamed, he tried to hide it from her. He refused the
third huge piece of cake, but she reached over and placed it in
his hand. She insisted that he eat the last piece, and the last
pickle in the bottle she had opened.

When he finished, she said:

"Now--I know."

"What?"

"That you have spoken the truth, that you have come from a long
time in the North, and that I need not fear--what I did fear."

"And that fear? Tell me--"

She answered calmly, and in her eyes and the lines of her face
came a look of despair which she had almost hidden from him until
now.

"I was thinking during those thirty minutes you away," she said.
"And I realized what folly it was in me to tell you as much as I
have. Back there, for just one insane moment, I thought that you
might help me in a situation which is as terrible as any you may
have faced in your months of Arctic night. But it is impossible.
All that I can ask of you now--all that I can demand of you to
prove that you are the man you said you were--is that you leave
me, and never whisper a word into another ear of our meeting. Will
you promise that?"

"To promise that--would be lying," he said slowly, and his hand
unclenched and lay listlessly on his knee. "If there is a reason--
some good reason why I should leave you--then I will go."

"Then--you demand a reason?"

"To demand a reason would be--"

He hesitated, and she added:

"Unchivalrous."

"Yes--more than that," he replied softly. He bowed his head, and
for a moment she saw the tinge of gray in his blond hair, the
droop of his clean, strong shoulders, the SOMETHING of
hopelessness in his gesture. A new light flashed into her own
face. She raised a hand, as if to reach out to him, and dropped it
as he looked up.

"Will you let me help you?" he asked.

She was not looking at him, but beyond him. In her face he saw
again the strange light of hope that had illumined it at the pool.

"If I could believe," she whispered, still looking beyond him. "If
I could trust you, as I have read that the maidens of old trusted
their knights. But--it seems impossible. In those days, centuries
and centuries ago, I guess, womanhood was next to--God. Men fought
for it, and died for it, to keep it pure and holy. If you had come
to me then you would have levelled your lance and fought for me
without asking a question, without demanding a reward, without
reasoning whether I was right or wrong--and all because I was a
woman. Now it is different. You are a part of civilization, and if
you should do all that I might ask of you it would be because you
have a price in view. I know. I have looked into you. I
understand. That price would be--ME!"

She looked at him now, her breast throbbing, almost a sob in her
quivering voice, defying him to deny the truth of her words.

"You have struck home," he said, and his voice sounded strange to
himself. "And I am not sorry. I am glad that you have seen--and
understand. It seems almost indecent for me to tell you this, when
I have known you for such a short time. But I have known you for
years--in my hopes and dreams. For you I would go to the end of
the world. And I can do what other men have done, centuries ago.
They called them knights. You may call me a MAN!"

At his words she rose from where she had been sitting. She faced
the radiant walls of the forests that rolled billow upon billow in
the distance, and the sun lighted up her crown of hair in a glory.
One hand still clung to her breast. She was breathing even more
quickly, and the flush had deepened in her cheek until it was like
the tender stain of the crushed bakneesh. Philip rose and stood
beside her. His shoulders were back. He looked where she looked,
and as he gazed upon the red and gold billows of forest that
melted away against the distant sky he felt a new and glorious
fire throbbing in his veins. From the forests their eyes turned--
and met. He held out his hand. And slowly her own hand fluttered
at her breast, and was given to him.

"I am quite sure that I understand you now," he said, and his
voice was the low, steady, fighting voice of the man new-born. "I
will be your knight, as you have read of the knights of old. I
will urge no reward that is not freely given. Now--will you let me
help you?"

For a moment she allowed him to hold her hand. Then she gently
withdrew it and stepped back from him.

"You must first understand before you offer yourself," she said.
"I cannot tell you what my trouble is. You will never know. And
when it is over, when you have helped me across the abyss, then
will come the greatest trial of all for you. I believe--when I
tell you that last thing which you must do--that you will regard
me as a monster, and draw back. But it is necessary. If you fight
for me, it must be in the dark. You will not know why you are
doing the things I ask you to do. You may guess, but you would not
guess the truth if you lived a thousand years. Your one reward
will be the knowledge that you have fought for a woman, and that
you have saved her. Now, do you still want to help me?'

"I can't understand," he gasped. "But--yes--I would still accept
the inevitable. I have promised you that I will do as you have
dreamed that knights of old have done. To leave you now would be"
--he turned his head with a gesture of hopelessness--"an empty
world forever. I have told you now. But you could not understand
and believe unless I did. I love you."

He spoke as quietly and with as little passion in his voice as if
he were speaking the words from a book. But their very quietness
made them convincing. She started, and the colour left her face.
Then it returned, flooding her cheeks with a feverish glow.

"In that is the danger," she said quickly. "But you have spoken
the words as I would have had you speak them. It is this danger
that must be buried--deep--deep. And you will bury it. You will
urge no questions that I do not wish to answer. You will fight for
me, blindly, knowing only that what I ask you to do is not sinful
nor wrong. And in the end--"

She hesitated. Her face had grown as tense as his own.

"And in the end," she whispered, "your greatest reward can be only
the knowledge that in living this knighthood for me you have won
what I can never give to any man. The world can hold only one such
man for a woman. For your faith must be immeasurable, your love as
pure as the withered violets out there among the rocks if you live
up to the tests ahead of you. You will think me mad when I have
finished. But I am sane. Off there, in the Snowbird Lake country,
is my home. I am alone. No other white man or woman is with me. As
my knight, the one hope of salvation that I cling to now, you will
return with me to that place--as my husband. To all but ourselves
we shall be man and wife. I will bear your name--or the one by
which you must be known. And at the very end of all, in that hour
of triumph when you know that you have borne me safely over that
abyss at the brink of which I am hovering now, you will go off
into the forest, and--"

She approached him, and laid a hand on his arm. "You will not come
back," she finished, so gently that he scarcely heard her words.
"You will die--for me--for all who have known you."

"Good God!" he breathed, and he stared over her head to where the
red and gold billows of the forests seemed to melt away into the
skies.





CHAPTER FOUR


Thus they stood for many seconds. Never for an instant did her
eyes leave his face, and Philip looked straight over her head into
that distant radiance of the forest mountains. It was she whose
emotions revealed themselves now. The blood came and went in her
cheeks. The soft lace at her throat rose and fell swiftly. In her
eyes and face there was a thing which she had not dared to reveal
to him before--a prayerful, pleading anxiety that was almost ready
to break into tears.

At last she had come to see and believe in the strength and wonder
of this man who had come to her from out of the North, and now he
stared over her head with that strange white look, as if the
things she had said had raised a mountain between them. She could
feel the throb of his arm on which her hand rested. All at once
her calm had deserted her. She had never known a man like this,
had never expected to know one; and in her face there shone the
gentle loveliness of a woman whose soul and not her voice was
pleading a great cause. It was pleading for her self. And then he
looked down.

"You want to go--now," she whispered. "I knew that you would."

"Yes, I want to go," he replied, and his two hands took hers, and
held them close to his breast, so that she felt the excited
throbbing of his heart. "I want to go--wherever you go. Perhaps in
those years of centuries ago there lived women like you to fight
and die for. I no longer wonder at men fighting for them as they
have sung their stories in books. I have nothing down in that
world which you have called civilization--nothing except the
husks of murdered hopes, ambitions, and things that were once
joys. Here I have you to love, to fight for. For you cannot tell
me that I must not love you, even though I swear to live up to
your laws of chivalry. Unless I loved you as I do there would not
be those laws."

"Then you will do all this for me--even to the end--when you must
sacrifice all of that for which you have struggled, and which you
have saved?"

"Yes."

"If that is so, then I trust you with my life and my honour. It is
all in your keeping--all."

Her voice broke in a sob. She snatched her hands from him, and
with that sob still quivering on her lips she turned and ran
swiftly to the little tent. She did not look back as she
disappeared into it, and Philip turned like one in a dream and
went to the summit of the bare rock ridge, from which he could
look over the quiet surface of the lake and a hundred square miles
of the unpeopled world which had now become so strangely his own.
An hour--a little more than that--had changed the course of his
life as completely as the master-strokes of a painter might have
changed the tones of a canvas epic. It did not take reason or
thought to impinge this fact upon him. It was a knowledge that
engulfed him overwhelmingly. So short a time ago that even now he
could not quite comprehend it all, he was alone out on the lake,
thinking of the story of the First Woman that Jasper had told him
down at Fond du Lac. Since then he had passed through a lifetime.
What had happened might well have covered the space of months--or
of years. He had met a woman, and like the warm sunshine she had
become instantly a part of his soul, flooding him with those
emotions which make life beautiful. That he had told her of this
love as calmly as if she had known of it slumbering within his
breast for years seemed to him to be neither unreal nor
remarkable.

He turned his face back to the tent, but there was no movement
there. He knew that there--alone--the girl was recovering from
the tremendous strain under which she had been fighting. He sat
down, facing the lake. For the first time his mental faculties
began to adjust themselves and his blood to flow less heatedly
through his veins. For the first time, too, the magnitude of his
promise--of what he had undertaken--began to impress itself upon
him. He had thought that in asking him to fight for her she had
spoken with the physical definition of that word in mind. But at
the outset she had plunged him into mystery. If she had asked him
to draw the automatic at his side and leap into battle with a
dozen of his kind he would not have been surprised. He had
expected something like that. But this other--her first demand
upon him! What could it mean? Shrouded in mystery, bound by his
oath of honour to make no effort to uncover her secret, he was to
accompany her back to her home AS HER HUSBAND! And after that--at
the end--he was to go out into the forest, and die--for her, for
all who had known him. He wondered if she had meant these words
literally, too. He smiled, and slowly his eyes scanned the lake.
He was already beginning to reason, to guess at the mystery which
she had told him he could not unveil if he lived a thousand years.
But he could at least work about the edges of it.

Suddenly he concentrated his gaze at a point on the lake three
quarters of a mile away. It was close to shore, and he was certain
that he had seen some movement there--a flash of sunlight on a
shifting object. Probably he had caught a reflection of light from
the palmate horn of a moose feeding among the water-lily roots. He
leaned forward, and shaded his eyes. In another moment his heart
gave a quicker throb. What he had seen was the flash of a paddle.
He made out a canoe, and then two. They were moving close in-
shore, one following the other, and apparently taking advantage of
the shadows of the forest. Philip's hand shifted to the butt of
his automatic. After all there might be fighting of the good old-
fashioned kind. He looked back in the direction of the tent.

The girl had reappeared, and was looking at him. She waved a hand,
and he ran down to meet her. She had been crying. The dampness of
tears still clung to her lashes; but the smile on her lips was
sweet and welcoming, and now, so frankly that his face burned with
pleasure, she held out a hand to him.

"I was rude to run away from you in that way," she apologized.
"But I couldn't cry before you. And I wanted to cry."

"Because you were glad, or sorry?" he asked.

"A little of both," she replied. "But mostly glad. A few hours ago
it didn't seem possible that there was any hope for me. Now--"

"There is hope," he urged.

"Yes, there is hope."

For an instant he felt the warm thrill of her fingers as they
clung tighter to his. Then she withdrew her hand, gently, smiling
at him with sweet confidence. Her eyes were like pure, soft
violets. He wanted to kneel at her feet, and cry out his thanks to
God for sending him to her. Instead of betraying his emotion, he
spoke of the canoes.

"There are two canoes coming along the shore of the lake," he
said. "Are you expecting some one?"

The smile left her lips. He was startled by the suddenness with
which the colour ebbed from her face and the old fear leapt back
into her eyes.

"Two? You are sure there are two?" Her fingers clutched his arm
almost fiercely. "And they are coming this way?"

"We can see them from the top of the rock ridge," he said. "I am
sure there are two. Will you look for yourself?"

She did not speak as they hurried to the bald cap of the ridge.
From the top Philip pointed down the lake. The two canoes were in
plain view now. Whether they contained three or four people they
could not quite make out. At sight of them the last vestige of
colour had left the girl's cheeks. But now, as she stood there
breathing quickly in her excitement, there came a change in her.
She threw back her head. Her lips parted. Her blue eyes flashed a
fire in which Philip in his amazement no longer saw fear, but
defiance. Her hands were clenched. She seemed taller. Back into
her cheeks there burned swiftly two points of flame. All at once
she put out a hand and drew him back, so that the cap of the ridge
concealed them from the lake.

"An hour ago those canoes would have made me run off into the
forest--and hide," she said. "But now I am not afraid! Do you
understand?"

"Then you trust me?"

"Absolutely."

"But--surely--there is something that you should tell me: Who they
are, what your danger is, what I am to do."

"I am hoping that I am mistaken," she replied. "They may not be
those whom I am dreading--and expecting. All I can tell you is
this: You are Paul Darcambal. I am Josephine, your wife. Protect
me as a wife. I will be constantly at your side. Were I alone I
would know what to expect. But--with you--they may not offer me
harm. If they do not, show no suspicion. But be watchful. Don't
let them get behind you. And be ready always--always--to use
that--if a thing so terrible must be done!" As she spoke she lay a
hand on his pistol. "And remember: I am your wife!"

"To live that belief, even in a dream, will be a joy as
unforgettable as life itself," he whispered, so low that, in
turning her head, she made as if she had not heard him.

"Come," she said. "Let us follow the coulee down to the lake. We
can watch them from among the rocks."

She gave him her hand as they began to traverse the boulder-strewn
bed of the creek. Suddenly he said:

"You will not suspect me of cowardice if I suggest that there is
not one chance in a hundred of them discovering us?"

"No," she replied, with a glance so filled with her confidence and
faith that involuntarily he held her hand closer in his own. "But
I want them to find us--if they are whom I fear. We will show
ourselves on the shore."

He looked at her in amazement before the significance of her words
had dawned upon him. Then he laughed.

"That is the greatest proof of your faith you have given me," he
said. "With me you are anxious to face your enemies. And I am as
anxious to meet them."

"Don't misunderstand me," she corrected him quickly. "I am praying
that they are not the ones I suspect. But if they are--why, yes, I
want to face them--with you."

They had almost reached the lake when he said:

"And now, I may call you Josephine?"

"Yes, that is necessary."

"And you will call me--"

"Paul, of course--for you are Paul Darcambal."

"Is that quite necessary?" he asked. "Is it not possible that you
might allow me to retain at least a part of my name, and call me
Philip? Philip Darcambal?"

"There really is no objection to that," she hesitated. "If you
wish I will call you Philip, But you must also be Paul--your
middle name, perhaps."

"In the event of certain exigencies," he guessed.

"Yes."

He had still assisted her over the rocks by holding to her hand,
and suddenly her fingers clutched his convulsively. She pointed to
a stretch of the open lake. The canoes were plainly visible not
more than a quarter of a mile away. Even as he felt her trembling
slightly he laughed.

"Only three!" he exclaimed. "Surely it is not going to demand a
great amount of courage to face that number, Josephine?"

"It is going to take all the courage in the world to face one of
them," she replied in a low, strained voice. "Can you make them
out? Are they white men or Indians?"

"The light is not right--I can't decide," he said, after a
moment's scrutiny. "If they are Indians--"

"They are friends," she interrupted. "Jean--my Jean Croisset--left
me hiding here five days ago. He is part French and part Indian.
But he could not be returning so soon. If they are white--"

"We will expose ourselves on the beach," he finished
significantly.

She nodded. He saw that in spite of her struggle to remain calm
she was seized again by the terror of what might be in the
approaching canoes. He was straining his eyes to make out their
occupants when a low cry drew his gaze to her.

"It is Jean," she gasped, and he thought that he could hear her
heart beating. "It is Jean--and the others are Indians! Oh, my
God, how thankful I am--"

She turned to him.

"You will go back to the camp--please. Wait for us there, I must
see Jean alone. It is best that you should do this."

To obey without questioning her or expostulating against his
sudden dismissal, he knew was in the code of his promise to her.
And he knew by what he saw in her face that Jean's return had set
the world trembling under her feet, that for her it was charged
with possibilities as tremendous as if the two canoes had
contained those whom she had at first feared.

"Go," she whispered. "Please go."

Without a word he returned in the direction of the camp.





CHAPTER FIVE


Close to the tent Philip sat down, smoked his pipe, and waited.
Not only had the developments of the last few minutes been
disappointing to him, but they had added still more to his
bewilderment. He had expected and hoped for immediate physical
action, something that would at least partially clear away the
cloud of mystery. And at this moment, when he was expecting things
to happen, there had appeared this new factor, Jean, to change the
current of excitement under which Josephine was fighting. Who
could Jean be? he asked himself. And why should his appearance at
this time stir Josephine to a pitch of emotion only a little less
tense than that roused by her fears of a short time before? She
had told him that Jean was part Indian, part French, and that he
"belonged to her." And his coming, he felt sure, was of tremendous
significance to her.

He waited impatiently. It seemed a long time before he heard
voices and the sound of footsteps over the edge of the coulee. He
rose to his feet, and a moment later Josephine and her companion
appeared not more than a dozen paces from him. His first glance
was at the man. In that same instant Jean Croisset stopped in his
tracks and looked at Philip. Steadily, and apparently oblivious of
Josephine's presence, they measured each other, the half-breed
bent a little forward, the lithe alertness of a cat in his
posture, his eyes burning darkly. He was a man whose age Philip
could not guess. It might have been forty. Probably it was close
to that. He was bareheaded, and his long coarse hair, black as an
Indian's, was shot with gray. At first it would have been
difficult to name the blood that ran strongest in his veins. His
hair, the thinness of his face and body, his eyes, and the tense
position in which he had paused, were all Indian. Then, above
these things, Philip saw the French. Swiftly it became the
dominant part of the man before him, and he was not surprised when
Jean advanced with outstretched hand, and said:

"M'sieur Philip, I am Jean--Jean Jacques Croisset--and I am glad
you have come."

The words were spoken for Philip alone, and where she stood
Josephine did not catch the strange flash of fire in the half-
breed's eyes, nor did she hear his still more swiftly spoken
words: "I am glad it is YOU that chance has sent to us, M'sieur
Weyman!"

The two men gripped hands. There was something about Jean that
inspired Philip's confidence, and as he returned the half-breed's
greeting his eyes looked for a moment over the other's shoulder
and rested on Josephine. He was astonished at the change in her.
Evidently Jean had not brought her bad news. She held the pages of
an open letter in her hand, and as she caught Philip's look she
smiled at him with a gladness which he had not seen in her face
before. She came forward quickly, and placed a hand on his arm.

"Jean's coming was a surprise," she explained. "I did not expect
him for a number of days, and I dreaded what he might have to tell
me. But this letter has brought me fresh cause for thankfulness,
though it may enslave you a little longer to your vows of
knighthood. We start for home this afternoon. Are you ready?"

"I have a little packing to do," he said, looking after Jean, who
was moving toward the tent. "Twenty-seven prunes and--"

"Me," laughed Josephine. "Is it not necessary that you make room
in your canoe for me?"

Philip's face flushed with pleasure.

"Of course it is," he cried. "Everything has seemed so wonderfully
unreal to me that for a moment I forgot that you were my--my wife.
But how about Jean? He called me M'sieur Weyman."

"He is the one other person in the world who knows what you and I
know," she explained. "That, too, was necessary. Will you go and
arrange your canoe now? Jean will bring down my things and
exchange them for some of your dunnage." She left him to run into
the tent, reappearing quickly with a thick rabbit-skin blanket and
two canoe pillows.

"These make my nest--when I'm not working," she said, thrusting
them into Philip's arms. "I have a paddle, too. Jean says that I
am as good as an Indian woman with it."

"Better, M'sieur," exclaimed Jean, who had come out of the tent.
"It makes you work harder to see her. She is--what you call it--
gwan-auch-ewin--so splendid! Out of the Cree you cannot speak it."

A tender glow filled Josephine's eyes as Jean began pulling up the
pegs of the tent.

"A little later I will tell you about Jean," she whispered. "But
now, go to your canoe. We will follow you in a few minutes."

He left her, knowing that she had other things to say to Jean
which she did not wish him to hear. As he turned toward the coulee
he noticed that she still held the opened letter in her hand.

There was not much for him to do when he reached his canoe. He
threw out his sleeping bag and tent, and arranged Josephine's robe
and pillows so that she would sit facing him. The knowledge that
she was to be with him, that they were joined in a pact which
would make her his constant companion, filled him with joyous
visions and anticipations. He did not stop to ask himself how long
this mysterious association might last, how soon it might come to
the tragic end to which she had foredoomed it. With the spirit of
the adventurer who had more than once faced death with a smile, he
did not believe in burning bridges ahead of him. He loved
Josephine. To him this love had come as it had come to Tristan and
Isolde, to Paola and Francesca--sudden and irresistible, but,
unlike theirs, as pure as the air of the world which he breathed.
That he knew nothing of her, that she had not even revealed her
full name to him, did not affect the depth or sincerity of his
emotion. Nor had her frank avowal that he could expect no reward
destroyed his hope. The one big thought that ran through his brain
now, as he arranged the canoe, was that there was room for hope,
and that she had been free to accept the words he had spoken to
her without dishonour to herself. If she belonged to some other
man she would not have asked him to play the part of a husband.
Her freedom and his right to fight for her was the one consuming
fact of significance to him just now. Beside that all others were
trivial and unimportant, and every drop of blood in his veins was
stirred by a strange exultation.

He found himself whistling again as he refolded his blankets and
straightened out his tent. When he had finished this last task he
turned to find Jean standing close behind him, his dark eyes
watching him closely. As he greeted the half-breed, Philip looked
for Josephine.

"I am alone, M'sieur," said Jean, coming close to Philip. "I
tricked her into staying behind until I could see you for a moment
as we are, alone, man to man. Why is it that our Josephine has
come to trust you as she does?"

His voice was low--it was almost soft as a woman's, but deep in
his eyes Philip saw the glow of a strange, slumbering fire.

"Why is it?" he persisted.

"God only knows," exclaimed Philip, the significance of the
question bursting upon him for the first time. "I hadn't thought
of it, Jean. Everything has happened so quickly, so strangely,
that there are many things I haven't thought of. It must be
because--she thinks I'm a MAN!"

"That is it, M'sieur," replied Jean, as quietly as before. "That,
and because you have come from two years in the North. I have been
there. I know that it breeds men. And our Josephine knows. I could
swear that there is not one man in a million she would trust as
she has put faith in you. Into your hands she has given herself,
and what you do means for her life or death. And for you--"

The fires in his eyes were nearer the surface now.

"What?" asked Philip tensely.

"Death--unless you play your part as a man," answered Jean. There
was neither threat nor excitement in his voice, but in his eyes
was the thing that Philip understood. Silently he reached out and
gripped the half-breed's hand, For an instant they stood, their
faces close, looking into each other's eyes. And as men see men
where the fires of the earth burn low, so they read each other's
souls, and their fingers tightened in a clasp of understanding.

"What that part is to be I cannot guess," said Philip, then. "But
I will play it, and it is not fear that will hold me to my promise
to her. If I fail, why--kill me!"

"That is the North," breathed Jean, and in his voice was the
thankfulness of prayer.

Without another word he stooped and picked up the tent and
blankets. Philip was about to stop him, to speak further with him,
when he saw Josephine climbing over the bulwark of rocks between
them and the trail. He hurried to meet her. Her arms were full,
and she allowed him to take a part of her load. With what Jean had
brought this was all that was to go in Philip's canoe, and the
half-breed remained to help them off.

"You will go straight across the lake," he said to Philip. "If you
paddle slowly, I will catch up with you."

Philip seated himself near the stern, facing Josephine, and Jean
gave the canoe a shove that sent it skimming like a swallow on the
smooth surface of the lake. For a moment Philip did not dip his
paddle. He looked at the girl who sat so near to him, her head
bent over in pretence of seeing that all was right, the sun
melting away into rich colours in the thick coils of her hair.
There filled him an overwhelming desire to reach over and touch
the shining braids, to feel the thrill of their warmth and
sweetness, and something of this desire was in his face when she
looked up at him, a look of gentle thankfulness disturbed a little
by anxiety in her eyes. He had not noticed fully how wonderfully
blue her eyes were until now, and soft and tender they were when
free of the excitement of fear and mental strain. They were more
than ever like the wild wood violets, flecked with those same
little brown spots which had made him think sometimes that the
flowers were full of laughter. There was something of wistfulness,
of thought for him in her eyes now, and in pure joy he laughed.

"Why do you laugh?" she asked.

"Because I am happy," he replied, and sent the canoe ahead with a
first deep stroke. "I have never been happier in my life. I did
not know that it was possible to feel as I do."

"And I am just beginning to feel my selfishness," she said. "You
have thought only of me. You are making a wonderful sacrifice for
me. You have nothing to gain, nothing to expect but the things
that make me shudder. And I have thought of myself alone,
selfishly, unreasonably. It is not fair, and yet this is the only
way that it can be."

"I am satisfied," he said. "I have nothing much to sacrifice,
except myself."

She leaned forward, with her chin in the cup of her hands, and
looked at him steadily.

"You have people?"

"None who cares for me. My mother was the last. She died before I
came North."

"And you have no sisters--or brothers?"

"None living."

For a moment she was silent. Then she said gently, looking into
his eyes:

"I wish I had known--that I had guessed--before I let you come
this far. I am sorry now--sorry that I didn't send you away. You
are different from other men I have known--and you have had your
suffering. And now--I must hurt you again. It wouldn't be so bad
if you didn't care for me. I don't want to hurt you--because--I
believe in you."

"And is that all--because you believe me?"

She did not answer. Her hands clasped at her breast. She looked
beyond him to the shore they were leaving.

"You must leave me," she said then, and her voice was as lifeless
as his had been. "I am beginning to see now. It all happened so
suddenly that I could not think. But if you love me you must not
go on. It is impossible. I would rather suffer my own fate than
have you do that. When we reach the other shore you must leave
me."

She was struggling to keep back her emotion, fighting to hold it
within her own breast.

"You must go back," she repeated, staring into his set face. "If
you don't, you will be hurt terribly, terribly!"

And then, suddenly, she slipped lower among the cushions he had
placed for her, and buried her face in one of them with a moaning
grief that cut to his soul. She was sobbing now, like a child. In
this moment Philip forgot all restraint. He leaned forward and put
a hand on her shining head, and bent his face close down to hers.
His free hand touched one of her hands, and he held it tightly.

"Listen, my Josephine," he whispered. "I am not going to turn
back, I am going on with you. That is our pact. At the end I know
what to expect. You have told me; and I, too, believe. But
whatever happens, in spite of all that may happen, I will still
have received more than all else in the world could give me. For I
will have known you, and you will be my salvation. I am going on."

For an instant he felt the fluttering pressure of her fingers on
his. It was an answer a thousand times more precious to him than
words, and he knew that he had won. Still lower he bent his head,
until for an instant his lips touched the soft, living warmth of
her hair. And then he leaned back, freeing her hand, and into his
face had leaped soul and life and fighting strength; and under his
breath he gave new thanks to God, and to the sun, and the blue sky
above, while from behind them came skimming over the water the
slim birchbark canoe of Jean Jacques Croisset.





CHAPTER SIX


At the touch of Weyman's lips to her hair Josephine lay very
still, and Philip wondered if she had felt that swift, stolen
caress. Almost he hoped that she had. The silken tress where for
an instant his lips had rested seemed to him now like some
precious communion cup in whose sacredness he had pledged himself.
Yet had he believed that she was conscious of his act he would
have begged her forgiveness. He waited, breathing softly, putting
greater sweep into his paddle to keep Jean well behind them.

Slowly the tremulous unrest of Josephine's shoulders ceased. She
raised her head and looked at him, her lovely face damp with
tears, her eyes shimmering like velvety pools through their mist.
She did not speak. She was woman now--all woman. Her strength, the
bearing which had made him think of her as a queen, the fighting
tension which she had been under, were gone. Until she looked at
him through her tears her presence had been like that of some
wonderful and unreal creature who held the control to his every
act in the cup of her hands. He thought no longer of himself now.
He knew that to him she had relinquished the mysterious fight
under which she had been struggling. In her eyes he read her
surrender. From this hour the fight was his. She told him, without
speaking. And the glory of it all thrilled him with a sacred
happiness so that he wanted to drop his paddle, draw her close
into his arms, and tell her that there was no power in the world
that could harm her now. But instead of this he laughed low and
joyously full into her eyes, and her lips smiled gently back at
him. And so they understood without words.

Behind them, Jean had been coming up swiftly, and now they heard
him break for an instant into the chorus of one of the wild half-
breed songs, and Philip listened to the words of the chant which
is as old in the Northland as the ancient brass cannon and the
crumbling fortress rocks at York Factory:

    "O, ze beeg black bear, he go to court,
    He go to court a mate;
    He court to ze Sout',
    He court to ze Nort',
    He court to ze shores of ze Indian Lake."

And then, in the moment's silence that followed, Philip threw back
his head, and in a voice almost as wild and untrained as Jean
Croisset's, he shouted back:

    "Oh! the fur fleets sing on Temiskaming,
      As the ashen paddles bend,
    And the crews carouse at Rupert's House,
      At the sullen winter's end.
    But my days are done where the lean wolves run,
      And I ripple no more the path
    Where the gray geese race 'cross the red moon's face
      From the white wind's Arctic wrath."

The suspense was broken. The two men's voices, rising in their
crude strength, sending forth into the still wilderness both
triumph and defiance, brought the quick flush of living back into
Josephine's face. She guessed why Jean had started his chant--to
give her courage. She KNEW why Philip had responded. And now Jean
swept up beside them, a smile on his thin, dark face.

"The Good Virgin preserve us, M'sieur, but our voices are like
those of two beasts," he cried.

"Great, true, fighting beasts," whispered Josephine under her
breath. "How I would hate almost--"

She had suddenly flushed to the roots of her hair.

"What?" asked Philip.

"To hear men sing like women," she finished.

As swiftly as he had come up Jean and his canoe had sped on ahead
of them.

"You should have heard us sing that up in our snow hut, when for
five months the sun never sent a streak above the horizon," said
Philip. "At the end--in the fourth month--it was more like the
wailing of madmen. MacTavish died then: a young half Scot, of the
Royal Mounted. After that Radisson and I were alone, and sometimes
we used to see how loud we could shout it, and always, when we
came to those two last lines--"

She interrupted him:

    "Where the gray geese race 'cross the red moon's face
    From the white wind's Arctic wrath."


"Your memory is splendid!" he cried admiringly.

"Yes, always when we came to the end of those lines, the white
foxes would answer us from out on the barrens, and we would wait
for the sneaking yelping of them before we went on. They haunted
us like little demons, those foxes, and never once could we catch
a glimpse of them during the long night. They helped to drive
MacTavish mad. He died begging us to keep them away from him. One
day I was wakened by Radisson crying like a baby, and when I sat
up in my ice bunk he caught me by the shoulders and told me that
he had seen something that looked like the glow of a fire
thousands and thousands of miles away. It was the sun, and it came
just in time."

"And this other man you speak of, Radisson?" she asked.

"He died two hundred miles back," replied Philip quietly. "But
that is unpleasant to speak of. Look ahead. Isn't that ridge of
the forest glorious in the sunlight?"

She did not take her eyes from his face.

"Do you know, I think there is something wonderful about you," she
said, so gently and frankly that the blood rushed to his cheeks.
"Some day I want to learn those words that helped to keep you
alive up there. I want to know all of the story, because I think I
can understand. There was more to it--something after the foxes
yelped back at you?"

"This," he said, and ahead of them Jean Croisset rested on his
paddle to listen to Philip's voice:

    "My seams gape wide, and I'm tossed aside
      To rot on a lonely shore,
    While the leaves and mould like a shroud enfold,
      For the last of my trails are o'er;
    But I float in dreams on Northland streams
      That never again I'll see,
    As I lie on the marge of the old Portage,
      With grief for company."

"A canoe!" breathed the girl, looking back over the sunlit lake.

"Yes, a canoe, cast aside, forgotten, as sometimes men and women
are forgotten when down and out."

"Men and women who live in dreams," she added. "And with such
dreams there must always be grief."

There was a moment of the old pain in her face, a little catch in
her breath, and then she turned and looked at the forest ridge to
which he had called her attention.

"We go deep into that forest," she said. "We enter a creek just
beyond where Jean is waiting for us, and Adare House is a hundred
miles to the south and east." She faced him with a quick smile.
"My name is Adare," she explained, "Josephine Adare."

"Is--or was?" he asked.

"Is," she said; then, seeing the correcting challenge in his eyes
she added quickly: "But only to you. To all others I am Madame
Paul Darcambal."

"Paul?"

"Pardon me, I mean Philip."

They were close to shore, and fearing that Jean might become
suspicious of his tardiness, Philip bent to his paddle and was
soon in the half-breed's wake. Where he had thought there was only
the thick forest he saw a narrow opening toward which Jean was
speeding in his canoe. Five minutes later they passed under a
thick mass of overhanging spruce boughs into a narrow stream so
still and black in the deep shadows of the forest that it looked
like oil. There was something a little awesome in the suddenness
and completeness with which they were swallowed up. Over their
heads the spruce and cedar tops met and shut out the sunlight. On
both sides of them the forest was thick and black. The trail of
the stream itself was like a tunnel, silent, dark, mysterious. The
paddles dipped noiselessly, and the two canoes travelled side by
side.

"There are few who know of this break into the forest," said Jean
in a low voice. "Listen, M'sieur!"

From out of the gloom ahead of them there came a faint, oily
splashing.

"Otter," whispered Jean. "The stream is like this for many miles,
and it is full of life that you can never see because of the
darkness."

Something in the stillness and the gloom held them silent. The
canoes slipped along like shadows, and sometimes they bent their
heads to escape the low-hanging boughs. Josephine's face shone
whitely in the dusk. She was alert and listening. When she spoke
it was in a voice strangely subdued.

"I love this stream," she whispered. "It is full of life. On all
sides of us, in the forest, there is life. The Indians do not come
here, because they have a superstitious dread of this eternal
gloom and quiet. They call it the Spirit Stream. Even Jean is a
little oppressed by it. See how closely he keeps to us. I love it,
because I love everything that is wild. Listen! Did you hear
that?"

"Mooswa," spoke Jean out of the gloom close to them.

"Yes, a moose," she said. "Here is where I saw my first moose, so
many years ago that it is time for me to forget," she laughed
softly. "I think I had just passed my fourth birthday."

"You were four on the day we started, ma Josephine," came Jean's
voice as his canoe shot slowly ahead where the stream narrowed;
and then his voice came back more faintly: "that was sixteen years
ago to-day."

A shot breaking the dead stillness of the sunless world about him
could not have sent the blood rushing through Philip's veins more
swiftly than Jean's last words. For a moment he stopped his
paddling and leaned forward so that he could look close into
Josephine's face.

"This is your birthday?"

"Yes. You ate my birthday cake."

She heard the strange, happy catch in his breath as he
straightened back and resumed his work. Mile after mile they wound
their way through the mysterious, subterranean-like stream,
speaking seldom, and listening intently for the breaks in the
deathlike stillness that spoke of life. Now and then they caught
the ghostly flutter of owls in the gloom, like floating spirits;
back in the forest saplings snapped and brush crashed underfoot as
caribou or moose caught the man-scent; they heard once the
panting, sniffing inquiry of a bear close at hand, and Philip
reached forward for his rifle. For an instant Josephine's hand
fluttered to his own, and held it back, and the dark glow of her
eyes said: "Don't kill." Here there were no big-eyed moose-birds,
none of the mellow throat sounds of the brush sparrow, no harsh
janglings of the gaudily coloured jays. In the timber fell the
soft footpads of creatures with claw and fang, marauders and
outlaws of darkness. Light, sunshine, everything that loved the
openness of day were beyond. For more than an hour they had driven
their canoes steadily on, when, as suddenly as they had entered
it, they slipped out from the cavernous gloom into the sunlight
again.

Josephine drew a deep breath as the sunlight flooded her face and
hair.

"I have my own name for that place," she said. "I call it the
Valley of Silent Things. It is a great swamp, and they say that
the moss grows in it so deep that caribou and deer walk over it
without breaking through."

The stream was swelling out into a narrow, finger-like lake that
stretched for a mile or more ahead of them, and she turned to nod
her head at the spruce and cedar shores with their colourings of
red and gold, where birch, and poplar, and ash splashed vividly
against the darker background.

"From now on it is all like that." she said. "Lake after lake,
most of them as narrow as this, clear to the doors of Adare House.
It is a wonderful lake country, and one may easily lose one's
self--hundreds of lakes, I guess, running through the forests like
Venetian canals."

"I would not be surprised if you told me you had been in Venice,"
he replied. "To-day is your birthday--your twentieth. Have you
lived all those years here?"

He repressed his desire to question her, because he knew that she
understood that to be a part of his promise to her. In what he now
asked her he could not believe that he was treading upon
prohibited ground, and in the face of their apparent innocence he
was dismayed at the effect his words had upon her. It seemed to
him that her eyes flinched when he spoke, as if he had struck at
her. There passed over her face the look which he had come to
dread: a swift, tense betrayal of the grief which he knew was
eating at her soul, and which she was fighting so courageously to
hide from him. It had come and gone in a flash, but the pain of it
was left with him. She smiled at him a bit tremulously.

"I understand why you ask that," she said, "and it is no more than
fair that I should tell you. Of course you are wondering a great
deal about me. You have just asked yourself how I could ever hear
of such a place as Venice away up here among the Indians. Why, do
you know"--she leaned forward, as if to whisper a secret, her blue
eyes shilling with a sudden laughter--"I've even read the 'Lives'
of Plutarch, and I'm waiting patiently for the English to bang a
few of those terrible Lucretia Borgias who call themselves
militant suffragettes!"

"I--I--beg your pardon," he stammered helplessly.

She no longer betrayed the hurt of his question, and so sweet was
the laughter of her eyes and lips that he laughed back at her, in
spite of his embarrassment. Then, all at once, she became serious.

"I am terribly unfair to you," she apologized gently; and then,
looking across the water, she added: "Yes, I've lived almost all
of those twenty years up here--among the forests. They sent me to
the Mission school at Fort Churchill, over on Hudson's Bay, for
three years; and after that, until I was seventeen, I had a little
white-haired English governess at Adare House. If she had lived--
" Her hands clenched the sides of the canoe, and she looked
straight away from Philip. She seemed to force the words that came
from her lips then: "When I was eighteen I went to Montreal--and
lived there a year, That is all--that one year--away from--my
forests--"

He almost failed to hear the last words, and he made no effort to
reply. He kept his canoe nearer to Jean's, so that frequently they
were running side by side. In the quick fall of the early northern
night the sun was becoming more and more of a red haze in the sky
as it sank farther toward the western forests. Josephine had
changed her position, so that she now sat facing the bow of the
canoe. She leaned a little forward, her elbows resting in her lap,
her chin tilted in the cup of her hands, looking steadily ahead,
and for a long time no sound but the steady dip, dip, dip of the
two paddles broke the stillness of their progress. Scarcely once
did Philip take his eyes from her. Every turn, every passing of
shadow and light, each breath of wind that set stirring the
shimmering tresses of her hair, made her more beautiful to him.
From red gold to the rich and lustrous brown of the ripened wintel
berries he marked the marvellous changing of her hair with the
setting of the sun. A quick chill was growing in the air now and
after a little he crept forward and slipped a light blanket about
the slender shoulders. Even then Josephine did not speak, but
looked up at him, and smiled her thanks. In his eyes, his touch,
even his subdued breath, were the whispers of his adoration.

Movement roused Jean from his Indian-like silence. As Philip moved
back, he called:

"It is four o'clock, M'sieur. We will have darkness in an hour.
There is a place to camp and tepee poles ready cut on the point
ahead of us."

Fifteen minutes later Philip ran his canoe ashore close to Jean
Croisset's on a beach of white sand. He could not help seeing
that, from the moment she had answered his question out on the
lake, a change had come over Josephine. For a short time that
afternoon she had risen from out of the thing that oppressed her,
and once or twice there had been almost happiness in her smile and
laughter. Now she seemed to have sunk again under its smothering
grip. It was as if the chill and dismal gloom of approaching night
had robbed her cheeks of colour, and had given a tired droop to
her shoulders as she sat silently, and waited for them to make her
tent comfortable. When it was up, and the blankets spread, she
went in and left them alone, and the last glimpse that he had of
her face left with Philip a cameo-like impression of hopelessness
that made him want to call out her name, yet held him speechless.
He looked closely at Jean as they put up their own tent, and for
the first time he saw that the mask had fallen from the half-
breed's face, and that it was filled with that same mysterious
hopelessness and despair. Almost roughly he caught him by the
shoulder.

"See here, Jean Croisset," he cried impatiently, "you're a man.
What are you afraid of?"

"God," replied Jean so quietly that Philip dropped his hand from
his shoulder in astonishment. "Nothing else in the world am I
afraid of, M'sieur!"

"Then why--why in the name of that God do you look like this?"
demanded Philip. "You saw her go into the tent. She is
disheartened, hopeless because of something that I can't guess at,
cold and shivering and white because of a FEAR of something. She
is a woman. You are a man. Are YOU afraid?"

"No, not afraid, M'sieur. It is her grief that hurts me, not fear.
If it would help her I would let you take this knife at my side
and cut me into pieces so small that the birds could carry them
away. I know what you mean. You think I am not a fighter. Our Lady
in Heaven, if fighting could only save her!"

"And it cannot?"

"No, M'sieur. Nothing can save her. You can help, but you cannot
save her. I believe that nothing like this terrible thing that has
come to her has happened before since the world began. It is a
mistake that it has come once. The Great God would not let it
happen twice."

He spoke calmly. Philip could find no words with which to reply.
His hand slipped from Jean's arm to his hand, and their fingers
gripped. Thus for a space they stood. Philip broke the silence.

"I love her, Jean," he spoke softly.

"Every one loves her, M'sieur. All our forest people call her
'L'Ange.'"

"And still you say there is no hope?"

"None."

"Not even--if we fight--?"

Jean's fingers tightened about his like cords of steel.

"We may kill, M'sieur, but that will not save hearts crushed like
--See!--like I crush these ash berries under my foot! I tell you
again, nothing like this has ever happened before since the world
began, and nothing like it will ever happen again!"

Steadily Philip looked into Jean's eyes.

"You have seen something of the world, Jean?"

"A good deal, M'sieur. For seven years I went to school at
Montreal, and prepared myself for the holy calling of Missioner.
That was many years ago. I am now simply Jean Jacques Croisset, of
the forests."

"Then you know--you must know, that where there is life there is
hope," argued Philip eagerly, "I have promised not to pry after
her secret, to fight for her only as she tells me to fight. But if
I knew, Jean. If I knew what this trouble is--how and where to
fight! Is this knowledge--impossible?"

"Impossible, M'sieur!"

Slowly Jean withdrew his hand.

"Don't take it that way, man," exclaimed Philip quickly. "I'm not
ferreting for her secret now. Only I've got to know--is it
impossible for her to tell me?"

"As impossible, M'sieur, as it would be for me. And Our Lady
herself could not make me do that if I heard Her voice commanding
me out of Heaven. All that I can do is to wait, and watch, and
guard. And all that you can do, M'sieur, is to play the part she
has asked of you. In doing that, and doing it well, you will keep
the last bit of life in her heart from being trampled out. If you
love her"--he picked up a tepee pole before he finished, and then,
said--"you will do as you have promised!"

There was a finality in the shrug of Jean's shoulders which Philip
did not question. He picked up an axe, and while Jean arranged the
tepee poles began to chop down a dry birch. As the chips flew his
mind flew faster. In his optimism he had half believed that the
cloud of mystery in which Josephine had buried him would, in time,
be voluntarily lifted by her. He had not been able to make himself
believe that any situation could exist where hopelessness was as
complete as she had described. Without arguing with himself he had
taken it for granted that she had been labouring under a
tremendous strain, and that no matter what her trouble was it had
come to look immeasurably darker to her than it really was. But
Jean's attitude, his low and unexcited voice, and the almost
omniscient decisiveness of his words had convinced him that
Josephine had not painted it as blackly as she might. She, at
least, had seemed to see a ray of hope. Jean saw none, and Philip
realized that the half-breed's calm and unheated judgment was more
to be reckoned with than hers. At the same time, he did not feel
dismayed. He was of the sort who have born in them the fighting
instinct, And with this instinct, which is two thirds of life's
battle won, goes the sort of optimism that has opened up raw
worlds to the trails of men. Without the one the other cannot
exist.

As the blows of his axe cut deep into the birch, Philip knew that
so long as there is life and freedom and a sun above it is
impossible for hope to become a thing of char and ash. He did not
use logic. He simply LIVED! He was alive, and he loved Josephine.

The muscles of his arms were like sinews of rawhide. Every fibre
in his body was strung with a splendid strength. His brain was as
clear as the unpolluted air that drifted over the cedar and
spruce. And now to these tremendous forces had come the added
strength of the most wonderful thing in the world: love of a
woman. In spite of all that Josephine and Jean had said, in spite
of all the odds that might be against him, he was confident of
winning whatever fight might be ahead of him.

He not only felt confident, but cheerful. He did not try to make
Jean understand what it meant to be in camp with the company of a
woman for the first time in two years. Long after the tents were
up and the birch-fire was crackling cheerfully in the darkness
Josephine still remained in her tent. But the mere fact that she
was there lifted Philip's soul to the skies.

And Josephine, with a blanket drawn about her shoulders, lay in
the thick gloom of her tent and listened to him. His far-reaching,
exuberant whistling seemed to warm her. She heard him laughing and
talking with Jean, whose voice never came to her; farther back,
where he was cutting down another birch, she heard him shout out
the words of a song between blows; and once, sotto voce, and close
to her tent, she quite distinctly heard him say "Damn!" She knew
that he had stumbled with an armful of wood, and for the first
time in that darkness and her misery she smiled. That one word
alone Philip had not intended that she should hear. But when it
was out he picked himself up and laughed.

He did not meddle with Jean's cook-fire, but he built a second
fire where the cheer of it would light up Josephine's tent, and
piled dry logs on it until the flame of it lighted up the gloom
about them for a hundred feet. And then, with a pan in one hand
and a stick in the other, he came close and beat a din that could
have been heard a quarter of a mile away.

Josephine came out full in the flood-light of the fire, and he saw
that she had been crying. Even now there was a tremble of her lips
as she smiled her gratitude. He dropped his pan and stick, and
went to her. It seemed as if this last hour in the darkness of
camp had brought her nearer to him, and he gently took her hands
in his own and held them for a moment close to him. They were cold
and trembling, and one of them that had rested under her cheek was
damp with tears.

"You mustn't do this any more," he whispered.

"I'll try not to," she promised. "Please let me stand a little in
the warmth of the fire. I'm cold."

He led her close to the flaming birch logs and the heat soon
brought a warm flush into her cheeks. Then they went to where Jean
had spread out their supper on the ground. When she had seated
herself on the pile of blankets they had arranged for her,
Josephine looked across at Philip, squatted Indian-fashion
opposite her, and smiled apologetically.

"I'm afraid your opinion of me isn't getting better," she said.
"I'm not much of a--a--sport--to let you men get supper by
yourselves, am I? You see--I'm taking advantage of my birthday."

"Oui, ma belle princesse," laughed Jean softly, a tender look
coming into his thin, dark face. "And do you remember that other
birthday, years and years ago, when you took advantage of Jean
Croisset while he was sleeping? Non, you do not remember?"

"Yes, I remember."

"She was six, M'sieur," explained Jean, "and while I slept,
dreaming of one gr-r-rand paradise, she cut off my moustaches.
They were splendid, those moustaches, but they would never grow
right after that, and so I have gone shaven."

In spite of her efforts to appear cheerful, Philip could see that
Josephine was glad when the meal was over, and that she was
forcing herself to sip at a second cup of tea on their account. He
accompanied her back to the tent after she had bade Jean good-
night, and as they stood for a moment before the open flap there
filled the girl's face a look that was partly of self-reproach and
partly of wistful entreaty for his understanding and forgiveness.

"You have been good to me," she said. "No one can ever know how
good you have been to me, what it has meant to me, and I thank
you."

She bowed her head, and again he restrained the impulse to gather
her close up in his arms. When she looked up he was holding
something toward her in the palm of his hand. It was a little
Bible, worn and frayed at the edges, pathetic in its raggedness.

"A long time ago, my mother gave me this Bible," he said. "She
told me that as long as I carried it, and believed in it, no harm
could come to me, and I guess she was right. It was her first
Bible, and mine. It's grown old and ragged with me, and the water
and snow have faded it. I've come to sort of believe that mother
is always near this Book. I'd like you to have it, Josephine. It's
the only thing I've got to offer you on your birthday."

While he was speaking he had taken one of her hands and thrust his
precious gift into it. Slowly Josephine raised the little Bible to
her breast. She did not speak, but for a moment Philip saw in her
eyes the look for which he would have sacrificed the world; a look
that told him more than all the volumes of the earth could have
told of a woman's trust and faith.

He bent his head lower and whispered:

"To-night, my Josephine--just this night--may I wish you all the
hope and happiness that God and my Mother can bring you, and kiss
you--once--"

In that moment's silence he heard the throbbing of her heart. She
seemed to have ceased breathing, and then, slowly, looking
straight into his eyes, she lifted her lips to him, and as one who
meets a soul of a thing too sanctified to touch with hands, he
kissed her. Scarcely had the warm sweetness of her lips thrilled
his own than she had turned from him, and was gone.





CHAPTER SEVEN


For a time after they had cleared up the supper things Philip sat
with Jean close to the fire and smoked. The half-breed had lapsed
again into his gloom and silence. Two or three times Philip caught
Jean watching him furtively. He made no effort to force a
conversation, and when he had finished his pipe he rose and went
to the tent which they were to share together. At last he found
himself not unwilling to be alone. He closed the flap to shut out
the still brilliant illumination of the fire, drew a blanket about
him, and stretched himself out on the top of his sleeping bag. He
wanted to think.

He closed his eyes to bring back more vividly the picture of
Josephine as she had given him her lips to kiss. This, of all the
unusual happenings of that afternoon, seemed most like a dream to
him, yet his brain was afire with the reality of it. His mind
struggled again with the hundred questions which he had asked
himself that day, and in the end Josephine remained as completely
enshrouded in mystery as ever. Yet of one thing was he convinced.
The oppression of the thing under which Jean and the girl were
fighting had become more acute with the turning of their faces
homeward. At Adare House lay the cause of their hopelessness, of
Josephine's grief, and of the gloom under which the half-breed had
fallen so completely that night. Until they reached Adare House he
could guess at nothing. And there--what would he find?

In spite of himself he felt creeping slowly over him a shuddering
fear that he had not acknowledged before. The darkness deepening
as the fire died away, the stillness of the night, the low wailing
of a wind growing out of the north roused in him the unrest and
doubt that sunshine and day had dispelled. An uneasy slumber came
at last with this disquiet. His mind was filled with fitful
dreams. Again he was back with Radisson and MacTavish, listening
to the foxes out on the barrens. He heard the Scotchman's moaning
madness and listened to the blast of storm. And then he heard a
cry--a cry like that which MacTavish fancied he had heard in the
wind an hour before he died. It was this dream-cry that roused
him.

He sat up, and his face and hands were damp. It was black in the
tent. Outside even the bit of wind had died away. He reached out a
hand, groping for Jean. The half-breed's blankets had not been
disturbed. Then for a few moments he sat very still, listening,
and wondering if the cry had been real. As he sat tense and still
in the half daze of the sleep it came again. It was the shrill
laughing carnival of a loon out on the lake. More than once he had
laughed at comrades who had shivered at that sound and cowered
until its echoes had died away in moaning wails. He understood
now. He knew why the Indians called it moakwa--"the mad thing." He
thought of MacTavish, and threw the blanket from his shoulders,
and crawled out of the tent.

Only a few faintly glowing embers remained where he had piled the
birch logs. The sky was full of stars. The moon, still full and
red, hung low in the west. The lake lay in a silvery and unruffled
shimmer. Through the silence there came to him from a great
distance the coughing challenge of a bull moose inviting a rival
to battle. Then Philip saw a dark object huddled close to
Josephine's tent.

He moved toward it, his moccasined feet making no sound. Something
impelled him to keep as quiet as the night itself. And when he
came near--he was glad. For the object was Jean. He sat with his
back to a block of birch twenty paces from the door of Josephine's
tent. His head had fallen forward on his chest. He was asleep, but
across his knees lay his rifle, gripped tightly in both hands.
Quick as a flash the truth rushed upon Philip. Like a faithful dog
Jean was guarding the girl. He had kept awake as long as he could,
but even in slumber his hands did not give up their hold on the
rifle.

Against whom was he guarding her? What danger could there be in
this quiet, starlit night for Josephine? A sudden chill ran
through Philip. Did Jean mistrust HIM? Was it possible that
Josephine had secretly expressed a fear which made the Frenchman
watch over her while she slept? As silently as he had approached
he moved away until he stood in the sand at the shore of the lake.
There he looked back. He could just see Jean, a dark blot; and all
at once the unfairness of his suspicion came upon him. To him
Josephine had given proofs of her faith which nothing could
destroy. And he understood now the reason for that tired, drawn
look in Jean's face. This was not the first night he had watched.
Every night he had guarded her until, in the small hours of dawn,
his eyes had closed heavily as they were closed now.

The beginning of the gray northern dawn was not far away. Philip
knew that without looking at the hour. He sensed it. It was in the
air, the stillness of the forest, in the appearance of the stars
and moon. To prove himself he looked at his watch with the match
with which he lighted his pipe. It was half-past three. At this
season of the year dawn came at five.

He walked slowly along the strip of sand between the dark wall of
the forest and the lake. Not until he was a mile away from the
camp did he stop. Then something happened to betray the uneasy
tension to which his nerves were drawn. A sudden crash in the
brush close at hand drew him about with a start, and even while he
laughed at himself he stood with his automatic in his hand.

He heard the whimpering, babyish-like complaint of the porcupine
that had made the sound, and still chuckling over his nervousness
he seated himself on a white drift-log that had lain bleaching for
half a century in the sand.

The moon had fallen behind the western forests; the stars were
becoming fainter in the sky, and about him the darkness was
drawing in like a curtain. He loved this hour that bridged the
northern night with the northern day, and he sat motionless and
still, covering the glow of fire in his pipe bowl with the palm of
his hand.

Out of the brush ambled the porcupine, chattering and talking to
itself in its queer and good-humoured way, fat as a poplar bud
ready to burst, and so intent on reaching the edge of the lake
that it passed in its stupid innocence so close that Philip might
have struck it with a stick. And then there swooped down from out
of the cover of the black spruce a gray cloudlike thing that came
with the silence and lightness of a huge snowflake, hovered for an
instant over the porcupine, and disappeared into the darkness
beyond. And the porcupine, still oblivious of danger and what the
huge owl would have done to him had he been a snowshoe rabbit
instead of a monster of quills, drank his fill leisurely and
ambled back as he had come, chattering his little song of good-
humour and satisfaction.

One after another there came now the sounds that merged dying
night into the birth of day, and for the hundredth time Philip
listened to the wonders that never grew old for him. The laugh of
the loon was no longer a raucous, mocking cry of exultation and
triumph, but a timid, question note--half drowsy, half filled with
fear; and from the treetops came the still lower notes of the
owls, their night's hunt done, and seeking now the densest covers
for the day. And then, from deep back in the forests, came a cry
that was filled with both hunger and defiance--the wailing howl of
a wolf. With these night sounds came the first cheep, cheep, cheep
of the little brush sparrow, still drowsy and uncertain, but
faintly heralding the day. Wings fluttered in the spruce and cedar
thickets. From far overhead came the honking of Canada geese
flying southward. And one by one the stars went out, and in the
south-eastern skies a gray hand reached up slowly over the forests
and wiped darkness from the earth. Not until then did Philip rise
from his seat and turn his face toward camp.

He tried to throw off the feeling of oppression that still clung
to him. By the time he reached camp he had partly succeeded. The
fire was burning brightly again, and Jean was busy preparing
breakfast. To his surprise he saw Josephine standing outside of
her tent. She had finished brushing her hair, and was plaiting it
in a long braid. He had wondered how they would meet that morning.
His face flushed warm as he approached her. The thrill of their
kiss was still on his lips, and his heart sent the memory of it
burning in his eyes as he came up, Josephine turned to greet him.
She was pale and calm. There were dark lines under her eyes, and
her voice was steady and without emotion as she said "Good
morning." It was as if he had dreamed the thing that had passed
the night before. There was neither glow of tenderness, of regret,
nor of memory in her eyes. Her smile was wan and forced. He knew
that she was calling upon his chivalry to forget that one moment
before the door of her tent. He bowed, and said simply:

"I'm afraid you didn't sleep well, Josephine. Did I disturb you
when I stole out of camp?"

"I heard nothing," she replied. "Nothing but the cries of that
terrible bird out on the lake. I'm afraid I didn't sleep much."

The atmosphere of the camp that morning weighted Philip's heart
with a heaviness which he could not throw off. He performed his
share of the work with Jean, and tried to talk to him, but
Croisset would only reply to his most pointed remarks. He
whistled. He shouted out a song back in the timber as he cut an
armful of dry birch, and he returned to Jean and the girl
laughing, the wood piled to his chin and the axe under his arm.
Neither showed that they had heard him. The meal was eaten in a
chilly silence that filled him with deepest foreboding. Josephine
seemed at ease. She talked with him when he spoke to her, but
there seemed now to be a mysterious restraint in every word that
she uttered. She excused herself before Jean and he were through,
and went to her tent. A moment later Philip rose and went down to
his canoe.

In the rubber sack was the last of his tobacco. He was fumbling
for it when his heart gave a great jump. A voice had spoken softly
behind him:

"Philip."

Slowly, unbelieving, he turned. It was Josephine. For the first
time she had called him by his name. And yet the speaking of it
seemed to put a distance between them, for her voice was calm and
without emotion, as she might have spoken to Jean.

"I lay awake nearly all of the night, thinking," she said. "It was
a terrible thing that we did, and I am sorry--sorry--"

In the quickening of her breath he saw how heroically she was
fighting to speak steadily to him.

"You can't understand," she resumed, facing him with the
steadiness of despair. "You cannot understand--until you reach
Adare House. And that is what I dread, the hour when you will know
what I am, and how terrible it was for me to do what I did last
night. If you were like most other men, I wouldn't care so much.
But you have been different."

He replied in words which he would not dare to have uttered a few
hours before.

"And yet, back there when you first asked me to go with you as
your husband, you knew what I would find at Adare House?" he
asked, his voice low and tense. "You knew?"

"Yes."

"Then what has produced the change that makes you fear to have me
go on? Is it because"--he leaned toward her, and his face was
bloodless--"Is it because you care a little for me?"

"Because I respect you, yes," she said in a voice that
disappointed him. "I don't want to hurt you. I don't want you to
go back into the world thinking of me as you will. You have been
honest with me. I do not blame you for what happened last night.
The fault was mine. And I have come to you now, so that you will
understand that, no matter how I may appear and act, I have faith
and trust in you. I would give anything that last night might be
wiped out of our memories. That is impossible, but you must not
think of it and you must not talk to me any more as you have,
until we reach Adare House. And then--"

Her white face was pathetic as she turned away from him.

"You will not want to," she finished. "After that you will fight
for me simply because you are a knight among men, and because you
have promised. There will not even be the promise to bind you, for
I release you from that."

Philip stood silent as she left him. He knew that to follow her
and to force further conversation upon her after what she had said
would be little less than brutal. She had given him to understand
that from now on he was to hold himself toward her with greater
restraint, and the blood flushed hot and uncomfortable into his
face as he realized for the first time how he had overstepped the
bounds.

All his life womanhood had been the most beautiful thing in the
world to him. And now there was forced upon him the dread
conviction that he had insulted it. He did not stop to argue that
the overwhelming completeness of his love had excused him. What he
thought of now was that he had found Josephine alone, had declared
that love for her before he knew her name, and had followed it up
by act and word which he now felt to be dishonourable. And yet,
after all, would he have recalled what had happened if he could?
He asked himself that question as he returned to help Jean. And he
found no answer to it until they were in their canoes again and
headed up the lake, Josephine sitting with her back to him, her
thick silken braid falling in a sinuous and sunlit rope of red
gold over her shoulders. Then he knew that he would not.

Jean gave little rest that day, and by noon they had covered
twenty miles of the lake-way. An hour for dinner, and they went
on. At times Josephine used her paddle, and not once during the
day did she sit with her face to Philip. Late in the afternoon
they camped on a portage fifty miles from Adare House.

There were no stars or moon in the sky this night. The wind had
changed, and came from the north. In it was the biting chill of
the Arctic, and overhead was a gray-dun mass of racing cloud. A
dozen times Jean turned his face anxiously from the fire into the
north, and held wet fingers high over his head to see if in the
air was that peculiar sting by which the forest man forecasts the
approach of snow.

At last he said to Philip: "The wind will grow, M'sieur," and
picked up his axe.

Philip followed with his own, and they piled about Josephine's
tent a thick protection of spruce and cedar boughs. Then together
they brought three or four big logs to the fire. After that Philip
went into their own tent, stripped off his outer garments, and
buried himself in his sleeping bag. For a long time he lay awake
and listened to the increasing wail of the wind in the tall spruce
tops. It was not new to him. For months he had fallen asleep with
the thunderous crash of ice and the screaming fury of storm in his
ears. But to-night there was something in the sound which sunk him
still deeper into the gloom which he had found it impossible to
throw off. At last he fell asleep.

When he awoke he struck a match and looked at his watch. It was
four o'clock, and he dressed and went outside. The wind had died
down. Jean was already busy over the cook-fire, and in Josephine's
tent he saw the light of a candle. She appeared a little later,
wrapped close in a thick red Hudson's Bay coat, and with a marten-
skin cap on her head. Something in her first appearance, the
picturesqueness of her dress, the jauntiness of the little cap,
and the first flush of the fire in her face filled him with the
hope that sleep had given her better spirit. A closer glance
dashed this hope. Without questioning her he knew that she had
spent another night of mental torture. And Jean's face looked
thinner, and the hollows under his eyes were deeper.

All that day the sky hung heavy and dark with cloud, and the water
was rough. Early in the afternoon the wind rose again, and
Croisset ran alongside them to suggest that they go ashore. He
spoke to Philip, but Josephine interrupted quickly:

"We must go on, Jean," she demanded. "If it is not impossible we
must reach Adare House to-night."

"It will be late--midnight," replied Jean. "And if it grows
rougher--"

A dash of spray swept over the bow into the girl's face.

"I don't care for that," she cried. "Wet and cold won't hurt us."
She turned to Philip, as if needing his argument against Jean's.
"Is it not possible to get me home to-night?" she asked.

"It is two o'clock," said Philip. "How far have we to go, Jean?"

"It is not the distance, M'sieur--it is that," replied Jean, as a
wave sent another dash of water over Josephine. "We are twenty
miles from Adare House."

Philip looked at Josephine.

"It is best for you to go ashore and wait until to-morrow,
Josephine. Look at that stretch of water ahead--a mass of
whitecaps."

"Please, please take me home," she pleaded, and now she spoke to
Philip alone. "I'm not afraid. And I cannot live through another
night like last night. Why, if anything should happen to us"--she
flung back her head and smiled bravely at him through the mist of
her wet hair and the drenching spray--"if anything should happen I
know you'd meet it gloriously. So I'm not afraid. And I want to go
home."

Philip turned to the half-breed, who had drifted a canoe length
away.

"We'll go on, Jean," he called. "We can make it by keeping close
inshore. Can you swim?"

"Oui, M'sieur; but Josephine--"

"I can swim with her," replied Philip, and Josephine saw the old
life and strength in his face again as she turned to the white-
capped seas ahead of them.

Hour after hour they fought their way on after that, the wind
rising stronger in their faces, the seas burying them deeper; and
each time that Josephine looked back she marvelled at the man
behind her, bare-headed, his hair drenched, his arms naked to the
elbows, and his clear gray eyes always smiling confidence at her
through the gloom of mist. Not until darkness was falling about
them did Jean drop near enough to speak again. Then he shouted:

"Another hour and we reach Snowbird River, M'sieur. That is four
miles from Adare House. But ahead of us the wind rushes across a
wide sweep of the lake. Shall we hazard it?"

"Yes, yes," cried the girl, answering for Philip. "We must go on!"

Without another word Croisset led the way. The wind grew stronger
with each minute's progress. Shouting for Jean to hold his canoe
for a space, Philip steadied his own canoe while he spoke to the
girl.

"Come back to me as quietly as you can, Josephine," he said. "Pass
the dunnage ahead of you to take the place of your weight. If
anything happens, I want you near me."

Cautiously Josephine did as he bade her, and as she added slowly
to the ballast in the bow she drew little by little nearer to
Philip, Her hand touched an object in the bottom of the canoe as
she came close to him. It was one of his moccasins. She saw now
his naked throat and chest. He had stripped off his heavy woollen
shirt as well as his footwear. He reached out, and his hand
touched her lightly as she huddled down in front of him.

"Splendid!" he laughed. "You're a little brick, Josephine, and the
best comrade in a canoe that I ever saw. Now if we go over all
I've got to do is to swim ashore with you. Is it good walking to
Adare House?"

He did not hear her reply; but a fresh burst of the wind sent a
loose strand of her hair back into his face, and he was happy.
Happy in spite of a peril which neither he nor Jean would have
thought of facing alone. In the darkness he could no longer see
Croisset or his canoe. But Jean's shout came back to him every
minute on the wind, and over Josephine's head he answered. He was
glad that it was so dark the girl could not see what was ahead of
them now. Once or twice his own breath stopped short, when it
seemed that the canoe had taken the fatal plunge which he was
dreading. Every minute he figured the distance from the shore, and
his chances of swimming it if they were overturned. And then,
after a long time, there came a sudden lull in the wind, and the
seas grew less rough. Jean's voice came from near them, filled
with a thrill of relief.

"We are behind the point," he shouted. "Another mile and we will
enter the Snowbird, M'sieur!"

Philip leaned forward in the gloom. Josephine's cap had fallen
off, and for a moment his hand rested on her wet and wind-blown
hair.

"Did you hear that?" he cried. "We're almost home."

"Yes," she shivered. "And I'm glad--glad--"

Was it an illusion of his own, or did she seem to shiver and draw
away from him AT THE TOUCH OF HIS HAND? Even in the blackness he
could FEEL that she was huddled forward, her face in her hands.
She did not speak to him again. When they entered the smooth water
of the Snowbird, Jean's canoe drew close in beside them, but not a
word fell from Croisset. Like shadows they moved up the stream
between two black walls of forest. A steadily increasing
excitement, a feeling that he was upon the eve of strange events,
grew stronger in Philip. His arms and back ached, his legs were
cramped, the last of his splendid strength had been called upon in
the fight with wind and seas, but he forgot this exhaustion in
anticipation of the hour that was drawing near. He knew that Adare
House would reveal to him things which Josephine had not told him.
She had said that it would, and that he would hate her then. That
they were burying themselves deeper into the forest he guessed by
the lessening of the wind.

Half an hour passed, and in that time his companion did not move
or speak. He heard faintly a distant wailing cry. He recognized
the sound. It was not a wolf-cry, but the howl of a husky. He
fancied then that the girl moved, that she was gripping the sides
of the canoe with her hands. For fifteen minutes more there was
not a sound but the dip of the paddles and the monotone of the
wind sweeping through the forest tops. Then the dog howled again,
much nearer; and this time he was joined by a second, a third, and
a fourth, until the night was filled with a din that made Philip
stare wonderingly off into the blackness. There were fifty dogs if
there was one in that yelping, howling horde, he told himself, and
they were coming with the swiftness of the wind in their
direction.

From his canoe Croisset broke the silence.

"The wind has given the pack our scent, ma Josephine, and they are
coming to meet you," he said.

The girl made no reply, but Philip could see now that she was
sitting tense and erect. As suddenly as it had begun the cry of
the pack ceased. The dogs had reached the water, and were waiting.
Not until Jean swung his canoe toward shore and the bow of it
scraped on a gravelly bar did they give voice again, and then so
close and fiercely that involuntarily Philip held his canoe back.
In another moment Josephine had stepped lightly over the side in a
foot of water. He could not see what happened then, except that
the bar was filled with a shadowy horde of leaping, crowding,
yelping beasts, and that Josephine was the centre of them. He
heard her voice clear and commanding, crying out their names--
Tyr, Captain, Bruno, Thor, Wamba--until their number seemed
without end; he heard the metallic snap of fangs, quick, panting
breaths, the shuffling of padded feet; and then the girl's voice
grew more clear, and the sounds less, until he heard nothing but
the bated breath of the pack and a low, smothered whine.

In that moment the wind-blown clouds above them broke in a narrow
rift across the skies, and for an instant the moon shone through.
What he saw then drew Philip's breath from him in a wondering
gasp.

On the white bar stood Josephine. The wind on the lake had torn
the strands of her long braid loose and her hair swept in a damp
and clinging mass to her hips. She was looking toward him, as if
about to speak. But it was the pack that made him stare. A sea of
great shaggy heads and crouching bodies surrounded her, a fierce
yellow and green-eyed horde flattened like a single beast upon
their bellies their heads turned toward her, their throats
swelling and their eyes gleaming in the joyous excitement of her
return. An instant of that strange and thrilling picture, and the
night was black again. The girl's voice spoke softly. Bodies
shuffled out of her path. And then she said, quite near to him;

"Are you coming, Philip?"





CHAPTER EIGHT


Not without a slight twinge of trepidation did Philip step from
his canoe to her. He had not heard Croisset go ashore, and for a
moment he felt as if he were deliberately placing himself at the
mercy of a wolf-pack. Josephine may have guessed the effect of the
savage spectacle he had beheld from the canoe, for she was close
to the water's edge to meet him. She spoke, and in the pitch
darkness he reached out. Her hand was groping for him, and her
fingers closed firmly about his own.

"They are my bodyguard, and I have trained them all from puppies,"
she explained. "They don't like strangers, but will fight for
anything that I touch. So I will lead you." She turned with him
toward the pack, and cried in her clear, commanding voice:
"Marche, boys!--Tyr, Captain, Thor, Marche! Hoosh, hoosh, Marche!"

It seemed as if a hundred eyes gleamed out of the blackness; then
there was a movement, a whining, snarling, snapping movement, and
as they walked up the bar and into a narrow trail Philip could
hear the pack falling out to the side and behind them. Also he
knew that Jean was ahead of them now. He did not speak, nor did
Josephine offer to break the silence again. Still letting her hand
rest in his she followed close behind the half-breed. Her hand was
so cold that Philip involuntarily held it tighter in his own, as
if to give it warmth. He could feel her shivering, and yet
something told him that what he sensed in the darkness was not
caused by chill alone. Several times her fingers closed
shudderingly about his.

They had not walked more than a couple of hundred yards when a
turn brought them out of the forest trail, and the blackness ahead
was broken by a solitary light, a dimly lighted window in a pit of
gloom.

"Marja is not expecting us to-night," apologized the girl
nervously. "That is Adare House."

The loneliness of the spot, its apparent emptiness of life, the
silence save for the snuffling and whining of the unseen beasts
about them, stirred Philip with a curious sensation of awe. He had
at least expected light and life at Adare House. Here were only
the mystery of darkness and a deathlike quiet. Even the one light
seemed turned low. As they advanced toward it a great shadow grew
out of the gloom; and then, all at once, it seemed as if a curtain
of the forest had been drawn aside, and away beyond the looming
shadow Philip saw the glow of a camp-fire. From that distant fire
there came the challenging howl of a dog, and instantly it was
taken up by a score of fierce tongues about them. As Josephine's
voice rose to quell the disturbance the light in the window grew
suddenly brighter, and then a door opened and in it stood the
figures of a man and woman. The man was standing behind the woman,
looking over her shoulder, and for one moment Philip caught the
flash of the lamp-glow on the barrel of a rifle.

Josephine paused.

"You will forgive me if I ask you to let me go on alone, and you
follow with Jean?" she whispered. "I will try and see you again
to-night, when I have dressed myself, and I am in better condition
to show you hospitality."

Jean was so close that he overheard her. "We will follow," he said
softly. "Go ahead, ma cheri."

His voice was filled with an infinite gentleness, almost of pity;
and as Josephine drew her hand from Philip's and went on ahead of
them he dropped back close to the other's side.

"Something will happen soon which may turn your heart to stone and
ice, M'sieur," he said, and his voice was scarce above a whisper.
"I wanted her to tell you back there, two days ago, but she shrank
from the ordeal then. It is coming to-night. And, however it may
effect you, M'sieur, I ask you not to show the horror of it, but
to have pity. You have perhaps known many women, but you have
never known one like our Josephine. In her soul is the purity of
the blue skies, the sweetness of the wild flowers, the goodness of
our Blessed Lady, the Mother of Christ. You may disbelieve, and
what is to come may eat at the core of your heart as it has
devoured life and happiness from mine. But you will love L'Ange--
our Josephine--just the same."

Even as he felt himself trembling strangely at Jean Croisset's
words, Philip replied:

"Always, Jean, I swear that."

In the open door Josephine had paused for a moment, and was
looking back. Then she disappeared.

"Come," said Jean. "And may God have pity on you if you fail to
keep your word in all you have promised, M'sieur Philip Darcambal.
For from this hour on you are Philip Darcambal, of Montreal, the
husband of Josephine Adare, our beloved lady of the forests. Come,
M'sieur!"





CHAPTER NINE


Without another word Jean led the way to the door, which had
partly closed after Josephine. For a moment he paused with his
hand upon it, and then entered. Philip was close behind him. His
first glance swept the room in search of the girl. She had
disappeared with her two companions. For a moment he heard voices
beyond a second door in front of him. Then there was silence.

In wonder he stared about him, and Jean did not interrupt his
gaze. He stood in a great room whose walls were of logs and axe-
hewn timbers. It was a room forty feet long by twenty in width,
massive in its build, with walls and ceiling stained a deep brown.
In one end was a fireplace large enough to hold a pile of logs six
feet in length, and in this a small fire was smouldering. In the
centre of the room was a long, massive table, its timber carved by
the axe, and on this a lamp was burning. The floor was strewn with
fur rugs, and on the walls hung the mounted heads of beasts. These
things impressed themselves upon Philip first. It was as if he had
stepped suddenly out of the world in which he was living into the
ancient hall of a wild and half-savage thane whose bones had
turned to dust centuries ago.

Not until Jean spoke to him, and led the way through the room, was
this first impression swept back by his swift and closer
observation of detail. About him extreme age was curiously blended
with the modern. His breath stopped short when he saw in the
shadow of the farther wall a piano, with a bronze lamp suspended
from the ceiling above it. His eyes caught the shadowy outline of
cases filled with books; he saw close to the fireplace wide, low-
built divans covered with cushions; and over the door through
which they passed hung a framed copy of da Vinci's masterpiece,
"La Joconde," the Smiling Woman.

Into a dimly lighted hall he followed Jean, who paused a moment
later before another door, which he opened. Philip waited while he
struck a match and lighted a lamp. He knew at a glance that this
was to be his sleeping apartment, and as he took in its ample
comfort, the broad low bed behind its old-fashioned curtains, the
easy chairs, the small table covered with books and magazines, and
the richly furred rugs on the floor, he experienced a new and
strange feeling of restfulness and pleasure which for the moment
overshadowed his more excited sensations. Jean was already on his
knees before a fireplace touching a match to a pile of birch, and
as the inflammable bark spurted into flame and the small logs
began to crackle he rose to his feet and faced Philip. Both were
soaked to the skin. Jean's hair hung lank and wet about his face,
and his hollow cheeks were cadaverous. In spite of the hour and
the place, Philip could not restrain a laugh.

"I'm glad Josephine was thoughtful enough to come in ahead of us,
Jean," he chuckled. "We look like a couple of drowned water-rats!"

"I will bring up your sack, M'sieur," responded Jean. "If you
haven't dry clothes of your own you will find garments behind the
curtains. I think some of them will fit you. After we are warmed
and dried we will have supper."

A few moments after Jean left him an Indian woman brought him a
pail of hot water. He was half stripped and enjoying a steaming
sponge bath when Croisset returned with his dunnage sack. The
Arctic had not left him much to choose from, but behind the
curtains which Jean had pointed out to him he found a good-sized
wardrobe. He glowed with warmth and comfort when he had finished
dressing. The chill was gone from his blood. He no longer felt the
ache in his arms and back. He lighted his pipe, and for a few
moments stood with his back to the crackling fire, listening and
waiting. Through the thick walls no sound came to him. Once he
thought that he heard the closing of a distant door. Even the
night was strangely silent, and he walked to the one large window
in his room and stared out into the darkness. On this side the
edge of the forest was not far away, for he could hear the
soughing of the wind in the treetops.

For an hour he waited with growing impatience for Jean's return or
some word from Josephine. At last there came another knock at the
door. He opened it eagerly. To his disappointment neither Jean nor
the girl stood there, but the Indian woman who had brought him the
hot water, carrying in her hands a metal server covered with
steaming dishes. She moved silently past him, placed the server on
the table, and was turning to go when he spoke to her.

"Tan'se a itumuche hooyun?" he asked in Cree.

She went out as if she had not heard him, and the door closed
behind her. With growing perplexity, Philip directed his attention
to the food. This manner of serving his supper partly convinced
him that he would not see Josephine again that night. He was
hungry, and began to do justice to the contents of the dishes. In
one dish he found a piece of fruit cake and half a dozen pickles,
and he knew that at least Josephine had helped to prepare his
supper. Half an hour later the Indian woman returned as silently
as before and carried away the dishes. He followed her to the door
and stood for a few moments looking down the hall. He looked at
his watch. It was after ten o'clock. Where was Jean? he wondered.
Why had Josephine not sent some word to him--at least an
explanation telling him why she could not see him as she had
promised? Why had Croisset spoken in that strange way just before
they entered the door of Adare House? Nothing had happened, and he
was becoming more and more convinced that nothing would happen--
that night.

He turned suddenly from the door, facing the window in his room.
The next instant he stood tense and staring. A face was glued
against the pane: dark, sinister, with eyes that shone with the
menacing glare of a beast. In a flash it was gone. But in that
brief space Philip had seen enough to hold him like one turned to
stone, still staring where the face had been, his heart beating
like a hammer. As the face disappeared he had seen a hand pass
swiftly through the light, and in the hand was a pistol. It was
not this fact, nor the suddenness of the apparition, that drew the
gasping breath from his lips. It was the face, filled with a
hatred that was almost madness--the face of Jean Jacques Croisset!

Scarcely was it gone when Philip sprang to the table, snatched up
his automatic, and ran out into the hall. The end of the hall he
believed opened outdoors, and he ran swiftly in that direction,
his moccasined feet making no sound. He found a door locked with
an iron bar. It took him but a moment to throw this up, open the
door, and leap out into the night. The wind had died away, and it
was snowing. In the silence he stood and listened, his eyes trying
to find some moving shadow in the gloom. His fighting blood was
up. His one impulse now was to come face to face with Jean
Croisset and demand an explanation. He knew that if he had stood
another moment with his back to the window Jean would have killed
him. Murder was in the half-breed's eyes. His pistol was ready.
Only Philip's quick turning from the door had saved him. It was
evident that Jean had fled from the window as quickly as Philip
had run out into the hall. Or, if he had not fled, he was hiding
in the gloom of the building. At the thought that Jean might be
crouching in the shadows Philip turned suddenly and moved swiftly
and silently along the log wall of Adare House. He half expected a
shot out of the darkness, and with his thumb he pressed down the
safety lever of his automatic. He had almost reached his own
window when a sound just beyond the pale filter of light that came
out of it drew him more cautiously into the pitch darkness of the
deep shadow next the wall. In another moment he was sure. Some
other person was moving through the gloom beyond the streak of
light.

With his pistol in readiness, Philip darted through the
illuminated path. A startled cry broke out of the night, and with
that cry his hand gripped fiercely in the deep fur of a coat. In
the same breath an exclamation of astonishment came from his own
lips as he looked into the white, staring face of Josephine. His
pistol arm had dropped to his side. He believed that she had not
seen the weapon, and he thrust it in his trousers pocket.

"You, Josephine!" he gasped. "What are you doing here?"

"And you?" she counter demanded. "You have no coat, no hat ..."
Her hands gripped his arm. "I saw you run through the light. You
had a pistol."

An impulse which he could not explain prompted him to tell her a
falsehood.

"I came out--to see what the night looked like," he said. "When I
heard you in the darkness it startled me for a moment, and I drew
my pistol."

It seemed to him that her fingers clutched deeper and more
convulsively into his arm.

"You have seen no one else?" she asked.

Again he was prompted to keep his secret.

"Is it possible that any one else is awake and roaming about at
this hour?" he laughed. "I was just returning to my room to go to
bed, Josephine. I thought that you had forgotten me. And Jean--
where is he?"

"We hadn't forgotten you," shivered Josephine. "But unexpected
things have happened since we came to Adare House to-night. I was
on my way to you. And Jean is back in the forest. Listen!"

From perhaps half a mile away there came the howl of a dog, and
scarcely had that sound died away when there followed it the full-
throated voice of the pack whose silence Philip had wondered at. A
strange cry broke from Josephine.

"They are coming!" she almost sobbed. "Quick, Philip! My last hope
of saving you is gone, and now you must be good to me--if you care
at all!" She seized him by the hand and half ran with him to the
door through which they had entered a short time before. In the
great room she threw off her hood and the long fur cape that
covered her, and then Philip saw that she had not dressed for the
night and the storm. She had on a thin, shimmering dress of white,
and her hair was coiled in loose golden masses about her head. On
her breast, just below her white, bare throat, she wore a single
red rose. It did not seem remarkable that she should be wearing a
rose. To him the wonderful thing was that the rose, the clinging
beauty of her dress, the glowing softness of her hair had been for
him, and that something unexpected had taken her out into the
night. Before he could speak she led him swiftly through the hall
beyond, and did not pause until they had entered through another
door and stood in the room which he knew was her room. In a glance
he took in its exquisite femininity. Here, too, the bed was set
behind curtains, and the curtains were closely drawn.

She had faced him now, standing a few steps away. She was deathly
white, but her eyes had never met his more unflinchingly or more
beautiful. Something in her attitude restrained him from
approaching nearer. He looked at her, and waited. When she spoke
her voice was low and calm. He knew that at last she had come to
the hour of her greatest fight, and in that moment he was more
unnerved than she.

"In a few minutes my mother and father will be here, Philip," she
said. "The letter Jean brought me back there, where we first saw
each other, came up by way of Wollaston House, and told me I need
not expect them for a number of weeks. That was what made me happy
for a little while. They were in Montreal, and I didn't want them
to return. You will understand why--very soon. But my father
changed his mind, and almost with the mailing of the letter he and
my mother started home by way of Fond du Lac. Only an hour ago an
Indian ran to us with the news that they were coming down the
river. They are out there now--less than half a mile away--with
Jean and the dogs!"

She turned a little from him, facing the bed.

"You remember--I told you that I had spent a year in Montreal,"
she went on. "I was there--alone--when it happened. See--"

She moved to the bed and gently drew the curtains aside. Scarcely
breathing, Philip followed her.

"It's my baby," she whispered, "My little boy."

He could not see her face. She bowed her head and continued
softly, as if fearing to awaken the baby asleep on the bed:

"No one knows--but Jean. My mother came first, and then my father.
I lied to them. I told them that I was married, and that my
husband had gone into the North. I came home with the baby--to
meet this man I called Paul Darcambal, and whom they thought was
my husband. I didn't want it to happen down there, but I planned
on telling them the truth when we all got back in our forests. But
after I returned I found that--I couldn't. Perhaps you may
understand. Up here--among the forest people--the mother of a
baby--like that--is looked upon as the most terrible thing in the
world. She is called La bete noir--the black beast. Day by day I
came to realize that I couldn't tell the truth, that I must live a
great lie to save other hearts from being crushed as life has been
crushed out of mine. I thought of telling them that my husband had
died up here--in the North. And I was fearing suspicion ... the
chance that my father might learn the untruth of it, when you
came. That is all, Philip. You understand now. You know why--some
day--you must go away and never come back. It is to save the boy,
my father, my mother, and me!"

Not once in her terrible recital had the girl's voice broke. And
now, as if bowing herself in silent prayer, she kneeled beside the
bed and laid her head close to the baby's. Philip stood
motionless, his unseeing eyes staring straight through the log
walls and the black night to a city a thousand miles away. He
understood now. Josephine's story was not the strangest thing in
the world after all. It was perhaps the oldest of all stories. He
had heard it a hundred times before, but never had it left him
quite so cold and pulseless as he was now. And yet, even as the
palace of the wonderful ideal he had builded crumbled about him in
ruin, there rose up out of the dust of it a thing new-born and
tangible for him. Slowly his eyes turned to the beautiful head
bowed in its attitude of prayer. The blood began to surge back
into his heart. His hands unclenched. She had told him that he
would hate her, that he would want to leave her when he heard the
story of her despair. And instead of that he wanted to kneel
beside her now and take her close in his arms, and whisper to her
that the sun had not set for them, but that it had only begun to
rise.

And then, as he took a step toward her, there flashed through his
brain like a disturbing warning the words with which she had told
him that he would never know the real cause of her grief. "YOU MAY
GUESS, BUT YOU WOULD NOT GUESS THE TRUTH IF YOU LIVED A THOUSAND
YEARS." And could this that he had heard, and this that he looked
upon be anything but the truth? Another step and he was at her
side. For a moment all barriers were swept from between them. She
did not resist him as he clasped her close to his breast. He
kissed her upturned face again and again, and his voice kept
whispering: "I love you, my Josephine--I love you--I love you--"

Suddenly there came to them sounds from out of the night. A door
opened, and through the hall there came the great, rumbling voice
of a man, half laughter, half shout; and then there were other
voices, the slamming of the door, and THE voice again, this time
in a roar that reached to the farthest walls of Adare House.

"Ho, Mignonne--Ma Josephine!"

And Philip held Josephine still closer and whispered:

"I love you!"





CHAPTER TEN


Not until the sound of approaching steps grew near did Josephine
make an effort to free herself from Philip's arms. Unresisting she
had given him her lips to kiss; for one rapturous moment he had
felt the pressure of her arms about his shoulders; in the blue
depths of her eyes he had caught the flash of wonderment and
disbelief, and then the deeper, tenderer glow of her surrender to
him. In this moment he forgot everything except that she had bared
her secret to him, and in baring it had given herself to him. Even
as her hands pressed now against his breast he kissed her lips
again, and his arms tightened about her.

"They are coming to the door, Philip," she panted, straining
against him. "We must not be found like this!"

The voice was booming in the hall again, calling her name, and in
a moment Philip was on his feet raising Josephine to him. Her face
still was white. Her eyes were still on the verge of fear, and as
the steps came nearer he brushed back the warm masses of her hair
and whispered for the twentieth time, as if the words must
convince her: "I love you!" He slipped an arm about her waist, and
Josephine's fingers nervously caught his hand.

Then the door was flung open. Philip knew that it was the master
of Adare House who stood on the threshold--a great, fur-capped
giant of a man who seemed to stoop to enter, and in whose eyes as
they met Philip's there was a wild and half-savage inquiry. Such a
man Philip had not expected to see; awesome in his bulk, a
Thorlike god of the forests, gray-bearded, deep-chested, with
shaggy hair falling out from under his cap, and in whose eyes
there was the glare which Philip understood and which he met
unflinchingly.

For a moment he felt Josephine's fingers grip tighter about his
own; then with a low cry she broke from him, and John Adare opened
his arms to her and crushed his bearded face down to hers as her
arms encircled his neck. In the gloom of the hall beyond them
there appeared for an instant the thin, dark face of Jean Jacques
Croisset. In a flash it had come and gone. In that flash the half-
breed's eyes had met Philip's, and in them was a look that made
the latter take a quick step forward. His impulse was to pass John
Adare and confront Jean in the hall. He held himself back, and
looked at Josephine and her father. She had pushed the cap from
the giant's head and had taken his bearded face between her two
hands, and John Adare was smiling down into her white, pleading
face with the gentleness and worship of a woman. In a moment he
broke forth into a great rumbling laugh, and looked over her head
at Philip.

"God bless my soul, if I don't almost believe my little girl
thought I was coming home to murder her!" he cried. "I guess she
thought I'd hate you for stealing her away from me the way you
did. I have contemplated disliking you, quite seriously, too. But
you're not the sort of looking chap I thought you'd be with that
oily French name. You've shown good judgment. There isn't a man in
the world good enough for my Jo. And if you'll excuse my
frankness, I like your looks!"

As he spoke he held out a hand, and Josephine eagerly faced
Philip. A flush grew in her cheeks as the two men shook hands. Her
eyes were on Philip, and her heart beat a little quicker. She had
not hoped that he would rise to the situation so completely. She
had feared that there would be some betrayal in voice or action.
But he was completely master of himself, and the colour in her
face deepened beautifully. Before this moment she had not wholly
perceived how splendidly clear and fearless were his eyes. His
long blond hair, touched with its premature gray, was still
windblown from his rush out into the night, giving to his head a
touch of leonine strength as he faced her father.

Quietly she slipped aside and looked at them, and neither saw the
strange, proud glow that came like a flash of fire into her eyes.
They were wonderful, these two strong men who were hers. And in
this moment they WERE her own. Neither spoke for a space, as they
stood, hand clasping hand, and in that space, brief as it was, she
saw that they measured each other as completely as man ever
measured man; and that it was not satisfaction alone, but
something deeper and more wonderful to her, that began to show in
their faces. It was as if they had forgotten her presence in this
meeting, and for a moment she, too, forgot that everything was not
real. Moved by an impulse that made her breath quicken, she darted
to them and caught their two clasped hands in both her own. Her
face was glorious as she looked up at them.

"I'm glad, glad that you like each other," she cried softly. "I
knew that it would be so, because--"

The master of Adare House had drawn her to him again. She put out
a hand, and it rested on Philip's shoulder. Her eyes turned
directly to him, and he alone saw the swift ebbing of the joyous
light from them. John Adare's voice rumbled happily, and with his
grizzled face bowed in Josephine's hair he said:

"I guess I'm not sorry--but glad, Mignonne." He looked at Philip
again. "Paul, my son, you are welcome to Adare House!"

"Philip, Mon Pere," corrected Josephine. "I like that better than
Paul."

"And you?" said Philip, smiling straight into Adare's eyes. "I am
almost afraid to keep my promise to Josephine. It was that I
should call you mon pere, too."

"There was one other promise, Philip," replied Adare quickly.
"There must have been one other promise, that you would never take
my girl away from me. If you did not swear to that, I am your
enemy!"

"That promise was unnecessary," said Philip. "Outside of my
Josephine's world there is nothing for me. If there is room for me
in Adare House--"

"Room!" interrupted Adare, beginning to throw off his great fur
coat. "Why, I've dreamed of the day when there'd be half a dozen
babies under my feet. I--" His huge frame suddenly stiffened. He
looked at Josephine, and his voice dropped to a hoarse whisper:
"Where's the kid?" he asked.

Philip saw Josephine turn at the question. Silently she pointed to
the curtained bed. As her father moved toward it she went to the
door, but not before Philip had taken a step to intercept her. He
felt her shuddering.

"I must go to my mother," she whispered for him alone. "I will
return soon. If he asks--tell him that we named the baby after
him." With a swift glance in her father's direction she whispered
still lower: "He knows nothing about you, so you may tell him the
truth about yourself--except that you met me in Montreal eighteen
months ago, and married me there."

With this warning she was gone. From the curtains Philip heard a
deep breath. When he came to the other's side John Adare stood
staring down upon the sleeping baby.

"I came in like a monster and didn't wake 'im," he was whispering
to himself. "The little beggar!"

He reached out a great hand behind him, gropingly, and it touched
a chair. He drew it to him, still keeping his eyes on the baby,
and sat down, his huge, bent shoulders doubled over the edge of
the bed, his hands hovering hesitatingly over the counterpane. In
wonderment Philip watched him, and he heard him whisper again:

"You blessed little beggar!"

Then he looked up suddenly. In his face was the transformation
that might have come into a woman's. There was something awesome
in its animal strength and its tenderness. He seized one of
Philip's hands and held it for a moment in a grip that made the
other's fingers ache.

"You're sure it's a boy?" he asked anxiously.

"Quite sure," replied Philip. "We've named him John."

The master of the Adare House leaned over the bed again. Philip
heard him mumbling softly in his thick beard, and very cautiously
he touched the end of a big forefinger to one of the baby's tiny
fists. The little fingers opened, and then they closed tightly
about John Adare's thumb. The older man looked again at Philip,
and from him his eyes sought Josephine. His voice trembled with
ecstasy.

"Where is Josephine?"

"Gone to her mother," replied Philip.

"Bring her--quick!" commanded Adare. "Tell her to bring her mother
and wake the kid or I'll yell. I've got to hear the little beggar
talk." As Philip turned toward the door he flung after him in a
sibilant whisper: "Wait! Maybe you know how to do it--"

"We'd better have Josephine," advised Philip quickly, and before
Adare could argue his suggestion he hurried into the hall.

Where he would find her he had no idea, and as he went down the
hall he listened at each of the several doors he passed. The door
into the big living-room was partly ajar, and he looked in. The
room was empty. For a few moments he stood silent. From the size
and shape of the building whose outside walls he had followed in
his hunt for Jean he knew there must be many other rooms, and
probably other shorter corridors leading to some of them.

Just now his greatest desire was to come face to face with
Croisset--and alone. He had already determined upon a course of
action if such a meeting occurred. Next to that he wanted to see
Josephine's mother. It had struck him as singular that she had not
accompanied her husband to Josephine's room, and his curiosity was
still further aroused by the girl's apparent indifference to this
fact. Jean Croisset and the mistress of Adare House had hung
behind when the older man came into the room where they were
standing. For an instant Jean had revealed himself, and he was
sure that Adare's wife was not far behind him, concealed in the
deeper gloom.

Suddenly the sound of a falling object came to his ears, as if a
book had dropped from a table, or a chair had overturned. It was
from the end of the hall--almost opposite his room. At his own
door he stopped again and listened. This time he could hear
voices, a low and unintelligible murmur. It was quite easy for him
to locate the sound. He moved across to the other door, and
hesitated. He had already disobeyed Josephine's injunction to
remain with her father. Should he take a further advantage by
obeying John Adare's command to bring his wife and daughter? A
strange and subdued excitement was stirring him. Since the
appearance of the threatening face at his window--the knowledge
that in another moment he would have invited death from out of the
night--he felt that he was no longer utterly in the hands of the
woman he loved. And something stronger than he could resist
impelled him to announce his presence at the door.

At his knock there fell a sudden silence beyond the thick panels.
For several moments he waited, holding his breath. Then he heard
quick steps, the door swung slowly open, and he faced Josephine.

"Pardon me for interrupting you," he apologized in a low voice.
"Your father sent me for you and your mother. He says that you
must come and wake the baby."

Slowly Josephine held out a hand to him. He was startled by its
coldness.

"Come in, Philip," she said. "I want you to meet my mother."

He entered into the warm glow of the room. Slightly bending over a
table stood the slender form of a woman, her back toward him.
Without seeing her face he was astonished at her striking
resemblance to Josephine--the same slim, beautiful figure, the
same thick, glowing coils of hair crowning her head--but darker.
She turned toward him, and he was still more amazed by this
resemblance. And yet it was a resemblance which he could not at
first define. Her eyes were very dark instead of blue. Her heavy
hair, drawn smoothly back from her forehead, was of the deep brown
that is almost black in the shadow. Slimness had given her the
appearance of Josephine's height. She was still beautiful. Hair,
eyes, and figure gave her at first glance an appearance of almost
girlish loveliness.

And then, all at once, the difference swept upon him. She was like
Josephine as he had seen her in that hour of calm despair when she
had come to him at the canoe. Home-coming had not brought her
happiness. Her face was colourless, her cheeks slightly hollowed,
in her eyes he saw now the lustreless glow which frequently comes
with a fatal sickness. He was smiling and holding out his hand to
her even as he saw these things, and at his side he heard
Josephine say:

"Mother, this is Philip."

The hand she gave him was small and cold. Her voice, too, was
wonderfully like Josephine's.

"I was not expecting to see you to-night, Philip," she said. "I am
almost ill. But I am glad now that you joined us. Did I hear you
say that my husband sent you?"

"The baby is holding his thumb," laughed Philip. "He says that you
must come and wake him. I doubt if you can get him out of the
baby's room to-night."

The voice of Adare himself answered from the door: "Was holding
it," he corrected. "He's squirming like an eel now and making
grimaces that frightened me. Better hurry to him, Josephine!" He
went directly to his wife, and his voice was filled with an
infinite tenderness as he slipped an arm about her and caressed
her smooth hair with one of his big hands. "You're tired, aren't
you?" he asked gently. "The jaunt was almost too much for my
little girl, wasn't it? It will do you good to see the baby before
you go to bed. Won't you come, Miriam?"

Josephine alone saw the look in Philip's face. And for one moment
Philip forgot himself as he stared at John Adare and his wife.
Beside this flowerlike slip of a woman Adare was more than ever a
giant, and his eyes glowed with the tenderness that was in his
voice. Miriam's lips trembled in a smile as she gazed up at her
husband. In her eyes shone a responsive gentleness; and then
Philip turned to find Josephine looking at him from the door, her
lips drawn in a straight, tense line, her face as white as the bit
of lace at her throat. He hurried to her. Behind him rumbled the
deep, joyous voice of the master of Adare House, and passing
through the door he glanced behind and saw them following, Adare's
arm about his wife's waist. Josephine caught Philip's arm, and
whispered in a low voice:

"They are always like that, always lovers. They are like two
wonderful children, and sometimes I think it is too beautiful to
be true. And now that you have met them I am going to ask you to
go to your room. You have been my true knight--more than I dared
to hope, and to-morrow--"

She interrupted herself as Adare and his wife appeared at the
door.

"To-morrow?" he persisted.

"I will try and thank you," she replied. Then she said, and Philip
saw she spoke directly to her father: "You will excuse Philip,
won't you, Mon Pere? I will go with you, for I have taken the care
of baby from Moanne to-night. Her husband is sick."

Adare shook hands with Philip.

"I'm up mornings before the owls have gone to sleep," he said.
"Will you breakfast with me? I'm afraid that if you wait for
Miriam and Mignonne you will go hungry. They will sleep until noon
to make up for to-night."

"Nothing would suit me better," declared Philip. "Will you knock
at my door if I fail to show up?"

Adare was about to answer, but caught himself suddenly as he
looked from Philip to Josephine.

"What! this soon, Mignonne?" he demanded, chuckling in his beard.
"Your rooms at the two ends of the house already! That was never
the way with Miriam and me. Can you remember such a thing, Ma
Cheri?"

"It--it is the baby," gasped Josephine, backing from the light to
hide the wild rush of blood to her face. "Philip cannot sleep,"
she finished desperately.

"Then I disapprove of his nerves," rejoined her father. "Good-
night, Philip, my boy!"

"Good-night!" said Philip.

He was looking at Adare's wife as they moved away. In the dim
light of the hall a strange look had come into her face at her
husband's jesting words. Was it the effect of the shadows, or had
he seen her start--almost as if for an instant she had been
threatened by a blow? Was it imagination, or had he in that same
instant caught a sudden look of alarm, of terror, in her eyes?
Josephine had told him that her mother knew nothing of the tragedy
of the child's birth. If this were so, why had she betrayed the
emotions which Philip was sure he had seen?

A chaotic tangle of questions and of doubts rushed through his
mind. John Adare alone had acted a natural and unrestrained part
in the brief space that had intervened since his home-coming.
Philip had looked upon the big man's love and happiness, his
worship of the woman who was his wife, his ecstasy over the baby,
his affection for Josephine, and it seemed to him that he KNEW
this man now. The few moments he had stood in the room with mother
and daughter had puzzled him most. In their faces he had seen no
sign of gladness at their reunion, and he asked himself if
Josephine had told him all the truth--if her mother were not,
after all, a partner to her secret.

And then there swept upon him in all its overwhelming cloud of
mystery that other question which until now he had not dared to
ask himself: HAD JOSEPHINE HERSELF TOLD HIM ALL THE TRUTH? He did
not dare to tell himself that it was possible that she was NOT the
mother of the child which she had told him was her own. And yet he
could not kill the whispering doubt deep back in his brain. It had
come to him in the room, quick as a flashlight, when she had made
her confession; it was insistent now as he stood looking at the
closed door through which they had disappeared.

For him to believe wholly and unquestioned Josephine's confession
was like asking him to believe that da Vinci's masterpiece hanging
in the big room had been painted by a blind man. In her he had
embodied all that he had ever dreamed of as pure and beautiful in
a woman, and the thought came now. Had Josephine, for some
tremendous reason known only to herself and Jean, tried to destroy
his great love for her by revealing herself in a light that was
untrue?

Instantly he told himself that this could not be so. If he
believed in Josephine at all, he must believe that she had told
him the truth. And he did believe, in spite of the whispering
doubt. He felt that he could not sleep until he had seen Josephine
alone. In her room John Adare had interrupted them a minute too
soon. In spite of the mysterious and unsettling events of the
night his heart still beat with the wild and joyous hope that had
come with Josephine's surrender to his arms and lips.

Instead of accepting the confession of her misfortune as the final
barrier between them, he had taken it as the key that had unlocked
the chains of her bondage. If she had told him the truth--if this
were what separated them--she belonged to him; and he wanted to
tell her this again before he slept, and hear from her lips the
words that would give her to him forever.

Despairing of this, he opened the door to his room.





CHAPTER ELEVEN


Scarcely had he crossed the threshold when an exclamation of
surprise rose to Philip's lips. A few minutes before he had left
his room even uncomfortably warm. A cold draught of air struck his
face now, and the light was out. He remembered that he had left
the lamp burning. He groped his way through the darkness to the
table before he lighted a match.

As he touched the flame to the wick he glanced toward the window.
It was open. A film of snow had driven through and settled upon
the rug under it. Replacing the chimney, he took a step or two
toward the window. Then he stopped, and stared at the floor. Some
one had entered his room through the open window and had gone to
the door opening into the hall. At each step had fallen a bit of
snow, and close to the door was a space of the bare floor soppy
and stained. At that point the intruder had stood for some moments
without moving.

For several seconds Philip stared at the evidences of a prowling
visitor without making a move himself. It was not without a
certain thrill of uneasiness that he went to the window and closed
it. It did not take him long to assure himself that nothing in the
room had been touched. He could find no other marks of feet except
those which led directly from the window to the door, and this
fact was sufficient proof that whoever had visited his room had
come as a listener and a spy and not as a thief.

It occurred to Philip now that he had found his door unlatched and
slightly ajar when he entered. That the eavesdropper had seen them
in the hall and had possibly overheard a part of their
conversation he was quite certain from the fact that the window
had been left open in a hurried flight.

For some time the impulse was strong in him to acquaint both
Josephine and her father with what had happened, and with Jean
Croisset's apparent treachery. He did not need to ask himself if
it was the half-breed who had stolen into his room. He was as
certain of that as he was of the identity of the face he had seen
at the window some time before. And yet something held him from
communicating these events of the night to the master of Adare
House and the girl. He was becoming more and more convinced that
there existed an unaccountable and mysterious undercurrent of
tragic possibilities at Adare House of which Josephine was almost
ignorant, and her father entirely so. Josephine's motherhood and
the secret she was guarding were not the only things that were
clouding his mental horizon now. There was something else. And he
believed that Jean was the key to the situation.

He felt a clammy chill creep over him as he asked himself how
closely Jean Jacques Croisset himself was associated with the girl
he loved. It was a thought that almost made him curse himself for
giving it birth. And yet it clung to him like a grim and haunting
spectre that he would have crushed if he could. Josephine's
confession of motherhood had not made him love her less. In those
terrible moments when she had bared her soul to him, his own soul
had suffered none of the revulsion with which he might have
sympathized in others. It was as if she had fallen at his feet,
fluttering in the agony of a terrible wound, a thing as pure as
the heavens, hurt for him to cherish in his greater strength--such
was his love. And the thought that Jean loved her, and that a
jealousy darker than night was burning all that was human out of
his breast, was a possibility which he found unpleasant to admit
to himself.

So deeply was he absorbed in these thoughts that he forgot any
immediate danger that might be threatening himself. He passed and
repassed the window, smoking his pipe, and fighting with himself
to hit upon some other tangible reason for Jean's unexpected
change of heart. He could not forget his first impression of the
dark-faced half-breed, nor the grip in which they had pledged
their fealty. He had accepted Jean as one of ten thousand--a man
he would have trusted to the ends of the earth, and yet he
recalled moments now when he had seen strange fires smouldering
far back in the forest man's eyes. The change in Jean alone he
felt that he might have diagnosed, but almost simultaneously with
his discovery of this change he had met Adare's wife--and she had
puzzled him even more than the half-breed.

Restlessly he moved to his door again, opened it, and looked down
the hall. The door of Josephine's room was closed, and he
reentered his room. For a moment he stood facing the window. In
the same instant there came the report of a rifle and the crashing
of glass. A shower of shot-like particles struck his face. He
heard a dull smash behind him, and then a stinging, red-hot pain
shot across his arm, as if a whiplash had seared his naked flesh.
He heard the shot, the crashing glass, the strike of the bullet
behind him before he felt the pain--before he reeled back toward
the wall. His heel caught in a rug and he fell. He knew that he
was not badly hurt, but he crouched low, and with his right hand
drew his automatic and levelled it at the window.

Never in his life had his blood leaped more quickly through his
body than it did now. It was not merely excitement--the knowledge
that he had been close to death, and had escaped. From out of the
darkness Jean Croisset had shot at him like a coward. He did not
feel the burn of the scratch on his arm as he jumped to his feet.
Once more he ran swiftly through the hall. At the end door he
looked back. Apparently the shot had not alarmed the occupants of
Josephine's room, to whom the report of a rifle--even at night--
held no special significance.

Another moment and Philip was outside. It had stopped snowing, and
the clouds were drifting away from under the moon. Crouched low,
his pistol level at his side, he ran swiftly in the direction from
which the shot must have come. The moon revealed the dark edge of
the forest a hundred yards away, and he was sure that his
attempted murderer had stood somewhere between Adare House and the
timber when he fired. He was not afraid of a second shot. Even
caution was lost in his mad desire to catch Jean red-handed and
choke a confession of several things from his lips. If Jean had
suddenly risen out of the snow he would not have used his pistol
unless forced to do so. He wanted to be hand to hand with the
treacherous half-breed, and his breath came in panting eagerness
as he ran.

Suddenly he stopped short. He had struck the trail. Here Croisset
had stood, fifty yards from his window, when he fired. The snow
was beaten down, and from the spot his retreating footsteps led
toward the forest. Like a dog Philip followed the trail. The first
timber was thinned by the axe, and the moon lighted up the white
spaces ahead of him. He was half across the darker wall of the
spruce when his heart gave a sudden jump. He had heard the snarl
of a dog, the lash of a whip, a man's low voice cursing the beast
he was striking. The sounds came from the dense cover of the
spruce, and told him that Jean was not looking for immediate
pursuit. He slipped in among the shadows quietly, and a few steps
brought him to a smaller open space where a few trees had been
cut. In this little clearing a slim dark figure of a man was
straightening out the tangled traces of a sledge-team.

Philip could not see his face, but he knew that it was Jean. It
was Jean's figure, Jean's movement, his low, sharp voice as he
spoke to the dogs. Man and huskies were not twenty steps from him.
With a tense breath Philip replaced his pistol in its holster. He
did not want to kill, and he possessed a proper respect for the
hair-trigger mechanism of his automatic. In the fight he
anticipated with Jean the weapon would be safer in its holster
than in his hand. Jean was at present unarmed, except for his
hunting-knife. His rifle leaned against a tree, and in another
moment Philip was between the gun and the half-breed.

One of the sledge dogs betrayed him. At its low and snarling
warning the half-breed whirled about with the alertness of a lynx,
and he was half ready when Philip launched himself at his throat.
They went down free of the dogs, the forest man under. One of
Philip's hands had reached his enemy's throat, but with a swift
movement of his arm the half-breed wrenched it off and slipped out
from under his assailant with the agility of an eel. Both were on
their feet in an instant, facing each other in the tiny moonlit
arena a dozen feet from the silent and watchful dogs.

Even now Philip could not see the half-breed's features because of
a hood drawn closely about his face. The "breed" had made no
effort to draw a weapon, and Philip flung himself upon him again.
Thus in open battle his greater physical strength and advantage of
fifty pounds in weight would have won for Philip. But the forest
man's fighting is filled with the elusive ermine's trickery and
the lithe quickness of the big, fur-padded cat of the trap-lines.

The half-breed made no effort to evade Philip's assault. He met
the shock of attack fairly, and went down with him. But this time
his back was to the watchful semicircle of dogs, and with a sharp,
piercing command he pitched back among them, dragging Philip with
him. Too late Philip realized what the cry meant. He tried to
fling himself out of reach of the threatening fangs, and freed one
hand to reach for his pistol. This saved him from the dogs, but
gave the half-breed his opportunity. Again he was on his feet, the
butt of his dog whip in his hand. As the moonlight glinted on the
barrel of the automatic, he brought the whip down with a crash on
Philip's head--and then again and again, and Philip pitched
backward into the snow.

He was not wholly unconscious. He knew that as soon as he had
fallen the half-breed had turned again to the dogs. He could hear
him as he straightened out the traces. In a subconscious sort of
way, Philip wondered why he did not take advantage of his
opportunity and finish what he had failed to do with the bullet
through the window. Philip heard him run back for his gun, and
tried to struggle to his knees. Instead of the shot he half
expected there came the low "Hoosh--hoosh--marche!" of the forest
man's voice. Dogs and sledge moved. He fought himself up and
swayed on his knees, staring after the retreating shadows. He saw
his automatic in the snow and crawled to it. It was another minute
before he could stand on his feet, and then he was dizzy. He
staggered to a tree and for a space leaned against it.

It was some minutes before he was steady enough to walk, and by
that time he knew that it would be futile to pursue the half-breed
and his swift-footed dogs, weakened and half dressed as he was.
Slowly he returned to Adare House, cursing himself for not having
used his pistol to compel Jean's surrender. He acknowledged that
he had been a fool, and that he had deserved what he got. The hall
was still empty when he reentered it. His adventure had roused no
one, and with a feeling of relief he went to his room.

If the walls had fallen about his ears he could not have received
a greater shock than when he entered through the door.

Seated in a chair close to the table, looking at him calmly as he
entered, was Jean Jacques Croisset!





CHAPTER TWELVE


Unable to believe that what he saw was not an illusion, Philip
stood and stared at the half-breed. No word fell from his lips. He
did not move. And Jean met his eyes calmly, without betraying a
tremor of excitement or of fear. In another moment Philip's hand
went to his pistol. As he half drew it his confused brain saw
other things which made him gasp with new wonder.

Croisset showed no signs of the fight in the forest which had
occurred not more than ten minutes before. He was wearing a pair
of laced Hudson's Bay boots. In the struggle in the snow Philip's
hand had once gripped his enemy's foot, and he knew that he had
worn moccasins. And Jean was not winded. He was breathing easily.
And now Philip saw that behind the calmness in his eyes there was
a tense and anxious inquiry. Slowly the truth broke upon him. It
could not have been Jean with whom he had fought in the edge of
the forest! He advanced a step or two toward the half-breed, his
hand still resting uncertainly on his pistol. Not until then did
Jean speak, and there was no pretence in his voice:

"The Virgin be praised, you are not badly hurt, M'sieur?" he
exclaimed, rising. "There is a little blood on your face. Did the
glass cut you?"

"No," said Philip. "I overtook him in the edge of the forest."

Not for an instant had his eyes left Croisset. Now he saw him
start. His dark face took on a strange pallor. He leaned forward,
and his breath came in a quick gasp.

"The result?" he demanded. "Did you kill him?"

"He escaped."

The tense lines on Croisset's face relaxed. Philip turned and
bolted the door.

"Sit down, Croisset," he commanded. "You and I are going to square
things up in this room to-night. It is quite natural that you
should be glad he escaped. Perhaps if you had fired the shot in
place of putting the affair into the hands of a hired murderer the
work would have been better done. Sit down!"

Something like a smile flickered across Jean's face as he reseated
himself. There was in it no suggestion of bravado or of defiance.
It was rather the facial expression of one who was looking beyond
Philip's set jaws, and seeing other things--the betrayal which
comes at times when one has suffered quietly for another. It was a
look which made Philip uneasy as he seated himself opposite the
half-breed, and made him ashamed of the fact that he had exposed
his right hand on the table, with the muzzle of his automatic
turned toward Jean's breast. Yet he was determined to have it out
with Jean now.

"You are glad that the man who tried to kill me escaped?" he
repeated.

The promptness and quiet decisiveness of Jean's answer amazed him.

"Yes, M'sieur, I am. But the shot was not for you. It was intended
for the master of Adare House. When I heard the shot to-night I
did not know what it meant. A little later I came to your room and
found the broken window and the bullet mark in the wall. This is
M'sieur Adare's old room, and the bullet was intended for him. And
now, M'sieur Philip, why do you say that I am responsible for the
attempt to kill you, or the master?"

"You have convicted yourself," declared Philip, his eyes ablaze.
"A moment ago you said you were glad the assassin escaped!"

"I am, M'sieur," replied Jean in the same quiet voice. "Why I am
glad I will leave to your imagination. Unless I still had faith in
you and was sure of your great love for our Josephine, I would
have lied to you. You were told that you would meet with strange
things at Adare House. You gave your oath that you would make no
effort to discover the secret which is guarded here. And this
early, the first night, you threaten me at the end of a pistol!"

Like fire Jean's eyes were burning now. He gripped the edges of
the table with his thin fingers, and his voice came with a sudden
hissing fury.

"By the great God in Heaven, M'sieur, are you accusing me of
turning traitor to the Master and to her, to our Josephine, whom I
have watched and guarded and prayed for since the day she first
opened her eyes to the world? Do you accuse me of that--I, Jean
Jacques Croisset, who would die a thousand deaths by torture that
she might be freed from her own suffering?"

He leaned over the table as if about to spring. And then, slowly,
his fingers relaxed, the fire died out of his eyes, and he sank
back in his chair. In the face of the half-breed's outburst Philip
had remained speechless. Now he spoke:

"Call it threatening, if you like. I do not intend to break my
word to Josephine. I demand no answer to questions which may
concern her, for that is my promise. But between you and me there
are certain things which must be explained. I concede that I was
mistaken in believing that it was you with whom I fought in the
forest. But it was you who looked through my window earlier in the
night, with a pistol in your hand. You would have killed me if I
had not turned."

Genuine surprise shot into Jean's face.

"I have not been near your window, M'sieur. Until I returned with
M'sieur Adare I was waiting up the river, several miles from here.
Since then I have not left the house. Josephine and her father can
tell you this, if you need proof."

"Your words are impossible!" exclaimed Philip. "I could not have
been mistaken. It was you."

"Will you believe Josephine, M'sieur? She will tell you that I
could not have been at the window."

"If it was not you--who was it?"

"It must have been the man who shot at you," replied Jean.

"And you know who that man is, and yet refuse to tell me in order
that he may have another opportunity of finishing what he failed
to do to-night. The most I can do is to inform John Adare."

"You will not do that," said Jean confidently. Again he showed
excitement. "Do you know what it would mean?" he demanded.

"Trouble for you," volunteered Philip,

"And ruin for Josephine and every soul in the House of Adare!"
added Croisset swiftly. "As soon as Adare could lace his moccasins
he would take up that trail out there. He would come to the end of
it, and then--mon Dieu!--in that hour the world would smash about
his ears!"

"Either you are mad or I am," gasped Philip, staring into the
half-breed's tense face. "I don't think you are lying, Jean. But
you must be mad. And I am mad for listening to you. You insist on
giving this murderer another chance. You as much as say that by
giving him a second opportunity to kill John Adare you are proving
your loyalty to Josephine and her father. Can that be anything but
madness?"

An almost gentle smile nickered over Jean's lips. He looked at
Philip as if marvelling that the other could not understand.

"Within an hour it will be Jean Jacques Croisset who will take up
the trail," he replied softly, and without boastfulness. "It is I,
and not the master of Adare House, who will come to the end of
that trail. And there will be no other shot after that, and no one
will ever know--but you and me."

"You mean that you will follow and kill him--and that John Adare
must never know that an attempt has been made on his life?"

"He must never know, M'sieur. And what happens in the forest at
the end of the trail the trees will never tell."

"And the reason for this secrecy you will not confide in me?"

"I dare not, M'sieur."

Philip leaned across the table.

"Perhaps you will, Jean, when you know there is no longer anything
between Josephine and me," he said. "To-night she told me
everything. I have seen the baby. Her secret she has given to me
freely--and it has made no difference. I love her. Tomorrow I
shall ask her to end all this make-believe, and my heart tells me
that she will. We can be married secretly. No one will ever know."

His face was filled with the flush of hope. One of his hands
caught Jean's in the old grip of friendship--of confidence. Jean
did not reply. But his face betrayed what he did not speak. Once
or twice before Philip had seen the same look of anguish in his
eyes, the tightening of the lines about the corners of his mouth.
Slowly the half-breed rose from the table and turned a little from
Philip. In a moment Philip was at his side.

"Jean!" he cried softly, "you love Josephine!"

No sign of passion was in Jean's face as he met the other's eyes.

"How do you mean, M'sieur?" he asked quietly. "As a father and a
brother, or as a man?"

"A man," said Philip.

Jean smiled. It was a smile of deep understanding, as if suddenly
there had burst upon him a light which he had not seen before.

"I love her as the flowers love the sunshine, as the wood violets
love the rains," he said, touching Philip's arm. "And that,
M'sieur, is not what you understand as the love of a man. There is
one other whom I love in another way, whose voice is the sweetest
music in the world, whose heart beats with mine, whose soul leads
me day and night through the forests, and who whispers to me of
our sweet love in my dreams--Iowaka, my wife! Come, M'sieur; I
will take you to her."

"It is late--too late," voiced Philip wonderingly.

But as he spoke he followed Jean. The half-breed seemed to have
risen out of his world now. There was a wonderful light in his
face, a something that seemed to reach back through centuries that
were gone--and in this moment Philip thought of Marechal, of
Prince Rupert, of le Chevalier Grosselier--of the adventurous and
royal blood that had first come over to the New World to form the
Great Company, and he knew that of such men as these was Jean
Jacques Croisset, the forest man. He understood now the meaning of
the soft and faultless speech of this man who had lived always
under the stars and the open skies. He was not of to-day, but a
harkening back to that long-forgotten yesterday; in his veins ran
the blood red and strong of the First Men of the North. Out into
the night Philip followed him, bare-headed, with the moonlight
streaming down from above; and he stopped only when Jean stopped,
close to a little plot where a dozen wooden crosses rose above a
dozen snow-covered mounds.

Jean stopped, and his hand fell on Philip's arm.

"These are Josephine's," he said softly, with a sweep of his other
hand. "She calls it her Garden of Little Flowers. They are
children, M'sieur. Some are babies. When a little one dies--if it
is not too far away--she brings it to Le Jardin--her garden, so
that it may not sleep alone under the lonely spruce, with the
wolves howling over it on winter nights. They must be lonely in
the woodsy graves, she says. I have known her to bring an Indian
baby a hundred miles, and some of these I have seen die in her
arms, while she crooned to them a song of Heaven. And five times
as many little ones she has saved, M'sieur. That is why even the
winds in the treetops whisper her name, L'Ange! Does it not seem
to you that even the moon shines brighter here upon these little
mounds and the crosses?"

"Yes," breathed Philip reverently.

Jean pointed to a larger mound, the one guardian mound of them
all, rising a little above the others, its cross lifted watchfully
above the other crosses; and he said, as if the spirits themselves
were listening to him:

"M'sieur, there is my wife, my Iowaka. She died three years ago,
but she is with me always, and even now her beloved voice is
singing in my heart, telling me that it is not black and cold
where she and the little ones are waiting, but that all is light
and beautiful. M'sieur"--his voice dropped to a whisper--"Could I
sell my hereafter with her for the price of another woman's love
on earth?"

Philip tried to speak; and strange after a moment he succeeded in
saying:

"Jean, an hour ago, I thought I was a man. I see how far short of
that I have fallen. Forgive me, and let me be your brother. Such a
love as yours is my love for Josephine. And to-morrow--"

"Despair will open up and swallow you to the depths of your soul,"
interrupted Jean gently. "Return to your room, M'sieur. Sleep.
Fight for the love that will be yours in Heaven, as I live for my
Iowaka's. For that love will be yours, up there. Josephine has
loved but one man, and that is you. I have watched and I have
seen. But in this world she can never be more to you than she is
now, for what she told you to-night is the least of the terrible
thing that is eating away her soul on earth. Good-night, M'sieur!"

Straight out into the moonlight Jean walked, head erect, in the
face of the forest. And Philip stood looking after him over the
little garden of crosses until he had disappeared.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN


Alone and with the deadening depression that had come with Jean's
last words, Philip returned to his room. He had made no effort to
follow the half-breed who had shamed him to the quick beside the
grave of his wife. He felt no pleasure, no sense of exultation,
that his suspicions of Croisset's feelings toward Josephine had
been dispelled. Since the hour MacTavish had died up in the
madness of Arctic night, deep and hopeless gloom had not laid its
hand more heavily upon him.

He bolted his door, drew the curtain to the window, and added a
bit of wood to the few embers that still remained alive in the
grate. Then he sat down, with his face to the fire. The dry birch
burst into flame, and for half an hour he sat staring into it with
almost unseeing eyes. He knew that Jean would keep his word--that
even now he was possibly on the fresh trail that led through the
forest. For him there was something about the half-breed now that
was almost omniscient. In him Philip had seen incarnated the
things which made him feel like a dwarf in manhood. In those few
moments close to the graves, Jean had risen above the world. And
Philip believed in him. Yet with his belief, his optimism did not
quite die.

In the same breath Jean had told him that he could never possess
Josephine, and that Josephine loved him. This in itself, Jean's
assurance of her love, was sufficient to arouse a spirit like his
with new hope. At last he went to bed, and in spite of his mental
and physical excitement of the night, he fell asleep.

John Adare did not fail in his promise to rouse Philip early in
the day. When Philip jumped out of bed in response to Adare's
heavy knock at the door, he judged that it was not later than
seven o'clock, and the room was still dark. Adare's voice came
booming through the thick panels in reply to Philip's assurance
that he was getting up.

"This is the third time," he cried. "I've cracked the door trying
to rouse you. And we've got a caribou porterhouse two inches thick
waiting for us."

The giant was walking back and forth in the big living-room when
Philip joined him a few minutes later. He wore an Indian-made
jacket and was smoking a big pipe. That he had been up for some
time was evident from the logs fully ablaze in the fireplace. He
rubbed his hands briskly as Philip entered. Every atom of him
disseminated good cheer.

"You don't know how good it seems to get back home," he exclaimed,
as they shook hands. "I feel like a boy--actually like a boy,
Philip! Didn't sleep two winks after I went to bed, and Miriam
scolded me for keeping her awake. Bless my soul, I wouldn't live
in Montreal if they'd make me a present of the whole Hudson's Bay
Company."

"Nor I," said Philip. "I love the North."

"How long?"

"Four years--without a break."

"One can live a long time in the North in four years," mused the
master of Adare. "But Josephine said she met you in Montreal?"

"True," laughed Philip, catching himself. "That was a break--and I
thank God for it. Outside of that I spent all of the four years
north of the Hight of Land. For eighteen months I lived along the
edges of the Arctic trying to take an impossible census of the
Eskimo for the government."

"I knew something of the sort when I first looked at you," said
Adare. "I can tell an Arctic man, just as I can pick a Herschel
dog or an Athabasca country malemute from a pack of fifty. We have
much to talk about, my boy. We will be great friends. Just now we
are going to that caribou steak."

Out into the hall, through another door, and down a short
corridor, he led Philip. Here a third door was open, and Adare
stood aside while Philip entered.

"This is my private sanctuary," he said proudly. "What do you
think of it?"

Philip looked about him. He was in a room almost as large as the
one from which they had come. In a huge fireplace a pile of logs
were blazing. One end of the room was given up almost entirely to
shelves and weighted down with books. Philip was amazed at their
number. The other end was still partially hidden in glooms but he
could make out that it was fitted up as a laboratory, and on
shelves he caught the white gleam of scores of wild beast skulls.
Comfortably near to the fire was a large table scattered with
books, papers, and piles of manuscript, and behind this was a
small iron safe. Here, Philip thought, was the adytum of no
ordinary man; it was the study of a scholar and a scientist. He
marked the absence of mounted heads from the walls, but in spite
of that the very atmosphere of the room breathed of the forests
and the beast. Here and there he saw the articulated skeletons of
wild animals. From among the books themselves the jaws and ivory
fangs of skulls gleamed out at him. Before he had finished his
wondering survey of the strange room, John Adare stepped to the
table and picked up a skull.

"This is my latest specimen," he said, his voice eager with
enthusiasm. "It is perfect. Jean secured it for me while I was
away. It is the skull of a beaver, and shows in three distinct and
remarkable gradations how nature replaces the soft enamel as it is
worn from the beaver's teeth. You see, I am a hobbyist. For twenty
years I have been studying wild animals. And there--"

He replaced the skull on the table to point to an isolated shelf
filled with books and magazines.

"--there is my most remarkable collection," he added, a gleam of
humour in his eyes. "They are the books and magazine stories of
nature fakirs, the 'works' of naturalists who have never heard the
howl of a wolf or the cry of a loon; the wild dreams of
fictionists, the rot of writers who spend two weeks or a month
each year on some blazed trail and return to the cities to call
themselves students of nature. When I feel in bad humour I read
some of that stuff and laugh."

He leaned over to press a button under the table,

"One of my little electrical arrangements," he explained. "That
will bring our breakfast. To use a popular expression of the
uninformed, I'm as hungry as a bear. As a matter of fact, you
know, a bear is the lightest eater of all brute creation for his
size, strength, and fat supply. That row of naturalists over there
have made him out a pig. The beast's a genius, for it takes a
genius to grow fat on poplar buds!"

Then he laughed good humouredly.

"I suppose you are tired of this already. Josephine has probably
been filling you with a lot of my foolishness. She says I must be
silly or I would have my stuff published in books. But I am
waiting, waiting until I have come down to the last facts. I am
experimenting now with the black and the silver fox. And there are
many other experiments to come, many of them. But you are tired of
this."

"Tired!"

Philip had listened to him without speaking. In this room John
Adare had changed. In him he saw now the living, breathing soul of
the wild. His own face was flushed with a new enthusiasm as he
replied:

"Such things could never tire me. I only ask that I may be your
companion in your researches, and learn something of the wonders
which you must already have discovered. You have studied wild
animals--for twenty years?"

"Twenty and four, day and night; it has been my hobby."

"And you have written about them?"

"A score of volumes, if they were in print."

Philip drew a deep breath.

"The world would give a great deal for what you know," he said.
"It would give a great deal for those books, more than I dare to
estimate, undoubtedly it would be a vast sum in dollars."

Adare laughed softly in his beard.

"And what would I do with dollars?" he asked. "I have sufficient
with which to live this life here. What more could money bring me?
I am the happiest man in the world!"

For a moment a cloud overshadowed his face.

"And yet of late I have had a worry," he added thoughtfully. "It
is because of Miriam, my wife. She is not well. I had hoped that
the doctors in Montreal would help her. But they have failed. They
say she possesses no malady, no sickness that they can discover.
And yet she is not the old Miriam. God knows I hope the tonic of
the snows will bring her back to health this winter!"

"It will," declared Philip. "The signs point to a glorious winter,
crisp and dry--the sledge and dog kind, when you can hear the
crack of a whiplash half a mile away."

"You will hear that frequently enough if you follow Josephine,"
chuckled Adare. "Not a trail in these forests for a hundred miles
she does not know. She trains all of the dogs, and they are
wonderful."

It was on the point of Philip's tongue to ask a reason for the
silence of the fierce pack he had seen the night before, when he
caught himself. At the same moment the Indian woman appeared
through the door with a laden tray. Adare helped her arrange their
breakfast on a small table near the fire.

"I thought we would be more congenial here than alone in the
dining-room, Philip," he explained. "Unless I am mistaken the
ladies won't be up until dinner time. Did you ever see a steak
done to a finer turn than this? Marie, you are a treasure." He
motioned Philip to a seat, and began serving. "Nothing in the
world is better than a caribou porterhouse cut well back," he went
on. "Don't fry or roast it, but broil it. An inch and a half is
the proper thickness, just enough to hold the heart of it ripe
with juice. See it ooze from that cut! Can you beat it?"

"Not with anything I have had along the Arctic," confessed Philip.
"A steak from the cheek of a cow walrus is about the best thing
you find up in the 'Big Icebox'--that is, at first. Later, when
the aurora borealis has got into your marrow, you gorge on seal
blubber and narwhal fat and call it good. As for me, I'd prefer
pickles to anything else in the world, so with your permission
I'll help myself. Just now I'd eat pickles with ice cream."

It was a pleasant meal. Philip could not remember when he had
known a more agreeable host. Not until they had finished, and
Adare had produced cigars of a curious length and slimness, did
the older man ask the question for which Philip had been carefully
preparing himself.

"Now I want to hear about you," he said. "Josephine told me very
little--said that she wanted me to get my impressions first hand.
We'll smoke and talk. These cigars are clear Havanas. I have the
tobacco imported by the bale and we make the cigars ourselves.
Reduces the cost to a minimum, and we always have a supply. Go on,
Philip, I'm listening."

Philip remembered Josephine's words telling him to narrate the
events of his own life to her father--except that he was to leave
open, as it were, the interval in which he was supposed to have
known her in Montreal. It was not difficult for him to slip over
this. He described his first coming into the North, and Adare's
eyes glowed sympathetically when Philip quoted Hill's words down
at Prince Albert and Jasper's up at Fond du Lac. He listened with
tense interest to his experiences along the Arctic, his
descriptions of the death of MacTavish and the passing of Pierre
Radisson. But what struck deepest with him was Philip's physical
and mental fight for new life, and the splendid way in which the
wilderness had responded.

"And you couldn't go back now," he said, a tone of triumph in his
voice. "When the forests once claim you--they hold."

"Not alone the forests, Mon Pere."

"Ah, Mignonne. No, there is neither man nor beast in the world
that would leave her. Even the dogs are chained out in the deep
spruce that they may not tear down her doors in the night to come
near her. The whole world loves my Josephine. The Indians make the
Big Medicine for her in a hundred tepees when they learn she is
ill. They have trimmed five hundred lob-stick trees in her memory.
Mon Dieu, in the Company's books there are written down more than
thirty babes and children grown who bear her name of Josephine!
She is different than her mother. Miriam has been always like a
flower--a timid wood violet, loving this big world, yet playing no
part in it away from my side. Sometimes Josephine frightens me.
She will travel a hundred miles by sledge to nurse a sick child,
and only last winter she buried herself in a shack filled with
smallpox and brought six souls out of it alive! For two weeks she
was buried in that hell. That is Mignonne, whom Indian, breed, and
white man call L'Ange. Miriam they call La Fleurette. We are two
fortunate men, my son!"

A dozen questions burned on Philip's lips, but he held them back,
fearing that some accidental slip of the tongue might betray him.
He was convinced that Josephine's father knew absolutely nothing
of the trouble that was wrecking the happiness of Adare House, and
he was equally positive that all, even Miriam herself, were
fighting to keep the secret from him.

That Josephine's motherhood was not the sole cause of the
mysterious and tragic undercurrent that he had been made to feel
he was more than suspicious. A few hours would tell him if he was
right, for he would ask Josephine to become his wife. And he
already knew what John Adare did not know.

Miriam was not sick with a physical illness. The doctors whom
Adare had not believed were right. And he wondered, as he sat
facing her husband, if it was fear for his life that was breaking
her down. Were they shielding him from some great and ever-
menacing peril--a danger with which, for some inconceivable
reason, they dared not acquaint him?

In the short time he had known him, a strange feeling for John
Adare had found a place in Philip's heart. It was more than
friendship, more than the feeling which his supposed relationship
might have roused. This big-hearted, tender, rumbling voiced giant
of a man he had grown to love. And he found himself struggling
blindly now to keep from him what the others were trying to
conceal, for he knew that John Adare's heart would crumble down
like a pile of dust if he knew the truth. He was thinking of the
baby, and it seemed as if his thoughts flashed like fire to the
other.

Adare was laughing softly in his beard.

"You should have seen the kid last night, Philip. When they woke
'im he stared at me for a time as though I was an ogre, then he
grinned, kicked me, and grabbed my whiskers, I've just one fault
to find. I wish he was a dozen instead of me. The little rascal! I
wonder if he is awake?"

He half rose, as if about to investigate, then reseated himself.

"Guess I'd better not take a chance of waking him," he reflected.
"If Jean should catch me rousing Josephine or the baby he'd
throttle me."

"Jean is--a sort of guardian," ventured Philip.

"More than that. Sometimes I think he is a spirit," said Adare
impressively. "I have known him for twenty years. Since the day
Josephine was born he has been her watch-dog. He came in the heart
of a great storm, years and years ago, nearly dead from cold and
hunger. He never went away, and he has talked but little about
himself. See--"

Adare went to a shelf and returned with a bundle of manuscript.

"Jean gave me the idea for this," he went on.

There are two hundred and eighty pages here. I call it 'The
Aristocracy of the North.' It is true--and it is wonderful!

"You have seen a spring or New Year's gathering of the forest
people at a Company's post--the crowd of Indians, half-breeds, and
whites who follow the trap-lines? And would you guess that in that
average foregathering of the wilderness people there is better
blood than you could find in a crowded ballroom of New York's
millionaires? It is true. I have given fish to hungry half-breeds
in whose veins flows the blood of royalty. I have eaten with
Indian women whose lineage reaches back to names that were mighty
before the first Astors and the first Vanderbilts were born. The
descendant of a king has hunted me caribou meat at two cents a
pound. In a smoke-blackened tepee, over beyond the Gray Loon
waterway, there lives a girl with hair and eyes as black as a
raven's wing who could go to Paris to-morrow and say: 'I am the
descendant of a queen,' and prove it. And so it is all over the
Northland.

"I have hunted down many curious facts, and I have them here in my
manuscript. The world cannot sneer at me, for records have been
kept almost since the day away back in the seventeenth century
when Prince Rupert landed with his first shipload of gentlemen
adventurers. They intermarried with our splendid Crees--those
first wanderers from the best families of Europe. They formed the
English-Cree half-breed. Prince Rupert himself had five children
that can be traced to him. Le Chevalier Grosselier had nine. And
so it went on for a hundred years, the best blood in England
giving birth to a new race among the Crees, and the best of France
sowing new generations among the Chippewyans on their way up from
Quebec.

"And for another hundred years and more the English-Cree half-
breed and the French-Chippewyan half-breed have been meeting and
intermarrying, forming the 'blood,' until in all this Northland
scarce a man or a woman cannot call back to names that have long
become dust in history.

"From the blood of some mighty king of France--of some splendid
queen--has come Jean Croisset. I have always felt that, and yet I
can trace him no farther than a hundred years back, to the
quarter-strain wife of the white factor at Monsoon. Jean has lost
interest in himself now--since his wife died three years ago. Has
Josephine told you of her?"

"Very little," said Philip.

The flush of enthusiasm faded from Adare's eyes. It was replaced
by a look that was grief deep and sincere.

"Iowaka's death was the first great blow that came to Adare
House," he said gently. "For nine years they were man and wife
lovers. God's pity they had no children. She was French--with a
velvety touch of the Cree, lovable as the wild flowers from which
she took her name. Since she went Jean has lived in a dream. He
says that she is constantly with him, and that often he hears her
voice. I am glad of that. It is wonderful to possess that kind of
a love, Philip!--the love that lives like a fresh flower after
death and darkness. And we have it--you and I."

Philip murmured softly that it was so. He felt that it was
dangerous to tread upon the ground which Adare was following. In
these moments, when this great bent-shouldered giant's heart lay
like an open book before him, he was not sure of himself. The
other's unbounded faith, his happiness, the idyllic fulness of his
world as he found it, were things which added to the heaviness and
fear at Philip's heart instead of filling him with similar
emotions. Of these things he was not a part. A voice kept
whispering to him with maddening insistence that he was a fraud.
One by one John Adare was unlocking for him hallowed pictures in
which Jean had told him he could never share possession. His
desire to see Josephine again was almost feverish, and filled him
with a restlessness which he knew he must hide from Adare. So when
Adare's eyes rested upon him in a moment's silence, he said:

"Last night Jean and I were standing beside her grave. It seemed
then as though he would have been happier if he had lain near her
--under the cross."

"You are wrong," said Adare quickly. "Death is beautiful when
there is a perfect love. If my Miriam should die it would mean
that she had simply gone from my SIGHT. In return for that loss
her hand would reach down to me from Heaven, as Iowaka reaches
down to Jean. I love life. My heart would break if she should go.
But it would be replaced by something almost like another soul.
For it must be wonderful to be over-watched by an angel."

He rose and went to the window, and with a queer thickening in his
throat Philip stared at his broad back. He thought he saw a
moment's quiver of his shoulders. Then Adare's voice changed.

"Winter brings close to our doors the one unpleasant feature of
this country," he said, turning to light a second cigar. "Thirty-
five miles to the north and west of us there is what the Indians
call 'Muchemunito Nek'--the Devil's Nest. It's a Free Trader's
house. A man down in Montreal by the name of Lang owns a string of
them, and his agent over at the Devil's Nest is a scoundrel of the
first water. His name is Thoreau. There are a score of half-breeds
and whites in his crowd, and not a one of them with an honest hair
in his head. It's the one criminal rendezvous I know of in all
this North country. Bad Indians who have lost credit at the
Hudson's Bay Company's posts go to Thoreau's. Whites and half-
breeds who have broken the laws are harboured there. A dozen
trappers are murdered each winter for their furs, and the
assassins are among Thoreau's men. One of these days there is
going to be a big clean-up. Meanwhile, they are unpleasant
company. There is a deep swamp between our house and Thoreau's, so
that during the open water seasons it means we are a hundred miles
away from them by canoe. When winter comes we are only thirty-five
miles, as the sledge-dogs run. I don't like it. You can snow-shoe
the distance in a few hours."

"I know of such a place far to the west," replied Philip. "Both
the Hudson's Bay Company and Reveillon Freres have threatened to
put it out of business, but it still remains. Perhaps that is
owned by Lang, too."

He had joined Adare at the window. The next moment both men were
staring at the same object in a mutual surprise. Into the white
snow space between the house and the forest there had walked
swiftly the slim, red-clad figure of Josephine, her face turned to
the forest, her hair falling in a long braid down her back.

The master of Adare chuckled exultantly.

"There goes our little Red Riding Hood!" he rumbled. "She beat us
after all, Philip. She is going after the dogs!"

Philip's heart was beating wildly. A better opportunity for seeing
Josephine alone could not have come to him. He feared that his
voice might betray him as he laid a hand on Adare's arm.

"If you will excuse me I will join her," he said. "I know it
doesn't seem just right to tear off in this way, but--you see--"

Adare interrupted him with one of his booming laughs.

"Go, my lad. I understand. If it was Miriam instead of Mignonne
running away like that, John Adare wouldn't be waiting this long."

Philip turned and left the room, every pulse in his body throbbing
with an excitement roused by the knowledge that the hour had come
when Josephine would give herself to him forever, or doom him to
that hopelessness for which Jean Croisset had told him to prepare
himself.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN


In his eagerness to join Josephine Philip had reached the outer
door before it occurred to him that he was without hat or coat and
had on only a pair of indoor moccasin slippers. He would still
have gone on, regardless of this utter incongruity of dress, had
he not known that John Adare would see him through the window. He
partly opened the hall door and looked out. Josephine was halfway
to the forest. He turned swiftly back to his room, threw on a
coat, p

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