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Northern Lights, Complete

by Gilbert Parker · English · Gutenberg #6191 · 625,603 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Northern Lights, Complete

Author: Gilbert Parker


        
Release date: November 16, 2004 [eBook #6191]
                Most recently updated: February 20, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6191

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NORTHERN LIGHTS, COMPLETE ***




NORTHERN LIGHTS, Complete

By Gilbert Parker



     CONTENTS

     Volume 1.
     A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS
     ONCE AT RED MAN’S RIVER
     THE STROKE OF THE HOUR
     BUCKMASTER’S BOY

     Volume 2.
     TO-MORROW
     QU’APPELLE
     THE STAKE AND THE PLUMB-LINE

     Volume 3.
     WHEN THE SWALLOWS HOMEWARD FLY
     GEORGE’S WIFE
     MARCILE

     Volume 4.
     A MAN, A FAMINE, AND A HEATHEN BOY
     THE HEALING SPRINGS AND THE PIONEERS
     THE LITTLE WIDOW OF JANSEN
     WATCHING THE RISE OF ORION

     Volume 5.
     THE ERROR OF THE DAY
     THE WHISPERER
     AS DEEP AS THE SEA




INTRODUCTION

This book, Northern Lights, belongs to an epoch which is a generation
later than that in which Pierre and His People moved. The conditions
under which Pierre and Shon McGann lived practically ended with the
advent of the railway. From that time forwards, with the rise of towns
and cities accompanied by an amazing growth of emigration, the whole
life lost much of that character of isolation and pathetic loneliness
which marked the days of Pierre. When, in 1905, I visited the Far West
again after many years, and saw the strange new life with its modern
episode, energy, and push, and realised that even the characteristics
which marked the period just before the advent, and just after the
advent, of the railway were disappearing, I determined to write a series
of stories which would catch the fleeting characteristics and hold
something of the old life, so adventurous, vigorous, and individual,
before it passed entirely and was forgotten. Therefore, from 1905 to
1909, I kept drawing upon all those experiences of others, from the
true tales that had been told me, upon the reminiscences of Hudson’s
Bay trappers and hunters, for those incidents natural to the West which
imagination could make true. Something of the old atmosphere had gone,
and there was a stir and a murmur in all the West which broke that grim
yet fascinating loneliness of the time of Pierre.

Thus it is that Northern Lights is written in a wholly different style
from that of Pierre and His People, though here and there, as for
instance in A Lodge in the Wilderness, Once at Red Man’s River, The
Stroke of the Hour, Qu’appelle, and Marcile, the old note sounds, and
something of the poignant mystery, solitude, and big primitive incident
of the earlier stories appears. I believe I did well--at any rate for
myself and my purposes--in writing this book, and thus making the human
narrative of the Far West and North continuous from the time of the
sixties onwards. So have I assured myself of the rightness of my
intention, that I shall publish a novel presently which will carry on
this human narrative of the West into still another stage-that of the
present, when railways are intersecting each other, when mills and
factories are being added to the great grain elevators in the West, and
when hundreds and thousands of people every year are moving across the
plains where, within my own living time, the buffalo ranged in their
millions, and the red men, uncontrolled, set up their tepees.




NOTE

The tales in this book belong to two different epochs in the life of the
Far West. The first five are reminiscent of “border days and deeds”--of
days before the great railway was built which changed a waste into a
fertile field of civilisation. The remaining stories cover the period
passed since the Royal North-West Mounted Police and the Pullman car
first startled the early pioneer, and sent him into the land of the
farther North, or drew him into the quiet circle of civic routine and
humdrum occupation.

G. P.





A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS

“Hai--Yai, so bright a day, so clear!” said Mitiahwe as she entered the
big lodge and laid upon a wide, low couch, covered with soft skins, the
fur of a grizzly which had fallen to her man’s rifle. “Hai-yai, I
wish it would last for ever--so sweet!” she added, smoothing the fur
lingeringly, and showing her teeth in a smile.

“There will come a great storm, Mitiahwe. See, the birds go south so
soon,” responded a deep voice from a corner by the doorway.

The young Indian wife turned quickly, and, in a defiant fantastic
mood--or was it the inward cry against an impending fate, the tragic
future of those who will not see, because to see is to suffer?--she
made some quaint, odd motions of the body which belonged to a mysterious
dance of her tribe, and, with flashing eyes, challenged the comely old
woman seated on a pile of deer-skins.

“It is morning, and the day will last for ever,” she said nonchalantly,
but her eyes suddenly took on a faraway look, half apprehensive, half
wondering. The birds were indeed going south very soon, yet had there
ever been so exquisite an autumn as this, had her man ever had so
wonderful a trade--her man with the brown hair, blue eyes, and fair,
strong face?

“The birds go south, but the hunters and buffalo still go north,”
 Mitiahwe urged searchingly, looking hard at her mother--Oanita, the
Swift Wing.

“My dream said that the winter will be dark and lonely, that the ice
will be thick, the snow deep, and that many hearts will be sick because
of the black days and the hunger that sickens the heart,” answered Swift
Wing.

Mitiahwe looked into Swift Wing’s dark eyes, and an anger came upon her.
“The hearts of cowards will freeze,” she rejoined, “and to those that
will not see the sun the world will be dark,” she added. Then suddenly
she remembered to whom she was speaking, and a flood of feeling ran
through her; for Swift Wing had cherished her like a fledgeling in the
nest till her young white man came from “down East.” Her heart had leapt
up at sight of him, and she had turned to him from all the young men of
her tribe, waiting in a kind of mist till he, at last, had spoken to
her mother, and then one evening, her shawl over her head, she had come
along to his lodge.

A thousand times as the four years passed by she had thought how good
it was that she had become his wife--the young white man’s wife, rather
than the wife of Breaking Rock, son of White Buffalo, the chief, who
had four hundred horses, and a face that would have made winter and
sour days for her. Now and then Breaking Rock came and stood before the
lodge, a distance off, and stayed there hour after hour, and once or
twice he came when her man was with her; but nothing could be done,
for earth and air and space were common to them all, and there was no
offence in Breaking Rock gazing at the lodge where Mitiahwe lived. Yet
it seemed as though Breaking Rock was waiting--waiting and hoping.
That was the impression made upon all who saw him, and even old White
Buffalo, the chief, shook his head gloomily when he saw Breaking Rock,
his son, staring at the big lodge which was so full of happiness, and
so full also of many luxuries never before seen at a trading post on
the Koonce River. The father of Mitiahwe had been chief, but because his
three sons had been killed in battle the chieftainship had come to White
Buffalo, who was of the same blood and family. There were those who said
that Mitiahwe should have been chieftainess; but neither she nor her
mother would ever listen to this, and so White Buffalo, and the tribe
loved Mitiahwe because of her modesty and goodness. She was even more to
White Buffalo than Breaking Rock, and he had been glad that Dingan the
white man--Long Hand he was called--had taken Mitiahwe for his woman.
Yet behind this gladness of White Buffalo, and that of Swift Wing, and
behind the silent watchfulness of Breaking Rock, there was a thought
which must ever come when a white man mates with an Indian maid, without
priest or preacher, or writing, or book, or bond.

Yet four years had gone; and all the tribe, and all who came and went,
half-breeds, traders, and other tribes, remarked how happy was the white
man with his Indian wife. They never saw anything but light in the eyes
of Mitiahwe, nor did the old women of the tribe who scanned her face as
she came and went, and watched and waited too for what never came--not
even after four years.

Mitiahwe had been so happy that she had not really missed what never
came; though the desire to have something in her arms which was part of
them both had flushed up in her veins at times, and made her restless
till her man had come home again. Then she had forgotten the unseen for
the seen, and was happy that they two were alone together--that was the
joy of it all, so much alone together; for Swift Wing did not live with
them, and, like Breaking Rock, she watched her daughter’s life, standing
afar off, since it was the unwritten law of the tribe that the wife’s
mother must not cross the path or enter the home of her daughter’s
husband. But at last Dingan had broken through this custom, and insisted
that Swift Wing should be with her daughter when he was away from home,
as now on this wonderful autumn morning, when Mitiahwe had been singing
to the Sun, to which she prayed for her man and for everlasting days
with him.

She had spoken angrily but now, because her soul sharply resented the
challenge to her happiness which her mother had been making. It was
her own eyes that refused to see the cloud, which the sage and bereaved
woman had seen and conveyed in images and figures of speech natural to
the Indian mind.

“Hai-yai,” she said now, with a strange touching sigh breathing in the
words, “you are right, my mother, and a dream is a dream; also, if it be
dreamt three times, then is it to be followed, and it is true. You have
lived long, and your dreams are of the Sun and the Spirit.” She shook a
little as she laid her hand on a buckskin coat of her man hanging by the
lodge-door; then she steadied herself again, and gazed earnestly into
her mother’s eyes. “Have all your dreams come true, my mother?” she
asked with a hungering heart. “There was the dream that came out of
the dark five times, when your father went against the Crees, and
was wounded, and crawled away into the hills, and all our warriors
fled--they were but a handful, and the Crees like a young forest in
number! I went with my dream, and found him after many days, and it was
after that you were born, my youngest and my last. There was also”--her
eyes almost closed, and the needle and thread she held lay still in her
lap--“when two of your brothers were killed in the drive of the buffalo.
Did I not see it all in my dream, and follow after them to take them
to my heart? And when your sister was carried off, was it not my dream
which saw the trail, so that we brought her back again to die in peace,
her eyes seeing the Lodge whither she was going, open to her, and the
Sun, the Father, giving her light and promise--for she had wounded
herself to die that the thief who stole her should leave her to herself.
Behold, my daughter, these dreams have I had, and others; and I have
lived long and have seen the bright day break into storm, and the herds
flee into the far hills where none could follow, and hunger come, and--”

“Hai-yo, see, the birds flying south,” said the girl with a gesture
towards the cloudless sky. “Never since I lived have they gone south so
soon.” Again she shuddered slightly, then she spoke slowly: “I also have
dreamed, and I will follow my dream. I dreamed”--she knelt down beside
her mother, and rested her hands in her mother’s lap--“I dreamed that
there was a wall of hills dark and heavy and far away, and that whenever
my eyes looked at them they burned with tears; and yet I looked and
looked, till my heart was like lead in my breast; and I turned from them
to the rivers and the plains that I loved. But a voice kept calling to
me, ‘Come, come! Beyond the hills is a happy land. The trail is hard,
and your feet will bleed, but beyond is the happy land.’ And I would
not go for the voice that spoke, and at last there came an old man in my
dream and spoke to me kindly, and said, ‘Come with me, and I will show
thee the way over the hills to the Lodge where thou shalt find what thou
hast lost.’ And I said to him, ‘I have lost nothing;’ and I would not
go. Twice I dreamed this dream, and twice the old man came, and three
times I dreamed it; and then I spoke angrily to him, as but now I did
to thee; and behold he changed before my eyes, and I saw that he was
now become--” she stopped short, and buried her face in her hands for a
moment, then recovered herself--“Breaking Rock it was, I saw before me,
and I cried out and fled. Then I waked with a cry, but my man was beside
me, and his arm was round my neck; and this dream, is it not a foolish
dream, my mother?”

The old woman sat silent, clasping the hands of her daughter firmly,
and looking out of the wide doorway towards the trees that fringed the
river; and presently, as she looked, her face changed and grew pinched
all at once, and Mitiahwe, looking at her, turned a startled face
towards the river also.

“Breaking Rock!” she said in alarm, and got to her feet quickly.

Breaking Rock stood for a moment looking towards the lodge, then came
slowly forward to them. Never in all the four years had he approached
this lodge of Mitiahwe, who, the daughter of a chief, should have
married himself, the son of a chief! Slowly but with long slouching
stride Breaking Rock came nearer. The two women watched him without
speaking. Instinctively they knew that he brought news, that something
had happened; yet Mitiahwe felt at her belt for what no Indian
girl would be without; and this one was a gift from her man, on the
anniversary of the day she first came to his lodge.

Breaking Rock was at the door now, his beady eyes fixed on Mitiahwe’s,
his figure jerked to its full height, which made him, even then, two
inches less than Long Hand. He spoke in a loud voice:

“The last boat this year goes down the river tomorrow. Long Hand, your
man, is going to his people. He will not come back. He has had enough of
the Blackfoot woman. You will see him no more.” He waved a hand to the
sky. “The birds are going south. A hard winter is coming quick. You will
be alone. Breaking Rock is rich. He has five hundred horses. Your man is
going to his own people. Let him go. He is no man. It is four years, and
still there are but two in your lodge. How!”

He swung on his heel with a chuckle in his throat, for he thought he had
said a good thing, and that in truth he was worth twenty white men. His
quick ear caught a movement behind him, however, and he saw the girl
spring from the lodge door, something flashing from her belt. But now
the mother’s arms were round her, with cries of protest, and Breaking
Rock, with another laugh, slipped away swiftly toward the river.

“That is good,” he muttered. “She will kill him perhaps, when she goes
to him. She will go, but he will not stay. I have heard.”

As he disappeared among the trees Mitiahwe disengaged herself from her
mother’s arms, went slowly back into the lodge, and sat down on the
great couch where, for so many moons, she had lain with her man beside
her.

Her mother watched her closely, though she moved about doing little
things. She was trying to think what she would have done if such a thing
had happened to her, if her man had been going to leave her. She assumed
that Dingan would leave Mitiahwe, for he would hear the voices of his
people calling far away, even as the red man who went East into the
great cities heard the prairies and the mountains and the rivers and
his own people calling, and came back, and put off the clothes of
civilisation, and donned his buckskins again, and sat in the Medicine
Man’s tent, and heard the spirits speak to him through the mist and
smoke of the sacred fire. When Swift Wing first gave her daughter to the
white man she foresaw the danger now at hand, but this was the tribute
of the lower race to the higher, and--who could tell! White men had left
their Indian wives, but had come back again, and for ever renounced
the life of their own nations, and become great chiefs, teaching
useful things to their adopted people, bringing up their children as
tribesmen--bringing up their children! There it was, the thing which
called them back, the bright-eyed children with the colour of the brown
prairie in their faces, and their brains so sharp and strong. But here
was no child to call Dingan back, only the eloquent, brave, sweet face
of Mitiahwe.... If he went! Would he go? Was he going? And now that
Mitiahwe had been told that he would go, what would she do? In her belt
was--but, no, that would be worse than all, and she would lose Mitiahwe,
her last child, as she had lost so many others. What would she herself
do if she were in Mitiahwe’s place? Ah, she would make him stay
somehow--by truth or by falsehood; by the whispered story in the long
night, by her head upon his knee before the lodge-fire, and her eyes
fixed on his, luring him, as the Dream lures the dreamer into the far
trail, to find the Sun’s hunting-ground where the plains are filled
with the deer and the buffalo and the wild horse; by the smell of the
cooking-pot and the favourite spiced drink in the morning; by the child
that ran to him with his bow and arrows and the cry of the hunter--but
there was no child; she had forgotten. She was always recalling her own
happy early life with her man, and the clean-faced papooses that crowded
round his knee--one wife and many children, and the old Harvester of the
Years reaping them so fast, till the children stood up as tall as
their father and chief. That was long ago, and she had had her
share--twenty-five years of happiness; but Mitiahwe had had only four.
She looked at Mitiahwe, standing still for a moment like one rapt, then
suddenly she gave a little cry. Something had come into her mind, some
solution of the problem, and she ran and stooped over the girl and put
both hands on her head.

“Mitiahwe, heart’s blood of mine,” she said, “the birds go south, but
they return. What matter if they go so soon, if they return soon. If the
Sun wills that the winter be dark, and he sends the Coldmaker to close
the rivers and drive the wild ones far from the arrow and the gun,
yet he may be sorry, and send a second summer--has it not been so, and
Coldmaker has hurried away--away! The birds go south, but they will
return, Mitiahwe.”

“I heard a cry in the night while my man slept,” Mitiahwe answered,
looking straight before her, “and it was like the cry of a bird-calling,
calling, calling.”

“But he did not hear--he was asleep beside Mitiahwe. If he did not wake,
surely it was good luck. Thy breath upon his face kept him sleeping.
Surely it was good luck to Mitiahwe that he did not hear.”

She was smiling a little now, for she had thought of a thing which
would, perhaps, keep the man here in this lodge in the wilderness; but
the time to speak of it was not yet. She must wait and see.

Suddenly Mitiahwe got to her feet with a spring, and a light in her
eyes. “Hai-yai!” she said with plaintive smiling, ran to a corner of the
lodge, and from a leather bag drew forth a horse-shoe and looked at it,
murmuring to herself.

The old woman gazed at her wonderingly. “What is it, Mitiahwe?” she
asked.

“It is good-luck. So my man has said. It is the way of his people. It is
put over the door, and if a dream come it is a good dream; and if a bad
thing come, it will not enter; and if the heart prays for a thing hid
from all the world, then it brings good-luck. Hai-yai! I will put it
over the door, and then--” All at once her hand dropped to her side, as
though some terrible thought had come to her, and, sinking to the
floor, she rocked her body backward and forward for a time, sobbing.
But presently she got to her feet again, and, going to the door of the
lodge, fastened the horseshoe above it with a great needle and a string
of buckskin.

“Oh great Sun,” she prayed, “have pity on me and save me! I cannot live
alone. I am only a Blackfoot wife; I am not blood of his blood. Give, O
great one, blood of his blood, bone of his bone, soul of his soul, that
he will say, This is mine, body of my body, and he will hear the cry and
will stay. O great Sun, pity me!” The old woman’s heart beat faster as
she listened. The same thought was in the mind of both. If there were
but a child, bone of his bone, then perhaps he would not go; or, if he
went, then surely he would return, when he heard his papoose calling in
the lodge in the wilderness.

As Mitiahwe turned to her, a strange burning light in her eyes, Swift
Wing said: “It is good. The white man’s Medicine for a white man’s wife.
But if there were the red man’s Medicine too--”

“What is the red man’s Medicine?” asked the young wife, as she smoothed
her hair, put a string of bright beads around her neck, and wound a red
sash round her waist.

The old woman shook her head, a curious half-mystic light in her eyes,
her body drawn up to its full height, as though waiting for something.
“It is an old Medicine. It is of winters ago as many as the hairs of the
head. I have forgotten almost, but it was a great Medicine when there
were no white men in the land. And so it was that to every woman’s
breast there hung a papoose, and every woman had her man, and the red
men were like leaves in the forest--but it was a winter of winters ago,
and the Medicine Men have forgotten; and thou hast no child! When Long
Hand comes, what will Mitiahwe say to him?”

Mitiahwe’s eyes were determined, her face was set, she flushed deeply,
then the colour fled. “What my mother would say, I will say. Shall the
white man’s Medicine fail? If I wish it, then it will be so: and I will
say so.”

“But if the white man’s Medicine fail?”--Swift Wing made a gesture
toward the door where the horse-shoe hung. “It is Medicine for a white
man, will it be Medicine for an Indian?”

“Am I not a white man’s wife?”

“But if there were the Sun Medicine also, the Medicine of the days long
ago?”

“Tell me. If you remember--Kai! but you do remember--I see it in your
face. Tell me, and I will make that Medicine also, my mother.”

“To-morrow, if I remember it--I will think, and if I remember it,
to-morrow I will tell you, my heart’s blood. Maybe my dream will come to
me and tell me. Then, even after all these years, a papoose--”

“But the boat will go at dawn to-morrow, and if he go also--”

“Mitiahwe is young, her body is warm, her eyes are bright, the songs she
sings, her tongue--if these keep him not, and the Voice calls him still
to go, then still Mitiahwe shall whisper, and tell him--”

“Hai-yo-hush,” said the girl, and trembled a little, and put both hands
on her mother’s mouth.

For a moment she stood so, then with an exclamation suddenly turned and
ran through the doorway, and sped toward the river, and into the path
which would take her to the post, where her man traded with the Indians
and had made much money during the past six years, so that he could have
had a thousand horses and ten lodges like that she had just left. The
distance between the lodge and the post was no more than a mile, but
Mitiahwe made a detour, and approached it from behind, where she could
not be seen. Darkness was gathering now, and she could see the glimmer
of the light of lamps through the windows, and as the doors opened and
shut. No one had seen her approach, and she stole through a door which
was open at the rear of the warehousing room, and went quickly to
another door leading into the shop. There was a crack through which she
could see, and she could hear all that was said. As she came she had
seen Indians gliding through the woods with their purchases, and now
the shop was clearing fast, in response to the urging of Dingan and his
partner, a Scotch half-breed. It was evident that Dingan was at once
abstracted and excited.

Presently only two visitors were left, a French halfbreed call Lablache,
a swaggering, vicious fellow, and the captain of the steamer, Ste. Anne,
which was to make its last trip south in the morning--even now it would
have to break its way through the young ice. Dingan’s partner dropped
a bar across the door of the shop, and the four men gathered about the
fire. For a time no one spoke. At last the captain of the Ste. Anne
said: “It’s a great chance, Dingan. You’ll be in civilisation again, and
in a rising town of white people--Groise ‘ll be a city in five years,
and you can grow up and grow rich with the place. The Company asked me
to lay it all before you, and Lablache here will buy out your share of
the business, at whatever your partner and you prove its worth. You’re
young; you’ve got everything before you. You’ve made a name out here for
being the best trader west of the Great Lakes, and now’s your time. It’s
none of my affair, of course, but I like to carry through what I’m set
to do, and the Company said, ‘You bring Dingan back with you. The place
is waiting for him, and it can’t wait longer than the last boat down.’
You’re ready to step in when he steps out, ain’t you, Lablache?”

Lablache shook back his long hair, and rolled about in his pride. “I
give him cash for his share to-night someone is behin’ me, share, yes!
It is worth so much, I pay and step in--I take the place over. I take
half the business here, and I work with Dingan’s partner. I take your
horses, Dingan, I take you lodge, I take all in your lodge--everyt’ing.”

His eyes glistened, and a red spot came to each cheek as he leaned
forward. At his last word Dingan, who had been standing abstractedly
listening, as it were, swung round on him with a muttered oath, and the
skin of his face appeared to tighten. Watching through the crack of
the door, Mitiahwe saw the look she knew well, though it had never been
turned on her, and her heart beat faster. It was a look that came into
Dingan’s face whenever Breaking Rock crossed his path, or when one or
two other names were mentioned in his presence, for they were names of
men who had spoken of Mitiahwe lightly, and had attempted to be jocular
about her.

As Mitiahwe looked at him, now unknown to himself, she was conscious
of what that last word of Lablache’s meant. Everyt’ing meant herself.
Lablache--who had neither the good qualities of the white man nor the
Indian, but who had the brains of the one and the subtilty of the other,
and whose only virtue was that he was a successful trader, though he
looked like a mere woodsman, with rings in his ears, gaily decorated
buckskin coat and moccasins, and a furtive smile always on his
lips! Everyt’ing!--Her blood ran cold at the thought of dropping the
lodge-curtain upon this man and herself alone. For no other man than
Dingan had her blood run faster, and he had made her life blossom. She
had seen in many a half-breed’s and in many an Indian’s face the look
which was now in that of Lablache, and her fingers gripped softly the
thing in her belt that had flashed out on Breaking Rock such a short
while ago. As she looked, it seemed for a moment as though Dingan would
open the door and throw Lablache out, for in quick reflection his eyes
ran from the man to the wooden bar across the door.

“You’ll talk of the shop, and the shop only, Lablache,” Dingan said
grimly. “I’m not huckstering my home, and I’d choose the buyer if I was
selling. My lodge ain’t to be bought, nor anything in it--not even
the broom to keep it clean of any half-breeds that’d enter it without
leave.”

There was malice in the words, but there was greater malice in the tone,
and Lablache, who was bent on getting the business, swallowed his ugly
wrath, and determined that, if he got the business, he would get the
lodge also in due time; for Dingan, if he went, would not take the
lodge-or the woman with him; and Dingan was not fool enough to stay when
he could go to Groise to a sure fortune.

The captain of the Ste. Anne again spoke. “There’s another thing the
Company said, Dingan. You needn’t go to Groise, not at once. You can
take a month and visit your folks down East, and lay in a stock of
home-feelings before you settle down at Groise for good. They was
fair when I put it to them that you’d mebbe want to do that. ‘You tell
Dingan,’ they said, ‘that he can have the month glad and grateful, and a
free ticket on the railway back and forth. He can have it at once,’ they
said.”

Watching, Mitiahwe could see her man’s face brighten, and take on a look
of longing at this suggestion; and it seemed to her that the bird she
heard in the night was calling in his ears now. Her eyes went blind a
moment.

“The game is with you, Dingan. All the cards are in your hands; you’ll
never get such another chance again; and you’re only thirty,” said the
captain.

“I wish they’d ask me,” said Dingan’s partner with a sigh, as he looked
at Lablache. “I want my chance bad, though we’ve done well here--good
gosh, yes, all through Dingan.”

“The winters, they go queeck in Groise,” said Lablache. “It is life all
the time, trade all the time, plenty to do and see--and a bon fortune to
make, bagosh!”

“Your old home was in Nove Scotia, wasn’t it, Dingan?” asked the captain
in a low voice. “I kem from Connecticut, and I was East to my village
las’ year. It was good seein’ all my old friends again; but I kem back
content, I kem back full of home-feelin’s and content. You’ll like the
trip, Dingan. It’ll do you good.” Dingan drew himself up with a start.
“All right. I guess I’ll do it. Let’s figure up again,” he said to his
partner with a reckless air.

With a smothered cry Mitiahwe turned and fled into the darkness, and
back to the lodge. The lodge was empty. She threw herself upon the great
couch in an agony of despair.

A half-hour went by. Then she rose, and began to prepare supper. Her
face was aflame, her manner was determined, and once or twice her hand
went to her belt, as though to assure herself of something.

Never had the lodge looked so bright and cheerful; never had she
prepared so appetising a supper; never had the great couch seemed so
soft and rich with furs, so homelike and so inviting after a long day’s
work. Never had Mitiahwe seemed so good to look at, so graceful and
alert and refined--suffering does its work even in the wild woods, with
“wild people.” Never had the lodge such an air of welcome and peace
and home as to-night; and so Dingan thought as he drew aside the wide
curtains of deerskin and entered.

Mitiahwe was bending over the fire and appeared not to hear him.
“Mitiahwe,” he said gently.

She was singing to herself to an Indian air the words of a song Dingan
had taught her:

  “Open the door: cold is the night, and my feet are heavy,
   Heap up the fire, scatter upon it the cones and the scented leaves;
   Spread the soft robe on the couch for the chief that returns,
   Bring forth the cup of remembrance--”

It was like a low recitative, and it had a plaintive cadence, as of a
dove that mourned.

“Mitiahwe,” he said in a louder voice, but with a break in it too; for
it all rushed upon him, all that she had been to him--all that had made
the great West glow with life, made the air sweeter, the grass greener,
the trees more companionable and human: who it was that had given the
waste places a voice. Yet--yet, there were his own people in the East,
there was another life waiting for him, there was the life of ambition
and wealth, and, and home--and children.

His eyes were misty as she turned to him with a little cry of surprise,
how much natural and how much assumed--for she had heard him enter--it
would have been hard to say. She was a woman, and therefore the daughter
of pretence even when most real. He caught her by both arms as she shyly
but eagerly came to him. “Good girl, good little girl,” he said. He
looked round him. “Well, I’ve never seen our lodge look nicer than it
does to-night; and the fire, and the pot on the fire, and the smell of
the pine-cones, and the cedar-boughs, and the skins, and--”

“And everything,” she said, with a queer little laugh, as she moved
away again to turn the steaks on the fire. Everything! He started at the
word. It was so strange that she should use it by accident, when but a
little while ago he had been ready to choke the wind out of a man’s body
for using it concerning herself.

It stunned him for a moment, for the West, and the life apart from the
world of cities, had given him superstition, like that of the Indians,
whose life he had made his own.

Herself--to leave her here, who had been so much to him? As true as the
sun she worshipped, her eyes had never lingered on another man since she
came to his lodge; and, to her mind, she was as truly sacredly married
to him as though a thousand priests had spoken, or a thousand Medicine
Men had made their incantations. She was his woman and he was her man.
As he chatted to her, telling her of much that he had done that day,
and wondering how he could tell her of all he had done, he kept looking
round the lodge, his eye resting on this or that; and everything had its
own personal history, had become part of their lodge-life, because it
had a use as between him and her, and not a conventional domestic place.
Every skin, every utensil, every pitcher and bowl and pot and curtain,
had been with them at one time or another, when it became of importance
and renowned in the story of their days and deeds.

How could he break it to her--that he was going to visit his own people,
and that she must be alone with her mother all winter, to await his
return in the spring? His return? As he watched her sitting beside him,
helping him to his favourite dish, the close, companionable trust and
gentleness of her, her exquisite cleanness and grace in his eyes, he
asked himself if, after all, it was not true that he would return in
the spring. The years had passed without his seriously thinking of this
inevitable day. He had put it off and off, content to live each hour as
it came and take no real thought for the future; and yet, behind all was
the warning fact that he must go one day, and that Mitiahwe could not go
with him. Her mother must have known that when she let Mitiahwe come to
him. Of course; and, after all, she would find another mate, a better
mate, one of her own people.

But her hand was in his now, and it was small and very warm, and
suddenly he shook with anger at the thought of one like Breaking Rock
taking her to his wigwam; or Lablache--this roused him to an inward
fury; and Mitiahwe saw and guessed the struggle that was going on in
him, and she leaned her head against his shoulder, and once she raised
his hand to her lips, and said, “My chief!”

Then his face cleared again, and she got him his pipe and filled it, and
held a coal to light it; and, as the smoke curled up, and he leaned
back contentedly for the moment, she went to the door, drew open the
curtains, and, stepping outside, raised her eyes to the horseshoe. Then
she said softly to the sky: “O Sun, great Father, have pity on me, for
I love him, and would keep him. And give me bone of his bone, and one
to nurse at my breast that is of him. O Sun, pity me this night, and be
near me when I speak to him, and hear what I say!”

“What are you doing out there, Mitiahwe?” Dingan cried; and when she
entered again he beckoned her to him. “What was it you were saying? Who
were you speaking to?” he asked. “I heard your voice.”

“I was thanking the Sun for his goodness to me. I was speaking for the
thing that is in my heart, that is life of my life,” she added vaguely.

“Well, I have something to say to you, little girl,” he said, with an
effort.

She remained erect before him waiting for the blow--outwardly calm,
inwardly crying out in pain. “Do you think you could stand a little
parting?” he asked, reaching out and touching her shoulder.

“I have been alone before--for five days,” she answered quietly.

“But it must be longer this time.”

“How long?” she asked, with eyes fixed on his. “If it is more than a
week I will go too.”

“It is longer than a month,” he said. “Then I will go.”

“I am going to see my people,” he faltered.

“By the Ste. Anne?”

He nodded. “It is the last chance this year; but I will come back--in
the spring.”

As he said it he saw her shrink, and his heart smote him. Four years
such as few men ever spent, and all the luck had been with him, and the
West had got into his bones! The quiet, starry nights, the wonderful
days, the hunt, the long journeys, the life free of care, and the warm
lodge; and, here, the great couch--ah, the cheek pressed to his, the
lips that whispered at his ear, the smooth arm round his neck. It
all rushed upon him now. His people? His people in the East, who had
thwarted his youth, vexed and cramped him, saw only evil in his widening
desires, and threw him over when he came out West--the scallywag,
they called him, who had never wronged a man or-or a woman!
Never--wronged-a-woman? The question sprang to his lips now. Suddenly
he saw it all in a new light. White or brown or red, this heart and soul
and body before him were all his, sacred to him; he was in very truth
her “Chief.”

Untutored as she was, she read him, felt what was going on in him. She
saw the tears spring to his eyes. Then, coming close to him she said
softly, slowly: “I must go with you if you go, because you must be with
me when--oh, hai-yai, my chief, shall we go from here? Here in this
lodge wilt thou be with thine own people--thine own, thou and I--and
thine to come.” The great passion in her heart made the lie seem very
truth.

With a cry he got to his feet, and stood staring at her for a moment,
scarcely comprehending; then suddenly he clasped her in his arms.

“Mitiahwe--Mitiahwe, oh, my little girl!” he cried. “You and me--and our
own--our own people!” Kissing her, he drew her down beside him on the
couch. “Tell me again--it is so at last?” he said, and she whispered in
his ear once more.

In the middle of the night he said to her, “Some day, perhaps, we will
go East--some day, perhaps.”

“But now?” she asked softly.

“Not now--not if I know it,” he answered. “I’ve got my heart nailed to
the door of this lodge.”

As he slept she got quietly out, and, going to the door of the lodge,
reached up a hand and touched the horse-shoe.

“Be good Medicine to me,” she said. Then she prayed. “O Sun, pity me
that it may be as I have said to him. O pity me, great Father!”

In the days to come Swift Wing said that it was her Medicine; when her
hand was burned to the wrist in the dark ritual she had performed
with the Medicine Man the night that Mitiahwe fought for her man--but
Mitiahwe said it was her Medicine, the horse-shoe, which brought one of
Dingan’s own people to the lodge, a little girl with Mitiahwe’s eyes and
form and her father’s face. Truth has many mysteries, and the faith of
the woman was great; and so it was that, to the long end, Mitiahwe kept
her man. But truly she was altogether a woman, and had good fortune.




ONCE AT RED MAN’S RIVER

“It’s got to be settled to-night, Nance. This game is up here, up for
ever. The redcoat police from Ottawa are coming, and they’ll soon be
roostin’ in this post; the Injuns are goin’, the buffaloes are most
gone, and the fur trade’s dead in these parts. D’ye see?”

The woman did not answer the big, broad-shouldered man bending over her,
but remained looking into the fire with wide, abstracted eyes and a face
somewhat set.

“You and your brother Bantry’s got to go. This store ain’t worth a
cent now. The Hudson’s Bay Company’ll come along with the redcoats, and
they’ll set up a nice little Sunday-school business here for what they
call ‘agricultural settlers.’ There’ll be a railway, and the Yankees’ll
send up their marshals to work with the redcoats on the border, and--”

“And the days of smuggling will be over,” put in the girl in a low
voice. “No more bull-wackers and muleskinners ‘whooping it up’; no
more Blackfeet and Piegans drinking alcohol and water, and cutting each
others’ throats. A nice quiet time coming on the border, Abe, eh?”

The man looked at her queerly. She was not prone to sarcasm, she had not
been given to sentimentalism in the past; she had taken the border-life
as it was, had looked it straight between the eyes. She had lived up to
it, or down to it, without any fuss, as good as any man in any phase of
the life, and the only white woman in this whole West country. It was
not in the words, but in the tone, that Abe Hawley found something
unusual and defamatory.

“Why, gol darn it, Nance, what’s got into you? You bin a man out West,
as good a pioneer as ever was on the border. But now you don’t sound
friendly to what’s been the game out here, and to all of us that’ve been
risking our lives to get a livin’.”

“What did I say?” asked the girl, unmoved.

“It ain’t what you said, it’s the sound o’ your voice.”

“You don’t know my voice, Abe. It ain’t always the same. You ain’t
always about; you don’t always hear it.”

He caught her arm suddenly. “No, but I want to hear it always. I want
to be always where you are, Nance. That’s what’s got to be settled
to-day--to-night.”

“Oh, it’s got to be settled to-night!” said the girl meditatively,
kicking nervously at a log on the fire. “It takes two to settle a thing
like that, and there’s only one says it’s got to be settled. Maybe it
takes more than two--or three--to settle a thing like that.” Now she
laughed mirthlessly.

The man started, and his face flushed with anger; then he put a hand on
himself, drew a step back, and watched her.

“One can settle a thing, if there’s a dozen in it. You see, Nance,
you and Bantry’s got to close out. He’s fixing it up to-night over at
Dingan’s Drive, and you can’t go it alone when you quit this place. Now,
it’s this way: you can go West with Bantry, or you can go North with
me. Away North there’s buffalo and deer, and game aplenty, up along the
Saskatchewan, and farther up on the Peace River. It’s going to be all
right up there for half a lifetime, and we can have it in our own way
yet. There’ll be no smuggling, but there’ll be trading, and land to get;
and, mebbe, there’d be no need of smuggling, for we can make it, I know
how--good white whiskey--and we’ll still have this free life for our
own. I can’t make up my mind to settle down to a clean collar and going
to church on Sundays, and all that. And the West’s in your bones too.
You look like the West--”

The girl’s face brightened with pleasure, and she gazed at him steadily.

“You got its beauty and its freshness, and you got its heat and cold--”

She saw the tobacco-juice stain at the corners of his mouth, she became
conscious of the slight odour of spirits in the air, and the light in
her face lowered in intensity.

“You got the ways of the deer in your walk, the song o’ the birds in
your voice; and you’re going North with me, Nance, for I bin talkin’
to you stiddy four years. It’s a long time to wait on the chance, for
there’s always women to be got, same as others have done--men like
Dingan with Injun girls, and men like Tobey with half-breeds. But I
ain’t bin lookin’ that way. I bin lookin’ only towards you.” He laughed
eagerly, and lifted a tin cup of whiskey standing on a table near. “I’m
lookin’ towards you now, Nance. Your health and mine together. It’s got
to be settled now. You got to go to the ‘Cific Coast with Bantry, or
North with me.”

The girl jerked a shoulder and frowned a little. He seemed so sure of
himself.

“Or South with Nick Pringle, or East with someone else,” she said
quizzically. “There’s always four quarters to the compass, even when Abe
Hawley thinks he owns the world and has a mortgage on eternity. I’m not
going West with Bantry, but there’s three other points that’s open.”

With an oath the man caught her by the shoulders, and swung her round to
face him. He was swelling with anger. “You--Nick Pringle, that trading
cheat, that gambler! After four years, I--”

“Let go my shoulders,” she said quietly. “I’m not your property. Go and
get some Piegan girl to bully. Keep your hands off. I’m not a bronco
for you to bit and bridle. You’ve got no rights. You--” Suddenly she
relented, seeing the look in his face, and realising that, after all,
it was a tribute to herself that she could keep him for four years
and rouse him to such fury--“but yes, Abe,” she added, “you have some
rights. We’ve been good friends all these years, and you’ve been all
right out here. You said some nice things about me just now, and I
liked it, even if it was as if you learned it out of a book. I’ve got
no po’try in me; I’m plain homespun. I’m a sapling, I’m not any
prairie-flower, but I like when I like, and I like a lot when I like.
I’m a bit of hickory, I’m not a prairie-flower--”

“Who said you was a prairie-flower? Did I? Who’s talking about
prairie-flowers--”

He stopped suddenly, turned round at the sound of a footstep behind him,
and saw, standing in a doorway leading to another room, a man who
was digging his knuckles into his eyes and stifling a yawn. He was a
refined-looking stripling of not more than twenty-four, not tall, but
well made, and with an air of breeding, intensified rather than hidden
by his rough clothes.

“Je-rick-ety! How long have I slept?” he said, blinking at the two
beside the fire. “How long?” he added, with a flutter of anxiety in his
tone.

“I said I’d wake you,” said the girl, coming forwards. “You needn’t have
worried.”

“I don’t worry,” answered the young man. “I dreamed myself awake, I
suppose. I got dreaming of redcoats and U. S. marshals, and an ambush
in the Barfleur Coulee, and--” He saw a secret, warning gesture from the
girl, and laughed, then turned to Abe and looked him in the face. “Oh, I
know him! Abe Hawley’s all O. K.--I’ve seen him over at Dingan’s Drive.
Honour among rogues. We’re all in it. How goes it--all right?” he added
carelessly to Hawley, and took a step forwards, as though to shake
hands. Seeing the forbidding look by which he was met, however, he
turned to the girl again, as Hawley muttered something they could not
hear.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“It’s nine o’clock,” answered the girl, her eyes watching his every
movement, her face alive.

“Then the moon’s up almost?”

“It’ll be up in an hour.”

“Jerickety! Then I’ve got to get ready.” He turned to the other room
again and entered.

“College pup!” said Hawley under his breath savagely. “Why didn’t you
tell me he was here?”

“Was it any of your business, Abe?” she rejoined quietly.

“Hiding him away here--”

“Hiding? Who’s been hiding him? He’s doing what you’ve done. He’s
smuggling--the last lot for the traders over by Dingan’s Drive. He’ll
get it there by morning. He has as much right here as you. What’s got
into you, Abe?”

“What does he know about the business? Why, he’s a college man from the
East. I’ve heard o’ him. Ain’t got no more sense for this life than a
dicky-bird. White-faced college pup! What’s he doing out here? If you’re
a friend o’ his, you’d better look after him. He’s green.”

“He’s going East again,” she said, “and if I don’t go West with Bantry,
or South over to Montana with Nick Pringle, or North--”

“Nancy--” His eyes burned, his lips quivered.

She looked at him and wondered at the power she had over this bully of
the border, who had his own way with most people, and was one of the
most daring fighters, hunters, and smugglers in the country. He was
cool, hard, and well-in-hand in his daily life, and yet, where she was
concerned, “went all to pieces,” as someone else had said about himself
to her.

She was not without the wiles and tact of her sex. “You go now, and come
back, Abe,” she said in a soft voice. “Come back in an hour. Come back
then, and I’ll tell you which way I’m going from here.”

He was all right again. “It’s with you, Nancy,” he said eagerly. “I bin
waiting four years.”

As he closed the door behind him the “college pup” entered the room
again. “Oh, Abe’s gone!” he said excitedly. “I hoped you’d get rid of
the old rip-roarer. I wanted to be alone with you for a while. I
don’t really need to start yet. With the full moon I can do it before
daylight.” Then, with quick warmth, “Ah, Nancy, Nancy, you’re a
flower--the flower of all the prairies,” he added, catching her hand and
laughing into her eyes.

She flushed, and for a moment seemed almost bewildered. His boldness,
joined to an air of insinuation and understanding, had influenced her
greatly from the first moment they had met two months ago, as he was
going South on his smuggling enterprise. The easy way in which he had
talked to her, the extraordinary sense he seemed to have of what was
going on in her mind, the confidential meaning in voice and tone and
words had, somehow, opened up a side of her nature hitherto unexplored.
She had talked with him freely then, for it was only when he left her
that he said what he instinctively knew she would remember till they
met again. His quick comments, his indirect but acute questions,
his exciting and alluring reminiscences of the East, his subtle yet
seemingly frank compliments, had only stimulated a new capacity in her,
evoked comparisons of this delicate-looking, fine-faced gentleman with
the men of the West by whom she was surrounded. But later he appeared to
stumble into expressions of admiration for her, as though he was carried
off his feet and had been stunned by her charm. He had done it all
like a master. He had not said that she was beautiful--she knew she was
not--but that she was wonderful, and fascinating, and with “something
about her” he had never seen in all his life, like her own prairies,
thrilling, inspiring, and adorable. His first look at her had seemed
full of amazement. She had noticed that, and thought it meant only that
he was surprised to find a white girl out here among smugglers, hunters,
squaw-men, and Indians. But he said that the first look at her had made
him feel things-feel life and women different from ever before; and he
had never seen anyone like her, nor a face with so much in it. It was
all very brilliantly done.

“You make me want to live,” he had said, and she, with no knowledge of
the nuances of language, had taken it literally, and had asked him if
it had been his wish to die; and he had responded to her mistaken
interpretation of his meaning, saying that he had had such sorrow he had
not wanted to live. As he said it his face looked, in truth, overcome
by some deep inward care; so that there came a sort of feeling she had
never had so far for any man--that he ought to have someone to look
after him. This was the first real stirring of the maternal and
protective spirit in her towards men, though it had shown itself amply
enough regarding animals and birds. He had said he had not wanted to
live, and yet he had come out West in order to try and live, to cure the
trouble that had started in his lungs. The Eastern doctors had told him
that the rough outdoor life would cure him, or nothing would, and he had
vanished from the college walls and the pleasant purlieus of learning
and fashion into the wilds. He had not lied directly to her when he said
that he had had deep trouble; but he had given the impression that he
was suffering from wrongs which had broken his spirit and ruined
his health. Wrongs there certainly had been in his life, by whomever
committed.

Two months ago he had left this girl with her mind full of memories of
what he had said to her, and there was something in the sound of the
slight cough following his farewell words which had haunted her ever
since. Her tremendous health and energy, the fire of life burning so
brightly in her, reached out towards this man living on so narrow a
margin of force, with no reserve for any extra strain, with just enough
for each day’s use and no more. Four hours before he had come again with
his team of four mules and an Indian youth, having covered forty miles
since his last stage. She was at the door and saw him coming while he
was yet along distance off. Some instinct had told her to watch that
afternoon, for she knew of his intended return and of his dangerous
enterprise. The Indians had trailed south and east, the traders had
disappeared with them, her brother Bantry had gone up and over to
Dingan’s Drive, and, save for a few loiterers and last hangers-on, she
was alone with what must soon be a deserted post; its walls, its great
enclosed yard, and its gun-platforms (for it had been fortified) left
for law and order to enter upon, in the persons of the red-coated
watchmen of the law.

Out of the South, from over the border, bringing the last great smuggled
load of whiskey which was to be handed over at Dingan’s Drive, and then
floated on Red Man’s River to settlements up North, came the “college
pup,” Kelly Lambton, worn out, dazed with fatigue, but smiling too, for
a woman’s face was ever a tonic to his blood since he was big enough to
move in life for himself. It needed courage--or recklessness--to run the
border now; for, as Abe Hawley had said, the American marshals were on
the pounce, the red-coated mounted police were coming west from Ottawa,
and word had winged its way along the prairie that these redcoats were
only a few score miles away, and might be at Fort Fair Desire at any
moment. The trail to Dingan’s Drive lay past it. Through Barfleur
Coulee, athwart a great open stretch of country, along a wooded belt,
and then, suddenly, over a ridge, Dingan’s Drive and Red Man’s River
would be reached.

The Government had a mind to make an example, if necessary, by killing
some smugglers in conflict, and the United States marshals had been
goaded by vanity and anger at one or two escapes “to have something for
their money,” as they said. That, in their language, meant, “to let the
red run,” and Kelly Lambton had none too much blood to lose.

He looked very pale and beaten as he held Nance Machell’s hands now, and
called her a prairie-flower, as he had done when he left her two months
before. On his arrival but now he had said little, for he saw that she
was glad to see him, and he was dead for sleep, after thirty-six hours
of ceaseless travel and watching and danger. Now, with the most perilous
part of his journey still before him, and worn physically as he was,
his blood was running faster as he looked into the girl’s face, and
something in her abundant force and bounding life drew him to her. Such
vitality in a man like Abe Hawley would have angered him almost, as it
did a little time ago, when Abe was there; but possessed by the girl, it
roused in him a hunger to draw from the well of her perfect health, from
the unused vigour of her being, something for himself. The touch of her
hands warmed him, in the fulness of her life, in the strong eloquence
of face and form, he forgot she was not beautiful. The lightness passed
from his words, and his face became eager.

“Flower, yes, the flower of the life of the West--that’s what I mean,”
 he said. “You are like an army marching. When I look at you, my blood
runs faster. I want to march too. When I hold your hand I feel that
life’s worth living--I want to do things.”

She drew her hand away rather awkwardly. She had not now that command
of herself which had ever been easy with the men of the West, except,
perhaps, with Abe Hawley when--

But with an attempt, only half-meant, to turn the topic, she said: “You
must be starting if you want to get through to-night. If the redcoats
catch you this side of Barfleur Coulee, or in the Coulee itself,
you’ll stand no chance. I heard they was only thirty miles north this
afternoon. Maybe they’ll come straight on here to-night, instead of
camping. If they have news of your coming, they might. You can’t tell.”

“You’re right.” He caught her hand again. “I’ve got to be going now. But
Nance--Nance--Nancy, I want to stay here, here with you; or to take you
with me.”

She drew back. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Take me with
you--me--where?”

“East--away down East.”

Her brain throbbed, her pulses beat so hard. She scarcely knew what to
say, did not know what she said. “Why do you do this kind of thing? Why
do you smuggle?” she asked. “You wasn’t brought up to this.”

“To get this load of stuff through is life and death to me,” he
answered. “I’ve made six thousand dollars out here. That’s enough to
start me again in the East, where I lost everything. But I’ve got to
have six hundred dollars clear for the travel--railways and things; and
I’m having this last run to get it. Then I’ve finished with the West, I
guess. My health’s better; the lung is closed up, I’ve only got a little
cough now and again; and I’m off East. I don’t want to go alone.”
 He suddenly caught her in his arms. “I want you--you, to go with me,
Nancy--Nance!”

Her brain swam. To leave the West behind, to go East to a new life
full of pleasant things, as this man’s wife! Her great heart rose, and
suddenly the mother in her as well as the woman in her was captured by
his wooing. She had never known what it was to be wooed like this.

She was about to answer, when there came a sharp knock at the door
leading from the backyard, and Lambton’s Indian lad entered. “The
soldier--he come--many. I go over the ridge; I see. They come quick
here,” he said.

Nance gave a startled cry, and Lambton turned to the other room for his
pistols, overcoat, and cap, when there was the sound of horses’ hoofs,
the door suddenly opened, and an officer stepped inside.

“You’re wanted for smuggling, Lambton,” he said brusquely. “Don’t stir!”
 In his hand was a revolver.

“Oh, bosh! Prove it,” answered the young man, pale and startled, but
cool in speech and action. “We’ll prove it all right. The stuff is
hereabouts.” The girl said something to the officer in the Chinook
language. She saw he did not understand. Then she spoke quickly to
Lambton in the same tongue.

“Keep him here a bit,” she said. “His men haven’t come yet. Your outfit
is well hid. I’ll see if I can get away with it before they find it.
They’ll follow, and bring you with them, that’s sure. So if I have luck
and get through, we’ll meet at Dingan’s Drive.”

Lambton’s face brightened. He quickly gave her a few directions in
Chinook, and told her what to do at Dingan’s if she got there first.
Then she was gone. The officer did not understand what Nance had said,
but he realised that, whatever she intended to do, she had an advantage
over him. With an unnecessary courage he had ridden on alone to make his
capture, and, as it proved, without prudence. He had got his man, but he
had not got the smuggled whiskey and alcohol he had come to seize. There
was no time to be lost. The girl had gone before he realised it. What
had she said to the prisoner? He was foolish enough to ask Lambton, and
Lambton replied coolly: “She said she’d get you some supper, but she
guessed it would have to be cold--What’s your name? Are you a colonel,
or a captain, or only a principal private?”

“I am Captain MacFee, Lambton. And you’ll now bring me where your outfit
is. March!”

The pistol was still in his hand, and he had a determined look in
his eye. Lambton saw it. He was aware of how much power lay in the
threatening face before him, and how eager that power was to make itself
felt, and provide “Examples”; but he took his chances.

“I’ll march all right,” he answered, “but I’ll march to where you tell
me. You can’t have it both ways. You can take me, because you’ve found
me, and you can take my outfit too when you’ve found it; but I’m not
doing your work, not if I know it.”

There was a blaze of anger in the eyes of the officer, and it looked
for an instant as though something of the lawlessness of the border
was going to mark the first step of the Law in the Wilderness, but
he bethought himself in time, and said quietly, yet in a voice which
Lambton knew he must heed:

“Put on your things-quick.”

When this was accomplished, and MacFee had secured the smuggler’s
pistols, he said again, “March, Lambton.”

Lambton marched through the moonlit night towards the troop of men who
had come to set up the flag of order in the plains and hills, and as he
went his keen ear heard his own mules galloping away down towards
the Barfleur Coulee. His heart thumped in his breast. This girl, this
prairie-flower, was doing this for him, was risking her life, was
breaking the law for him. If she got through, and handed over the
whiskey to those who were waiting for it, and it got bundled into the
boats going North before the redcoats reached Dingan’s Drive, it would
be as fine a performance as the West had ever seen; and he would be six
hundred dollars to the good. He listened to the mules galloping, till
the sounds had died into the distance, but he saw now that his captor
had heard too, and that the pursuit would be desperate.

A half-hour later it began, with MacFee at the head, and a dozen
troopers pounding behind, weary, hungry, bad-tempered, ready to exact
payment for their hardships and discouragement.

They had not gone a dozen miles when a shouting horseman rode furiously
on them from behind. They turned with carbines cocked, but it was Abe
Hawley who cursed them, flung his fingers in their faces, and rode on
harder and harder. Abe had got the news from one of Nancy’s half-breeds,
and, with the devil raging in his heart, had entered on the chase.
His spirit was up against them all; against the Law represented by the
troopers camped at Fort Fair Desire, against the troopers and their
captain speeding after Nancy Machell--his Nonce, who was risking her
life and freedom for the hated, pale-faced smuggler riding between the
troopers; and his spirit was up against Nance herself.

Nance had said to him, “Come back in an hour,” and he had come back to
find her gone. She had broken her word. She had deceived him. She had
thrown the four years of his waiting to the winds, and a savage lust
was in his heart, which would not be appeased till he had done some evil
thing to someone.

The girl and the Indian lad were pounding through the night with ears
strained to listen for hoof-beats coming after, with eyes searching
forward into the trail for swollen creeks and direful obstructions.
Through Barfleur Coulee it was a terrible march, for there was no road,
and again and again they were nearly overturned, while wolves hovered
in their path, ready to reap a midnight harvest. But once in the open
again, with the full moonlight on their trail, the girl’s spirits rose.
If she could do this thing for the man who had looked into her eyes as
no one had ever done, what a finish to her days in the West! For they
were finished, finished for ever, and she was going--she was going East;
not West with Bantry, nor South with Nick Pringle, nor North with Abe
Hawley, ah, Abe Hawley, he had been a good friend, he had a great heart,
he was the best man of all the western men she had known; but another
man had come from the East, a man who had roused something in her never
felt before, a man who had said she was wonderful; and he needed someone
to take good care of him, to make him love life again. Abe would have
been all right if Lambton had never come, and she had meant to marry Abe
in the end; but it was different now, and Abe must get over it. Yet she
had told Abe to come back in an hour. He was sure to do it; and, when
he had done it, and found her gone on this errand, what would he do? She
knew what he would do. He would hurt someone. He would follow too. But
at Dingan’s Drive, if she reached it before the troopers and before Abe,
and did the thing she had set out to do; and, because no whiskey could
be found, Lambton must go free; and they all stood there together, what
would be the end? Abe would be terrible; but she was going East, not
North, and when the time came she would face it and put things right
somehow.

The night seemed endless to her fixed and anxious eyes and mind, yet
dawn came, and there had fallen no sound of hoof-beats on her ear. The
ridge above Dingan’s Drive was reached and covered, but yet there was
no sign of her pursuers. At Red Man’s River she delivered her load of
contraband to the traders waiting for it, and saw it loaded into the
boats and disappear beyond the wooded bend above Dingan’s.

Then she collapsed into the arms of her brother Bantry, and was carried,
fainting, into Dingan’s Lodge. A half-hour later MacFee and his troopers
and Lambton came. MacFee grimly searched the post and the shore, but
he saw by the looks of all that he had been foiled. He had no proof of
anything, and Lambton must go free.

“You’ve fooled us,” he said to Nance sourly, yet with a kind of
admiration too. “Through you they got away with it. But I wouldn’t try
it again, if I were you.”

“Once is enough,” answered the girl laconically, as Lambton, set free,
caught both her hands in his and whispered in her ear.

MacFee turned to the others. “You’d better drop this kind of thing,”
 he said. “I mean business.” They saw the troopers by the horses, and
nodded.

“Well, we was about quit of it anyhow,” said Bantry. “We’ve had all we
want out here.”

A loud laugh went up, and it was still ringing when there burst into the
group, out of the trail, Abe Hawley, on foot.

He looked round the group savagely till his eyes rested on Nance and
Lambton. “I’m last in,” he said in a hoarse voice. “My horse broke its
leg cutting across to get here before her--” He waved a hand towards
Nance. “It’s best stickin’ to old trails, not tryin’ new ones.” His eyes
were full of hate as he looked at Lambton. “I’m keeping to old
trails. I’m for goin’ North, far up, where these two-dollar-a-day and
hash-and-clothes people ain’t come yet.” He made a contemptuous gesture
toward MacFee and his troopers. “I’m goin’ North--” He took a step
forward and fixed his bloodshot eyes on Nance. “I say I’m goin’ North.
You comin’ with me, Nance?” He took off his cap to her.

He was haggard, his buckskins were torn, his hair was dishevelled, and
he limped a little; but he was a massive and striking figure, and MacFee
watched him closely, for there was that in his eyes which meant trouble.
“You said, ‘Come back in an hour,’ Nance, and I come back, as I said I
would,” he went on. “You didn’t stand to your word. I’ve come to git it.
I’m goin’ North, Nance, and I bin waitin’ for four years for you to go
with me. Are you comin’?”

His voice was quiet, but it had a choking kind of sound, and it struck
strangely in the ears of all. MacFee came nearer.

“Are you comin’ with me, Nance, dear?”

She reached a hand towards Lambton, and he took it, but she did not
speak. Something in Abe’s eyes overwhelmed her--something she had
never seen before, and it seemed to stifle speech in her. Lambton spoke
instead.

“She’s going East with me,” he said. “That’s settled.”

MacFee started. Then he caught Abe’s arm. “Wait!” he said peremptorily.
“Wait one minute.” There was something in his voice which held Abe back
for the instant.

“You say she is going East with you,” MacFee said sharply to Lambton.
“What for?” He fastened Lambton with his eyes, and Lambton quailed.
“Have you told her you’ve got a wife--down East? I’ve got your history,
Lambton. Have you told her that you’ve got a wife you married when you
were at college--and as good a girl as ever lived?”

It had come with terrible suddenness even to Lambton, and he was too
dazed to make any reply. With a cry of shame and anger Nancy started
back. Growling with rage and hate, Abe Hawley sprang toward Lambton, but
the master of the troopers stepped between.

No one could tell who moved first, or who first made the suggestion,
for the minds of all were the same, and the general purpose was
instantaneous; but in the fraction of a minute Lambton, under menace,
was on his hands and knees crawling to the riverside. Watchful, but not
interfering, the master of the troopers saw him set adrift in a canoe
without a paddle, while he was pelted with mud from the shore.

The next morning at sunrise Abe Hawley and the girl he had waited for so
long started on the North trail together, MacFee, master of the troopers
and justice of the peace, handing over the marriage lines.




THE STROBE OF THE HOUR

“They won’t come to-night--sure.”

The girl looked again towards the west, where, here and there, bare
poles, or branches of trees, or slips of underbrush marked a road made
across the plains through the snow. The sun was going down golden red,
folding up the sky a wide soft curtain of pink and mauve and deep purple
merging into the fathomless blue, where already the stars were beginning
to quiver. The house stood on the edge of a little forest, which had
boldly asserted itself in the wide flatness. At this point in the west
the prairie merged into an undulating territory, where hill and wood
rolled away from the banks of the Saskatchewan, making another England
in beauty. The forest was a sort of advance-post of that land of beauty.

Yet there was beauty too on this prairie, though there was nothing to
the east but snow and the forest so far as eye could see. Nobility and
peace and power brooded over the white world.

As the girl looked, it seemed as though the bosom of the land rose and
fell. She had felt this vibrating life beat beneath the frozen surface.
Now, as she gazed, she smiled sadly to herself, with drooping eyelids
looking out from beneath strong brows.

“I know you--I know you,” she said aloud. “You’ve got to take your toll.
And when you’re lying asleep like that, or pretending to, you reach
up-and kill. And yet you can be kind-ah, but you can be kind and
beautiful! But you must have your toll one way or t’other.” She sighed
and paused; then, after a moment, looking along the trail--“I don’t
expect they’ll come to-night, and mebbe not to-morrow, if--if they stay
for THAT.”

Her eyes closed, she shivered a little. Her lips drew tight, and her
face seemed suddenly to get thinner. “But dad wouldn’t--no, he couldn’t,
not considerin’--” Again she shut her eyes in pain.

Her face was now turned from the western road by which she had expected
her travellers, and towards the east, where already the snow was taking
on a faint bluish tint, a reflection of the sky deepening nightwards
in that half-circle of the horizon. Distant and a little bleak and
cheerless the half-circle was looking now.

“No one--not for two weeks,” she said, in comment on the eastern trail,
which was so little frequented in winter, and this year had been less
travelled than ever. “It would be nice to have a neighbour,” she added,
as she faced the west and the sinking sun again. “I get so lonely--just
minutes I get lonely. But it’s them minutes that seem to count more than
all the rest when they come. I expect that’s it--we don’t live in months
and years, but just in minutes. It doesn’t take long for an earthquake
to do its work--it’s seconds then.... P’r’aps dad won’t even come
to-morrow,” she added, as she laid her hand on the latch. “It never
seemed so long before, not even when he’s been away a week.” She laughed
bitterly. “Even bad company’s better than no company at all. Sure. And
Mickey has been here always when dad’s been away past times. Mickey was
a fool, but he was company; and mebbe he’d have been better company if
he’d been more of a scamp and less a fool. I dunno, but I really think
he would. Bad company doesn’t put you off so.”

There was a scratching at the inside of the door. “My, if I didn’t
forget Shako,” she said, “and he dying for a run!”

She opened the door quickly, and out jumped a Russian dog of almost full
breed, with big, soft eyes like those of his mistress, and with the air
of the north in every motion--like his mistress also.

“Come, Shako, a run--a run!”

An instant after she was flying off on a path towards the woods, her
short skirts flying and showing limbs as graceful and shapely as those
of any woman of that world of social grace which she had never seen; for
she was a prairie girl through and through, born on the plains and
fed on its scanty fare--scanty as to variety, at least. Backwards and
forwards they ran, the girl shouting like a child of ten,--she was
twenty-three, her eyes flashing, her fine white teeth showing, her hands
thrown up in sheer excess of animal life, her hair blowing about her
face-brown, strong hair, wavy and plentiful.

Fine creature as she was, her finest features were her eyes and her
hands. The eyes might have been found in the most savage places; the
hands, however, only could have come through breeding. She had got them
honestly; for her mother was descended from an old family of the French
province. That was why she had the name of Loisette--and had a touch of
distinction. It was the strain of the patrician in the full blood of the
peasant; but it gave her something which made her what she was--what she
had been since a child, noticeable and besought, sometimes beloved. It
was too strong a nature to compel love often, but it never failed to
compel admiration. Not greatly a creature of words, she had become moody
of late; and even now, alive with light and feeling and animal life, she
suddenly stopped her romp and run, and called the dog to her.

“Heel, Shako!” she said, and made for the door of the little house,
which looked so snug and home-like. She paused before she came to the
door, to watch the smoke curling up from the chimney straight as a
column, for there was not a breath of air stirring. The sun was almost
gone and the strong bluish light was settling on everything, giving even
the green spruce trees a curious burnished tone.

Swish! Thud! She faced the woods quickly. It was only a sound that she
had heard how many hundreds of times! It was the snow slipping from
some broad branch of the fir trees to the ground. Yet she started
now. Something was on her mind, agitating her senses, affecting her
self-control.

“I’ll be jumping out of my boots when the fire snaps, or the frost
cracks the ice, next,” she said aloud contemptuously. “I dunno what’s
the matter with me. I feel as if someone was hiding somewhere ready to
pop out on me. I haven’t never felt like that before.”

She had formed the habit of talking to herself, for it had seemed at
first, as she was left alone when her father went trapping or upon
journeys for the Government, that by and by she would start at the
sound of her own voice, if she didn’t think aloud. So she was given to
soliloquy, defying the old belief that people who talked to themselves
were going mad. She laughed at that. She said that birds sang to
themselves and didn’t go mad, and crickets chirruped, and frogs croaked,
and owls hooted, and she would talk and not go crazy either. So she
talked to herself and to Shako when she was alone.

How quiet it was inside when her light supper was eaten, bread and beans
and pea-soup--she had got this from her French mother. Now she sat, her
elbows on her knees, her chin on her hands, looking into the fire. Shako
was at her feet upon the great musk-ox rug, which her father had got on
one of his hunting trips in the Athabasca country years ago. It belonged
as she belonged. It breathed of the life of the north-land, for the
timbers of the hut were hewn cedar; the rough chimney, the seats, and
the shelves on which a few books made a fair show beside the bright tins
and the scanty crockery, were of pine; and the horned heads of deer and
wapiti made pegs for coats and caps, and rests for guns and rifles. It
was a place of comfort; it had an air of well-to-do thrift, even as the
girl’s dress, though plain, was made of good sound stuff, grey, with a
touch of dark red to match the auburn of her hair.

A book lay open in her lap, but she had scarcely tried to read it.
She had put it down after a few moments fixed upon it. It had sent her
thoughts off into a world where her life had played a part too big for
books, too deep for the plummet of any save those who had lived through
the storm of life’s trials; and life when it is bitter to the young is
bitter with an agony the old never know. At last she spoke to herself.

“She knows now. Now she knows what it is, how it feels--your heart like
red-hot coals, and something in your head that’s like a turnscrew, and
you want to die and can’t, for you’ve got to live and suffer.”

Again she was quiet, and only the dog’s heavy breathing, the snap of the
fire, or the crack of a timber in the deadly frost broke the silence.
Inside it was warm and bright and home-like; outside it was twenty
degrees below zero, and like some vast tomb where life itself was
congealed, and only the white stars, low, twinkling, and quizzical,
lived-a life of sharp corrosion, not of fire.

Suddenly she raised her head and listened. The dog did the same. None
but those whose lives are lived in lonely places can be so acute, so
sensitive to sound. It was a feeling delicate and intense, the whole
nature getting the vibration. You could have heard nothing had you been
there; none but one who was of the wide spaces could have done so. But
the dog and the woman felt, and both strained towards the window. Again
they heard, and started to their feet. It was far, far away, and still
you could not have heard; but now they heard clearly--a cry in the
night, a cry of pain and despair. The girl ran to the window and pulled
aside the bearskin curtain which had completely shut out the light. Then
she stirred the fire, threw a log upon it, snuffed the candles, hastily
put on her moccasins, fur coat, wool cap, and gloves, and went to the
door quickly, the dog at her heels. Opening it, she stepped out into the
night.

“Qui va la? Who is it? Where?” she called, and strained towards the
west. She thought it might be her father or Mickey the hired man, or
both.

The answer came from the east, out of the homeless, neighbourless, empty
east--a cry, louder now. There were only stars, and the night was dark,
though not deep dark. She sped along the prairie road as fast as she
could, once or twice stopping to call aloud. In answer to her calls the
voice sounded nearer and nearer. Now suddenly she left the trail and
bore away northward. At last the voice was very near. Presently a figure
appeared ahead, staggering towards her.

“Qui va la? Who is it?” she asked.

“Ba’tiste Caron,” was the reply in English, in a faint voice. She was
beside him in an instant.

“What has happened? Why are you off the trail?” she said, and supported
him.

“My Injun stoled my dogs and run off,” he replied. “I run after. Then,
when I am to come to the trail”--he paused to find the English word, and
could not--“encore to this trail I no can. So. Ah, bon Dieu, it has so
awful!” He swayed and would have fallen, but she caught him, bore him
up. She was so strong, and he was as slight as a girl, though tall.

“When was that?” she asked.

“Two nights ago,” he answered, and swayed. “Wait,” she said, and pulled
a flask from her pocket. “Drink this-quick.”

He raised it to his lips, but her hand was still on it, and she only let
him take a little. Then she drew it away, though she had almost to use
force, he was so eager for it. Now she took a biscuit from her pocket.

“Eat; then some more brandy after,” she urged. “Come on; it’s not far.
See, there’s the light,” she added cheerily, raising her head towards
the hut.

“I saw it just when I have fall down--it safe me. I sit down to
die--like that! But it safe me, that light--so. Ah, bon Dieu, it was so
far, and I want eat so!” Already he had swallowed the biscuit.

“When did you eat last?” she asked, as she urged him on.

“Two nights--except for one leetla piece of bread--O--O--I fin’ it in my
pocket. Grace! I have travel so far. Jesu, I think it ees ten thousan’
miles I go. But I mus’ go on, I mus’ go--O--certainement.”

The light came nearer and nearer. His footsteps quickened, though he
staggered now and then, and went like a horse that has run its race, but
is driven upon its course again, going heavily with mouth open and head
thrown forwards and down.

“But I mus’ to get there, an’ you-you will to help me, eh?”

Again he swayed, but her strong arm held him up. As they ran on, in a
kind of dog-trot, her hand firm upon his arm--he seemed not to notice
it--she became conscious, though it was half dark, of what sort of man
she had saved. He was about her own age, perhaps a year or two older,
with little, if any, hair upon his face, save a slight moustache. His
eyes, deep sunken as they were, she made out were black, and the face,
though drawn and famished, had a handsome look. Presently she gave him
another sip of brandy, and he quickened his steps, speaking to himself
the while.

“I haf to do it--if I lif. It is to go, go, go, till I get.”

Now they came to the hut where the firelight flickered on the
window-pane; the door was flung open, and, as he stumbled on the
threshold, she helped him into the warm room. She almost pushed him over
to the fire.

Divested of his outer coat, muffler, cap, and leggings, he sat on a
bench before the fire, his eyes wandering from the girl to the flames,
and his hands clasping and unclasping between his knees. His eyes
dilating with hunger, he watched her preparations for his supper; and
when at last--and she had been but a moment--it was placed before him,
his head swam, and he turned faint with the stress of his longing. He
would have swallowed a basin of pea-soup at a draught, but she stopped
him, holding the basin till she thought he might venture again. Then
came cold beans, and some meat which she toasted at the fire and laid
upon his plate. They had not spoken since first entering the house, when
tears had shone in his eyes, and he had said:

“You have safe--ah, you have safe me, and so I will do it yet by help
bon Dieu--yes.”

The meat was done at last, and he sat with a great dish of tea beside
him, and his pipe alight.

“What time, if please?” he asked. “I t’ink nine hour, but no sure.”

“It is near nine,” she said. She hastily tidied up the table after his
meal, and then came and sat in her chair over against the wall of the
rude fireplace. “Nine--dat is good. The moon rise at ‘leven; den I go. I
go on,” he said, “if you show me de queeck way.”

“You go on--how can you go on?” she asked, almost sharply.

“Will you not to show me?” he asked. “Show you what?” she asked
abruptly.

“The queeck way to Askatoon,” he said, as though surprised that she
should ask. “They say me if I get here you will tell me queeck way to
Askatoon. Time, he go so fas’, an’ I have loose a day an’ a night, an’
I mus’ get Askatoon if I lif--I mus’ get dere in time. It is all safe to
de stroke of de hour, mais, after, it is--bon Dieu--it is hell then. Who
shall forgif me--no!”

“The stroke of the hour--the stroke of the hour!” It beat into her
brain. Were they both thinking of the same thing now?

“You will show me queeck way. I mus’ be Askatoon in two days, or it is
all over,” he almost moaned. “Is no man here--I forget dat name, my head
go round like a wheel; but I know dis place, an’ de good God He help
me fin’ my way to where I call out, bien sur. Dat man’s name I have
forget.”

“My father’s name is John Alroyd,” she answered absently, for there were
hammering at her brain the words, “The stroke of the hour.”

“Ah, now I get--yes. An’ your name, it is Loisette Alroy’--ah, I have it
in my mind now--Loisette. I not forget dat name, I not forget you--no.”

“Why do you want to go the ‘quick’ way to Askatoon?” she asked.

He puffed a moment at his pipe before he answered her. Presently he
said, holding out his pipe, “You not like smoke, mebbe?”

She shook her head in negation, making an impatient gesture.

“I forget ask you,” he said. “Dat journee make me forget. When Injun
Jo, he leave me with the dogs, an’ I wake up all alone, an’ not know my
way--not like Jo, I think I die, it is so bad, so terrible in my head.
Not’ing but snow, not’ing. But dere is de sun; it shine. It say to me,
‘Wake up, Ba’tiste; it will be all right bime-bye.’ But all time I t’ink
I go mad, for I mus’ get Askatoon before--dat.”

She started. Had she not used the same word in thinking of Askatoon.
“That,” she had said.

“Why do you want to go the ‘quick’ way to Askatoon?” she asked again,
her face pale, her foot beating the floor impatiently.

“To save him before dat!” he answered, as though she knew of what he was
speaking and thinking. “What is that?” she asked. She knew now, surely,
but she must ask it nevertheless.

“Dat hanging--of Haman,” he answered. He nodded to himself. Then he took
to gazing into the fire. His lips moved as though talking to himself,
and the hand that held the pipe lay forgotten on his knee. “What have
you to do with Haman?” she asked slowly, her eyes burning.

“I want safe him--I mus’ give him free.” He tapped his breast. “It is
hereto mak’ him free.” He still tapped his breast.

For a moment she stood frozen still, her face thin and drawn and white;
then suddenly the blood rushed back into her face, and a red storm raged
in her eyes.

She thought of the sister, younger than herself, whom Rube Haman had
married and driven to her grave within a year--the sweet Lucy, with
the name of her father’s mother. Lucy had been all English in face and
tongue, a flower of the west, driven to darkness by this horse-dealing
brute, who, before he was arrested and tried for murder, was about to
marry Kate Wimper. Kate Wimper had stolen him from Lucy before Lucy’s
first and only child was born, the child that could not survive the
warm mother-life withdrawn, and so had gone down the valley whither the
broken-hearted mother had fled. It was Kate Wimper, who, before that,
had waylaid the one man for whom she herself had ever cared, and drawn
him from her side by such attractions as she herself would keep for an
honest wife, if such she ever chanced to be. An honest wife she would
have been had Kate Wimper not crossed the straight path of her life. The
man she had loved was gone to his end also, reckless and hopeless, after
he had thrown away his chance of a lifetime with Loisette Alroyd. There
had been left behind this girl, to whom tragedy had come too young,
who drank humiliation with a heart as proud as ever straightly set its
course through crooked ways.

It had hurt her, twisted her nature a little, given a fountain of
bitterness to her soul, which welled up and flooded her life sometimes.
It had given her face no sourness, but it put a shadow into her eyes.

She had been glad when Haman was condemned for murder, for she believed
he had committed it, and ten times hanging could not compensate for that
dear life gone from their sight--Lucy, the pride of her father’s heart.
She was glad when Haman was condemned, because of the woman who had
stolen him from Lucy, because of that other man, her lover, gone out of
her own life. The new hardness in her rejoiced that now the woman,
if she had any heart at all, must have it bowed down by this supreme
humiliation and wrung by the ugly tragedy of the hempen rope.

And now this man before her, this man with a boy’s face, with the dark
luminous eyes, whom she had saved from the frozen plains, he had that in
his breast which would free Haman, so he had said. A fury had its birth
in her at that moment. Something seemed to seize her brain and master
it, something so big that it held all her faculties in perfect control,
and she felt herself in an atmosphere where all life moved round her
mechanically, she herself the only sentient thing, so much greater
than all she saw, or all that she realised by her subconscious self.
Everything in the world seemed small. How calm it was even with the fury
within!

“Tell me,” she said quietly--“tell me how you are able to save Haman?”

“He not kill Wakely. It is my brudder Fadette dat kill and get away.
Haman he is drunk, and everyt’ing seem to say Haman he did it, an’
everyone know Haman is not friend to Wakely. So the juree say he must be
hanging. But my brudder he go to die with hawful bad cold queeck, an’ he
send for the priest an’ for me, an’ tell all. I go to Governor with the
priest, an’ Governor gif me dat writing here.” He tapped his breast,
then took out a wallet and showed the paper to her. “It is life of
dat Haman, voici! And so I safe him for my brudder. Dat was a bad boy,
Fadette. He was bad all time since he was a baby, an’ I t’ink him pretty
lucky to die on his bed, an’ get absolve, and go to purgatore. If he not
have luck like dat he go to hell, an’ stay there.”

He sighed, and put the wallet back in his breast carefully, his eyes
half-shut with weariness, his handsome face drawn and thin, his limbs
lax with fatigue.

“If I get Askatoon before de time for dat, I be happy in my heart, for
dat brudder off mine he get out of purgatore bime-bye, I t’ink.”

His eyes were almost shut, but he drew himself together with a great
effort, and added desperately, “No sleep. If I sleep it is all smash.
Man say me I can get Askatoon by dat time from here, if I go queeck way
across lak’--it is all froze now, dat lak’--an’ down dat Foxtail Hills.
Is it so, ma’m’selle?”

“By the ‘quick’ way if you can make it in time,” she said; “but it is no
way for the stranger to go. There are always bad spots on the ice--it is
not safe. You could not find your way.”

“I mus’ get dere in time,” he said desperately. “You can’t do
it--alone,” she said. “Do you want to risk all and lose?”

He frowned in self-suppression. “Long way, I no can get dere in time?”
 he asked.

She thought a moment. “No; it can’t be done by the long way. But there
is another way--a third trail, the trail the Gover’ment men made a year
ago when they came to survey. It is a good trail. It is blazed in the
woods and staked on the plains. You cannot miss. But--but there is so
little time.” She looked at the clock on the wall. “You cannot leave
here much before sunrise, and--”

“I will leef when de moon rise, at eleven,” he interjected.

“You have had no sleep for two nights, and no food. You can’t last it
out,” she said calmly.

The deliberate look on his face deepened to stubbornness.

“It is my vow to my brudder--he is in purgatore. An’ I mus’ do it,” he
rejoined, with an emphasis there was no mistaking. “You can show me dat
way?”

She went to a drawer and took out a piece of paper. Then, with a point
of blackened stick, as he watched her and listened, she swiftly drew his
route for him.

“Yes, I get it in my head,” he said. “I go dat way, but I wish--I wish
it was dat queeck way. I have no fear, not’ing. I go w’en dat moon
rise--I go, bien sur.”

“You must sleep, then, while I get some food for you.” She pointed to a
couch in a corner. “I will wake you when the moon rises.”

For the first time he seemed to realise her, for a moment to leave the
thing which consumed him, and put his mind upon her.

“You not happy--you not like me here?” he asked simply; then added
quickly, “I am not bad man like me brudder--no.”

Her eyes rested on him for a moment as though realising him, while some
thought was working in her mind behind.

“No, you are not a bad man,” she said. “Men and women are equal on the
plains. You have no fear--I have no fear.”

He glanced at the rifles on the walls, then back at her. “My mudder, she
was good woman. I am glad she did not lif to know what Fadette do.” His
eyes drank her in for a minute, then he said: “I go sleep now, t’ank
you--till moontime.”

In a moment his deep breathing filled the room, the only sound save for
the fire within and the frost outside.

Time went on. The night deepened.

        .........................

Loisette sat beside the fire, but her body was half-turned from it
towards the man on the sofa. She was not agitated outwardly, but within
there was that fire which burns up life and hope and all the things that
come between us and great issues. It had burned up everything in her
except one thought, one powerful motive. She had been deeply wronged,
and justice had been about to give “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth.” But the man lying there had come to sweep away the scaffolding
of justice--he had come for that.

Perhaps he might arrive at Askatoon before the stroke of the hour, but
still he would be too late, for in her pocket now was the Governor’s
reprieve. The man had slept soundly. His wallet was still in his breast;
but the reprieve was with her.

If he left without discovering his loss, and got well on his way, and
discovered it then, it would be too late. If he returned--she only saw
one step before her, she would wait for that, and deal with it when it
came. She was thinking of Lucy, of her own lover ruined and gone. She
was calm in her madness.

At the first light of the moon she roused him. She had put food into his
fur-coat pocket, and after he had drunk a bowl of hot pea-soup, while
she told him his course again, she opened the door, and he passed out
into the night. He started forward without a word, but came back again
and caught her hand.

“Pardon,” he said; “I go forget everyt’ing except dat. But I t’ink what
you do for me, it is better than all my life. Bien sur, I will come
again, when I get my mind to myself. Ah, but you are beautibul,” he
said, “an’ you not happy. Well, I come again--yes, a Dieu.”

He was gone into the night, with the moon silvering the sky, and the
steely frost eating into the sentient life of this northern world.
Inside the house, with the bearskin blind dropped at the window again,
and the fire blazing high, Loisette sat with the Governor’s reprieve in
her hand. Looking at it, she wondered why it had been given to Ba’tiste
Caron, and not to a police-officer. Ah yes, it was plain--Ba’tiste was
a woodsman and plainsman, and could go far more safely than a constable,
and faster. Ba’tiste had reason for going fast, and he would travel
night and day--he was travelling night and day indeed. And now Ba’tiste
might get there, but the reprieve would not. He would not be able to
stop the hanging of Haman--the hanging of Rube Haman.

A change came over her. Her eyes blazed, her breast heaved now. She had
been so quiet, so cold and still. But life seemed moving in her once
again. The woman, Kate Wimper, who had helped to send two people to
their graves, would now drink the dregs of shame, if she was capable of
shame--would be robbed of her happiness, if so be she loved Rube Haman.

She stood up, as though to put the paper in the fire, but paused
suddenly at one thought--Rube Haman was innocent of murder.

Even so, he was not innocent of Lucy’s misery and death, of the death of
the little one who only opened its eyes to the light for an instant, and
then went into the dark again. But truly she was justified! When Haman
was gone things would go on just the same--and she had been so bitter,
her heart had been pierced as with a knife these past three years. Again
she held out her hand to the fire, but suddenly she gave a little cry
and put her hand to her head. There was Ba’tiste!

What was Ba’tiste to her? Nothing-nothing at all. She had saved his
life--even if she wronged Ba’tiste, her debt would be paid. No, she
would not think of Ba’tiste. Yet she did not put the paper in the fire,
but in the pocket of her dress. Then she went to her room, leaving the
door open. The bed was opposite the fire, and, as she lay there--she did
not take off her clothes, she knew not why-she could see the flames. She
closed her eyes, but could not sleep, and more than once when she opened
them she thought she saw Ba’tiste sitting there as he had sat hours
before. Why did Ba’tiste haunt her so? What was it he had said in his
broken English as he went away?--that he would come back; that she was
“beautibul.”

All at once as she lay still, her head throbbing, her feet and hands icy
cold, she sat up listening. “Ah-again!” she cried. She sprang from her
bed, rushed to the door, and strained her eyes into the silver night.
She called into the icy void, “Qui va la? Who goes?”

She leaned forwards, her hand at her ear, but no sound came in reply.
Once more she called, but nothing answered. The night was all light and
frost and silence.

She had only heard, in her own brain, the iteration of Ba’tiste’s
calling. Would he reach Askatoon in time, she wondered, as she shut the
door? Why had she not gone with him and attempted the shorter way the
quick way, he had called it? All at once the truth came back upon her,
stirring her now. It would do no good for Ba’tiste to arrive in time.
He might plead to them all and tell the truth about the reprieve, but it
would not avail--Rube Haman would hang. That did not matter--even though
he was innocent; but Ba’tiste’s brother would be so long in
purgatory. And even that would not matter; but she would hurt
Ba’tiste--Ba’tiste--Ba’tiste. And Ba’tiste he would know that she--and
he had called her “beautibul,” that she had--

With a cry she suddenly clothed herself for travel. She put some food
and drink in a leather bag and slung them over her shoulder. Then she
dropped on a knee and wrote a note to her father, tears falling from
her eyes. She heaped wood on the fire and moved towards the door. All
at once she turned to the crucifix on the wall which had belonged to her
mother, and, though she had followed her father’s Protestant religion,
she kissed the feet of the sacred figure.

“Oh, Christ, have mercy on me, and bring me safe to my journey’s end-in
time,” she said breathlessly; then she went softly to the door, leaving
the dog behind.

It opened, closed, and the night swallowed her. Like a ghost she sped
the quick way to Askatoon. She was six hours behind Ba’tiste, and, going
hard all the time, it was doubtful if she could get there before the
fatal hour.

On the trail Ba’tiste had taken there were two huts where he could rest,
and he had carried his blanket slung on his shoulder. The way she went
gave no shelter save the trees and caves which had been used to cache
buffalo meat and hides in old days. But beyond this there was danger in
travelling by night, for the springs beneath the ice of the three lakes
she must, cross made it weak and rotten even in the fiercest weather,
and what would no doubt have been death to Ba’tiste would be peril at
least to her. Why had she not gone with him?

“He had in his face what was in Lucy’s,” she said to herself, as she
sped on. “She was fine like him, ready to break her heart for those she
cared for. My, if she had seen him first instead of--”

She stopped short, for the ice gave way to her foot, and she only sprang
back in time to save herself. But she trotted on, mile after mile,
the dog-trot of the Indian, head bent forwards, toeing in, breathing
steadily but sharply.

The morning came, noon, then a fall of snow and a keen wind, and despair
in her heart; but she had passed the danger-spots, and now, if the storm
did not overwhelm her, she might get to Askatoon in time. In the midst
of the storm she came to one of the caves of which she had known. Here
was wood for a fire, and here she ate, and in weariness unspeakable fell
asleep. When she waked it was near sun-down, the storm had ceased, and,
as on the night before, the sky was stained with colour and drowned in
splendour.

“I will do it--I will do it, Ba’tiste!” she called, and laughed aloud
into the sunset. She had battled with herself all the way, and she had
conquered. Right was right, and Rube Haman must not be hung for what he
did not do. Her heart hardened whenever she thought of the woman, but
softened again when she thought of Ba’tiste, who had to suffer for the
deed of a brother in “purgatore.” Once again the night and its silence
and loneliness followed her, the only living thing near the trail till
long after midnight. After that, as she knew, there were houses here and
there where she might have rested, but she pushed on unceasing.

At daybreak she fell in with a settler going to Askatoon with his dogs.
Seeing how exhausted she was, he made her ride a few miles upon his
sledge; then she sped on ahead again till she came to the borders of
Askatoon.

People were already in the streets, and all were tending one way. She
stopped and asked the time. It was within a quarter of an hour of the
time when Haman was to pay another’s penalty. She spurred herself on,
and came to the jail blind with fatigue. As she neared the jail she saw
her father and Mickey. In amazement her father hailed her, but she would
not stop. She was admitted to the prison on explaining that she had a
reprieve. Entering a room filled with excited people, she heard a cry.

It came from Ba’tiste. He had arrived but ten minutes before, and, in
the Sheriff’s presence had discovered his loss. He had appealed in vain.

But now, as he saw the girl, he gave a shout of joy which pierced the
hearts of all.

“Ah, you haf it! Say you haf it, or it is no use--he mus’ hang.
Spik-spik! Ah, my brudder--it is to do him right! Ah, Loisette--bon
Dieu, merci!”

For answer she placed the reprieve in the hands of the Sheriff. Then she
swayed and fell fainting at the feet of Ba’tiste.

She had come at the stroke of the hour.

When she left for her home again the Sheriff kissed her.

And that was not the only time he kissed her. He did it again six months
later, at the beginning of the harvest, when she and Ba’tiste Caron
started off on the long trail of life together. None but Ba’tiste knew
the truth about the loss of the reprieve, and to him she was “beautibul”
 just the same, and greatly to be desired.




BUCKMASTER’S BOY

“I bin waitin’ for him, an’ I’ll git him of it takes all winter. I’ll
git him--plumb.”

The speaker smoothed the barrel of his rifle with mittened hand, which
had, however, a trigger-finger free. With black eyebrows twitching over
sunken grey eyes, he looked doggedly down the frosty valley from the
ledge of high rock where he sat. The face was rough and weather-beaten,
with the deep tan got in the open life of a land of much sun and little
cloud, and he had a beard which, untrimmed and growing wild, made him
look ten years older than he was.

“I bin waitin’ a durn while,” the mountain-man added, and got to
his feet slowly, drawing himself out to six and a half feet of burly
manhood. The shoulders were, however, a little stooped, and the head was
thrust forwards with an eager, watchful look--a habit become a physical
characteristic.

Presently he caught sight of a hawk sailing southward along the peaks
of the white icebound mountains above, on which the sun shone with such
sharp insistence, making sky and mountain of a piece in deep purity and
serene stillness.

“That hawk’s seen him, mebbe,” he said, after a moment. “I bet it went
up higher when it got him in its eye. Ef it’d only speak and tell me
where he is--ef he’s a day, or two days, or ten days north.”

Suddenly his eyes blazed and his mouth opened in superstitious
amazement, for the hawk stopped almost directly overhead at a great
height, and swept round in a circle many times, waveringly, uncertainly.
At last it resumed its flight southward, sliding down the mountains like
a winged star.

The mountaineer watched it with a dazed expression for a moment longer,
then both hands clutched the rifle and half swung it to position
involuntarily.

“It’s seen him, and it stopped to say so. It’s seen him, I tell you, an’
I’ll git him. Ef it’s an hour, or a day, or a week, it’s all the same.
I’m here watchin’, waitin’ dead on to him, the poison skunk!”

The person to whom he had been speaking now rose from the pile of cedar
boughs where he had been sitting, stretched his arms up, then shook
himself into place, as does a dog after sleep. He stood for a minute
looking at the mountaineer with a reflective, yet a furtively sardonic,
look. He was not above five feet nine inches in height, and he was slim
and neat; and though his buckskin coat and breeches were worn and even
frayed in spots, he had an air of some distinction and of concentrated
force. It was a face that men turned to look at twice and shook their
heads in doubt afterwards--a handsome, worn, secretive face, in as
perfect control as the strings of an instrument under the bow of a great
artist. It was the face of a man without purpose in life beyond the
moment--watchful, careful, remorselessly determined, an adventurer’s
asset, the dial-plate of a hidden machinery.

Now he took the handsome meerschaum pipe from his mouth, from which he
had been puffing smoke slowly, and said in a cold, yet quiet voice, “How
long you been waitin’, Buck?”

“A month. He’s overdue near that. He always comes down to winter at Fort
o’ Comfort, with his string of half-breeds, an’ Injuns, an’ the dogs.”

“No chance to get him at the Fort?”

“It ain’t so certain. They’d guess what I was doin’ there. It’s surer
here. He’s got to come down the trail, an’ when I spot him by the
Juniper clump”--he jerked an arm towards a spot almost a mile farther up
the valley--“I kin scoot up the underbrush a bit and git him--plumb.
I could do it from here, sure, but I don’t want no mistake. Once only,
jest one shot, that’s all I want, Sinnet.”

He bit off a small piece of tobacco from a black plug Sinnet offered
him, and chewed it with nervous fierceness, his eyebrows working, as
he looked at the other eagerly. Deadly as his purpose was, and grim and
unvarying as his vigil had been, the loneliness had told on him, and he
had grown hungry for a human face and human companionship. Why Sinnet
had come he had not thought to inquire. Why Sinnet should be going north
instead of south had not occurred to him. He only realised that Sinnet
was not the man he was waiting for with murder in his heart; and all
that mattered to him in life was the coming of his victim down the
trail. He had welcomed Sinnet with a sullen eagerness, and had told him
in short, detached sentences the dark story of a wrong and a waiting
revenge, which brought a slight flush to Sinnet’s pale face and awakened
a curious light in his eyes.

“Is that your shack--that where you shake down?” Sinnet said, pointing
towards a lean-to in the fir trees to the right.

“That’s it. I sleep there. It’s straight on to the Juniper clump, the
front door is.” He laughed viciously, grimly. “Outside or inside, I’m on
to the Juniper clump. Walk into the parlour?” he added, and drew open a
rough-made door, so covered with green cedar boughs that it seemed of a
piece with the surrounding underbrush and trees. Indeed, the little but
was so constructed that it could not be distinguished from the woods
even a short distance away.

“Can’t have a fire, I suppose?” Sinnet asked.

“Not daytimes. Smoke ‘d give me away if he suspicioned me,” answered the
mountaineer. “I don’t take no chances. Never can tell.”

“Water?” asked Sinnet, as though interested in the surroundings, while
all the time he was eyeing the mountaineer furtively--as it were, prying
to the inner man, or measuring the strength of the outer man. He lighted
a fresh pipe and seated himself on a rough bench beside the table in the
middle of the room, and leaned on his elbows, watching.

The mountaineer laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh to hear. “Listen,”
 he said. “You bin a long time out West. You bin in the mountains a good
while. Listen.”

There was silence. Sinnet listened intently. He heard the faint drip,
drip, drip of water, and looked steadily at the back wall of the room.

“There--rock?” he said, and jerked his head towards the sound.

“You got good ears,” answered the other, and drew aside a blanket which
hung on the back wall of the room. A wooden trough was disclosed hanging
under a ledge of rock, and water dripped into it softly, slowly.

“Almost providential, that rock,” remarked Sinnet. “You’ve got your well
at your back door. Food--but you can’t go far, and keep your eye on
the Bend too,” he nodded towards the door, beyond which lay the
frost-touched valley in the early morning light of autumn.

“Plenty of black squirrels and pigeons come here on account of the
springs like this one, and I get ‘em with a bow and arrow. I didn’t call
myself Robin Hood and Daniel Boone not for nothin’ when I was knee-high
to a grasshopper.” He drew from a rough cupboard some cold game, and
put it on the table, with some scones and a pannikin of water. Then he
brought out a small jug of whiskey and placed it beside his visitor.
They began to eat.

“How d’ye cook without fire?” asked Sinnet. “Fire’s all right at nights.
He’d never camp ‘twixt here an’ Juniper Bend at night. The next camp’s
six miles north from here. He’d only come down the valley daytimes. I
studied it ‘all out, and it’s a dead sure thing. From daylight till dusk
I’m on to him. I got the trail in my eye.”

He showed his teeth like a wild dog, as his look swept the valley. There
was something almost revolting in his concentrated ferocity.

Sinnet’s eyes half closed as he watched the mountaineer, and the long,
scraggy hands and whipcord neck seemed to interest him greatly. He
looked at his own slim brown hands with a half smile, and it was almost
as cruel as the laugh of the other. Yet it had, too, a knowledge and an
understanding which gave it humanity.

“You’re sure he did it?” Sinnet asked presently, after drinking a very
small portion of liquor, and tossing some water from the pannikin after
it. “You’re sure Greevy killed your boy, Buck?”

“My name’s Buckmaster, ain’t it--Jim Buckmaster? Don’t I know my own
name? It’s as sure as that. My boy said it was Greevy when he was dying.
He told Bill Ricketts so, and Bill told me afore he went East. Bill
didn’t want to tell, but he said it was fair I should know, for my boy
never did nobody any harm--an’ Greevy’s livin’ on. But I’ll git him.
Right’s right.”

“Wouldn’t it be better for the law to hang him, if you’ve got the proof,
Buck? A year or so in jail, an’ a long time to think over what’s going
round his neck on the scaffold--wouldn’t that suit you, if you’ve got
the proof?”

A rigid, savage look came into Buckmaster’s face.

“I ain’t lettin’ no judge and jury do my business. I’m for certain sure,
not for p’r’aps! An’ I want to do it myself. Clint was only twenty. Like
boys we was together. I was eighteen when I married, an’ he come
when she went--jest a year--jest a year. An’ ever since then we lived
together, him an’ me, an’ shot together, an’ trapped together, an’ went
gold-washin’ together on the Cariboo, an’ eat out of the same dish, an’
slept under the same blanket, and jawed together nights--ever since he
was five, when old Mother Lablache had got him into pants, an’ he was
fit to take the trail.”

The old man stopped a minute, his whipcord neck swelling, his lips
twitching. He brought a fist down on the table with a bang. “The
biggest little rip he was, as full of fun as a squirrel, an’ never a
smile-o-jest his eyes dancin’, an’ more sense than a judge. He laid hold
o’ me, that cub did--it was like his mother and himself together; an’
the years flowin’ in an’ peterin’ out, an’ him gettin’ older, an’ always
jest the same. Always on rock-bottom, always bright as a dollar, an’ we
livin’ at Black Nose Lake, layin’ up cash agin’ the time we was to go
South, an’ set up a house along the railway, an’ him to git married. I
was for his gittin’ married same as me, when we had enough cash. I use
to think of that when he was ten, and when he was eighteen I spoke to
him about it; but he wouldn’t listen--jest laughed at me. You remember
how Clint used to laugh sort of low and teasin’ like--you remember that
laugh o’ Clint’s, don’t you?”

Sinnet’s face was towards the valley and Juniper Bend, but he slowly
turned his head and looked at Buckmaster strangely out of his half-shut
eyes. He took the pipe from his mouth slowly.

“I can hear it now,” he answered slowly. “I hear it often, Buck.”

The old man gripped his arm so suddenly that Sinnet was startled,--in so
far as anything could startle anyone who had lived a life of chance and
danger and accident, and his face grew a shade paler; but he did not
move, and Buckmaster’s hand tightened convulsively.

“You liked him, an’ he liked you; he first learnt poker off you, Sinnet.
He thought you was a tough, but he didn’t mind that no more than I did.
It ain’t for us to say what we’re goin’ to be, not always. Things in
life git stronger than we are. You was a tough, but who’s goin’ to judge
you! I ain’t; for Clint took to you, Sinnet, an’ he never went wrong
in his thinkin’. God! he was wife an’ child to me--an’ he’s
dead--dead--dead.”

The man’s grief was a painful thing to see. His hands gripped the table,
while his body shook with sobs, though his eyes gave forth no tears.
It was an inward convulsion, which gave his face the look of unrelieved
tragedy and suffering--Laocoon struggling with the serpents of sorrow
and hatred which were strangling him.

“Dead an’ gone,” he repeated, as he swayed to and fro, and the table
quivered in his grasp. Presently, however, as though arrested by a
thought, he peered out of the doorway towards Juniper Bend. “That hawk
seen him--it seen him. He’s comin’, I know it, an’ I’ll git him--plumb.”
 He had the mystery and imagination of the mountain-dweller.

The rifle lay against the wall behind him, and he turned and touched
it almost caressingly. “I ain’t let go like this since he was killed,
Sinnet. It don’t do. I got to keep myself stiddy to do the trick when
the minute comes. At first I usen’t to sleep at nights, thinkin’ of
Clint, an’ missin’ him, an’ I got shaky and no good. So I put a cinch
on myself, an’ got to sleepin’ again--from the full dusk to dawn, for
Greevy wouldn’t take the trail at night. I’ve kept stiddy.” He held out
his hand as though to show that it was firm and steady, but it trembled
with the emotion which had conquered him. He saw it, and shook his head
angrily.

“It was seein’ you, Sinnet. It burst me. I ain’t seen no one to speak to
in a month, an’ with you sittin’ there, it was like Clint an’ me cuttin’
and comin’ again off the loaf an’ the knuckle-bone of ven’son.”

Sinnet ran a long finger slowly across his lips, and seemed meditating
what he should say to the mountaineer. At length he spoke, looking into
Buckmaster’s face. “What was the story Ricketts told you? What did your
boy tell Ricketts? I’ve heard, too, about it, and that’s why I asked
you if you had proofs that Greevy killed Clint. Of course, Clint should
know, and if he told Ricketts, that’s pretty straight; but I’d like
to know if what I heard tallies with what Ricketts heard from Clint.
P’r’aps it’d ease your mind a bit to tell it. I’ll watch the Bend--don’t
you trouble about that. You can’t do these two things at one time. I’ll
watch for Greevy; you give me Clint’s story to Ricketts. I guess you
know I’m feelin’ for you, an’ if I was in your place I’d shoot the man
that killed Clint, if it took ten years. I’d have his heart’s blood--all
of it. Whether Greevy was in the right or in the wrong, I’d have
him--plumb.”

Buckmaster was moved. He gave a fierce exclamation and made a gesture of
cruelty. “Clint right or wrong? There ain’t no question of that. My boy
wasn’t the kind to be in the wrong. What did he ever do but what was
right? If Clint was in the wrong I’d kill Greevy jest the same, for
Greevy robbed him of all the years that was before him--only a sapling
he was, an’ all his growin’ to do, all his branches to widen an’ his
roots to spread. But that don’t enter in it, his bein’ in the wrong.
It was a quarrel, and Clint never did Greevy any harm. It was a quarrel
over cards, an’ Greevy was drunk, an’ followed Clint out into the
prairie in the night and shot him like a coyote. Clint hadn’t no chance,
an’ he jest lay there on the ground till morning, when Ricketts and
Steve Joicey found him. An’ Clint told Ricketts who it was.”

“Why didn’t Ricketts tell it right out at once?” asked Sinnet.

“Greevy was his own cousin--it was in the family, an’ he kept thinkin’
of Greevy’s gal, Em’ly. Her--what’ll it matter to her! She’ll get
married, an she’ll forgit. I know her, a gal that’s got no deep feelin’
like Clint had for me. But because of her Ricketts didn’t speak for a
year. Then he couldn’t stand it any longer, an’ he told me--seein’ how I
suffered, an’ everybody hidin’ their suspicions from me, an’ me up here
out o’ the way, an’ no account. That was the feelin’ among ‘em--what was
the good of making things worse! They wasn’t thinkin’ of the boy or of
Jim Buckmaster, his father. They was thinkin’ of Greevy’s gal--to save
her trouble.”

Sinnet’s face was turned towards Juniper Bend, and the eyes were
fixed, as it were, on a still more distant object--a dark, brooding,
inscrutable look.

“Was that all Ricketts told you, Buck?” The voice was very quiet, but it
had a suggestive note.

“That’s all Clint told Bill before he died. That was enough.”

There was a moment’s pause, and then, puffing out long clouds of smoke,
and in a tone of curious detachment, as though he were telling of
something that he saw now in the far distance, or as a spectator of a
battle from a far vantage-point might report to a blind man standing
near, Sinnet said:

“P’r’aps Ricketts didn’t know the whole story; p’r’aps Clint didn’t know
it all to tell him; p’r’aps Clint didn’t remember it all. P’r’aps he
didn’t remember anything except that he and Greevy quarrelled, and that
Greevy and he shot at each other in the prairie. He’d only be thinking
of the thing that mattered most to him--that his life was over, an’ that
a man had put a bullet in him, an’--”

Buckmaster tried to interrupt him, but he waved a hand impatiently, and
continued: “As I say, maybe he didn’t remember everything; he had
been drinkin’ a bit himself, Clint had. He wasn’t used to liquor, and
couldn’t stand much. Greevy was drunk, too, and gone off his head with
rage. He always gets drunk when he first comes South to spend the winter
with his girl Em’ly.” He paused a moment, then went on a little more
quickly. “Greevy was proud of her--couldn’t even bear her being crossed
in any way; and she has a quick temper, and if she quarrelled with
anybody Greevy quarrelled too.”

“I don’t want to know anything about her,” broke in Buckmaster roughly.
“She isn’t in this thing. I’m goin’ to git Greevy. I bin waitin’ for
him, an’ I’ll git him.”

“You’re going to kill the man that killed your boy, if you can, Buck;
but I’m telling my story in my own way. You told Ricketts’s story; I’ll
tell what I’ve heard. And before you kill Greevy you ought to know all
there is that anybody else knows--or suspicions about it.”

“I know enough. Greevy done it, an’ I’m here.” With no apparent
coherence and relevancy Sinnet continued, but his voice was not so
even as before. “Em’ly was a girl that wasn’t twice alike. She was
changeable. First it was one, then it was another, and she didn’t seem
to be able to fix her mind. But that didn’t prevent her leadin’ men on.
She wasn’t changeable, though, about her father. She was to him what
your boy was to you. There she was like you, ready to give everything up
for her father.”

“I tell y’ I don’t want to hear about her,” said Buckmaster, getting to
his feet and setting his jaws. “You needn’t talk to me about her.
She’ll git over it. I’ll never git over what Greevy done to me or to
Clint--jest twenty, jest twenty! I got my work to do.”

He took his gun from the wall, slung it into the hollow of his arm, and
turned to look up the valley through the open doorway.

The morning was sparkling with life--the life and vigour which a touch
of frost gives to the autumn world in a country where the blood tingles
to the dry, sweet sting of the air. Beautiful, and spacious, and
buoyant, and lonely, the valley and the mountains seemed waiting, like a
new-born world, to be peopled by man. It was as though all had been made
ready for him--the birds whistling and singing in the trees, the whisk
of the squirrels leaping from bough to bough, the peremptory sound of
the woodpecker’s beak against the bole of a tree, the rustle of the
leaves as a wood-hen ran past--a waiting, virgin world.

Its beauty and its wonderful dignity had no appeal to Buckmaster. His
eyes and mind were fixed on a deed which would stain the virgin wild
with the ancient crime that sent the first marauder on human life into
the wilderness.

As Buckmaster’s figure darkened the doorway Sinnet seemed to waken as
from a dream, and he got swiftly to his feet.

“Wait--you wait, Buck. You’ve got to hear all. You haven’t heard my
story yet. Wait, I tell you.” His voice was so sharp and insistent, so
changed, that Buckmaster turned from the doorway and came back into the
room.

“What’s the use of my hearin’? You want me not to kill Greevy, because
of that gal. What’s she to me?”

“Nothing to you, Buck, but Clint was everything to her.”

The mountaineer stood like one petrified.

“What’s that--what’s that you say? It’s a damn lie!”

“It wasn’t cards--the quarrel, not the real quarrel. Greevy found Clint
kissing her. Greevy wanted her to marry Gatineau, the lumber-king. That
was the quarrel.”

A snarl was on the face of Buckmaster. “Then she’ll not be sorry when
I git him. It took Clint from her as well as from me.” He turned to
the door again. “But, wait, Buck, wait one minute and hear--” He was
interrupted by a low, exultant growl, and he saw Buckmaster’s rifle
clutched as a hunter, stooping, clutches his gun to fire on his prey.

“Quick, the spy-glass!” he flung back at Sinnet. “It’s him--but I’ll
make sure.”

Sinnet caught the telescope from the nails where it hung, and looked out
towards Juniper Bend. “It’s Greevy--and his girl, and the half-breeds,”
 he said, with a note in his voice that almost seemed agitation, and yet
few had ever seen Sinnet agitated. “Em’ly must have gone up the trail in
the night.”

“It’s my turn now,” the mountaineer said hoarsely, and, stooping, slid
away quickly into the undergrowth. Sinnet followed, keeping near him,
neither speaking. For a half mile they hastened on, and now and then
Buckmaster drew aside the bushes, and looked up the valley, to keep
Greevy and his bois brulees in his eye. Just so had he and his son and
Sinnet stalked the wapiti and the red deer along these mountains; but
this was a man that Buckmaster was stalking now, with none of the joy
of the sport which had been his since a lad; only the malice of the
avenger. The lust of a mountain feud was on him; he was pursuing the
price of blood.

At last Buckmaster stopped at a ledge of rock just above the trail.
Greevy would pass below, within three hundred yards of his rifle. He
turned to Sinnet with cold and savage eyes. “You go back,” he said.
“It’s my business. I don’t want you to see. You don’t want to see, then
you won’t know, and you won’t need to lie. You said that the man that
killed Clint ought to die. He’s going to die, but it’s none o’ your
business. I want to be alone. In a minute he’ll be where I kin git
him--plumb. You go, Sinnet-right off. It’s my business.”

There was a strange, desperate look in Sinnet’s face; it was as hard as
stone, but his eyes had a light of battle in them.

“It’s my business right enough, Buck,” he said, “and you’re not going to
kill Greevy. That girl of his has lost her lover, your boy. It’s broke
her heart almost, and there’s no use making her an orphan too. She can’t
stand it. She’s had enough. You leave her father alone--you hear me, let
up!” He stepped between Buckmaster and the ledge of rock from which the
mountaineer was to take aim.

There was a terrible look in Buckmaster’s face. He raised his
single-barrelled rifle, as though he would shoot Sinnet; but, at the
moment, he remembered that a shot would warn Greevy, and that he might
not have time to reload. He laid his rifle against a tree swiftly.

“Git away from here,” he said, with a strange rattle in his throat. “Git
away quick; he’ll be down past here in a minute.”

Sinnet pulled himself together as he saw Buckmaster snatch at a great
clasp-knife in his belt. He jumped and caught Buckmaster’s wrist in a
grip like a vice.

“Greevy didn’t kill him, Buck,” he said. But the mountaineer was gone
mad, and did not grasp the meaning of the words. He twined his left arm
round the neck of Sinnet, and the struggle began, he fighting to free
Sinnet’s hand from his wrist, to break Sinnet’s neck. He did not realise
what he was doing. He only knew that this man stood between him and the
murderer of his boy, and all the ancient forces of barbarism were alive
in him. Little by little they drew to the edge of the rock, from which
there was a sheer drop of two hundred feet. Sinnet fought like a panther
for safety, but no sane man’s strength could withstand the demoniacal
energy that bent and crushed him. Sinnet felt his strength giving. Then
he said in a hoarse whisper, “Greevy didn’t kill him. I killed him,
and--”

At that moment he was borne to the ground with a hand on his throat, and
an instant after the knife went home.

Buckmaster got to his feet and looked at his victim for an instant,
dazed and wild; then he sprang for his gun. As he did so the words that
Sinnet had said as they struggled rang in his ears, “Greevy didn’t kill
him; I killed him!”

He gave a low cry and turned back towards Sinnet, who lay in a pool of
blood.

Sinnet was speaking. He went and stooped over him. “Em’ly threw me over
for Clint,” the voice said huskily, “and I followed to have it out with
Clint. So did Greevy, but Greevy was drunk. I saw them meet. I was hid.
I saw that Clint would kill Greevy, and I fired. I was off my head--I’d
never cared for any woman before, and Greevy was her father. Clint was
off his head too. He had called me names that day--a cardsharp, and a
liar, and a thief, and a skunk, he called me, and I hated him just then.
Greevy fired twice wide. He didn’t know but what he killed Clint, but he
didn’t. I did. So I tried to stop you, Buck--”

Life was going fast, and speech failed him; but he opened his eyes again
and whispered, “I didn’t want to die, Buck. I am only thirty-five, and
it’s too soon; but it had to be. Don’t look that way, Buck. You got the
man that killed him--plumb. But Em’ly didn’t play fair with me--made a
fool of me, the only time in my life I ever cared for a woman. You leave
Greevy alone, Buck, and tell Em’ly for me I wouldn’t let you kill her
father.”

“You--Sinnet--you, you done it! Why, he’d have fought for you. You--done
it--to him--to Clint!” Now that the blood-feud had been satisfied, a
great change came over the mountaineer. He had done his work, and the
thirst for vengeance was gone. Greevy he had hated, but this man had
been with him in many a winter’s hunt. His brain could hardly grasp the
tragedy--it had all been too sudden.

Suddenly he stooped down. “Sinnet,” he said, “ef there was a woman in
it, that makes all the difference. Sinnet, of--”

But Sinnet was gone upon a long trail that led into an illimitable
wilderness. With a moan the old man ran to the ledge of rock. Greevy and
his girl were below.

“When there’s a woman in it--!” he said, in a voice of helplessness
and misery, and watched Em’ly till she disappeared from view. Then he
turned, and, lifting up in his arms the man he had killed, carried him
into the deeper woods.




TO-MORROW

“My, nothing’s the matter with the world to-day! It’s so good it almost
hurts.”

She raised her head from the white petticoat she was ironing, and gazed
out of the doorway and down the valley with a warm light in her eyes
and a glowing face. The snow-tipped mountains far above and away, the
fir-covered, cedar-ranged foothills, and, lower down, the wonderful
maple and ash woods, with their hundred autumn tints, all merging to one
soft, red tone, the roar of the stream tumbling down the ravine from
the heights, the air that braced the nerves--it all seemed to be part of
her, the passion of life corresponding to the passion of living in her.

After watching the scene dreamily for a moment, she turned and laid the
iron she had been using upon the hot stove near. Taking up another, she
touched it with a moistened finger to test the heat, and, leaning above
the table again, passed it over the linen for a few moments, smiling
at something that was in her mind. Presently she held the petticoat up,
turned it round, then hung it in front of her, eyeing it with critical
pleasure.

“To-morrow!” she said, nodding at it. “You won’t be seen, I suppose, but
I’ll know you’re nice enough for a queen--and that’s enough to know.”

She blushed a little, as though someone had heard her words and was
looking at her, then she carefully laid the petticoat over the back of
a chair. “No queen’s got one whiter, if I do say it,” she continued,
tossing her head.

In that, at any rate, she was right, for the water of the mountain
springs was pure, the air was clear, and the sun was clarifying; and
little ornamented or frilled as it was, the petticoat was exquisitely
soft and delicate. It would have appealed to more eyes than a woman’s.

“To-morrow!” She nodded at it again and turned again to the bright world
outside. With arms raised and hands resting against the timbers of the
doorway, she stood dreaming. A flock of pigeons passed with a whir not
far away, and skirted the woods making down the valley. She watched
their flight abstractedly, yet with a subconscious sense of pleasure.
Life--they were Life, eager, buoyant, belonging to this wild region,
where still the heart could feel so much at home, where the great world
was missed so little.

Suddenly, as she gazed, a shot rang out down the valley, and two of the
pigeons came tumbling to the ground, a stray feather floating after.
With a startled exclamation she took a step forward. Her brain became
confused and disturbed. She had looked out on Eden, and it had been
ravaged before her eyes. She had been thinking of to-morrow, and this
vast prospect of beauty and serenity had been part of the pageant
in which it moved. Not the valley alone had been marauded, but that
“To-morrow,” and all it meant to her.

Instantly the valley had become clouded over for her, its glory and its
grace despoiled. She turned back to the room where the white petticoat
lay upon the chair, but stopped with a little cry of alarm.

A man was standing in the centre of the room. He had entered stealthily
by the back door, and had waited for her to turn round. He was haggard
and travel stained, and there was a feverish light in his eyes. His
fingers trembled as they adjusted his belt, which seemed too large for
him. Mechanically he buckled it tighter.

“You’re Jenny Long, ain’t you?” he asked. “I beg pardon for sneakin’ in
like this, but they’re after me, some ranchers and a constable--one o’
the Riders of the Plains. I’ve been tryin’ to make this house all day.
You’re Jenny Long, ain’t you?”

She had plenty of courage, and, after the first instant of shock, she
had herself in hand. She had quickly observed his condition, had marked
the candour of the eye and the decision and character of the face, and
doubt of him found no place in her mind. She had the keen observation
of the dweller in lonely places, where every traveller has the
potentialities of a foe, while the door of hospitality is opened to him
after the custom of the wilds. Year in, year out, since she was a
little girl and came to live here with her Uncle Sanger when her father
died--her mother had gone before she could speak--travellers had halted
at this door, going North or coming South, had had bite and sup, and
bed, may be, and had passed on, most of them never to be seen again.
More than that, too, there had been moments of peril, such as when,
alone, she had faced two wood-thieves with a revolver, as they
were taking her mountain-pony with them, and herself had made them
“hands-up,” and had marched them into a prospector’s camp five miles
away.

She had no doubt about the man before her. Whatever he had done, it was
nothing dirty or mean--of that she was sure.

“Yes, I’m Jenny Long,” she answered. “What have you done? What are they
after you for?”

“Oh! to-morrow,” he answered, “to-morrow I got to git to Bindon. It’s
life or death. I come from prospecting two hundred miles up North. I
done it in two days and a half. My horse dropped dead--I’m near
dead myself. I tried to borrow another horse up at Clancey’s, and at
Scotton’s Drive, but they didn’t know me, and they bounced me. So I
borrowed a horse off Weigall’s paddock, to make for here--to you.
I didn’t mean to keep that horse. Hell, I’m no horse-stealer! But I
couldn’t explain to them, except that I had to git to Bindon to save a
man’s life. If people laugh in your face, it’s no use explainin’. I took
a roan from Weigall’s, and they got after me. ‘Bout six miles up they
shot at me an’ hurt me.”

She saw that one arm hung limp at his side and that his wrist was wound
with a red bandana.

She started forward. “Are you hurt bad? Can I bind it up or wash it for
you? I’ve got plenty of hot water here, and it’s bad letting a wound get
stale.”

He shook his head. “I washed the hole clean in the creek below. I
doubled on them. I had to go down past your place here, and then work
back to be rid of them. But there’s no telling when they’ll drop on to
the game, and come back for me. My only chance was to git to you. Even
if I had a horse, I couldn’t make Bindon in time. It’s two days round
the gorge by trail. A horse is no use now--I lost too much time since
last night. I can’t git to Bindon to-morrow in time, if I ride the
trail.”

“The river?” she asked abruptly.

“It’s the only way. It cuts off fifty mile. That’s why I come to you.”

She frowned a little, her face became troubled, and her glance fell
on his arm nervously. “What’ve I got to do with it?” she asked almost
sharply.

“Even if this was all right,”--he touched the wounded arm--“I couldn’t
take the rapids in a canoe. I don’t know them, an’ it would be sure
death. That’s not the worst, for there’s a man at Bindon would lose his
life--p’r’aps twenty men--I dunno; but one man sure. To-morrow, it’s go
or stay with him. He was good--Lord, but he was good!--to my little
gal years back. She’d only been married to me a year when he saved her,
riskin’ his own life. No one else had the pluck. My little gal, only
twenty she was, an’ pretty as a picture, an’ me fifty miles away when
the fire broke out in the hotel where she was. He’d have gone down to
hell for a friend, an’ he saved my little gal. I had her for five years
after that. That’s why I got to git to Bindon to-morrow. If I don’t, I
don’t want to see to-morrow. I got to go down the river to-night.”

She knew what he was going to ask her. She knew he was thinking what
all the North knew, that she was the first person to take the Dog Nose
Rapids in a canoe, down the great river scarce a stone’s-throw from her
door; and that she had done it in safety many times. Not in all the
West and North were there a half-dozen people who could take a canoe
to Bindon, and they were not here. She knew that he meant to ask her to
paddle him down the swift stream with its murderous rocks, to Bindon.
She glanced at the white petticoat on the chair, and her lips tightened.
To-morrow-tomorrow was as much to her here as it would be to this man
before her, or the man he would save at Bindon. “What do you want?” she
asked, hardening her heart. “Can’t you see? I want you to hide me here
till tonight. There’s a full moon, an’ it would be as plain goin’ as by
day. They told me about you up North, and I said to myself, ‘If I git to
Jenny Long, an’ tell her about my friend at Bindon, an’ my little gal,
she’ll take me down to Bindon in time.’ My little gal would have paid
her own debt if she’d ever had the chance. She didn’t--she’s lying up on
Mazy Mountain. But one woman’ll do a lot for the sake of another woman.
Say, you’ll do it, won’t you? If I don’t git there by to-morrow noon,
it’s no good.”

She would not answer. He was asking more than he knew. Why should she be
sacrificed? Was it her duty to pay the “little gal’s debt,” to save the
man at Bindon? To-morrow was to be the great day in her own life. The
one man in all the world was coming to marry her to-morrow. After four
years’ waiting, after a bitter quarrel in which both had been to blame,
he was coming from the mining town of Selby to marry her to-morrow.

“What will happen? Why will your friend lose his life if you don’t get
to Bindon?”

“By noon to-morrow, by twelve o’clock noon; that’s the plot; that’s what
they’ve schemed. Three days ago, I heard. I got a man free from trouble
North--he was no good, but I thought he ought to have another chance,
and I got him free. He told me of what was to be done at Bindon. There’d
been a strike in the mine, an’ my friend had took it in hand with
knuckle-dusters on. He isn’t the kind to fell a tree with a jack-knife.
Then three of the strikers that had been turned away--they was the
ringleaders--they laid a plan that’d make the devil sick. They’ve put a
machine in the mine, an’ timed it, an’ it’ll go off when my friend comes
out of the mine at noon to-morrow.”

Her face was pale now, and her eyes had a look of pain and horror. Her
man--him that she was to marry--was the head of a mine also at Selby,
forty miles beyond Bindon, and the horrible plot came home to her with
piercing significance.

“Without a second’s warning,” he urged, “to go like that, the man that
was so good to my little gal, an’ me with a chance to save him, an’
others too, p’r’aps. You won’t let it be. Say, I’m pinnin’ my faith to
you. I’m--”

Suddenly he swayed. She caught him, held him, and lowered him gently in
a chair. Presently he opened his eyes. “It’s want o’ food, I suppose,”
 he said. “If you’ve got a bit of bread and meat--I must keep up.”

She went to a cupboard, but suddenly turned towards him again. Her ears
had caught a sound outside in the underbush. He had heard also, and he
half staggered to his feet.

“Quick-in here!” she said, and, opening a door, pushed him inside.
“Lie down on my bed, and I’ll bring you vittles as quick as I can,” she
added. Then she shut the door, turned to the ironing-board, and took up
the iron, as the figure of a man darkened the doorway.

“Hello, Jinny, fixin’ up for to-morrow?” the man said, stepping inside,
with a rifle under his arm and some pigeons in his hand.

She nodded and gave him an impatient, scrutinising glance. His face had
a fatuous kind of smile.

“Been celebrating the pigeons?” she asked drily, jerking her head
towards the two birds, which she had seen drop from her Eden skies a
short time before.

“I only had one swig of whiskey, honest Injun!” he answered. “I s’pose I
might have waited till to-morrow, but I was dead-beat. I got a bear over
by the Tenmile Reach, and I was tired. I ain’t so young as I used to be,
and, anyhow, what’s the good! What’s ahead of me? You’re going to git
married to-morrow after all these years we bin together, and you’re
going down to Selby from the mountains, where I won’t see you, not once
in a blue moon. Only that old trollop, Mother Massy, to look after me.”

“Come down to Selby and live there. You’ll be welcome by Jake and me.”

He stood his gun in the corner and, swinging the pigeons in his hand,
said: “Me live out of the mountains? Don’t you know better than that?
I couldn’t breathe; and I wouldn’t want to breathe. I’ve got my shack
here, I got my fur business, and they’re still fond of whiskey up
North!” He chuckled to himself, as he thought of the illicit still
farther up the mountain behind them. “I make enough to live on, and I’ve
put a few dollars by, though I won’t have so many after to-morrow, after
I’ve given you a little pile, Jinny.”

“P’r’aps there won’t be any to-morrow, as you expect,” she said slowly.

The old man started. “What, you and Jake ain’t quarrelled again? You
ain’t broke it off at the last moment, same as before? You ain’t had a
letter from Jake?” He looked at the white petticoat on the chairback,
and shook his head in bewilderment.

“I’ve had no letter,” she answered. “I’ve had no letter from Selby for
a month. It was all settled then, and there was no good writing, when
he was coming to-morrow with the minister and the licence. Who do you
think’d be postman from Selby here? It must have cost him ten dollars to
send the last letter.”

“Then what’s the matter? I don’t understand,” the old man urged
querulously. He did not want her to marry and leave him, but he wanted
no more troubles; he did not relish being asked awkward questions by
every mountaineer he met, as to why Jenny Long didn’t marry Jake Lawson.

“There’s only one way that I can be married tomorrow,” she said at
last, “and that’s by you taking a man down the Dog Nose Rapids to Bindon
to-night.”

He dropped the pigeons on the floor, dumbfounded. “What in--”

He stopped short, in sheer incapacity, to go further. Jenny had not
always been easy to understand, but she was wholly incomprehensible now.

She picked up the pigeons and was about to speak, but she glanced at the
bedroom door, where her exhausted visitor had stretched himself on her
bed, and beckoned her uncle to another room.

“There’s a plate of vittles ready for you in there,” she said. “I’ll
tell you as you eat.”

He followed her into the little living-room adorned by the trophies of
his earlier achievements with gun and rifle, and sat down at the table,
where some food lay covered by a clean white cloth.

“No one’ll ever look after me as you’ve done, Jinny,” he said, as he
lifted the cloth and saw the palatable dish ready for him. Then he
remembered again about to-morrow and the Dog Nose Rapids.

“What’s it all about, Jinny? What’s that about my canoeing a man down to
Bindon?”

“Eat, uncle,” she said more softly than she had yet spoken, for his
words about her care of him had brought a moisture to her eyes. “I’ll be
back in a minute and tell you all about it.”

“Well, it’s about took away my appetite,” he said. “I feel a kind of
sinking.” He took from his pocket a bottle, poured some of its contents
into a tin cup, and drank it off.

“No, I suppose you couldn’t take a man down to Bindon,” she said, as she
saw his hand trembling on the cup. Then she turned and entered the other
room again. Going to the cupboard, she hastily heaped a plate with
food, and, taking a dipper of water from a pail near by, she entered her
bedroom hastily and placed what she had brought on a small table, as her
visitor rose slowly from the bed.

He was about to speak, but she made a protesting gesture.

“I can’t tell you anything yet,” she said. “Who was it come?” he asked.

“My uncle--I’m going to tell him.”

“The men after me may git here any minute,” he urged anxiously.

“They’d not be coming into my room,” she answered, flushing slightly.

“Can’t you hide me down by the river till we start?” he asked, his eyes
eagerly searching her face. He was assuming that she would take him down
the river: but she gave no sign.

“I’ve got to see if he’ll take you first,” she answered.

“He--your uncle, Tom Sanger? He drinks, I’ve heard. He’d never git to
Bindon.”

She did not reply directly to his words. “I’ll come back and tell you.
There’s a place you could hide by the river where no one could ever find
you,” she said, and left the room.

As she stepped out, she saw the old man standing in the doorway of the
other room. His face was petrified with amazement.

“Who you got in that room, Jinny? What man you got in that room? I
heard a man’s voice. Is it because o’ him that you bin talkin’ about no
weddin’ to-morrow? Is it one o’ the others come back, puttin’ you off
Jake again?”

Her eyes flashed fire at his first words, and her breast heaved with
anger, but suddenly she became composed again and motioned him to a
chair.

“You eat, and I’ll tell you all about it, Uncle Tom,” she said, and,
seating herself at the table also, she told him the story of the man who
must go to Bindon.

When she had finished, the old man blinked at her for a minute without
speaking, then he said slowly: “I heard something ‘bout trouble down at
Bindon yisterday from a Hudson’s Bay man goin’ North, but I didn’t take
it in. You’ve got a lot o’ sense, Jinny, an’ if you think he’s tellin’
the truth, why, it goes; but it’s as big a mixup as a lariat in a
steer’s horns. You’ve got to hide him sure, whoever he is, for I
wouldn’t hand an Eskimo over, if I’d taken him in my home once; we’re
mountain people. A man ought to be hung for horse-stealin’, but this was
different. He was doing it to save a man’s life, an’ that man at Bindon
was good to his little gal, an’ she’s dead.”

He moved his head from side to side with the air of a sentimental
philosopher. He had all the vanity of a man who had been a success in a
small, shrewd, culpable way--had he not evaded the law for thirty years
with his whiskey-still?

“I know how he felt,” he continued. “When Betsy died--we was only four
years married--I could have crawled into a knot-hole an’ died there. You
got to save him, Jinny, but”--he came suddenly to his feet--“he ain’t
safe here. They might come any minute, if they’ve got back on his trail.
I’ll take him up the gorge. You know where.”

“You sit still, Uncle Tom,” she rejoined. “Leave him where he is a
minute. There’s things must be settled first. They ain’t going to look
for him in my bedroom, be they?”

The old man chuckled. “I’d like to see ‘em at it. You got a temper,
Jinny; and you got a pistol too, eh?” He chuckled again. “As good a shot
as any in the mountains. I can see you darin’ ‘em to come on. But what
if Jake come, and he found a man in your bedroom”--he wiped the tears of
laughter from his eyes--“why, Jinny--!”

He stopped short, for there was anger in her face. “I don’t want to hear
any more of that. I do what I want to do,” she snapped out.

“Well, well, you always done what you wanted; but we got to git him up
the hills, till it’s sure they’re out o’ the mountains and gone back.
It’ll be days, mebbe.”

“Uncle Tom, you’ve took too much to drink,” she answered. “You don’t
remember he’s got to be at Bindon by to-morrow noon. He’s got to save
his friend by then.”

“Pshaw! Who’s going to take him down the river to-night? You’re goin’
to be married to-morrow. If you like, you can give him the canoe. It’ll
never come back, nor him neither!”

“You’ve been down with me,” she responded suggestively. “And you went
down once by yourself.”

He shook his head. “I ain’t been so well this summer. My sight ain’t
what it was. I can’t stand the racket as I once could. ‘Pears to me I’m
gettin’ old. No, I couldn’t take them rapids, Jinny, not for one frozen
minute.”

She looked at him with trouble in her eyes, and her face lost some of
its colour. She was fighting back the inevitable, even as its shadow
fell upon her. “You wouldn’t want a man to die, if you could save him,
Uncle Tom--blown up, sent to Kingdom Come without any warning at all;
and perhaps he’s got them that love him--and the world so beautiful.”

“Well, it ain’t nice dyin’ in the summer, when it’s all sun, and there’s
plenty everywhere; but there’s no one to go down the river with him.
What’s his name?”

Her struggle was over. She had urged him, but in very truth she was
urging herself all the time, bringing herself to the axe of sacrifice.

“His name’s Dingley. I’m going down the river with him--down to Bindon.”

The old man’s mouth opened in blank amazement. His eyes blinked
helplessly.

“What you talkin’ about, Jinny! Jake’s comin’ up with the minister, an’
you’re goin’ to be married at noon to-morrow.”

“I’m takin’ him”--she jerked her head towards the room where Dingley
was--“down Dog Nose Rapids to-night. He’s risked his life for his
friend, thinkin’ of her that’s dead an’ gone, and a man’s life is a
man’s life. If it was Jake’s life in danger, what’d I think of a woman
that could save him, and didn’t?”

“Onct you broke off with Jake Lawson--the day before you was to be
married; an’ it’s took years to make up an’ agree again to be spliced.
If Jake comes here to-morrow, and you ain’t here, what do you think
he’ll do? The neighbours are comin’ for fifty miles round, two is comin’
up a hundred miles, an’ you can’t--Jinny, you can’t do it. I bin sick
of answerin’ questions all these years ‘bout you and Jake, an’ I ain’t
goin’ through it again. I’ve told more lies than there’s straws in a
tick.”

She flamed out. “Then take him down the river yourself--a man to do a
man’s work. Are you afeard to take the risk?”

He held out his hands slowly and looked at them. They shook a little.
“Yes, Jinny,” he said sadly, “I’m afeard. I ain’t what I was. I made a
mistake, Jinny. I’ve took too much whiskey. I’m older than I ought to
be. I oughtn’t never to have had a whiskey-still, an’ I wouldn’t have
drunk so much. I got money--money for you, Jinny, for you an’ Jake, but
I’ve lost what I’ll never git back. I’m afeard to go down the river with
him. I’d go smash in the Dog Nose Rapids. I got no nerve. I can’t hunt
the grizzly any more, nor the puma, Jinny. I got to keep to common
shootin’, now and henceforth, amen! No, I’d go smash in Dog Nose
Rapids.”

She caught his hands impulsively. “Don’t you fret, Uncle Tom. You’ve
bin a good uncle to me, and you’ve bin a good friend, and you ain’t the
first that’s found whiskey too much for him. You ain’t got an enemy in
the mountains. Why, I’ve got two or three--”

“Shucks! Women--only women whose beaux left ‘em to follow after you.
That’s nothing, an’ they’ll be your friends fast enough after you’re
married tomorrow.”

“I ain’t going to be married to-morrow. I’m going down to Bindon
to-night. If Jake’s mad, then it’s all over, and there’ll be more
trouble among the women up here.”

By this time they had entered the other room. The old man saw the white
petticoat on the chair. “No woman in the mountains ever had a petticoat
like that, Jinny. It’d make a dress, it’s that pretty an’ neat. Golly,
I’d like to see it on you, with the blue skirt over, and just hitched up
a little.”

“Oh, shut up--shut up!” she said in sudden anger, and caught up the
petticoat as though she would put it away; but presently she laid it
down again and smoothed it with quick, nervous fingers. “Can’t you talk
sense and leave my clothes alone? If Jake comes, and I’m not here, and
he wants to make a fuss, and spoil everything, and won’t wait, you give
him this petticoat. You put it in his arms. I bet you’ll have the laugh
on him. He’s got a temper.”

“So’ve you, Jinny, dear, so’ve you,” said the old man, laughing. “You’re
goin’ to have your own way, same as ever--same as ever.”


II

A moon of exquisite whiteness silvering the world, making shadows on the
water as though it were sunlight and the daytime, giving a spectral look
to the endless array of poplar trees on the banks, glittering on the
foam of the rapids. The spangling stars made the arch of the sky like
some gorgeous chancel in a cathedral as vast as life and time. Like the
day which was ended, in which the mountain-girl had found a taste of
Eden, it seemed too sacred for mortal strife. Now and again there came
the note of a night-bird, the croak of a frog from the shore; but the
serene stillness and beauty of the primeval North was over all.

For two hours after sunset it had all been silent and brooding, and then
two figures appeared on the bank of the great river. A canoe was softly
and hastily pushed out from its hidden shelter under the overhanging
bank, and was noiselessly paddled out to midstream, dropping down the
current meanwhile.

It was Jenny Long and the man who must get to Bindon. They had waited
till nine o’clock, when the moon was high and full, to venture forth.
Then Dingley had dropped from her bedroom window, had joined her under
the trees, and they had sped away, while the man’s hunters, who had
come suddenly, and before Jenny could get him away into the woods,
were carousing inside. These had tracked their man back to Tom Sanger’s
house, and at first they were incredulous that Jenny and her uncle had
not seen him. They had prepared to search the house, and one had laid
his finger on the latch of her bedroom door; but she had flared out with
such anger that, mindful of the supper she had already begun to prepare
for them, they had desisted, and the whiskey-jug which the old man
brought out distracted their attention.

One of their number, known as the Man from Clancey’s, had, however, been
outside when Dingley had dropped from the window, and had seen him from
a distance. He had not given the alarm, but had followed, to make the
capture by himself. But Jenny had heard the stir of life behind them,
and had made a sharp detour, so that they had reached the shore and were
out in mid-stream before their tracker got to the river. Then he called
to them to return, but Jenny only bent a little lower and paddled on,
guiding the canoe towards the safe channel through the first small
rapids leading to the great Dog Nose Rapids.

A rifle-shot rang out, and a bullet “pinged” over the water and
splintered the side of the canoe where Dingley sat. He looked calmly
back, and saw the rifle raised again, but did not stir, in spite of
Jenny’s warning to lie down.

“He’ll not fire on you so long as he can draw a bead on me,” he said
quietly.

Again a shot rang out, and the bullet sang past his head.

“If he hits me, you go straight on to Bindon,” he continued. “Never mind
about me. Go to the Snowdrop Mine. Get there by twelve o’clock, and warn
them. Don’t stop a second for me--”

Suddenly three shots rang out in succession--Tom Sanger’s house had
emptied itself on the bank of the river--and Dingley gave a sharp
exclamation.

“They’ve hit me, but it’s the same arm as before,” he growled. “They got
no right to fire at me. It’s not the law. Don’t stop,” he added quickly,
as he saw her half turn round.

Now there were loud voices on the shore. Old Tom Sanger was threatening
to shoot the first man that fired again, and he would have kept his
word.

“Who you firin’ at?” he shouted. “That’s my niece, Jinny Long, an’ you
let that boat alone. This ain’t the land o’ lynch law. Dingley ain’t
escaped from gaol. You got no right to fire at him.”

“No one ever went down Dog Nose Rapids at night,” said the Man from
Clancey’s, whose shot had got Dingley’s arm. “There ain’t a chance of
them doing it. No one’s ever done it.”

The two were in the roaring rapids now, and the canoe was jumping
through the foam like a racehorse. The keen eyes on the bank watched
the canoe till it was lost in the half-gloom below the first rapids, and
then they went slowly back to Tom Sanger’s house.

“So there’ll be no wedding to-morrow,” said the Man from Clancey’s.

“Funerals, more likely,” drawled another.

“Jinny Long’s in that canoe, an’ she ginerally does what she wants to,”
 said Tom Sanger sagely.

“Well, we done our best, and now I hope they’ll get to Bindon,” said
another.

Sanger passed the jug to him freely. Then they sat down and talked
of the people who had been drowned in Dog Nose Rapids and of the last
wedding in the mountains.


III

It was as the Man from Clancey’s had said, no one had ever gone down Dog
Nose Rapids in the nighttime, and probably no one but Jenny Long would
have ventured it. Dingley had had no idea what a perilous task had been
set his rescuer. It was only when the angry roar of the great rapids
floated up-stream to them, increasing in volume till they could see the
terror of tumbling waters just below, and the canoe shot forward like a
snake through the swift, smooth current which would sweep them into the
vast caldron, that he realised the terrible hazard of the enterprise.

The moon was directly overhead when they drew upon the race of rocks
and fighting water and foam. On either side only the shadowed shore,
forsaken by the races which had hunted and roamed and ravaged here--not
a light, nor any sign of life, or the friendliness of human presence to
make their isolation less complete, their danger, as it were, shared
by fellow-mortals. Bright as the moon was, it was not bright enough for
perfect pilotage. Never in the history of white men had these rapids
been ridden at nighttime. As they sped down the flume of the deep,
irresistible current, and were launched into the trouble of rocks and
water, Jenny realised how great their peril was, and how different the
track of the waters looked at nighttime from daytime. Outlines seemed
merged, rocks did not look the same, whirlpools had a different vortex,
islands of stone had a new configuration. As they sped on, lurching,
jumping, piercing a broken wall of wave and spray like a torpedo,
shooting an almost sheer fall, she came to rely on a sense of intuition
rather than memory, for night had transformed the waters.

Not a sound escaped either. The man kept his eyes fixed on the woman;
the woman scanned the dreadful pathway with eyes deep-set and burning,
resolute, vigilant, and yet defiant too, as though she had been trapped
into this track of danger, and was fighting without great hope, but
with the temerity and nonchalance of despair. Her arms were bare to the
shoulder almost, and her face was again and again drenched; but second
succeeded second, minute followed minute in a struggle which might well
turn a man’s hair grey, and now, at last-how many hours was it since
they had been cast into this den of roaring waters!--at last, suddenly,
over a large fall, and here smooth waters again, smooth and untroubled,
and strong and deep. Then, and only then, did a word escape either;
but the man had passed through torture and unavailing regret, for he
realised that he had had no right to bring this girl into such a fight.
It was not her friend who was in danger at Bindon. Her life had been
risked without due warrant. “I didn’t know, or I wouldn’t have asked
it,” he said in a low voice. “Lord, but you are a wonder--to take that
hurdle for no one that belonged to you, and to do it as you’ve done it.
This country will rise to you.” He looked back on the raging rapids far
behind, and he shuddered. “It was a close call, and no mistake. We must
have been within a foot of down-you-go fifty times. But it’s all right
now, if we can last it out and git there.” Again he glanced back,
then turned to the girl. “It makes me pretty sick to look at it,” he
continued. “I bin through a lot, but that’s as sharp practice as I
want.”

“Come here and let me bind up your arm,” she answered. “They hit
you--the sneaks! Are you bleeding much?”

He came near her carefully, as she got the big canoe out of the current
into quieter water. She whipped the scarf from about her neck, and with
his knife ripped up the seam of his sleeve. Her face was alive with
the joy of conflict and elated with triumph. Her eyes were shining. She
bathed the wound--the bullet had passed clean through the fleshy part
of the arm--and then carefully tied the scarf round it over her
handkerchief.

“I guess it’s as good as a man could do it,” she said at last.

“As good as any doctor,” he rejoined.

“I wasn’t talking of your arm,” she said.

“‘Course not. Excuse me. You was talkin’ of them rapids, and I’ve got to
say there ain’t a man that could have done it and come through like you.
I guess the man that marries you’ll get more than his share of luck.”

“I want none of that,” she said sharply, and picked up her paddle again,
her eyes flashing anger.

He took a pistol from his pocket and offered it to her. “I didn’t mean
any harm by what I said. Take this if you think I won’t know how to
behave myself,” he urged.

She flung up her head a little. “I knew what I was doing before I
started,” she said. “Put it away. How far is it, and can we do it in
time?”

“If you can hold out, we can do it; but it means going all night and all
morning; and it ain’t dawn yet, by a long shot.”

Dawn came at last, and the mist of early morning, and the imperious and
dispelling sun; and with mouthfuls of food as they drifted on, the two
fixed their eyes on the horizon beyond which lay Bindon. And now it
seemed to the girl as though this race to save a life or many lives
was the one thing in existence. To-morrow was to-day, and the white
petticoat was lying in the little house in the mountains, and her
wedding was an interminable distance off, so had this adventure drawn
her into its risks and toils and haggard exhaustion.

Eight, nine, ten, eleven o’clock came, and then they saw signs of
settlement. Houses appeared here and there upon the banks, and now and
then a horseman watched them from the shore, but they could not pause.
Bindon--Bindon--Bindon--the Snowdrop Mine at Bindon, and a death-dealing
machine timed to do its deadly work, were before the eyes of the two
voyageurs.

Half-past eleven, and the town of Bindon was just beyond them. A quarter
to twelve, and they had run their canoe into the bank beyond which were
the smokestacks and chimneys of the mine. Bindon was peacefully pursuing
its way, though here and there were little groups of strikers who had
not resumed work.

Dingley and the girl scrambled up the bank. Trembling with fatigue, they
hastened on. The man drew ahead of her, for she had paddled for fifteen
hours, practically without ceasing, and the ground seemed to rise up at
her. But she would not let him stop.

He hurried on, reached the mine, and entered, shouting the name of his
friend. It was seven minutes to twelve.

A moment later, a half-dozen men came rushing from that portion of the
mine where Dingley had been told the machine was placed, and at their
head was Lawson, the man he had come to save.

The girl hastened on to meet them, but she grew faint and leaned against
a tree, scarce conscious. She was roused by voices.

“No, it wasn’t me, it wasn’t me that done it; it was a girl. Here she
is--Jenny Long! You got to thank her, Jake.”

Jake! Jake! The girl awakened to full understanding now. Jake--what
Jake? She looked, then stumbled forward with a cry.

“Jake--it was my Jake!” she faltered. The mine-boss caught her in his
arms. “You, Jenny! It’s you that’s saved me!”

Suddenly there was a rumble as of thunder, and a cloud of dust and stone
rose from the Snowdrop Mine. The mine-boss tightened his arm round the
girl’s waist. “That’s what I missed, through him and you, Jenny,” he
said.

“What was you doing here, and not at Selby, Jake?” she asked.

“They sent for me-to stop the trouble here.”

“But what about our wedding to-day?” she asked with a frown.

“A man went from here with a letter to you three days ago,” he said,
“asking you to come down here and be married. I suppose he got drunk,
or had an accident, and didn’t reach you. It had to be. I was needed
here--couldn’t tell what would happen.”

“It has happened out all right,” said Dingley, “and this’ll be the end
of it. You got them miners solid now. The strikers’ll eat humble pie
after to-day.”

“We’ll be married to-day, just the same,” the mine-boss said, as he gave
some brandy to the girl.

But the girl shook her head. She was thinking of a white petticoat in a
little house in the mountains. “I’m not going to be married to-day,” she
said decisively.

“Well, to-morrow,” said the mine-boss.

But the girl shook her head again. “To-day is tomorrow,” she answered.
“You can wait, Jake. I’m going back home to be married.”




QU’APPELLE

(Who calls?)

“But I’m white; I’m not an Indian. My father was a white man. I’ve been
brought up as a white girl. I’ve had a white girl’s schooling.”

Her eyes flashed as she sprang to her feet and walked up and down the
room for a moment, then stood still, facing her mother,--a dark-faced,
pock-marked woman, with heavy, somnolent eyes, and waited for her to
speak. The reply came slowly and sullenly--

“I am a Blackfoot woman. I lived on the Muskwat River among the braves
for thirty years. I have killed buffalo. I have seen battles. Men, too,
I have killed when they came to steal our horses and crept in on our
lodges in the night-the Crees! I am a Blackfoot. You are the daughter
of a Blackfoot woman. No medicine can cure that. Sit down. You have no
sense. You are not white. They will not have you. Sit down.”

The girl’s handsome face flushed; she threw up her hands in an agony of
protest. A dreadful anger was in her panting breast, but she could not
speak. She seemed to choke with excess of feeling. For an instant she
stood still, trembling with agitation, then she sat down suddenly on
a great couch covered with soft deerskins and buffalo robes. There was
deep in her the habit of obedience to this sombre but striking woman.
She had been ruled firmly, almost oppressively, and she had not yet
revolted. Seated on the couch, she gazed out of the window at the flying
snow, her brain too much on fire for thought, passion beating like a
pulse in all her lithe and graceful young body, which had known the
storms of life and time for only twenty years.

The wind shrieked and the snow swept past in clouds of blinding drift,
completely hiding from sight the town below them, whose civilisation had
built itself many habitations and was making roads and streets on the
green-brown plain, where herds of buffalo had stamped and streamed and
thundered not long ago. The town was a mile and a half away, and these
two were alone in a great circle of storm, one of them battling against
a tempest which might yet overtake her, against which she had set her
face ever since she could remember, though it had only come to violence
since her father died two years before--a careless, strong, wilful
white man, who had lived the Indian life for many years, but had been
swallowed at last by the great wave of civilisation streaming westward
and northward, wiping out the game and the Indian, and overwhelming the
rough, fighting, hunting, pioneer life. Joel Renton had made money, by
good luck chiefly, having held land here and there which he had got for
nothing, and had then almost forgotten about it, and, when reminded
of it, still held on to it with that defiant stubbornness which often
possesses improvident and careless natures. He had never had any real
business instinct, and to swagger a little over the land he held and
to treat offers of purchase with contempt was the loud assertion of a
capacity he did not possess. So it was that stubborn vanity, beneath
which was his angry protest against the prejudice felt by the new people
of the West for the white pioneer who married an Indian, and lived the
Indian life,--so it was that this gave him competence and a comfortable
home after the old trader had been driven out by the railway and the
shopkeeper. With the first land he sold he sent his daughter away to
school in a town farther east and south, where she had been brought in
touch with a life that at once cramped and attracted her; where, too,
she had felt the first chill of racial ostracism, and had proudly fought
it to the end, her weapons being talent, industry, and a hot, defiant
ambition.

There had been three years of bitter, almost half-sullen, struggle,
lightened by one sweet friendship with a girl whose face she had since
drawn in a hundred different poses on stray pieces of paper, on the
walls of the big, well-lighted attic to which she retreated for hours
every day, when she was not abroad on the prairies, riding the Indian
pony that her uncle the Piegan Chief, Ice Breaker, had given her years
before. Three years of struggle, and then her father had died, and the
refuge for her vexed, defiant heart was gone. While he lived she could
affirm the rights of a white man’s daughter, the rights of the daughter
of a pioneer who had helped to make the West; and her pride in him had
given a glow to her cheek and a spring to her step which drew every eye.
In the chief street of Portage la Drome men would stop their trafficking
and women nudge each other when she passed, and wherever she went she
stirred interest, excited admiration, or aroused prejudice--but the
prejudice did not matter so long as her father, Joel Renton, lived.
Whatever his faults, and they were many--sometimes he drank too much,
and swore a great deal, and bullied and stormed--she blinked at them
all, for he was of the conquering race, a white man who had slept in
white sheets and eaten off white tablecloths, and used a knife and fork,
since he was born; and the women of his people had had soft petticoats
and fine stockings, and silk gowns for festal days, and feathered
hats of velvet, and shoes of polished leather, always and always, back
through many generations. She had held her head high, for she was of his
women, of the women of his people, with all their rights and all their
claims. She had held it high till that stormy day--just such a day
as this, with the surf of snow breaking against the house--when they
carried him in out of the wild turmoil and snow, laying him on the couch
where she now sat, and her head fell on his lifeless breast, and she
cried out to him in vain to come back to her.

Before the world her head was still held high, but in the attic-room,
and out on the prairies far away, where only the coyote or the
prairie-hen saw, her head drooped, and her eyes grew heavy with pain and
sombre protest. Once in an agony of loneliness, and cruelly hurt by a
conspicuous slight put upon her at the Portage by the wife of the Reeve
of the town, who had daughters twain of pure white blood got from behind
the bar of a saloon in Winnipeg, she had thrown open her window at night
with the frost below zero, and stood in her thin nightdress, craving the
death which she hoped the cold would give her soon. It had not availed,
however, and once again she had ridden out in a blizzard to die, but
had come upon a man lost in the snow, and her own misery had passed from
her, and her heart, full of the blood of plainsmen, had done for another
what it would not do for itself. The Indian in her had, with strange,
sure instinct, found its way to Portage la Drome, the man with both
hands and one foot frozen, on her pony, she walking at his side, only
conscious that she had saved one, not two, lives that day.

Here was another such day, here again was the storm in her heart which
had driven her into the plains that other time, and here again was that
tempest of white death outside.

“You have no sense. You are not white. They will not have you. Sit
down--”

The words had fallen on her ears with a cold, deadly smother. There came
a chill upon her which stilled the wild pulses in her, which suddenly
robbed the eyes of their brightness and gave a drawn look to the face.

“You are not white. They will not have you, Pauline.” The Indian mother
repeated the words after a moment, her eyes grown still more gloomy;
for in her, too, there was a dark tide of passion moving. In all the
outlived years this girl had ever turned to the white father rather than
to her, and she had been left more and more alone. Her man had been
kind to her, and she had been a faithful wife, but she had resented the
natural instinct of her half-breed child, almost white herself and with
the feelings and ways of the whites, to turn always to her father, as
though to a superior guide, to a higher influence and authority. Was
not she herself the descendant of Blackfoot and Piegan chiefs through
generations of rulers and warriors? Was there not Piegan and Blackfoot
blood in the girl’s veins? Must only the white man’s blood be reckoned
when they made up their daily account and balanced the books of their
lives, credit and debtor,--misunderstanding and kind act, neglect
and tenderness, reproof and praise, gentleness and impulse, anger and
caress,--to be set down in the everlasting record? Why must the Indian
always give way--Indian habits, Indian desires, the Indian way of doing
things, the Indian point of view, Indian food, Indian medicine? Was it
all bad, and only that which belonged to white life good?

“Look at your face in the glass, Pauline,” she added at last. “You are
good-looking, but it isn’t the good looks of the whites. The lodge of
a chieftainess is the place for you. There you would have praise and
honour; among the whites you are only a half-breed. What is the good?
Let us go back to the life out there beyond the Muskwat River--up
beyond. There is hunting still, a little, and the world is quiet, and
nothing troubles. Only the wild dog barks at night, or the wolf sniffs
at the door and all day there is singing. Somewhere out beyond the
Muskwat the feasts go on, and the old men build the great fires, and
tell tales, and call the wind out of the north, and make the thunder
speak; and the young men ride to the hunt or go out to battle, and build
lodges for the daughters of the tribe; and each man has his woman, and
each woman has in her breast the honour of the tribe, and the little
ones fill the lodge with laughter. Like a pocket of deerskin is every
house, warm and small and full of good things. Hai-yai, what is this
life to that! There you will be head and chief of all, for there is
money enough for a thousand horses; and your father was a white man, and
these are the days when the white man rules. Like clouds before the sun
are the races of men, and one race rises and another falls. Here you
are not first, but last; and the child of the white father and mother,
though they be as the dirt that flies from a horse’s heels, it is before
you. Your mother is a Blackfoot.”

As the woman spoke slowly and with many pauses, the girl’s mood changed,
and there came into her eyes a strange, dark look deeper than anger.
She listened with a sudden patience which stilled the agitation in
her breast and gave a little touch of rigidity to her figure. Her eyes
withdrew from the wild storm without and gravely settled on her mother’s
face, and with the Indian woman’s last words understanding pierced,
but did not dispel, the sombre and ominous look in her eyes. There was
silence for a moment, and then she spoke almost as evenly as her mother
had done.

“I will tell you everything. You are my mother, and I love you; but
you will not see the truth. When my father took you from the lodges and
brought you here, it was the end of the Indian life. It was for you to
go on with him, but you would not go. I was young, but I saw, and I said
that in all things I would go with him. I did not know that it would be
hard, but at school, at the very first, I began to understand. There was
only one, a French girl--I loved her--a girl who said to me, ‘You are
as white as I am, as anyone, and your heart is the same, and you are
beautiful.’ Yes, Manette said I was beautiful.”

She paused a moment, a misty, far-away look came into her eyes, her
fingers clasped and unclasped, and she added:

“And her brother, Julien,--he was older,--when he came to visit Manette,
he spoke to me as though I was all white, and was good to me. I have
never forgotten, never. It was five years ago, but I remember him. He
was tall and strong, and as good as Manette--as good as Manette. I loved
Manette, but she suffered for me, for I was not like the others, and my
ways were different--then. I had lived up there on the Warais among the
lodges, and I had not seen things--only from my father, and he did so
much in an Indian way. So I was sick at heart, and sometimes I wanted to
die; and once--But there was Manette, and she would laugh and sing, and
we would play together, and I would speak French and she would speak
English, and I learned from her to forget the Indian ways. What were
they to me? I had loved them when I was of them, but I came on to a
better life. The Indian life is to the white life as the parfleche pouch
to--to this.” She laid her hand upon a purse of delicate silver mesh
hanging at her waist. “When your eyes are opened you must go on, you
cannot stop. There is no going back. When you have read of all there
is in the white man’s world, when you have seen, then there is no
returning. You may end it all, if you wish, in the snow, in the river,
but there is no returning. The lodge of a chief--ah, if my father had
heard you say that--!”

The Indian woman shifted heavily in her chair, then shrank away from
the look fixed on her. Once or twice she made as if she would speak, but
sank down in the great chair, helpless and dismayed.

“The lodge of a chief!” the girl continued in a low, bitter voice. “What
is the lodge of a chief? A smoky fire, a pot, a bed of skins, aih-yi! If
the lodges of the Indians were millions, and I could be head of all,
and rule the land, yet would I rather be a white girl in the hut of her
white man, struggling for daily bread among the people who sweep the
buffalo out, but open up the land with the plough, and make a thousand
live where one lived before. It is peace you want, my mother, peace and
solitude, in which the soul goes to sleep. Your days of hope are over,
and you want to drowse by the fire. I want to see the white men’s cities
grow, and the armies coming over the hill with the ploughs and the
reapers and the mowers, and the wheels and the belts and engines of the
great factories, and the white woman’s life spreading everywhere; for I
am a white man’s daughter. I can’t be both Indian and white. I will not
be like the sun when the shadow cuts across it and the land grows dark.
I will not be half-breed. I will be white or I will be Indian; and I
will be white, white only. My heart is white, my tongue is white, I
think, I feel, as white people think and feel. What they wish, I wish;
as they live, I live; as white women dress, I dress.”

She involuntarily drew up the dark red skirt she wore, showing a white
petticoat and a pair of fine stockings on an ankle as shapely as she had
ever seen among all the white women she knew. She drew herself up
with pride, and her body had a grace and ease which the white woman’s
convention had not cramped.

Yet, with all her protests, no one would have thought her English.
She might have been Spanish, or Italian, or Roumanian, or Slav, though
nothing of her Indian blood showed in purely Indian characteristics, and
something sparkled in her, gave a radiance to her face and figure
which the storm and struggle in her did not smother. The white women
of Portage la Drome were too blind, too prejudiced, to see all that she
really was, and admiring white men could do little, for Pauline would
have nothing to do with them till the women met her absolutely as an
equal; and from the other halfbreeds, who intermarried with each other
and were content to take a lower place than the pure whites, she held
aloof, save when any of them was ill or in trouble. Then she recognised
the claim of race, and came to their doors with pity and soft impulses
to help them. French and Scotch and English half-breeds, as they were,
they understood how she was making a fight for all who were half-Indian,
half-white, and watched her with a furtive devotion, acknowledging her
superior place, and proud of it.

“I will not stay here,” said the Indian mother with sullen stubbornness.
“I will go back beyond the Warais. My life is my own life, and I will do
what I like with it.”

The girl started, but became composed again on the instant. “Is your
life all your own, mother?” she asked. “I did not come into the world
of my own will. If I had I would have come all white or all Indian. I am
your daughter, and I am here, good or bad--is your life all your own?”

“You can marry and stay here, when I go. You are twenty. I had my man,
your father, when I was seventeen. You can marry. There are men. You
have money. They will marry you--and forget the rest.”

With a cry of rage and misery the girl sprang to her feet and started
forwards, but stopped suddenly at sound of a hasty knocking and a voice
asking admittance. An instant later, a huge, bearded, broad-shouldered
man stepped inside, shaking himself free of the snow, laughing
half-sheepishly as he did so, and laying his fur-cap and gloves with
exaggerated care on the wide window-sill.

“John Alloway,” said the Indian woman in a voice of welcome, and with
a brightening eye, for it would seem as though he came in answer to her
words of a few moments before. With a mother’s instinct she had divined
at once the reason for the visit, though no warning thought crossed the
mind of the girl, who placed a chair for their visitor with a heartiness
which was real--was not this the white man she had saved from death in
the snow a year ago? Her heart was soft towards the life she had kept
in the world. She smiled at him, all the anger gone from her eyes, and
there was almost a touch of tender anxiety in her voice as she said
“What brought you out in this blizzard? It wasn’t safe. It doesn’t seem
possible you got here from the Portage.”

The huge ranchman and auctioneer laughed cheerily. “Once lost, twice get
there,” he exclaimed, with a quizzical toss of the head, thinking he had
said a good thing. “It’s a year ago to the very day that I was lost out
back”--he jerked a thumb over his shoulder--“and you picked me up and
brought me in; and what was I to do but come out on the anniversary and
say thank you? I’d fixed up all year to come to you, and I wasn’t to be
stopped, ‘cause it was like the day we first met, old Coldmaker hitting
the world with his whips of frost, and shaking his ragged blankets of
snow over the wild west.”

“Just such a day,” said the Indian woman after a pause. Pauline remained
silent, placing a little bottle of cordial before their visitor, with
which he presently regaled himself, raising his glass with an air.

“Many happy returns to us both!” he said, and threw the liquor down his
throat, smacked his lips, and drew his hand down his great moustache and
beard like some vast animal washing its face with its paw. Smiling
and yet not at ease, he looked at the two women and nodded his head
encouragingly, but whether the encouragement was for himself or for them
he could not have told.

His last words, however, had altered the situation. The girl had caught
at a suggestion in them which startled her. This rough white plainsman
was come to make love to her, and to say--what? He was at once awkward
and confident, afraid of her, of her refinement, grace, beauty, and
education, and yet confident in the advantage of his position, a
white man bending to a half-breed girl. He was not conscious of the
condescension and majesty of his demeanour, but it was there, and his
untutored words and ways must make it all too apparent to the girl. The
revelation of the moment made her at once triumphant and humiliated.
This white man had come to make love to her, that was apparent; but that
he, ungrammatical, crude, and rough, should think he had but to put
out his hand, and she in whom every subtle emotion and influence had
delicate response, whose words and ways were as far removed from his as
day from night, would fly to him, brought the flush of indignation to
her cheek. She responded to his toast with a pleasant nod, however, and
said:

“But if you will keep coming in such wild storms, there will not be many
anniversaries.” Laughing, she poured out another glass of liquor for
him.

“Well, now, p’r’aps you’re right, and so the only thing to do is not to
keep coming, but to stay--stay right where you are.”

The Indian woman could not see her daughter’s face, which was turned to
the fire, but she herself smiled at John Alloway, and nodded her head
approvingly. Here was the cure for her own trouble and loneliness.
Pauline and she, who lived in different worlds, and yet were tied to
each other by circumstances they could not control, would each work
out her own destiny after her own nature, since John Alloway had come
a-wooing. She would go back on the Warais, and Pauline would remain at
the Portage, a white woman with her white man. She would go back to the
smoky fires in the huddled lodges; to the venison stew and the snake
dance; to the feasts of the Medicine Men, and the long sleeps in the
summer days, and the winter’s tales, and be at rest among her own
people; and Pauline would have revenge of the wife of the prancing
Reeve, and perhaps the people would forget who her mother was.

With these thoughts flying through her sluggish mind, she rose and moved
heavily from the room, with a parting look of encouragement at Alloway,
as though to say, a man that is bold is surest.

With her back to the man, Pauline watched her mother leave the room,
saw the look she gave Alloway. When the door was closed she turned and
looked Alloway in the eyes.

“How old are you?” she asked suddenly.

He stirred in his seat nervously. “Why, fifty, about,” he answered with
confusion.

“Then you’ll be wise not to go looking for anniversaries in blizzards,
when they’re few at the best,” she said with a gentle and dangerous
smile.

“Fifty-why, I’m as young as most men of thirty,” he responded with
an uncertain laugh. “I’d have come here to-day if it had been snowing
pitchforks and chain-lightning. I made up my mind I would. You saved my
life, that’s dead sure; and I’d be down among the moles if it wasn’t
for you and that Piegan pony of yours. Piegan ponies are wonders in a
storm-seem to know their way by instinct. You, too--why, I bin on
the plains all my life, and was no better than a baby that day; but
you--why, you had Piegan in you, why, yes--”

He stopped short for a moment, checked by the look in her face, then
went blindly on: “And you’ve got Blackfoot in you, too; and you just
felt your way through the tornado and over the blind prairie like a bird
reaching for the hills. It was as easy to you as picking out a moverick
in a bunch of steers to me. But I never could make out what you was
doing on the prairie that terrible day. I’ve thought of it a hundred
times. What was you doing, if it ain’t cheek to ask?”

“I was trying to lose a life,” she answered quietly, her eyes dwelling
on his face, yet not seeing him; for it all came back on her, the agony
which had driven her out into the tempest to be lost evermore.

He laughed. “Well, now, that’s good,” he said; “that’s what they call
speaking sarcastic. You was out to save, and not to lose, a life; that
was proved to the satisfaction of the court.” He paused and chuckled
to himself, thinking he had been witty, and continued: “And I was that
court, and my judgment was that the debt of that life you saved had to
be paid to you within one calendar year, with interest at the usual per
cent for mortgages on good security. That was my judgment, and there’s
no appeal from it. I am the great Justinian in this case.”

“Did you ever save anybody’s life?” she asked, putting the bottle of
cordial away, as he filled his glass for the third time.

“Twice certain, and once dividin’ the honours,” he answered, pleased at
the question.

“And did you expect to get any pay, with or without interest?” she
added.

“Me? I never thought of it again. But yes--by gol, I did! One case was
funny, as funny can be. It was Ricky Wharton over on the Muskwat River.
I saved his life right enough, and he came to me a year after and said,
You saved my life, now what are you going to do with it? I’m stony
broke. I owe a hundred dollars, and I wouldn’t be owing it if you hadn’t
saved my life. When you saved it I was five hunderd to the good, and
I’d have left that much behind me. Now I’m on the rocks, because you
insisted on saving my life; and you just got to take care of me.’ I
‘insisted!’ Well, that knocked me silly, and I took him on--blame me, if
I didn’t keep Ricky a whole year, till he went north looking for gold.
Get pay--why, I paid! Saving life has its responsibilities, little gal.”

“You can’t save life without running some risk yourself, not as a rule,
can you?” she said, shrinking from his familiarity.

“Not as a rule,” he replied. “You took on a bit of risk with me, you and
your Piegan pony.”

“Oh, I was young,” she responded, leaning over the table, and drawing
faces on a piece of paper before her. “I could take more risks, I was
only nineteen!”

“I don’t catch on,” he rejoined. “If it’s sixteen or--”

“Or fifty,” she interposed.

“What difference does it make? If you’re done for, it’s the same at
nineteen as fifty, and vicey-versey.”

“No, it’s not the same,” she answered. “You leave so much more that you
want to keep, when you go at fifty.”

“Well, I dunno. I never thought of that.”

“There’s all that has belonged to you. You’ve been married, and have
children, haven’t you?”

He started, frowned, then straightened himself. “I got one girl--she’s
east with her grandmother,” he said jerkily.

“That’s what I said; there’s more to leave behind at fifty,” she
replied, a red spot on each cheek. She was not looking at him, but at
the face of a man on the paper before her--a young man with abundant
hair, a strong chin, and big, eloquent eyes; and all around his face she
had drawn the face of a girl many times, and beneath the faces of both
she was writing Manette and Julien.

The water was getting too deep for John Alloway.

He floundered towards the shore. “I’m no good at words,” he said--“no
good at argyment; but I’ve got a gift for stories--round the fire of a
night, with a pipe and a tin basin of tea; so I’m not going to try and
match you. You’ve had a good education down at Winnipeg. Took every
prize, they say, and led the school, though there was plenty of fuss
because they let you do it, and let you stay there, being half-Indian.
You never heard what was going on outside, I s’pose. It didn’t matter,
for you won out. Blamed foolishness, trying to draw the line between red
and white that way. Of course, it’s the women always, always the women,
striking out for all-white or nothing. Down there at Portage they’ve
treated you mean, mean as dirt. The Reeve’s wife--well, we’ll fix that
up all right. I guess John Alloway ain’t to be bluffed. He knows too
much and they all know he knows enough. When John Alloway, 32 Main
Street, with a ranch on the Katanay, says, ‘We’re coming--Mr. and Mrs.
John Alloway is coming,’ they’ll get out their cards visite, I guess.”

Pauline’s head bent lower, and she seemed laboriously etching lines into
the faces before her--Manette and Julien, Julien and Manette; and there
came into her eyes the youth and light and gaiety of the days when
Julien came of an afternoon and the riverside rang with laughter; the
dearest, lightest days she had ever spent.

The man of fifty went on, seeing nothing but a girl over whom he was
presently going to throw the lasso of his affection, and take her home
with him, yielding and glad, a white man, and his half-breed girl--but
such a half-breed!

“I seen enough of the way some of them women treated you,” he continued,
“and I sez to myself, Her turn next. There’s a way out, I sez, and John
Alloway pays his debts. When the anniversary comes round I’ll put things
right, I sez to myself. She saved my life, and she shall have the rest
of it, if she’ll take it, and will give a receipt in full, and open
a new account in the name of John and Pauline Alloway. Catch it?
See--Pauline?”

Slowly she got to her feet. There was a look in her eyes such as
had been in her mother’s a little while before, but a hundred times
intensified: a look that belonged to the flood and flow of generations
of Indian life, yet controlled in her by the order and understanding of
centuries of white men’s lives, the pervasive, dominating power of race.

For an instant she kept her eyes towards the window. The storm had
suddenly ceased, and a glimmer of sunset light was breaking over the
distant wastes of snow.

“You want to pay a debt you think you owe,” she said, in a strange,
lustreless voice, turning to him at last. “Well, you have paid it. You
have given me a book to read which I will keep always. And I give you a
receipt in full for your debt.”

“I don’t know about any book,” he answered dazedly. “I want to marry you
right away.”

“I am sorry, but it is not necessary,” she replied suggestively. Her
face was very pale now.

“But I want to. It ain’t a debt. That was only a way of putting it. I
want to make you my wife. I got some position, and I can make the West
sit up, and look at you and be glad.”

Suddenly her anger flared out, low and vivid and fierce, but her words
were slow and measured. “There is no reason why I should marry you--not
one. You offer me marriage as a prince might give a penny to a beggar.
If my mother were not an Indian woman, you would not have taken it all
as a matter of course. But my father was a white man, and I am a white
man’s daughter, and I would rather marry an Indian, who would think me
the best thing there was in the light of the sun, than marry you. Had I
been pure white you would not have been so sure, you would have asked,
not offered. I am not obliged to you. You ought to go to no woman as
you came to me. See, the storm has stopped. You will be quite safe going
back now. The snow will be deep, perhaps, but it is not far.”

She went to the window, got his cap and gloves, and handed them to him.
He took them, dumbfounded and overcome.

“Say, I ain’t done it right, mebbe, but I meant well, and I’d be good to
you and proud of you, and I’d love you better than anything I ever saw,”
 he said shamefacedly, but eagerly and honestly too.

“Ah, you should have said those last words first,” she answered.

“I say them now.”

“They come too late; but they would have been too late in any case,” she
added. “Still, I am glad you said them.”

She opened the door for him.

“I made a mistake,” he urged humbly. “I understand better now. I never
had any schoolin’.”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” she answered gently. “Goodbye.”

Suddenly he turned. “You’re right--it couldn’t ever be,” he said.
“You’re--you’re great. And I owe you my life still.”

He stepped out into the biting air.

For a moment Pauline stood motionless in the middle of the room, her
gaze fixed upon the door which had just closed; then, with a wild
gesture of misery and despair, she threw herself upon the couch in a
passionate outburst of weeping. Sobs shook her from head to foot, and
her hands, clenched above her head, twitched convulsively.

Presently the door opened and her mother looked in eagerly. At what she
saw her face darkened and hardened for an instant, but then the girl’s
utter abandonment of grief and agony convinced and conquered her.
Some glimmer of the true understanding of the problem which Pauline
represented got into her heart, and drove the sullen selfishness from
her face and eyes and mind. She came over heavily and, sinking upon her
knees, swept an arm around the girl’s shoulder. She realised what had
happened, and probably this was the first time in her life that she had
ever come by instinct to a revelation of her daughter’s mind, or of the
faithful meaning of incidents of their lives.

“You said no to John Alloway,” she murmured. Defiance and protest spoke
in the swift gesture of the girl’s hands. “You think because he was
white that I’d drop into his arms! No--no--no!”

“You did right, little one.”

The sobs suddenly stopped, and the girl seemed to listen with all her
body. There was something in her Indian mother’s voice she had never
heard before--at least, not since she was a little child, and swung in a
deer-skin hammock in a tamarac tree by Renton’s Lodge, where the chiefs
met, and the West paused to rest on its onward march. Something of the
accents of the voice that crooned to her then was in the woman’s tones
now.

“He offered it like a lump of sugar to a bird--I know. He didn’t know
that you have great blood--yes, but it is true. My man’s grandfather, he
was of the blood of the kings of England. My man had the proof. And for
a thousand years my people have been chiefs. There is no blood in all
the West like yours. My heart was heavy, and dark thoughts came to me,
because my man is gone, and the life is not my life, and I am only an
Indian woman from the Warais, and my heart goes out there always now.
But some great Medicine has been poured into my heart. As I stood at the
door and saw you lying there, I called to the Sun. ‘O great Spirit,’ I
said, ‘help me to understand; for this girl is bone of my bone and flesh
of my flesh, and Evil has come between us!’ And the Sun Spirit poured
the Medicine into my spirit, and there is no cloud between us now. It
has passed away, and I see. Little white one, the white life is the only
life, and I will live it with you till a white man comes and gives you
a white man’s home. But not John Alloway--shall the crow nest with the
oriole?”

As the woman spoke with slow, measured voice, full of the cadences of
a heart revealing itself, the girl’s breath at first seemed to stop, so
still she lay; then, as the true understanding of the words came to her,
she panted with excitement, her breast heaved, and the blood flushed
her face. When the slow voice ceased, and the room became still, she lay
quiet for a moment, letting the new thing find secure lodgment in her
thought; then, suddenly, she raised herself and threw her arms round her
mother in a passion of affection.

“Lalika! O mother Lalika!” she said tenderly, and kissed her again
and again. Not since she was a little girl, long before they left the
Warais, had she called her mother by her Indian name, which her father
had humorously taught her to do in those far-off happy days by the
beautiful, singing river and the exquisite woods, when, with a bow and
arrow, she had ranged a young Diana who slew only with love.

“Lalika, mother Lalika, it is like the old, old times,” she added
softly. “Ah, it does not matter now, for you understand!”

“I do not understand altogether,” murmured the Indian woman gently. “I
am not white, and there is a different way of thinking; but I will hold
your hand, and we will live the white life together.”

Cheek to cheek they saw the darkness come, and, afterwards, the silver
moon steal up over a frozen world, in which the air bit like steel and
braced the heart like wine. Then, at last, before it was nine o’clock,
after her custom, the Indian woman went to bed, leaving her daughter
brooding peacefully by the fire.

For a long time Pauline sat with hands clasped in her lap, her gaze on
the tossing flames, in her heart and mind a new feeling of strength and
purpose. The way before her was not clear, she saw no further than this
day, and all that it had brought; yet she was as one that has crossed
a direful flood and finds herself on a strange shore in an unknown
country, with the twilight about her, yet with so much of danger passed
that there was only the thought of the moment’s safety round her, the
camp-fire to be lit, and the bed to be made under the friendly trees and
stars.

For a half-hour she sat so, and then, suddenly, she raised her head
listening, leaning towards the window, through which the moonlight
streamed. She heard her name called without, distinct and
strange--“Pauline! Pauline!”

Starting up, she ran to the door and opened it. All was silent and
cruelly cold. Nothing but the wide plain of snow and the steely air. But
as she stood intently listening, the red glow from the fire behind her,
again came the cry--“Pauline!” not far away. Her heart beat hard, and
she raised her head and called--why was it she should call out in a
language not her own? “Qu’appelle? Qu’appelle?”

And once again on the still night air came the trembling
appeal--“Pauline!”

“Qu’appelle? Qu’appelle?” she cried, then, with a gasping murmur of
understanding and recognition she ran forwards in the frozen night
towards the sound of the voice. The same intuitive sense which had made
her call out in French,

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