Produced by Al Haines.




[Illustration: The Settler]




                              THE SETTLER


                                   BY

                            HERMAN WHITAKER

                               AUTHOR OF
                     "THE MYSTERY OF THE BARRANCA"
                           "THE PLANTER" ETC.



                      HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
                          NEW YORK AND LONDON



                       [Illustration: Title page]




                 COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY HARPER & BROTHERS

                PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




                                   TO
                                 ALYSE




                               *CONTENTS*


CHAP.

      I. The Park Lands
     II. A Deputation
    III. The Trail
     IV. The Coyote Snaps
      V. Jenny
     VI. The Shadow
    VII. Mr. Flynn Steps into the Breach
   VIII. When April Smiled Again
     IX. The Devil
      X. Friction
     XI. The Frost
    XII. The Break
   XIII. The Camp
    XIV. The Red Teamster
     XV. Travail
    XVI. A House-party
   XVII. —And Its Finale
  XVIII. The Persistence of the Established
    XIX. The Wages of Sin
     XX. —Is Death
    XXI. Persecution
   XXII. Denunciation
  XXIII. The Charivari
   XXIV. Without the Pale
    XXV. The Sunken Grade
   XXVI. Winnipeg
  XXVII. The Nature of the Cinch
 XXVIII. The Strike
   XXIX. The Bluff
    XXX. Fire
   XXXI. Wherein the Fates Substitute a Change of Bill
  XXXII. The Trail Again




                             *THE SETTLER*



                                  *I*

                            *THE PARK LANDS*


The clip of a cutting axe flushed a heron from the bosom of a reedy lake
and sent him soaring in slow spirals until, at the zenith of his flight,
he overlooked a vast champaign.  Far to the south a yellow streak marked
the scorched prairies of southern Manitoba; eastward and north a spruce
forest draped the land in a mantle of gloom; while to the west the woods
were thrown with a scattering hand over a vast expanse of rolling
prairie.  These were the Park Lands of the Fertile Belt—a beautiful
country, rich, fat-soiled, rank with flowers and herbage, once the
hunting-ground of Cree and Ojibway, but now passed to the sterner race
whose lonely farmsteads were strewn over the face of the land.  These
presented a deadly likeness.  Each had its log-house, its huge tent of
firewood upreared against next winter’s drift, and the same yellow
strawstacks dotted their fenceless fields.  One other thing, too, they
had in common—though this did not lie to the eye of the heron—a
universal mortgage, legacy of the recent boom, covered all.

At the flap of the great bird’s wing a man stepped from the timber and
stood watching him soar.  He was a tall fellow, lean as a greyhound,
flat-flanked, in color neither dark nor fair.  His eyes were deep-set
and looked out from a face that was burned to the color of a brick.  His
nose was straight and large, cheeks well hollowed; the face would have
been stern but for the humor that lurked about the mouth.  Taken
together, the man was an excellent specimen of what he was—a young
American of the settler type.

"Gone plumb out of sight," he muttered, rubbing his dazzled eyes.  "An’
he wasn’t no spring chicken.  Time to feed, I reckon."

A few steps carried him to his team, a rangy yoke of steers which were
tied in the shade.  Having fed them, he returned to his work and chopped
steadily until, towards evening, his wagon was loaded with poplar rails.
Then hitching, he mounted his load and "hawed" and "geed" his way
through the forest.  As he came out on the open prairie the metallic
rattle of a mower travelled down the wind.  Stopping, he listened, while
a shadow deepened his tan.

"Comes from Morrill’s big slough," he muttered, whipping up the oxen.
"Who’ll it be?"

Morrill, his near neighbor, was sick in bed, and the rattle could only
mean that some one was trespassing on his hay rights—or rather the
privilege which he claimed as such—for trespass such as he suspected was
simply the outward sign of a change in the settlement’s condition.  In
the beginning the first-comers had found an abundance of natural fodder
growing in the sloughs, where, for lack of a water-shed, the spring
thaws stored flood-waters.  There was plenty then for all.  But with
thicker settlement anarchy ensued.  New neighbors grabbed sloughs on
unsettled lands, which old-timers had sealed to themselves, and so
forced them to steal from one another.  Morrill and the man on the wagon
had "hayed" together for the last three seasons, which fact explained
the significance he attached to the rattle of the alien mower.

"It’s Hines!" he muttered when, five minutes later, he sighted the mower
from the crown of a roll.  "The son of a gun!"

The man was running the first swath around a mile-long slough which lay
in the trough of two great rolls. It was a pretty piece of hay, thick,
rank, and so long that one might have tied two spears together across a
horse’s back.  Indeed, when the settler rattled down the bank and
stopped his oxen they were hidden to the horns, which fact accounted for
Hines not seeing them until his team brought against the load.

"Hullo!" he cried, startled.  "Didn’t expect to see you, Carter!"

"Don’t reckon you did," the settler replied.  The shadow was now gone
from his face.  Cool, cheerful, unconcerned, he sat in the mower’s path,
swinging an easy leg.

Hines gave him an uneasy glance.  "Been cutting poles?" he asked,
affecting nonchalance.

"Yes.  Corral needed raising a couple of rails," Carter carelessly
answered.

Encouraged, Hines made an observation about the crops which the other
answered, and so the talk drifted on until Hines, feeling that he had
established a footing, said, "Well, I must be moving."  But as he backed
his horses to drive around, the steers lurched forward and again blocked
the way.

"Pretty cut of hay this."  Carter ignored the other’s savage glance.
"Ought to turn Morrill thirty tons, don’t you reckon?"

Hines shuffled uneasily in the mower seat.  "I didn’t allow," he
growled, "as Morrill would want hay this year?"

"No?"  The monosyllable was subtly sarcastic.

Hines flushed.  "What kin a dead man do with hay?" he snarled.

"Is Morrill dead?"

"No!  But Doc Ellis tol’ me at Stinkin’ Water as he couldn’t live
through winter."  He almost yelled it; opposition was galling his savage
temper.

"So you thought you’d beat the funeral?" Carter jeered.  "Savin’ man!
Well—he ain’t dead yet?"

The challenge was unmistakable.  But though brutal, ferocious as a wolf,
Hines shared the animal’s preferences for an easy prey.  Corner him and
he would turn, snarling, but his was the temper which takes no chances
with an equal force.  Now he lived up to his tradition. Viciously
setting his teeth, he awaited the other’s action.

But Carter was in no hurry.  Leaning back on his load, he sprawled at
ease, turning his eyes to the fathomless vault above.  Time crept on.
The oxen ceased puffing and cropped the grass about them, the horses
switched impatience of the flies.  The sun dropped and hung like a split
orange athwart the horizon, the hollows blued with shadows, which
presently climbed the knolls and extinguished their golden lights.  Soon
the last red ray kindled the forest, silver specks dusted the darkening
sky, only the west blushed with the afterglow.

Hines tired first.  "Quitting-time," he growled, backing his horses.

"Took you a long time to find it out," Carter drawled, giving the words
a significance the other had not intended.  "But grace is always waiting
for the sinner.  So long!  But say!" he called after the disappearing
figure, "if you hear any one inquiring after this slough, you can tell
them as Merrill’s goin’ to cut it to-morrow."

Whipping up his oxen, he swung up the bank and headed south on Merrill’s
hay trail.  Fresh from their rest, the steers stepped out to a lively
rattling of chains, and in a quarter of an hour stopped of their own
volition before his cabin.

As Carter entered, the sick man leaned on his elbow and looked up at his
magnificent inches: he loomed like a giant in the gloom of the cabin.
There was envy in the glance but no spite.  It was the look the sick
bestow on the rudely healthy.  For Carter’s physique was a constant
reminder to Morrill of his own lost strength—he had been a college
athlete, strong and well set-up, the kind of man to whom women render
the homage of a second lingering glance.  Three years ago, inherited
lung trouble had driven him from the Eastern city in which he had laid
the foundation of a pretty law practice, but the dry air and open life
of the central plains had not checked the ravages of the disease.
Still, though but the wraith of his former self, he had kept a brave
face, and now he cheerfully answered Carter’s greeting.

"Cast your eye over this," he said, holding out an open letter.  "It’s
from my sister Helen."

Handling it as tenderly as though it were a feather from the wing of
love, Carter held the letter to the lamp. It was written in a small,
feminine hand which took all manner of flourishes unto itself as it ran
along the lines. Carter regarded them with a look in which surprise
struggled with respect.  "Oh, shore!" he laughed at last.  "Them curly
cues is mighty pretty, Bert, but it would take too long for me to cipher
’em out.  What’s it all about?"

"She’s coming out.  Arrives in Lone Tree day after to-morrow."

"Phew!" Carter whistled.  "Short notice."

He thoughtfully stroked his chin.  Lone Tree lay sixty miles to the
south and the Eastern mail-train came in at noon.  But this was not the
cause of his worry. His ponies could cover the distance within the time.
But there was Hines.  If he did not try the slough, others might.
Morrill mistook his silence.

"I hate to ask you to go," he said, hesitatingly. "You’ve done so much
for me."

"Done nothing," the big man laughed.  "’Twasn’t that. Jes’ now I warned
Hines off that big slough o’ yours, an’ I intended to begin cutting it
to-morrow morning."

Morrill impulsively extended his hand.  "You’re a good fellow, Carter."

"Shucks!" the other laughed.  "Ain’t we two the only Yanks in these
parts?  But say! won’t she find this a bit rough?"

Morrill glanced discontentedly at the log walls, the soap-boxes which
served for seats, the home-made table, and the peg ladder that led to
the loft above.  Three years’ hard work had rubbed the romance from his
rough surroundings, but he remembered that it had once been there.  "Oh,
I don’t know," he answered. "She’ll like it.  Has all the romantic
notions about keeping home in a log-house, you see."

"Never had ’em," the other mused, "though mebbe that was on account of
being born in one.  What’s bringing her out?"

"Well, now that father’s dead I’m all the kin she’s got.  He didn’t
leave anything worth mentioning, so Helen has to choose between a place
in a store and keeping house for me.  But say! your team’s moving! Don’t
tell her I’m sick," he called, as Carter rushed for the door.  "She’d
worry, and think I was worse than I am."

"Couldn’t very well," Carter muttered, as he ran after his team.  "No,
she really couldn’t," he repeated, as he caught up and climbed upon his
load.  "Poor chap!—An’ poor little girl!"




                                  *II*

                             *A DEPUTATION*


Fifty miles in a day is big travel in the East, yet a team of northern
ponies will, if the load be light, run it on three legs.  The fourth,
unless cinched with a kicking-strap, is likely to be in the buck-board
half the time; but if the driver is good at dodging he need not use a
strap.

Starting next morning at sunrise, Carter ran through the settlements,
fed at the mission in the valley of the Assiniboin at noon, then,
climbing out, he rattled south through the arid plains which cumber the
earth from the river to Beaver Creek.  There Vickery, the keeper of the
stopping-house, yelled to him to put in and feed.  He had not seen a man
for two weeks, and his wells of speech were full to overflowing.  But
Carter shook denial.  Far off a dark smudge rose from under the edge of
the world—the smoke of the express, he thought.  One would have believed
it within a dozen miles, yet when, an hour later, he rattled into Lone
Tree, it seemed no nearer than when first it impinged on the quivering
horizon.  This appearance, however, was deceptive as the first, for he
had scarcely unhitched at the livery before an engine and two toy cars
stole out from under the smudge.

"General manager’s private car," the station agent answered Carter’s
inquiry.  "The old man lays over here to talk with a deputation.  It’s
over at the hotel now, feeding and liquoring up."

"The old grievance?" Carter asked.

The agent nodded.  "That and others.  They say we’re coming their flesh
and blood.  You should hear old man Cummings orate on that.  And they
accuse us of exacting forty bushels of wheat out of every hundred we
tote out to the seaboard."

"Wheat at forty-five, freight to Montreal at twenty-seven?" Carter
mused.  "Don’t that pretty near size it, Hooper?"

"Is that our fault?" the agent ruffled, like an irate gobbler.  "Did we
freeze their wheat?  Sound grain is worth sixty-eight, and if they will
farm at the north pole they must expect to get frozen."

"And if you will railroad at the north pole," Carter suggested, "you
ought to—"

"Get all that’s coming to us," the agent finished. "But we don’t.  Our
line runs through fifteen hundred miles of country that don’t pay for
axle-grease.  We must make running expenses, and ought to pay a
reasonable interest to our stockholders, though we haven’t yet.  The
settled lands have to bear hauling charges on the unsettled.  But these
fellows don’t see our side of it.  Where would they be without the line,
anyway? Now answer me that, Carter."

"Back East, landless, homeless, choring for sixteen a month an’ board,"
Carter slowly answered.  "I’m not bucking your railroad, Hooper.  But
here’s the point—your people and the government sent out all sorts of
lying literature an’ filled these fellows with the idea that they were
going to get rich quick; whereas this is a poor man’s country an’ will
be for a generation to come.  Five generations of farmers couldn’t have
built this line which one generation must pay for.  There’s the point.
They’ve clapped a mortgage an’ a fifteen-hundred-mile handicap on their
future, an’ the interest is going to bear their noses hard down on the
grindstone. They’ll make a living, but they ain’t going to have much of
a time.  Their children’s children will reap the profit off their
sweat."

"No," the agent profanely agreed, "they ain’t going to have a hell of a
time."  Having spent his mature years in one continuous wrangle over
freights and rates, it was positively disconcerting to find a farmer who
could appreciate the necessities of railroad economics, and after a
thoughtful pause the agent said, "You ain’t so slow—for a farmer."

"Thank you," Carter gravely answered.  "Some day, if I’m good, I may
rise to the heights of railroading."

The agent grinned appreciatively.  "Coming back to the deputation, these
fellows might as well tackle a grizzly as the old man.  There’s not
enough of you to supply grease for a freight-train’s wheels."

"Oh, I don’t know," Carter gently murmured.

Ten minutes ago the agent would have hotly proved his point; now he
replied, quite mildly: "If you think different, tag on to the
deputation.  Here it comes, all het-up with wrongs and whiskey."

"There’s Bill Cummings!" Carter indicated an elderly man, very white of
beard, very red of face, and transparently innocent in expression.

"He’s bell-wether," the agent said, grinning.  Then, as the approaching
locomotive blew two sharp blasts, he added, "Blamed if the old man won’t
make mutton of the entire flock if they don’t clear out of the way!"

A quick scattering averted the catastrophe while increasing the heat of
the deputation.  Very much disrumpled, it filed into the car, with
Carter tagging on behind.

The general manager, who was smoking by an open window, tossed out his
cigar as he rose.  Not a tall man, power yet expressed itself in every
movement of his thick-set body; it lurked in his keen gray glance; was
given off like electrical energy in his few crisp words of welcome.
From the eyes, placed well apart in the massive head, to the strong jaw
his every feature expressed his graduation in the mastership of men;
told eloquently of his wonderful record, his triumphs over man and
nature.  Beginning a section hand, he had filled almost every position
in the gift of his road, driving spikes in early days with the same
expertness he now evidenced in directing its enormous affairs—the road
which had sprung from his own fertile imagination; the road which, from
nothing, he had called into being.  Where others had only discerned
mountains, gulfs, cañons, trackless forest, he had seen a great trunk
line with a hundred feeders—mills, mines, factories, farms, and
steamships plying to the Orient for trade. And because his was the faith
that moves mountains, the magnificent dream had taken form in wood and
iron.

Purblind to all but their own interests, the settlers saw only the
proximate result of that mighty travail—the palace-car with its
luxurious fittings.

"We pay for this," Carter’s neighbor growled.

"My, but I’d like his job!" another whispered.  "Nothing to do but sit
there and dictate a few letters."

A third gave the figures of the manager’s salary, while a fourth added
that it was screwed out of the farmers. So they muttered their private
envy while Cummings voiced their public grievance.  When surveys were
run for the trunk line, settlers had swarmed in, pre-empting land on
either side of the right of way, and when, to avoid certain engineering
problems, the surveys were shifted south, they found themselves from
fifty to sixty miles from a market.  A branch had been promised—

"When settlement and traffic justify it."  The manager cut the oration
short.

He had listened quietly while Cummings talked of rights, lawsuits, and
government intervention; now he launched his ultimatum on the following
silence: "Gentlemen, our road is not run for fun, but profit, and though
we should very much like to accommodate you, it is impossible under the
circumstances.  I am pleased to have met you, and"—the corners of the
firm mouth twitched ever so slightly—"and I shall be pleased to meet you
again when you can advance something more to our advantage than costs
and suits.  I bid you good-day."

Business-like, terse, devoid of feeling, the laconic answer acted upon
the deputation like a blow in the face. Cummings actually recoiled, and
his expression of sheep-like surprise, baffled wonder, innocent anger
set Carter chuckling.  He was still smiling as he shouldered forward.

"A minute, please."

The manager glanced at his watch.  "I can’t spare you much more."

"I won’t need it," Carter answered, and so took up the case.

Humorously allowing that Cummings had stepped off with the wrong foot,
that he and his fellows had no case in law, Carter went on, in short,
crisp sentences, to give the number of settlers on the old survey, the
acreage under cultivation and of newly broken ground, the lumbering
outlook in the spruce forests north of the Park Lands, the number of
tye-camps already there established, finishing with a brief description
of the rich cattle country the proposed line would tap.

Ten minutes had added themselves to the first while he was talking, but
the manager’s gray glance had evinced no impatience.  "Now," he
commented, "we have something to go on.  The settlements alone would not
justify us in building, but with the lumber—and colonization prospects—"
He mused a while, then, after expressing regrets for the haste that
called him away, he said, "But if you will put all this and other
information into writing, Mr. Carter, I’ll see what we can do."

"He’s big, the old man."  Nodding at the black trail of smoke, the agent
thus commented on his superior five minutes later.  Then, indicating the
deputation which was making its jubilant way back to the clapboard
hotel, he said, "They ain’t giving you all the credit, are they?"

Shrugging at the last remark, Carter answered the first.  "He’s a big
man, shorely.  But, bless you"—he flipped a thumb at the
delegation—"they don’t see it. Any of ’em is willing to allow that the
manager has had chances that didn’t fly by his particular roost—just as
though the same opportunity hadn’t been tweaking him by the nose this
last twenty years.  There it lay, loose, loose enough for people to
break their shins on, till this particular man picked it up.  He’s big.
Puts me in mind of them robber barons you read of in history. Big,
powerful chaps, who trod down everything that came in their own way
while dealing out a rough sort of justice.  There’s a crowd"—he looked
at the agent interrogatively—"that haven’t had what’s coming to them.
In their times moral suasion, as the parsons call it, hadn’t been
invented and folks were a heap blooded. A little bleeding once in a
while kept down the temperature, and I’ve always allowed that the barons
prevented a sight more murder than they did."  Then, nailing his point,
he finished: "The historians fixed a cold deck for them like the one
they’ll deal this general manager. But you can’t stop the world.  She
waggles in spite of them, and it’s the big men that make her go.  But
there!  I must eat.  What does your ticker say of the express?"

"Half an hour late.  You’ll just have nice time."  And as he watched the
tall figure swinging across the tracks, the agent gave words to a
thought that was even then in the general manager’s mind—"There’s a
division superintendent going to seed on a farm."

Having made up ten minutes, however, the train rolled in while Carter
was still at dinner, and as—for some motive too subtle for even his own
definition—he had not mentioned her coming, Miss Helen Morrill had
become a subject of bashful curiosity to assembled Lone Tree before he
came dashing across the tracks.  Apart from his size, sunburn, and
certain intelligence of expression, there was really nothing to
distinguish this particular young man from the people who, at home, were
not on her visiting-list, and if polite the girl turned rather a cold
ear to a magnificently evolved and smoothly told set of lies as he
escorted her over to the hotel. Morrill was busy with the hay, and as
he, Carter, had to come to town for a mower casting he had agreed to
bring her out.  Her brother was well!  A bit delicate!  He dare not
raise her hopes too high.  Oh, he’d pull through! This clear northern
air—and so forth.

That clear northern air!  Glowing with color, infinite, flat, the
prairies basked under the afternoon sun.  From the car windows the girl
had seen them unfolding: the great screeds of God on which he had
written his wonders.  Now nothing interposed between her and their vast
expanse.  Swimming in lambent light they reached out through the
quivering distance till merged with the turquoise sky.  After she had
dined, Carter showed her, from the hotel veranda, the train from which
she had dismounted, no larger than a toy, puffing defiance at a receding
horizon.  Other things he told her—curious facts, strange happenings
drawled forth easily with touches of humor that kept her interested and
laughing.  Not until the moon’s magic translated the prairie’s golden
sheen to ashes, and she unconsciously offered her hand as she rose to
retire, did she realize how completely she had cancelled her first
impression.

It was then that Lone Tree closed in on Carter with invitations to drink
and requests for verification of a theory that the northern settlement
was spreading itself on educational lines.  "She’s a right smart-looking
girl," said the store-keeper, its principal exponent, "and Silver Creek
is surely going to turn out some scholars."

But he clucked his sympathy when he heard the truth.  "An’ you say he’s
having hemerrages?  Shore, shore!  Here, come over to the store.  That
girl don’t look like she’d been raised on sow-belly, an’ sick folks is
mighty picky in their eating."

So, by moonlight, the buck-board was loaded up with jams, jellies,
fruits, and meats, the best in stock and of fabulous value at frontier
prices.  While the evil deed was being perpetrated neither man looked at
the other. The store-keeper cloaked his villany by learned discourse of
freight rates, while Carter spoke indifferently of crops.  Only the
parting hand-shake revealed each conspirator to the other.




                                 *III*

                              *THE TRAIL*


"To make Flynn’s for noon," Carter had said the preceding evening, "we
shall have to be early on the trail."  And there was approbation in his
glance when he found Helen Morrill waiting upon the veranda.

"What pretty ponies!" she exclaimed, quickly adding, "Are they—tame?"

"Regular sheep," he reassured her.

However, she still dubiously eyed the "sheep," which were pawing the
high heavens in beliance of their pacific character, until, catching the
humorous twinkle in Carter’s eye, she saw that he was gauging her
courage. Then she stepped in.  As they felt her weight the ponies
plunged out and raced off down the trail; but Carter’s arm eased her
back to her seat, and when, flushed and just a little trembling, she was
able to look back Lone Tree lay far behind, its grain-sheds looking for
all the world like red Noah’s arks on a yellow carpet.  Over them, but
beyond the horizon, hung a black smudge, mark of a distant
freight-train.  Wondering if one ever lost sight of things in this
country of distances, she turned back to the ponies, which had now found
a legitimate outlet for their energies, and were knocking off the miles
at ten to the hour.

Carter drew a loose rein, but she noticed that even when talking he kept
the team in the tail of his eye.

"Yes," he answered her question, "that Devil horse will bear watching,
and Death, the mare, is just about as sudden.  Why did I name her that?"
He twinkled down upon her.  "You mightn’t feel complimented if I told."

"Well—if I must," he drawled when she pressed the question.  "You see
there’s two things that can get away with a right smart man—death and
woman.  So, being a female—there!  I told you that you wouldn’t be
complimented."

"Oh, I don’t mind," she laughed.  "Like curses, slights on my sex come
home to roost, Mr. Carter. You are not dead yet."

"Nor married," he retorted.

This morning they had taken up their acquaintanceship where it was laid
down the night before, but now something in his manner—it was not
freedom; assurance would better describe it—caused a reversion to her
first coldness.

"Doubtless," she said, with condescension, "some good girl will take
pity on you."

He looked squarely in her eyes.  "Mebbe—though the country isn’t
overstocked.  Still, they’ve been coming in some of late."

The suddenness of it made her gasp.  How dare he? Even if he had been a
man of her own station!  Turning, she looked off and away, giving him a
cold, if pretty, shoulder, till instinct told her that he was making
good use of his opportunities.  But when she turned back he was
discreetly eying the ponies, apparently lost in thought.

His preoccupation permitted minute study, and in five minutes she had
memorized his every feature, from the clean profile to the strong chin
and humorous mouth. A clean, wholesome face she thought it.  She failed,
however, to classify him for, despite his homely speech, he simply would
not fit in with the butchers, bakers, and candle-stick makers of her
limited experience.  One thing she felt, and that very vividly: he was
not to be snubbed or slighted.  So—

"Do we follow the railroad much farther?" she asked.

"A smart mile," he answered.  Then, with a sidelong glance at the space
between them, he added, "I wouldn’t sit on the rail."

"Thank you," she said, coldly.  "I’m quite comfortable."

"Tastes differ," he genially commented.  Then, stretching his whip, he
added, "See that wolf!"

In a flash she abolished the space.  "Oh, where?  Will he—follow us?"

"Mebbe not," he said, adding, as he noticed a disposition on her part to
edge out, "But he shorely looks hungry."

It was only a coyote, and afterwards she could never recall the episode
without a blush, but the fact remains that while the grizzled apparition
crowned a roll, she threw dignity overboard and clung to Carter.  It was
well, too, that she did, for more from deviltry than fear of the gray
shadow the ponies just then bolted.

Ensued a minute of dust, wind, bumpings; then, without any attempt to
check their speed, Carter got the mad little brutes back to the trail.
Several furious miles had passed before, answering a gasping question as
to whether he couldn’t stop them, that imperturbable driver said:

"I ain’t trying very hard.  They’re going our way, and we’ve got to hit
this trail some licks to make Flynn’s by noon.  He’s the first settler
north of the valley."

They did hit it some "licks."  One after another the yellow miles slid
beneath the buck-board, deadly in their sameness.  With the exception of
that lone coyote, they saw no life.  Right and left the tawny prairies
reached out to the indefinite horizon; neither cabin nor farmstead broke
their sweep; save where the dark growths of the Assiniboin Valley drew a
dull line to the north, no spot of color marred that great monochrome.
Just before they came to the valley Carter dashed around the Red River
cart of a Cree squaw.  Shortly after they came on her lord driving
industrious heels into the ribs of a ragged pony.  Then the trail shot
through a bluff—rugged, riven, buttressed with tall headlands to whose
scarred sides dark woods clung, the mile-wide valley lay before them.
Up from its depths rose the cry of a bell. Clear, silvery, resonant, it
flowed with the stream, echoed in dark ravines, filled the air with its
rippling music.

"Catholic mission," Carter said, and as he spoke the ponies plunged
after the trail which fell at an angle of forty-five into a black
ravine.  The girl felt as though the earth had dropped from under, then,
bump! the wheels struck and went slithering and ricochetting among the
ruts and bowlders.  A furious burst down the last slopes and they were
galloping out on the bottom-lands.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, regaining breath.  "What recklessness!"

"Now do you really call that reckless?"  His mild surprise would have
been convincing but for the wicked twinkle.

"Of course—I do," she said, choking with fright and indignation.  "I
believe—you did it on purpose."

"Well, well."  He shook a sorrowful head.  "And to think I shouldn’t
have knowed it!  Look out!"

They had swung by the log mission with the black-robed priest in the
door, circled the ruins of a Hudson Bay fort, and now the Assiniboin
Ford had suddenly opened before them.  Fed fat by mountain streams, the
river poured, a yeasty flood, over the ford, a roaring terror of swift
waters.  While the girl caught her breath they were in to the hubs, the
thills; then the green waters licked up through the buck-board staves.
Half wading, half swimming, the ponies were held to the narrow passage
by that master-hand.  On either side smooth, sucking mouths drew down to
dangerous currents, and, reaching, Carter flicked one with his whip.

"Cree Injun drowned there last flood."

A moment later he turned the ponies sharply upstream and told of two
settlers who had lingered a second too long on that turn.  Indeed, it
seemed to Helen as though each race, every eddy, perpetuated the memory
of some unfortunate.  She sighed her relief when, with a rush, the
ponies took them up the bank, out of the roar and swirl, into the shade
of a ravine.

Glancing up, she caught Carter regarding her with serious admiration.
"You’ll do," he said.  Then she realized that this man, whom she had
been trying to classify with her city tradesmen, had been trying her out
according to his standards.  The thought brought sudden confusion.  She
blushed.  But with ready tact he turned and kept up a rapid fire of
comment on the country through which they were passing till she
recovered her composure.

For they were now in the Park Lands, the antithesis of the arid plains
on the other side of the river. Flower-bespangled, dotted with clump
poplar, retaining in August a suggestion of spring’s verdure, the
prairies rolled off and away in long earth billows.  Everywhere rank
herbage bowed in sunlit waves under the wind. Nor was there lack of
life.  Here an elk sprang from behind a bluff.  A band of jumping deer
followed him over the horizon.  There a covey of prairie-chickens rose
on whirring wing; a fox grinned at them from the crest of a sand-hill.
A rich country, the girl was remarking on the lack of settlers when
Carter extended his whip.

"There’s the first of them.  That’s Flynn’s place."

Speeding through the enormous grain-fields west of Winnipeg, Helen had
seen from the cars solitary cabins of frame or sod, pinned down, as it
were, in the exact centre of a carpet of wheat, emphasizing with their
loneliness that vastness about them.  But this was different, more
homelike, if quite as strange.  Built of hewn logs and lime-washed,
Flynn’s house nestled with its stables and out-buildings under the wing
of a poplar bluff. Around it, of course, stretched the wheat; but here
it was merely an oasis, a bright shoal in the sea of brown that flowed
on to a distant dark line, the spruce forests of the Riding Mountains.

Bathed in sunshine, with cattle wandering at will, knee-deep in pasture,
it made a beautiful picture.  The girl came under its spell.  She felt
the freedom, the witchery of those sun-washed spaces; their silences,
whispers, cloud-shadows, the infinity which broods upon them.

"Is our place like this?" she asked.

"Prettier."  Carter indicated the distant forest line. "We are close in
to the bush and the country is broken up into woodland, lake, and
rolling prairie."

"Then I can be happy," she sighed.

Quickly averting his eyes that their sympathy might not dampen her mood,
he drew her attention to a man who was cutting green fodder on the far
side of the wheat-field.

"There’s Flynn."




                                  *IV*

                           *THE COYOTE SNAPS*


A tall Irishman of the gaunt Tipperary breed, Flynn straightened as
Carter reined in, and thrust out a mighty paw.  "Ye’re welcome, ma’am;
an’ ye’ve come in season, for the woman’s just called to dinner. Just
drive on an’ unhitch before the door."

"Yes, it’s a fine stand of wheat."

Walking beside them, he replied to Carter’s comment: "Too foine.  It’s a
troifle rank to ripen before the frost."  A wistful shade clouded his
face, extinguished the mercurial twinkle in his eye.  "It ’ll freeze,
shure."  The accent on the last syllable was pitiable, for it told of
long waiting, hope deferred, labor ill-requited.  It was the voice of
one who bolsters himself that the stroke of fate may not utterly kill,
who slays expectation lest it betray him.  Yet in its pessimism dead
hope breathed. "Yes, it ’ll freeze," Flynn assured the malicious fates.

At close range the house was not nearly so picturesque. A motley of
implements strewed the yard: ploughs, harrows, rakes, a red-and-green
binder, all resting hap-hazard among a litter of chips, half-hewn logs,
and other debris. The stables were hidden by huge manure piles.  The
place lacked every element of the order one sees on an Eastern
farm—rioted in the necessary disorder of newness.  Flynn’s generation
were too busy making farms; tidiness would come with the next.

Not realizing this, Helen was drawing unfavorable parallels from the
pervading squalor, when Mrs. Flynn, who was simply Flynn in petticoats,
came bustling out with welcomes.  Miss Morrill must come right in!  It
was that long since she, Mrs. Flynn, had set eyes on a woman’s face that
she had almost forgotten what they looked like!

"An’ you that fond av your glass, mother?" Flynn teased.

"Glass, ye say?" Mrs. Flynn retorted.  "Sure an’ ’twas yerself that
smashed it three months ago.  It’s the bottom av a milk-pan he’s been
shaving in ever since, my dear," she added.

Flynn winked.  "An’ let me advise you, Carter.  If ivir ye marry, don’t
have a glass in the house an’ ye’ll be able to see ye’self in ivery
tin."

Out at the stable the merriment died from his face, and facing Carter he
asked: "Phwat’s up between ye and Hines?  I was taking dinner with
Bender yesterday, an’ while we was eating along came Hines.

"’There’s a man,’ he says, spaking to Bender av you. ’There’s a man!
big, impident, strong.  Ye’re no chicken, Bender, but ye couldn’t put
that fellow’s shoulders to the ground.’  I’m not needing to tell you the
effect on Bender?" Flynn finished.

Carter nodded.  He knew the man.  Big, burly, brutal, Bender was a
natural product of the lumber-camps in which he had lived a life that
was little more than a calender of "scraps."  Starting in at eighteen on
the Mattawa, he had fought his way to the head of its many camps, then
passed to the Michigan woods and attained the kingship there.  He
_lived_ rather than _loved_ to fight.  But, though in the northern
settlements Carter was the only man who approximated the lumberman’s
difficult standard in courage and inches, so far fate had denied him
cause of quarrel.

"The coyote!" Flynn exclaimed, when Carter had told of Hines’s attempt
on Morrill’s hay-slough.  "An’ him sick in bed, poor man.  I wouldn’t
wipe me feet on Hines’s dirty rag av a soul.  But he’s made ye some
mischief.  ’Ye’re a liar, Hines!’ Bender growls.  ’I can lick him er any
other man betwixt this an’ the Rockies.’

"Hines didn’t like the lie, but he gulped it.  ’Talk’s cheap,’ he
snarls.

"’Carter’s a good neighbor,’ Bender answers.  ’But if he gives me a
cause—’

"’A _cause_?’ Hines cackles, laughing.  ’Why, him an’ Morrill have
grabbed all the best hay in Silver Creek an’ defy anny man to touch it.
Run your mower into their big slough an’ ye’ll have cause enough.’

"That made Bender hot.  ’I’ll do it!’ he roars, ’this very day.’  But,"
Flynn finished, "he had to run out to the blacksmith’s to fix his mower
sickle, so he won’t get out till to-morrow morning."

"If ye need anny help—" he said, tentatively, as Carter pondered with
frowning brow.  Then, catching the other’s eye, he hastily added: "Ye’ll
pardon me!  But Bender’s a terr’ble fighter!"

His alarm was so palpable that Carter laughed. "Don’t bother," he said.
"I’m not going to roll, bite, chew, or gouge with Bender."

"Look here!" Flynn interposed, with additional alarm. "Ye’ll not be
after making anny gun-plays?  This is Canada, ye’ll mind, where they
hang folks mighty easy."

Carter laughed again.  "There won’t be any fight. Listen!"

And Flynn did listen.  As he grasped the other’s meaning, his face
cleared and his hearty laugh carried to the house where Helen was making
the acquaintance of the smaller Flynns.  Six in number, bare-legged, and
astonishingly regular in gradation, they scampered like mice on her
entrance and hid behind the cotton partition that divided bedroom from
kitchen.  For a while they were quiet, then Helen became aware of a
current of stealthy talk underflowing Mrs. Flynn’s volubility.

"Ain’t her waist small?"

"Bet you she wears stays the hull time."

"Like them mother puts on to meetin’?"

"Shore!"

"Git out; her face ain’t red.  Mother nearly busts when she hitches
her’n."

"Ain’t that yaller hair pretty?"  This sounded like a girl, though it
was hard to decide, for all wore a single sexless garment.

"Bet you it ain’t all her’n.  Dad says as them city gals is all took to
pieces when they go to bed."  This was surely a boy, and, unfortunately
for him, the remark sailed out on a pause in his mother’s comment.

"James!" she exclaimed, raising shocked hands. "Come right here."

He came slowly, suspiciously, then, divining from his parent’s look the
enormity of his crime, he dived under her arm, shot out-doors, and was
lost in the wheat.  After him, a cataract of bare limbs, poured the
others, all escaping but one small girl whom Helen caught, kissed, and
held thereafter in willing bondage until, after dinner, Carter drove
round to the door.

Though they had rested barely an hour after their forty-mile run, the
ponies repeated the morning’s performance, to the horror of Mrs. Flynn;
then, as though realizing that they had done all that reputation
required, they settled down to a steady jog—in which respect,
colloquially, they were imitated by their human freight. A little tired,
Helen was content to sit and take silent note of the homesteads which
now occurred at regular intervals, while Carter was perfecting his plan
for the discomfiture of the warlike Bender.  Slough, lake, wood-land,
farm passed in slow and silent procession.  Once he roused to answer her
comment as they rattled by some Indian graves that crowned a knoll.

"To keep the coyotes from robbing the resurrection," he explained the
poplar poles that roofed in the graves.

He spoke again when the buck-board ran in among a score of curious mud
pillars.  About thrice the height of a man, inscriptionless, they
loomed, weird guardians of that lonely land till he robbed their
mystery.

"Them?  Mud chimneys.  You see, when a Cree Indian dies his folks burn
down the cabin to keep his spirit from returning, and as mud won’t burn
the chimneys stand.  Small-pox cleaned out this village."  Then, with
innocent gravity, he went on to tell of a stray scientist who had
written a monograph on those very chimneys.  "’Monoliths’ he called ’em.
Allowed that they were dedicated to a tribal god, and was used to burn
prisoners captured in war.  It was a beautiful theory and made a real
nice article.  Why did I let him?  Well, now, ’twould have been a sin to
enlighten him, he was that blamed happy poking round them chimneys, and
the folks that read his article wouldn’t know any better."

Chuckling at the remembrance, he relapsed again to his planning, and did
not speak again till they had crossed the valley of Silver Creek from
which the northern settlement took its name.  Then, indicating a black
dot far off on the trail, he said:

"There comes Molyneux."

"Two in the rig," he added, a few minutes later.  "A man and a woman.
That ’ll be Mrs. Leslie."

Unaccustomed to the plainsman’s vision, which senses rather than sees
the difference of size, color, movement that mark cattle from horses, a
single rig from a double team, Helen was dubious till, swinging out from
behind a poplar bluff, the team bore down upon them.  Two persons were
in the rig: a man of the blackly handsome type, and a stylish, pretty
woman, who, as Carter turned out to drive by, waved him to stop.

"Monopolist!" she scolded, when the rigs ranged side by side.  "Here I’m
just dying to meet Miss Morrill and you would have whisked her by.  Now
do your duty."

"Captain Molyneux," she said, introducing her companion in turn.  "A
neighbor.  We just heard this morning that you were coming and I was so
glad; and I’m gladder now that I’ve seen you."  Her glance travelled
admiringly over Helen’s face and figure.  "You know there are so few
women here, and they—"  Her pretty nose tip-tilted.  "Well, you’ll see
them.  Soon I shall make my call; carry you off for a few days, if your
brother will permit it.  But there!  I’m keeping you from him.
Good-bye.  Now you may go, Mr. Carter."

A touch of merry defiance in the permission caused Helen to glance up at
her companion.  Though Mrs. Leslie’s glance was almost caressing
whenever it touched him, he had stared straight ahead of him while she
chatted.

"You don’t like them?" the girl asked.  "Why?  She likes you."

His sternness vanished and he smiled down upon her. "Now, what made you
think that?"

"I didn’t think; I felt it."

"Funny things, feelings, ain’t they?  I mind one that took me fishing
when I ought to have been keeping school.  ’Twas a beautiful day.
Indian-summer back East.  You know ’t: still, silent, broody, warm;
first touch of gold in the leafage.  I just _felt_ that I had to go
fishing.  But when dad produced a peeled hickory switch that night he
told me: ’Son, feelings is treacherous things.  This will teach you the
difference between thinking and knowing.’  It did—for a while."

"But you don’t like them?" she persisted, refusing to be side-tracked.
Then she blushed under his look of grave surprise, realizing that she
had broken one of the unwritten canons of frontier etiquette.  "I beg
your pardon," she said, hastily.  "I didn’t mean to—"

His smile wiped out the offence.  Stretching his whip, he said, "There’s
your house."

Helen cried aloud.  Nestling under the eaves of green forest, it faced
on a lake that lay a scant quarter-mile to the south.  North, west, and
south, trim clump poplar dotted its rolling land and rose in the fields
of grain.  Here nature, greatest of landscape-gardeners, had planned her
best, setting a watered garden within a fence of forest.  Just for a
second the house flashed out between two green bluffs, a neat log
building, lime-washed in settler style, then it was snatched again from
her shining eyes.

But Carter had seen a figure standing at the door. "Clear grit!" he
mentally ejaculated.  "Blamed if he ain’t up and dressed to save her
feelings."  Then, aloud, he gave her necessary warnings.  "Now you
mustn’t expect too much.  He’s doing fine, but no doubt pulled down a
bit since you saw him."


Two hours later Carter stepped out from his own cabin.  He and Morrill
had "homesteaded" halves of the same section, and as he strode south the
latter’s lamp beamed a yellow welcome through the soft night. Already he
had refused an invitation to supper, deeming that the brother and sister
would prefer to spend their first evening alone together, and now
ignoring the lamp’s message, he entered Merrill’s stable, saddled the
latter’s cattle pony in darkness thick as ink, led him out, and rode
quietly away.

Now of all equines, your northern cross-bred pony is the most cunning.
For three black miles Shyster behaved with propriety, then, sensing by
the slack line that his rider was preoccupied, he achieved a vicious
sideling buck.  Well executed, it yet failed of its intent.

"You little devil!" Carter remonstrated, as he applied correctives in
the form of quirt and spurs.  "Rest don’t suit your complaint.
To-morrow you go on the mower."

"Hullo!" a voice cried from the darkness ahead. "Who’s that cussing?"

It was Danvers, an English remittance-man, a typical specimen of the
tribe of Ishmael which is maintained in colonial exile on "keep-away"
allowances.

"Are you lost?" Carter asked.

"Lost?  No!"  There was an aggrieved note in Danvers’ tone.  "You
fellows seem to think that I oughtn’t to be out after dark.  There’s Jed
Hines going about and telling people that I knocked at my own door one
night to inquire my way."

"Tut, tut," Carter sympathized.  "And Jed counted such a truthful man!
You’ll find it hard to live that down.  But where might you be heading
for now—if it’s any of my darn business?"

"Morrill’s.  Heard his sister had arrived.  I’m going to drop in and pay
my respects."

"Humph! that’s neighborly.  They’ve had just two hours to exchange the
news of three years; they’ll shorely be through by this.  Keep right on,
son.  In five-and-twenty minutes this trail will land you at Jed Hines’s
door."

"Oh, get out!" Danvers exclaimed.

"Sir, to you?" Carter assumed a wonderful stiffness. "I’ll give you
good-night."

"Oh, here!" the youth called after him.  "I didn’t mean to doubt you."

Carter rode on.

Ridden by a vivid memory of the jeering Hines, Danvers became desperate.
"Oh, Carter!  Say, don’t get mad!  Do tell a fellow!  How shall I get
there?"

Carter reined in.  "Where?  To Hines’s?  Keep right along."

"N-o!  Morrill’s?"

"Oh, let me see.  One—two—three—take the third fork to the left and
second to the right; that ought to bring you—to your own door," he
finished, as he listened to the departing hoof-beats.  "That is, if you
follow directions, which ain’t likely.  Anyway," he philosophically
concluded, "you ain’t agoing to bother that girl much to-night."

Spurring Shyster, he galloped on, and in ten minutes caught Murchison,
an Englishman of the yeoman class, out at his stables.  Receiving a
hearty affirmative, rounded out with full-mouthed English "damns," in
answer to his question, he declined Murchison’s invitation to "put in,"
and rode on—rode from homestead to homestead, asking always the same
question, receiving always the same answer.  Remittance-men, Scotch
Canadians, Seebach, the solitary German settler, alike listened,
laughed, and fell in with the plan as Flynn had done.  He covered many
miles and the moon caught him on trail before he permitted the last man
to carry his cold legs back to bed.  It was long past midnight when he
unsaddled at Morrill’s stable.

Softly closing the door on his tired beast, he stood gazing at the
house.  Far-off in the woods a night-owl hooted, a bittern boomed on the
lake shore, the still air pulsed to the howl of a timber-wolf.  Though
born of the plains, its moods had never palled upon him. Usually he had
been stirred.  But now he had no ears for the night nor eyes for the
lake chased in rippled silver. He listened, listened, as though his
strained hearing would drag the girl’s soft sleep breathing from the
house’s jealous embrace.  Soon he leaned back against the door musing;
and when, having inspected the cabin from one side, the moon sailed over
and looked down on the other, he was still there.


As the first quivering flushes shot through the grays of dawn Bender
came out of his cabin.  He intended to be at work on Merrill’s big
slough at sunrise.  But as he rammed home the sickle into its place in
the mower-bar a projecting rivet caused it to buckle and break. That
spelled another journey to the blacksmith’s, and the sun stood at noon
before the sickle was in place. Falling to oiling with savage
earnestness, that an ancient Briton might have exhibited in greasing his
scythe-armed war-chariot, Bender then stuffed bread and meat into his
jumper, hitched, and drove off north, looking for all the world like a
grisly pirate afloat on a yellow sea.

Half an hour’s easy jogging would carry him to Merrill’s big slough, but
on the way he had to pass two smaller ones.  The first, which had a
hundred-yard belt of six-foot hay ringing its sedgy centre, tempted him
sorely, yet he refrained, having in mind a bigger prey. At the next he
reined in, and stared at a dozen cut swaths and a mower with feeding
horses tied to its wheels.

It was Molyneux’s mower, and to Bender its presence could only mean that
the settlement was rushing the sick man’s sloughs.  "Invasion of the
British!" he yelled.  "What ’ll Carter say to this?  Remember Yorktown!"

He was still laughing when a buck-board came rattling up the trail
behind him.  It was Hines.

"Cut that slough yet?" he asked.

"Just going there," Bender answered; then gave the reason of his delay,
garnished with furious anathema on the maker of sickles.  "But ain’t
that a joke?" he said, indicating Molyneux’s mower.

Hines whinnied his satisfaction.  "Didn’t think it was in the Britisher.
But my! won’t that gall the long-geared son of a gun of a Yank?  Drive
on an’ I’ll follow up an’ see you started—mebbe see some of the fun," he
added to himself, "if Carter’s there."

Quarter of an hour brought them to the big slough, which, on this side,
was ringed so thickly with willow-scrub that neither could see it till
they reined on its edge.  Both stared blankly.  When Hines went by that
morning a mile of solid hay had bowed in sunlit waves before the breeze.
Save a strip some twenty yards wide down the centre, it now lay in flat
green swaths, while along the strip a dozen feeding teams were tied to
as many mowers.

"A bee, by G—!" Bender swore.

"Hell!" Hines snarled even in his swearing.  "Bilked, by the Almighty!"

For a moment they stood, staring from the slough to each other, the
lumberman red, angry, foolish, Hines the personification of venomous
chagrin.  Presently his rage urged him to a great foolishness.

"You an’ your casting!" he sneered.  "Scairt, you was—plumb scairt!"

Astonishment, the astonishment with which a bull might regard the attack
of an impertinent fly, obliterated for one moment all other expression
from Bender’s face.  Then, roaring his furious anger, he sprang from his
mower.

Realizing his mistake, Hines had already lashed his ponies, but even
then they barely jerked the buck-board tail from under the huge,
clutching fingers.  Foaming with passion, Bender gave chase for a score
of yards, then stopped and shook his great fist, pouring out invective.

"To-morrow," he roared, "I’ll come over and cut on you."

"What’s the matter?  You seem all het up?"  Carter’s quiet voice gave
Bender first notice of the buckboard that had come quietly upon him from
the grassy prairie.  With Carter were Flynn, Seebach, and two others.
Not very far away a wagon was bringing others back from dinner.

"We’re all giving Morrill a day’s cutting," Carter went on, with a quiet
twinkle.  "I called at your place this morning with a bid, but you was
away.  We’re right glad to see you.  Who told you?"

Gradually a grin wiped out Bender’s choler.  "You’re damn smart," he
rumbled.  "Well—where shall I begin?"




                                  *V*

                                *JENNY*


Thus did the bolt which Hines forged for Carter prove a boomerang and
recoil upon himself.  For next morning Bender started his mower on a
particularly fine slough which Hines had left to the last because of its
wetness.  Moreover, Hines had ten tons of cut hay bleaching near by in
the sun and dare not try to rake it.

It was oppressively hot the morning that Bender hitched to rake the
stolen slough; fleecy thunder-heads were slowly heaving up from behind
the swart spruce forest.

"’Twon’t be worth cow-feed if it ain’t raked to-day," the giant
remarked, as he overlooked his enemy’s hay. Then his satisfaction gave
place to sudden anger—a rake was at work on Hines’s hay less than a
quarter-mile away.

"Hain’t seen me, I reckon," Bender growled.  Leaving his own rake, he
crouched in a gully, skulked along the low land, gained a willow
thicket, and sprang out just as the rake came clicking by.

"Now I’ve got you!" he roared.  Then his hands dropped.  He stood
staring at a thin slip of a girl, who returned his gaze with dull, tired
eyes.  It was Jenny Hines, Jed’s only child.

"Well," Bender growled, "what d’ you reckon you’re doing?"

"Raking."  Her voice was listless as her look.  Just eleven when her
mother died, her small shoulders had borne the weight of Jed’s
housekeeping.  Heavy choring had robbed her youth, and left her, at
eighteen, nothing but a faded shadow of a possible prettiness.

Bender coughed, shuffled.  "Where’s your dad?"

"Up at the house.  He allowed you wouldn’t tech me.  But," she added,
dully, "I’d liefer you killed me than not."

Bender’s anger had already passed.  Rough pity now took its place.  His
furious strength prevented him from realizing the killing drudgery, the
lugging of heavy water-buckets, the milking, feeding of pigs, the hard
labor which had killed her spirit and left this utter hopelessness; but
he knew by experience that a young horse should not be put to a heavy
draw, and here was a violation of the precept.  Bender was puzzled.  Had
he come on a neighbor maltreating a horse, a curse backed by his heavy
fist would have righted the wrong; but this frail creature’s humanity
placed her wrongs outside his rough remedial practice.

He whistled, swore softly, and, failing to invoke inspiration by these
characteristic methods, he said, kindly: "Well, for onct Jed tol’ the
truth.  Must have strained him some.  Go ahead, I ain’t agoing to bother
you."

Having finished raking his own hay, he fell to work with the fork,
stabbing huge bunches, throwing them right and left, striving to work
off the pain at his heart. But pity grew with exertion, and, pausing
midway of the morning, he saw that she also was plying a weary fork.

"You need a rest," he growled five minutes later. "Sit down."

She glanced up at the ominous sky.  "Can’t.  Rain’s coming right on."

Lifting her bodily, he placed her in a nest of hay. "Now you stay right
there.  I’m running this."

Picking up her fork, he put forth all his magnificent strength while she
sat listlessly watching.  It seemed as though nothing could banish her
chronic weariness, her ineffable lassitude.  Once, indeed, she remarked,
"My, but you’re strong!" but voice and words lacked animation.  She
added the remarkable climax, "Pa says you are a devil."

"Yes?" he questioned.  "An’ you bet he’s right, gal. Keep a right smart
distance from men like me."

"Oh, I don’t know," she slowly answered.  "I’d liefer be a devil.
Angels is tiresome.  Pa’s always talking about them.  He’s a heap
religious—in spells."

Pausing in his forking, Bender stared down on the small heretic.
Vestigial traces of religious belief occupied a lower strata of his
savage soul.  Crude they were, anthropomorphic, barely higher than
superstitions, yet they were there, and chief among them was an idea
that has appealed to the most cultured of men—that woman is incomplete,
nay, lost, without religion.

"Shore, child!" he protested.  "Little gals shouldn’t talk so.  That
ain’t the way to get to heaven."

"D’ you allow to go there?" she demanded, with disconcerting suddenness.

Bender grimaced, laughed at the ludicrousness of the question.  "Don’t
allow as I’d be comfortable. Anyway, lumbermen go to t’other place.  But
that don’t alter your case.  Gals all go to heaven."

"Well!"  For the first time she displayed some animation. "I ain’t!
Pa’s talked me sick of it.  I allow it’s them golden streets he’s after.
He’d coin ’em into dollars."

Seeing that Hines had not hesitated in minting this, his flesh and
blood, Bender thought it very likely, and feeling his inability to cope
with such reasonable heresies he attacked the hay instead.  Having small
skill in women—the few of his intimate experience being as free of
feminine complexities as they were of virtue—he was sorely puzzled.
Looking backward, he remembered his own pious mother.  Hines’s wife had
died whispering of religion’s consolations; yet here was the daughter
turning a determined back on the source of the mother’s comfort.  It was
unnatural to his scheme of things, contrary to the law of his vestigial
piety.  He would try again!  But when, the hay finished, he came back to
her, he quailed before her pale hopelessness; it called God in question.

Limbering up her rake, he watched her drive away, a small, thin figure,
woful speck of life under a vast gray sky.  For twisting cloud masses
had blotted out the sun, a chill wind snatched the tops from the
hay-cocks as fast as Bender coiled them, blots of water splashed the
dust before he finished his task.

Black care rode home with him; and as that night the thunder split over
his cabin, he saw Jenny’s eyes mirrored on the wet, black pane, and it
was borne dimly upon him that something besides overwork was responsible
for their haunting.


Bender had a friend, a man of his own ilk, with whom he had hit camp and
log-drive for these last ten years. At birth it is supposable that the
friend inherited a name, but in the camps he was known only as the
"Cougar."  A silent man, broad, deep-lunged, fierce-eyed, nature had
laid his lines for great height, then bent him in a perpetual crouch.
He always seemed gathering for a spring, which, combined with tigerish
courage, had gained him his name.  Inseparable, if Bender appeared on
the Mattawa for the spring drive, it was known that the Cougar might be
shortly expected.  If the Cougar stole into a Rocky Mountain camp, a
bunk was immediately reserved for his big affinity. Only a bottle of
whiskey and two days’ delay on the Cougar’s part had prevented them from
settling up the same section.  However, though five miles lay between
their respective homesteads, never a Sunday passed without one man
riding over to see the other, and it was returning from such a visit
that Bender next fell in with Jenny Hines.

It was night and late, but as Bender rode by the forks where Hines’s
private road joined on to the Lone Tree trail, a new moon gave
sufficient light for him to see a whitish object lying in the grass.  He
judged it a grain-sack till a convulsion shook it and a sob rose to his
ears.

"Good land, girl!" he ejaculated, when, a moment later, Jenny’s pale
face turned up to his, "what are you doing here?"

"He’s turned me out."

"Who?"

"Jed."  The absence of the parental title spoke volumes—of love killed
by slow starvation, cold sternness, of youth enslaved to authority
without mitigation of fatherly tenderness.

Without understanding, Bender felt.  "What for?" he demanded.

Crowding against his stirrup, she remained silent, and the touch of her
body against his leg, the mute appeal of the contact, sent a flame of
righteous passion through Bender’s big body.  Indecision had never been
among his faults.  Stooping, he raised her to the saddle before him, and
as she settled in against his broad breast a wave of tenderness flowed
after the flame.

"No, no!" she begged, when he turned in on Jed’s trail.  "I won’t go
back!"  And he felt her violently trembling as he soothed and coaxed.
She tried to slip from his arms as they approached the cabin, and her
terror filled him with such anger that his kick almost stove in the
door.

"It’s me!" he roared, answering Hines’s challenge. "Bender!  I came on
your gal lying out on the prairies. Open an’ take her in!"

In response the window raised an inch; the moonlight glinted on a
rifle-barrel.  "Kick the door ag’in!"  Jed’s voice snarled, "an’ I’ll
bore you.  Git! the pair of ye!"

"Come, come, Jed."  For her sake Bender mastered his anger.  "Come, this
ain’t right.  Let her in an’ we’ll call it by-gones."

"No, no!" the girl protested.

Though she had whispered, Jed heard, and her protest touched off his
furious wolfish passion.  "Git! Won’t you git!" he screeched, following
the command with a stream of screamed imprecations, vile abuse.

If alone Bender would have beaten in the door, but there was no
mistaking Hines’s deadly intent.  Warned by the click of a cocking
hammer, he swung Jenny in front again, galloped out of range; then,
uncertain what to do, he gave his beast its head, and half an hour later
brought up at his own door.

"There, sis," he said, as he lit his lamp, "make yourself happy while I
stable Billy.  Then I’ll cook up some grub, an’ while we’re eating we
can talk over things."

She smiled wanly yet gratefully.  But when he returned she was rocking
back and forth and moaning.

"Don’t take on so," he comforted.  "To-night I’ll sleep in the stable;
at daybreak we’ll hit south for Mother Flynn’s."  But the moans followed
in quick succession, beaded sweat started on her brow, and as she swung
forward he saw that which, two hours before, had turned Jed Hines into a
foaming beast.

"Oh, my God!"  The exclamation burst from him. "You pore little thing!
you pore little child!  Only a baby yourself!"

Stooping, he lifted her into his bed, tucked her in, then stood,
doubtful, troubled, looking down upon her. Two-thirds of the settlers in
Silver Creek were of Scotch descent; were deeply dyed with the granite
hardness, harsh malignancy, fervid bigotry which have caused the history
of their race to be written in characters of blood. Fiercely moral,
dogmatically religious, she could expect no mercy at their hands.
Hard-featured women, whose angular unloveliness had efficiently
safeguarded their own virtue, would hate her the more because her fault
had been beyond their compass.  Looking forward, Bender saw the poor
little body a passive centre for a whorl of spite, jealousy, virulent
spleen, and the rough heart of him was mightily troubled.  In all Silver
Creek, Mrs. Flynn was the only woman to whom he felt he might safely
turn.  But Flynn’s farm lay eighteen miles to the south—too far; the
child was in imminent labor. What should he do?

"Jenny," he said, "any women folk been to your house lately?"

When she answered that they had been without a visitor for three months,
Bender nodded his satisfaction. "Lie still, child," he said.  "I’ll be
back right smart."

He was not gone long—just long enough to drive over to and back from
Carter’s.  "I’m not trusting any of the women hereabouts," he told
Carter.  "Though it ain’t generally known, the Cougar was married once.
The same Indians that did up Custer cleaned up his wife and family.  An’
as he always lived a thousand miles from a doctor, he knows all about
sech things. So if you’ll drive like all hell for him, I’ll tend to the
little gal."

And Carter drove.  In one hour he brought the Cougar, but even in that
short time a wonderful transformation was wrought in that rough cabin
under Bender’s sympathetic eyes.  From the travail of the suffering girl
was born a woman—but not a mother.  For of the essence of life Jenny had
not sufficient to endow the child of her labor.  The spark flickered
down in herself, sank, till the Cougar, roughest yet gentlest of nurses,
sweated with apprehension.

"It’s death or a doctor," he told Carter, hiding his emotion under a
surly growl.  "Now show what them ponies are good for."

And that night those small fiends did "show what they were good
for";—made a record that stood for many a year.  Roused from his
beauty-sleep, Flynn caught the whir of hot wheels and wondered who was
sick.  It was yet black night when Carter called Father Francis, the
silent mission priest, from his bed.  By lantern-light they two, layman
and priest, spelled each other with pick and shovel in the mission acre,
and when the last spadeful dropped on the small grave, Carter flew on.
At cock-crow he pulled into Lone Tree, sixty miles in six hours, without
counting the stop at the mission.

"I doubt I’ve killed you," he murmured, as the ponies stood before the
doctor’s door, "but it just had to be done."

The doctor himself answered the knock.  A heavy man, grizzled,
gray-eyed, sun and wind had burned his face to leather, for his days and
nights were spent on trail, pursuing a practice that was only limited by
the endurance of horse-flesh.  From the ranges incurably vicious broncos
were sent to his stables, devils in brute form.  He used seven teams;
yet the toughest wore out in a year.  Day or night, winter or summer, a
hundred in the shade or sixty below, he might be seen pounding them
along the trails.  Even now he had just come in from the Pipe Stone,
sixty miles southwest, but he instantly routed out his man.

"Hitch the buckskins, Bill," he said, "and let him run yours round to
the stables, Carter.  He’ll turn ’em out prancing by the time we’re
back."

It took Bill, the doctor, and Carter to get the buckskins clear of town,
but once out the doctor handed the lines to Carter.  "Now let ’em run."
Then he fell asleep.

He woke as they passed the mission, exchanged words with the priest, and
dozed again till Carter reined in at Bender’s door.  Then, shedding
sleep as a dog shakes off water, he entered, clear-eyed, into the battle
with death.

It was night when he came out to Bender and Carter, sprawled on the hay
in the stable.

"She’ll live," he answered the lumberman’s look, "but she must have
woman’s nursing.  Who’s to be? Mrs. Flynn?" He shook his head.  "A good
woman, but—she has her sex’s weakness—damned long-tongued."

Bender looked troubled.  "There ain’t a soul knows it—yet."

The doctor nodded.  "Yes, yes, but I doubt whether you can keep it,
boys."

"I think," Carter said, slowly, "that if it was rightly put Miss Morrill
might—"

"That sweet-faced girl?"  The doctor’s gray eyes lit with approval, and
the cloud swept back from Bender’s rugged face.

"If she only would!" the giant stammered, "I’d—"  He cast about for a
fitting recompense, and finding none worth, finished, "There ain’t a
damn thing I wouldn’t do for her."

The doctor took doubt by the ears.  "Well, hitch and let’s see."

Realizing that the girl would probably have her fair share of the
prejudice, he opened his case very gently an hour later.  But he might
have saved his diplomacy.

"Of course!" she exclaimed, as soon as she grasped the facts.  "Poor
little thing!  I’ll go right over with Mr. Bender.

"And remember," the doctor said, finishing his instructions, "she needs
mothering more than medicine."

So, satisfied, he and Carter hit the back trail, but not till he had
examined Morrill with stethoscope and tapping finger.  "Must have some
excuse for my trip," he said, "and you’ll have to serve.  So don’t be
scared if you happen to hear that you have had another hemorrhage. Good!
Good!" he exclaimed at every tap, but once on trail he shook his head.
"May go in a month; can’t last six.  Be prepared."

A fiery sunset was staining the western sky when, on his way back from
Lone Tree, Carter stopped at Bender’s door.  The glow tinged the furious
cloud that rose from the Cougar’s pipe.

"Doing well," he laconically answered.  "Never saw a gal pull round
better from a fainting spell."

Nodding comprehension, Carter mentioned a doubt that had nettled him on
the trail.  "Jed?  Do you think he’ll—"

Sudden ferocity flamed up in the Cougar’s face.  "I tended to him this
morning," he said, slowly, ominously. "He’s persuaded as he mistook the
girl’s symptoms. Anyway, he ain’t agoing to foul his own nest so long as
no one knows."

"Wants her back, I suppose?"

The Cougar nodded.  "She’s worth more to him than his best ox-team.  But
he ain’t agoing to get her. Don’t go!  Miss Morrill’s inside an’ wants
to run over home for some things.  Fine gal that."  The Cougar’s set
fierceness of face almost thawed as he delivered his opinion.

Driving homeward, Helen opened the subject just where the Cougar had
left it.  "She won’t go back to her father," she said, "and I don’t
blame her.  But she can’t stay here."

However, Jenny’s future was already provided. "You needn’t to worry,"
Carter said.  "The doctor’s fixed things.  He and his wife have neither
chick nor child of their own; they’ll take her in."

The girl exclaimed her surprised gladness.  To her, indeed, the entire
incident was a revelation.  Here three rough frontiersmen had banded
successfully together to protect a wronged child and keep her within
their rough social pale.  Through all they had exhibited a tact and
delicacy not always found in finer social stratas, and the lesson went
far in modifying certain caste ideas—would have gone farther could she
have known the fulness of their delicacy.

Only once was the cause of Jenny’s illness ever hinted at among the
three; that when Carter and Bender lay waiting for the doctor in the
stable.

"You don’t happen to have made a guess at the man?" Carter had asked.

"She hain’t mentioned him," the giant answered, a little stiffly.

But he thawed when Carter answered: "You’ll pardon me.  I was just
wondering if a rope might help her case."

Bender had shaken his head.  "Las’ year, you’ll remember, one of
Molyneux’s remittance-men uster drive her out while Jed had her hired
out to Leslie’s.  But he’s gone back to England."

Also Helen had learned to look beneath Bender’s scarred surface.  Every
day, while Jenny lay in his shanty, he would slip in between loads of
hay to see her.  At first the presence of so much femininity embarrassed
him.  One petticoat hanging on the wall while another floats over the
floor is enough to upset any bachelor.  Only when sitting with Jenny did
he find his tongue; then, giant of the camps, he prattled like a
school-boy, freeing thoughts and feelings that had been imprisoned
through all his savage years.  It was singularly strange, too, to see
how Jenny reciprocated his feelings.  She liked Helen, but all of her
petting could not bring the smile that came for Bender, in whom she
sensed a kindred shy simplicity.

Helen was to get yet one other light from these unpromising surfaces, a
light bright as those of Scripture which are said to shine as lamps to
the feet.  A few days after Jenny’s departure Bender rode up to the door
where Carter sat talking with Morrill.

"Got any stock to sell?" he inquired.  "Cows in calf?"

"Going in for butter-making?" Carter inquired, grinning.

"Nope!"  The giant laughed.  "’Tain’t for myself I’m asking.  I’m a
lumberman born an’ bred; the camps draw me like salt-licks pull the
deer.  I’d never have time to look after them.  Farming’s play with me.
On’y I was thinking as it wouldn’t be so bad if that little gal had a
head or two of her own growing inter money. You kin let ’em run with
your band summers, an’ I’ll put up winter hay for them an’ the increase.
How are you, miss?"  He nodded as Helen came to the door.

It was her first experience in such free giving, and she was astonished
to see how devoid his manner was of philanthropic consciousness.
Plainly he regarded the whole affair as very ordinary business.
Carter’s answer accentuated the novel impression—"What’s the matter with
me contributing them heifers?"

"Da—beg pardon, miss."  Bender blushed.  "No you don’t.  This is my
funeral.  But I’m no hawg.  Now if you wanter throw in a couple of
calves—"

Thus, without deed, oath, or mortgage, but with a certainty that none of
these forms could afford, did little Jenny Hines become a young lady of
property.  The matter disposed of, Bender called Carter off to the
stable, where, after many mysterious fumblings, he produced from a
package a gorgeous silk kerchief of rainbow hues.

"You’ll give Miss Morrill this?"

But Carter balked, grinning.  "Lordy, man; do your own courting."

"Say!" the giant ejaculated, shocked.  "You don’t reckon she’d take it
that way?"

Carter judiciously considered the question, and after mature
deliberation replied: "I’ve seen breach-of-promise suits swing on less.
But I reckon you’re safe enough—if you explain your motive."

The giant sighed his relief.  "Did you ever give a gal anything,
Carter?"

"Did I?  Enough to stock a farm if ’twas collected."

"How’d you go about it?"

"Why, jes’ give it to her.  You’re bigger’n she is; kain’t hurt you."

"Oh, Lordy, I don’t know."  Bender sighed again. "It’s surprising what
them small things kin do to you. Say, there’s a good feller.  You take
it in?"

But Carter sternly refused, and five minutes later Bender might have
been seen, stern and rigid from the desperate nature of his enterprise,
sitting on one of Helen’s soap-boxes.  In the hour he talked with
Morrill, he never once relaxed a death-grip on his hat.  His eye never
once strayed towards Helen, and it was late that evening when she found
the kerchief under his box.

It speaks well for her that she did not laugh at its gorgeous colors;
and her smile as she scribbled a little note of thanks that was
delivered by Carter was far too tender for ridicule.  Truly she was
learning.




                                  *VI*

                              *THE SHADOW*


Down a half-mile furrow that gleamed wetly black against the dull brown
of "broken" prairie, Carter followed his oxen.  He was "back-setting,"
deep-ploughing the sod that had lain rotting through the summer. For
October, it was hot; an acrid odor, ammoniacal from his sweating beasts,
mingled with the tang of the soil and the strong hay scent of scorching
prairies. Summer was making a desperate spurt from winter’s chill
advance, and, as though realizing it, bird, beast, insects, as well as
men, went busily about their business. The warm air was freighted with
the boom of bees, vibrated to the whir of darting prairie-chicken, the
yells of distant ploughmen; for, stimulated by an answer from the
railroad gods, the settlers were striving to add to their wheat acreage.

"In certain contingencies," the general manager answered the petition,
"we will build through Silver Creek next summer."

Judging by a remark dropped to his third assistant, "uncertain" would
have expressed his meaning more correctly.  "A little hope won’t hurt
them, and ought to go a long way in settling up the country.
By-the-way, who signed these statistics?  Cummings?  That wasn’t the
tall Yankee who spoke so well.  He never would have sent in such a
jumble."

Blissfully ignorant, however, of railroad methods, the settlers
interpreted the guarded answer as an iron promise.  Forgetting Carter’s
part in getting them a hearing, Cummings and his fellows plumed
themselves upon their diplomacy, took to themselves the credit—in which
they evidenced the secret malevolence that a rural community holds
against the man who rises above its intellectual level.  Human
imperfection is invariable through the ages.  Plebeian Athens ostracised
the just Aristides.  Similarly, Silver Creek evidenced its petty
jealousy against its best brains.  "Oh, he’s too damned smart!" it
exclaimed, whenever Carter was mentioned for the council, school
trustee, or other public office, nor paused to consider its logic.

Slowly, with heavy gaspings, the oxen stopped at the end of the furrow,
and as he sat down on the plough while they rested, Carter blessed the
happy chance that had caused him to "break" clear down to Morrill’s
boundary. Helen sat in the shade of her cabin, thus affording him
delicious glimpses of a scarlet mouth, slightly pursed over her sewing,
a loose curl that glowed like a golden bar amid the creamy shadows of
her neck, the palpitant life of the feminine figure.  Small wonder that
he lingered on that turn.

"It’s that warm," he hypocritically remarked, fanning himself, "those
poor critters’ tongues are hanging to their knees."

The girl bowed to hide her smile.  "They always seem to tire at this end
of the field."

"Discerning brutes," he answered, nowise nonplussed.

She broke a silence.  "It is considered bad manners to stare."

"Yes?" he cheerfully inquired.  "I’ll make a note of that."

A few moments later she remarked, "You have a poor memory."

"Thank you for telling.  In what way?"

"You were staring."

"N-o."

"You were."

"Beg your pardon.  It takes two to make a stare. If I keep on looking
you in the eye—that’s staring.  If I’m looking when you ain’t supposed
to know it—that’s—that’s—"

"Well?" she prompted.

"Mighty pleasant," he finished, rising.

As he moved off she looked curiously after.  While he was talking, some
fleeting expression, trick of speech had recalled him as she first saw
him at Lone Tree—a young man, tall, sunburned, soft of speech,
ungrammatical, and the picture had awakened her to a change in herself.
In this her fourth month in the settlement she felt she had lost the
keen freshness of the stranger’s point of view.  She now scarcely
noticed his idiom, accent, grammatical lapses.  Oddities of speech and
manner that at first would have provoked surprise or laughter no longer
challenged her attention.  If the land’s vast rawness still impressed,
she was losing the clarity of first perceptions.

She was being absorbed; her individuality was slowly undergoing the
inevitable process of addition and cancellation.  How dim, indefinite
the past already seemed. Some other girl might have lived it, gone
through the round of parties, balls, associated with the well-groomed
men, refined girls of her acquaintance.  How vivid, concrete was the
present!  She contemplated her hands, roughened by dish-washing.  Did it
foretell her future? Would this equilibration with environment end by
leaving her peer of the gaunt, labor-stricken women of the settlements?
She shuddered.  The thought stamped her mood so that, returning on the
other round, Carter passed on, thinking her offended.

"Why so grave, sis?"  Her brother smiled down upon her from the doorway.
Since her arrival he had had many ups and downs, alternating between
bed-fast and apparent convalescence.  To-day the fires of life would
flare high, to flicker down to-morrow like a guttering candle that
wastes the quicker to its end.  Not for the world would she increase his
anxiety with her foreboding. Hiding the dejection with a quick smile,
she turned his question with another.

"Bert, why does Mr. Carter dislike Captain Molyneux, the Leslies, and—"

"The English crowd in general?" he finished for her. "Does he?  I never
heard him say much against them."

"No, he’s one of your silent men.  But actions count more than words.
When he drives me to or from Leslies’ he invariably refuses the
invitation to come in, pleading hurry."

"Well, he has been pretty busy."

Morrill stated a fact.  Carter had spent the haying months in the forest
sloughs, where they cut the bulk of their fodder.  There, with the deep
woods smothering every errant breeze, mercury at a hundred, the fat
marsh sweating underfoot, he had moved, raked, or pitched while
sand-flies took toll of his flesh by day and mosquitoes converted his
homeward journey into a feast of blood.  Eighty head of cattle, his and
Merrill’s, had to be provided for, and he alone to do it.  And it was
from these heavy labors that he had stolen time to drive Helen back and
forth.

"But he repels their every attempt at friendliness!" she protested.
"Positively snubbed Captain Molyneux the other day."

Morrill laughed.  "Why do they persist in their overtures? Carter is
flesh and blood of the frontier, which makes no bones over its likes and
dislikes.  With him a friend is a friend.  He has no use for
civilization which calls upon its votaries to spread their friendship in
a thin veneer over a vast acquaintance.  Having, courteously enough,
intimated that he doesn’t desire closer acquaintance, he expects them to
heed the hint.  Failing, they may expect to have it stated in stronger
terms. Molyneux has lived long enough in the north to know that."  His
answer, however, simply completed the circle and brought them back to
the starting-point.

She restated the issue.  "But why doesn’t he like them?"

Morrill answered her question with another.  "Why do you like them?"

"They are nice."

"Mrs. Leslie?" he catechised.

"A trifle frivolous, perhaps, but—I like her."

"Leslie, Danvers, Poole, and the rest of them?"

"Impractical," she admitted, "thoroughly impractical, all but Captain
Molyneux.  His farm is a model. Yet—I like them."

She spoke musingly, as though examining her feelings for cause, analysis
of which would have shown that the wide differences between herself and
her new acquaintances had added to the glamour and sparkle which are
given off by fresh personalities.  She liked their refinement, courtesy,
subtleties, and grace of conduct which shone the brighter in that rough
setting.  To her their very speech was charming, with its broad vowels,
leisurely drawled, so much softer than the clipped American idiom.

They were, indeed, over-refined.  Five centuries ago the welding of
Celt, Saxon, Roman, Norman into one homogeneous whole was full and
complete; since then that potent mixture of blood had undergone slow
stagnation. Noble privilege and laws of entail had checked in the
motherland those selective processes which sweep the foolish, wicked,
and vicious from the face of the earth.  Protected by the aristocratic
system, the fool, the idler, the roué had handed their undesirableness
down the generations, a heavy mortgage on posterity. Ripe fruit of a
vicious system, decay had touched them at the core; last links of a
chain once strong, they had lacked the hot hammering from grim
circumstance that alone could make them fit to hold and bind.

Morrill laid his thin finger on the spot.  "All right, Nell, they are
harmless."  He laughed as he used the scornful term which the Canadian
settlers applied to their English neighbors.  "You must have some
company. I don’t dislike them myself, and would probably like them
better if it was not for their insufferable national conceit and blind
caste feeling.  They look with huge contempt on all persons and things
which cannot claim origin in the narrow bit of English society from
which they sprang.  I’m not denying their country’s greatness.  But,
like the Buddhist, lost in contemplation of his own navel, they have
turned their eyes inward till they’re blind to all else.  On we
Americans they are particularly hard, regarding us with the easy
tolerance that one may extend to the imperfections of an anthropoid ape.
Now don’t fire up!  They have always been nice to me.  Still I can feel
the superiority beneath the surface.  With Carter it is different.  Him
they classify with the Canadian settlers, and you may fancy the effect
on a man who, in skill of hands and brain, character, all the things
that count in life, stands waist-high above them.  He sees them cheated,
cozened by every shyster.  Men in years, they are children in
experience, and if help from home were withdrawn not one could stand on
his own legs.  They are the trimmings of their generation, encumbrances
on the family estate or fortune, useless timber lopped off from the
genealogical tree.  Do you wonder that he despises them?"

"I think," she said, after a thoughtful pause, "that he is too stern in
his judgments.  Impracticability isn’t a crime, Bert, and people ought
not to be blamed for the conditions that made them."

"True, little wisehead."

"He ought," she went on, "to be more friendly.  I’m sure Mrs. Leslie
likes him."

Morrill smothered a laugh.  "Carter’s a mighty handsome man, young lady,
and Mrs. Leslie is—a shade impressionable.  But in social affairs women
decide on women, men on men."

She nodded, puckering her brow.  "Yes, but he behaved dreadfully to
Captain Molyneux."

Her genuine distress prevented the laugh from escaping.  "Tell me about
it," he sympathized.

"It was the other evening when he came to drive me home.  Despite his
reserve, the younger boys all like him, and when Captain Molyneux
brought me out he was telling Mr. Poole and Mr. Rhodes about a horse
that Danvers had bought from Cummings.  ’The critter,’ Carter said, ’is
blind, spavined, sweenied, and old enough to homestead.’

"’Well,’ the captain added, ’Danvers has always needed a guardian, Mr.
Carter.’"

"In his patronizing way?" Morrill commented.

"A little, perhaps," she admitted.  "Then, looking straight at us,
Carter answered, ’He could have picked a worse.’  What did he mean,
Bert?  The captain reddened and the boys looked silly."

Morrill grinned.  "Well—you see, Nell, Molyneux’s income is mostly
derived from the farming of pupils who are apprenticed to him by a firm
of London lawyers while under the impression that colonial farming is a
complex business that requires years of study.  Having whacked up from
five hundred to five thousand dollars premium, they find, on arrival,
that they have simply paid for the privilege of doing ordinary farm
work. You said Molyneux’s place was a model.  No wonder, when he draws
pay where other men have to hire.  No, the business isn’t exactly
dishonorable!"  He anticipated her question.  "He does teach them
something, and prevents them from falling into the hands of Canuck
shysters who would bleed them for hundreds when he takes fifties.
But—well, it isn’t a business I’d care to be in.  But there!  I’ve
talked myself tired, and Molyneux is coming at three to drive you up to
Leslie’s. You have just half an hour to dress."

"But I won’t go," she protested, "if you’re not feeling well."

"Bosh!" he laughed.  "I’m dying to be rid of you. Expect to get quiet
sleep this afternoon."

But as, half an hour later, he watched her drive away, his face
darkened, and he muttered: "This will never do.  She can’t settle down
to this life.  Just as soon—"  A fit of coughing left him gasping; but,
under the merciful hallucination that attends consumption, he finished,
"I’ll sell out as soon as I’m rid of this cough and go back to the law."

Carter also watched her go.  As, dank with sweat, grimed with dust and
labor, he "geed" his oxen around the "land," she went by, a flutter of
billowy white, deliciously dainty, cool, and clean.  The contrast
emphasized the difference between them so strongly that a sudden feeling
of bitter hopelessness caused him to return only a stern nod to her bow
and smile.  Surprised, she looked back, and gleaning, perhaps, an
intuition of his feeling from the dogged set of his face and figure, she
was swept with sudden pity.

For a mile she was quiet; but while the sun shines youth may not hobnob
with care, and that was a perfect day.  Autumn’s crimsons mottled the
tawny prairies; waves of sunshine chased one another over the brown
grasses to the distant forest line; and as, with cheerful clatter of
pole and harness, the buggy dipped, swallow-like, over the long earth
rolls, her spirits rose. She laughed, chatted, within five miles was
involved in a mild flirtation.  That was wicked!  Of course! Afterwards,
in private, she mortified the strain of coquetry that made such shame
possible.  Yet it was very natural.  Given a handsome man, a pretty
maid, and isolation, what else should follow?  Molyneux had travelled in
far countries and talked well of them and their savage peoples.  He knew
London, the Mecca of womankind, like a book; abounded in anecdotes of
people and places that had been awesome names to her.  Also he was
skilled in subtle flattery, never exceeding by a hair’s-breadth the
amount which her vanity—of which she had a pretty woman’s rightful
share—could easily assimilate.  Small wonder if she forgot the grim
figure at the ploughtail.

Forgetfulness, however, was not for Carter.  As he followed the steady
rhythm of his furrows in heat and dust, heavy thought now loosened, now
tightened the corners of his mouth.  But bitterness did not hold him
long.

"Baby!  You are going to get her.  But that ain’t the way to play the
game," he said, as the buggy disappeared.  And she saw only friendliness
in his smile on her return that evening and the score of other occasions
on which he watched her goings and comings.

He "played his game" like a man, and with a masterly hand.  Never
obtrusive, he was always kind, cheerful, hopefully sympathetic during
Merrill’s bad spells.  At other times his dry humor kept her laughing.
He was always helpful.  When the snows blanketed the prairies he
instructed her in the shifts of winter housekeeping—how to keep the
cabin snug when the blizzard walled it in fleecy cloud; how to keep the
frost out of the cellar and from the small stock of fruits in the
pantry. Together they "froze down" a supply of milk against the time
when it would be cruel to keep cows milking.  A night’s frost transmuted
her pans of milk into oval cakes, which he piled out-doors like
cordwood.  A milk pile!  The snows soon covered it, and how she laughed
when, drawing home wood from the forest, he mistook the pile for a drift
and so upset his load.

Indeed, he wrought well!  Kindliness, good temper, consideration, these
are splendid bases for love.  Not that he ever hinted his hope.  He was
far too shrewdly circumspect.  It speaks for the quality of his wit that
he recognized that, given differences in rank and station, love must
steal upon her from ambush.  Startled, she would fly behind ramparts
that would be proof against the small god’s sharpest arrows.  So he was
very careful, masking his feeling under a gentle imperturbability; sure
that, if not alarmed, she must turn to him in the coming time of
trouble.

For Morrill had steadily failed since winter set in. During the
Christmas week he rallied, recovered voice and color, improved so much
that Helen yielded to his wish for her to attend a New Year’s party at
Mrs. Leslie’s; and as she kissed him good-bye there was nothing to
indicate that this was but the last flash, the leaping flame which
precedes the darkness.

A genuine frontier party, it was to be an all-day affair, and Carter
drove her up in the morning.  New Year had broken beautifully: clear,
bright, almost warm; for the first time in a month the mercury had
thawed long enough to register twenty-eight below.  There had been no
wind or drift for a week, so the trail was packed hard, and as the
ponies swept its curves, balancing the cutter on one or the other
runner, rapid motion joined with pleasurable anticipation to raise the
girl’s spirits to the point of repentance.

"Here I’m laughing and chatting," she said, soberly, "when I ought to be
home with Bert."

"Nonsense!"  Carter glanced approvingly upon the glow which the keen air
had brought to her cheeks. "You haven’t been out for a month, and you
were getting that pale and peaked.  I shall be with him.  Now you just
go in for a good time."

His generous solicitude for her happiness, for she was going among
people he did not like, touched her.  "I wish you were coming," she
said.  Then she added, "Won’t you come in—just for a little while—if
Mrs. Leslie asks you?"

He returned her coaxing smile.  "I’ll see."  And as the men were all
away, clearing a slough for skating, he stayed long enough to drink a
toast with Mrs. Leslie.

That lady’s eyes shone with soft approval as, standing by the table that
was already spread with glass, silver, and white napery, he bowed.  "To
your continued health and beauty."

"Now wasn’t that pretty?" she exclaimed, after he was gone.  "Do you
know, standing there in his furs, so tall and strong, he reminded me of
one of those old Norsemen who sometimes strayed into degenerate southern
courts.  You are happy in your cavalier, my dear. If he asked me, I
believe I’d run away with him."  And there was a sigh in her laugh.  For
though a good fellow, Leslie was prodigiously chuckle-headed, and she
had moods when his simple foolishness was as unbearable as her own
frivolity—dangerous moods for a woman of her light timber.

"I wish," she added, a little later, "that we could have persuaded him
to stay."

He knew better.  Striding, a conqueror, into southern halls, the
Norseman cut a mighty figure where he would have made but a poor
appearance as an invited guest. A thought that was expressed in Carter’s
meditation on the homeward drive.

"She meant it, shorely!  But, bless her! you ain’t to be drawn into such
a brace game.  You’d look nice among those dudes."

He had left no fire in his cabin, but he was not surprised when, afar
off, he saw his stove-pipe flinging a banner of smoke to the crystal
air.  As yet the northland had not achieved refinements in the shape of
locks and bolts, and, coming in from a forty-mile drive from a Cree
village, Father Francis, the priest of the Assiniboin mission, had put
in and brewed a jug of tea.

Easy, courteous in bearing, upright despite his silvered years, the
priest came to the door and welcomed Carter home.  "Not much travel
beyond the settlements," he said.  "It was pretty heavy going and my
ponies are tired.  So I’ll just accept the old invitation, son, and stay
the night—that is"—his mellow laugh rang out—"if my presence won’t make
you anathema maranatha unto your neighbors."

Carter knew them, their rigid dogmatism, the bigotry which made them
look askance at this man who, for thirty years, had fought the devil
over the face of a parish as big as an Eastern State.

"I don’t allow that they’ll more than excommunicate me," he grinned,
"and if they do I reckon that you’d drop the bars of your fold."

"Gladly!" the priest laughed.  "They are always down, son."  So, seated
by the humming stove with the jug steaming between them, the two settled
down to exchange the news of the neighborhood—an elastic term that
stretched over territory enough to set an Old-World kingdom up in
business.

It was strange gossip.  To the north of them—and not very far at that;
old Fort Pelly lay within twenty miles—the Hudson Bay Company, the
oldest of chartered traders, still lorded it over the tribes.  In dark
woods, on open prairies stood the forts with their storehouses, fur
lofts waiting groups of Indians.  There Factor, Clerk, the Bois Brulés
still lived and loved in the primitive fashion, careless of the
settlement, first wave of civilization that was lipping around their
borders.  So the talk ran on fur packs, mishaps by trail or river,
sinister doings in the far north, where the aftermath of the Metis
rebellion was still simmering.  A wild budget!  What between it and
Carter’s choring, dark was settling as he and the priest entered
Morrill’s cabin.

Both started at what they saw.  Despite Carter’s optimism in Helen’s
presence, he had been fully alive to Morrill’s condition, yet—he now
stood, shocked, grieved in the presence of the expected.

The sick man was wellnigh spent, yet the stroke of death brought only a
spark from his iron courage. "Another hemorrhage!" he whispered.
"Shortly after you left.  No, don’t go for Helen.  She gets so little
pleasure.  It is all over.  I’ll be all right to-morrow."

But it was _not_ all over—though it would be "right" on the morrow.  The
rising moon saw Carter’s ponies scouring the ghostly snows.

It had been a jolly party, skating in the afternoon, music and dancing
in the evening; then, as reserve thawed under the prolonged association,
they had fallen to playing Christmas games.  Forfeits were being
"declared" as Carter reined in at the door, and Mrs. Leslie’s merry
tones fell like blasphemy upon his ear.

"Fine or superfine?"

"Superfine?  Then that must be Helen!  Captain Molyneux will—"  The
penalty was drowned in uproar, which also smothered his knock.  Followed
loud laughter, and the door quivered under the impact of struggling
bodies.

"Don’t—please!"

Now, under Christmas license no girl is particularly averse to being
kissed, and had Molyneux gone a little more gently about it, Helen had
probably offered no more than the conventional resistance.  But when he
forced her head back so that her lips would come up to his with all the
abandon of lovers, she broke his grip, and when pinned again against the
door, struggled madly.

"Don’t!"

There was no mistaking her accent.  A flame of anger, leaping,
confusing, blinded Carter.  His every muscle contorted.  From his
unconscious pressure, hasp and handle flew from the door; as Mrs. Leslie
shrieked her surprise, his hand dropped on Helen’s shoulder, and from
that small leverage his elbow sent Molyneux staggering back to the wall.

The action cleared his brain, calmed the great muscles that quivered
under his furs with primordial impulse to break and tear.  The flush
faded from his tan, the flash from his eye.  The hasp lay on the floor
with the handle he had forgotten to turn.  He saw neither them nor the
guests in their postures of uneasy astonishment. Before his mental
vision rose the scene he had just left, the priest kneeling in prayer
beside a dying man.

The reaction of his shove had thrown Helen in against him, and her touch
recalled his mission.  "Your brother—" he began, then paused.  He had
meant to break it gently, but the confusion of conflicting emotions left
him nothing but the fact.  "Is—" he went on, then, appalled by a sudden
sense of the ruthlessness of it, he stopped.  But, reading the truth in
his eyes, she collapsed on his arm.


To Carter, waiting outside in the moonlight for Helen, came Molyneux,
and the door closing behind him shut in the hum of wonder and the
sobbing that came from the bedroom where the women were putting on their
wraps.

Molyneux was smoking, though, to give him his due, he did not require
that invaluable aid to a cool bearing. Regarding the spirals, curling
sharply blue in the moonlight, he remarked, "I don’t quite understand
your methods, my friend."  The insolence of the "my friend" is
indescribable.  "It may be fashionable in Stump town to announce bad
news by breaking down a gentleman’s door, but with us—it savors of
roughness."

"_Roughness?_"  Carter scrutinized the dim horizon. "It wasn’t all on
one side of the door—_my friend_."  His mimicry was perfect.

The captain hummed, cleared his throat.  "A little Christmas
foolery—perfectly allowable."

Carter’s gaze shifted to the nimbus about the moon, a clear storm
warning.  "Foolery becomes roughness when it ain’t agreeable to both
parties."

"Who told you it wasn’t?"

"My ear.  If yours didn’t—it needs training."

Molyneux smoked out a pause that perhaps covered a slight confusion.
"Well, I don’t care to accept you for a music-master.  Under the
distressing circumstances, I shall have to let it pass—for the present.
But I shall not forget."

Carter smiled at the moon.  "Looks like storm?"




                                 *VII*

                   *MR. FLYNN STEPS INTO THE BREACH*


After putting forth a feeble straggle on the morning of the funeral, the
pale winter sun retired for good as the north wind began to herd the
drift over vast white steppes.  Though fire had been kept up all night
in Merrill’s cabin by Mrs. Flynn, who had come in to perform the last
offices, a pail of water had frozen solid close to the stove.  After a
quarter of an hour in the oven, a loaf of bread yet showed frost
crystals in its centre at breakfast; a drop of coffee congealed as it
fell in the saucer.

It was, indeed, the hardest of weather.  By noon a half-inch of ice
levelled the window-panes with the sash; pouring through the key-hole a
spume of fine drift laid a white finger across the floor.  Outside, the
spirit thermometer registered forty-five below.  The very air was
frozen, blanketing the snow with lurid frost clouds. Yet, though a pair
of iridescent "sun-dogs" gave storm warnings, a score of Canadian
settlers, men and women, assembled for the service in the cabin.
Severe, silent, they sat around on boards and boxes, eying Mrs. Leslie
and other English neighbors with great disfavor, inwardly critical of
the funeral arrangements.  For ceremony and service had been stripped of
the lugubrious attributes which gave mournful satisfaction to the
primitive mind.  Helen herself, in her quiet grief, was a
disappointment; and she wore no black or other grievous emblem.  Worse!
The casket-lid was screwed down, and, filched of their prerogative of
"viewing the corpse," they turned gloomy faces to the theological
student who had come out from Lone Tree.

Here was an additional disappointment.  Afterwards, in the stable, it
was held that he had not improved the occasion.  Of Morrill, who had
been so lax in his attendance at occasional preachings as to justify a
suspicion of atheism, he could have made an edifying text, thrilling his
hearers with doubts as to whether the man was altogether fallen short of
grace.  But there was none of this.  Just a word on the brother’s sunny
nature and brave fight against wasting sickness, and he was passed
without doubt of title to mansions in the skies.

"I don’t call that no sermon," Hines growled, as he thrust a frosty bit
into his pony’s mouth.  "Missed all the good points, he did."

"Never heerd the like," said Shinn, his neighbor, nearest in disposition
as well as location.  "Not a bit of crape for the pall-bearers.  I know
a person that ain’t going to be missed much."

"I’ve heerd," another man said, "as he doubted the Scriptures.  If that
is so—Is it true as the Roman priest was with him at the last?"

Hines despondently nodded.  "We’ll hope for the best," he said, with an
accent that murdered the hope.

Shinn, however, who never could compass the art of suggestion, gave
plainer terms to his thought.  "There ain’t a doubt in my mind.  It’s a
warning to turn from the paths he trod."

"You needn’t be scairt."  From the gloom of the far corner, where he was
harnessing the team that was to draw the burial sleigh, Bender’s voice
issued.  "You needn’t be scairt.  There ain’t a damn one of you
travelling his trail."

Ensued a silence, then Hines snarled, "No, an’ I ain’t agoing to follow
him on this.  If you fellows want to tag after priests’ leavings, you
kin.  I’m pulling my freight for home."

"You’re what?"

Hines quailed as Bender’s huge body and blue-scarred face materialized
from the gloom.  "I said as ’twas too cold to go to the grave."

"You did, eh?  Well, you’re going.  Not that your presence is necessary,
but just because you ain’t to be allowed to show disrespect to a better
man than yourself.  Tie up that hoss.  You’re agoing to ride with me.
An’ if there’s any other man as thinks his team ain’t fit to buck the
drifts"—his fierce eyes searched for opposition—"he’ll find room in my
sleigh."

So with Hines—albeit much against his will—heading the procession, a
long line of sleighs sped through the mirk drift to the lonely acre
which had been set apart for the _long_ sleep.  A few posts and a single
wire marked it off from white wastes, and through these the drift flew
with sibilant hiss, piling against the mounded grave which Flynn and
Carter had thawed out and dug, inch by inch, with many fires, these last
two days.  And there was small ceremony.  King Frost is no respecter of
persons, freezes alike the quick and the dead.  Removing his cap to
offer a short prayer, the student’s ears turned deathly white; while he
rubbed them with snow, the mourners spelled one another with the
shovels, working furiously in vain efforts to warm chilled blood.
Roughly filled, the grave was left to be smoothed in warmer season; the
living fled, leaving the dead with the drift, the frost, the wind, stern
ministers of the illimitable.

No woman had dared the weather.  Lying in the bottom of a sled, under
hides and blankets, with hot stones at hands and feet, Helen had gone
home with Mrs. Leslie.  Coming back from the grave she formed the
subject of conversation between Flynn and Carter, who rode together.

To Flynn’s inquiry Carter replied that, as far as he was aware, she had
no private means.  Her father, a physician in good practice in a New
England town, had lived up to every cent of his income, and the
insurance he carried had been mortgaged to start the brother out West.

"Not having any special training," Carter finished, "she had to choose
between a place in a store or keeping house for him."

"It’s no snap in them sthores," Flynn sighed.  "Shmall pay an’ big
temptations, they’re telling me."  Then, giving Carter the tail of his
eye, he added, "But there’ll be nothing else for it—now?"

"Oh, I don’t know," Carter mused.  "Flynn, are you and the other married
folks around here going to let your families grow up in ignorance?
Ain’t it pretty nigh time you was forming a school district?"

In the slit between his cap and scarf the Irishman’s eyes twinkled like
blue jewels.  Affecting ignorance, however, he answered, "An’ phwere
would we be after getting a teacher in this frozen country?"

"Miss Morrill."

Flynn subdued his laugh out of respect to the occasion.  "Jest what’s in
me own mind.  An’ there’ll be no lack av children for the same school,
me boy, when you—There, don’t be looking mad!  ’Tis after the order of
nature; an’ I’m not blaming ye, she’s sweet as she’s pretty.  Putting
you an’ me out av the question, I’d do it for her.  An’ it shouldn’t be
so hard—if we can corral the bachelors.  But lave thim to me."

And Flynn went about it with all the political sagacity inherent in his
race.  "We’ll not be spreading the news much," he told the married men
to whom he broached the subject.  "Not a word till we get ’em in
meeting, or they’ll organize an’ vote us down."

Accordingly the summons to gather in public meeting was issued without
statement of purpose, a mystery that brought out every settler for
twenty miles around. An hour before time, some fifty men, rough-looking
fellows in furs, arctic socks, moose-skins, and moccasins, crowded into
the post-office, which, as most centrally located, was chosen for the
meeting.

The expected opposition developed as soon as the postmaster, who
presided, mentioned "eddycation."

"More taxation!" a bachelor roared.  "You’re to marry the girls an’
we’re to eddycate the kids!"

"Right you are, Pete!" others chorused.

But Flynn was ready.  "Is that you, Pete Ross?"  He transfixed the
speaker with his blue twinkle.  "An’ yerself coorting the Brown girl so
desprit that she don’t get time to comb her hair anny more?

"An’ you, Bill MacCloud," he went on, as Peter, growling that he "wasn’t
married yet," carried his blushing face behind the stove, "you that’s
galloping your ponies so hard after the Baker girl.  Twins it was, twice
running, in her mother’s family, an’ well ye know it.  A public school
ain’t good enough for you, Bill? Which is to be—a governess, or a young
ladies’ siminery?"

So, one after another, Flynn smote the bachelors. Had a man so much as
winked at a girl, it made a text for a sermon that was witty as
_risque_.

Yet he was so good-tempered about it that by the time he had finished
grilling the last victim the first-cooked were joining their laughter to
that of the married men.

Then Flynn turned his eloquence upon a common evil.  Everywhere the best
of the land had passed into the hands of non-resident speculators, who
hindered settlement and development by holding for high prices. "Was it
a question of increased taxation?" Flynn asked. Then let the
non-residents pay.  Under the law they could expend eight hundred
dollars on a building.  Well, they would distribute the contracts among
themselves—one man cut logs, another hew them, a third draw them, and so
on!  Every man should have a contract, an’ who the divil would care if
taxes were raised on the speculators.

It was his closing argument, however, that finished the bachelors.  "Now
me an’ Jimmy have spotted a teacher, a right smart young woman—"

A howl of applause cut him short—the bachelors would call it settled!

Thus it came to pass that as, a week or so after the funeral, Carter was
driving Helen from Leslie’s back to her cabin, a deputation consisting
of Mr. Flynn and Mr. Glaves was heading in the same direction.

All that week the cabin had stood, fireless, a mournful blot on the
snowscape, but though she was only to be there for the hour required to
pack her belongings, Carter had swept out the drift that morning and put
on the fires.  So the place was cosey and warm.  Yet, with all its
cheer, on entering, she relapsed into the first passionate grief.  For
nothing is so vividly alive as the things of a dead person, and
everywhere her glance fell on objects her brother had used.  Divining
the cause, Carter left her to have her cry out on pretence of stable
chores, and when he returned she was busily packing.

So while she worked he talked, explaining her affairs as related to
himself through his partnership with Morrill.  Their cattle were worth
so much, but as it would require a summer’s grazing to fit them for
market, he would advance the money on her share.  He did not mention the
fact that he would have to borrow it himself at usurer’s interest.  As
to the homestead: Land was unsalable since the bottom fell out of the
boom, but in any case it was advisable to hold for the values that would
accrue with the coming of the railroad. He would rent it, on settler’s
terms, paying roadwork and taxes for use of the broken land.

As, kindly thoughtful for her interests, he ran on, she rose from her
packing, grasped his hand impulsively, squeezed his arm to her bosom.

"You have been so good!"  The sunsets in her cheeks, the softness of her
glance, her touch, almost upset his reason.  But he resisted a mad
impulse.

"Nonsense!" he said, when he could trust himself to speak.  "I’m going
to make money off you."

"Really?" she asked, smiling.

"Really," he smiled back.

"I—wish you could," she sighed.  "But I am afraid you are saying that to
please me.  Well, you know best. Do as you please."

Had he done as he pleased, the question of their mutual interests would
have been simply solved.  But the time was not ripe.  He was too shrewd
to mistake gratitude for love.

"Now," he said, resolutely thrusting away temptation, "if it’s any of my
darn business—what are your plans?"

"My plans?"  Leaning on the table beside him, she gazed dreamily upon
the frosted panes.  The question forced in upon her the imminence of
impending change and brought a feeling of strong revulsion.  The ties
that death forges are stronger than those of life.  It was inexpressibly
painful, just then, to think of leaving the land which held her recent
dead.

"My plans!" she mused, knitting her brows.  "I haven’t any—yet.  Of
course I have relatives, back East.  But as father did not like them, I
hardly know more than their names.  I shall have to do something, but
Mrs. Leslie is so good.  She won’t hear of me leaving until spring.  I
have heaps of time to plan."

But having bucked trail all morning, the solution of her immediate
future just then heralded its arrival by the groan of frosty runners.

"Me an’ Jimmy," Mr. Flynn explained, after he had introduced his
co-trustee, "is a depytation.  Being as it’s the only crop the frost
won’t nip, Silver Creek is going to raise a few legislators.  We want
the young lady to teach our school."

"But," Helen objected, when she had assimilated the startling news, "I
never taught school."

"You’ll nivir begin younger," Flynn comforted; to which he added, "An’
it’s the foinest training agin the time ye’ll have a few av your own."

Mr. Glaves solemnly contemplated the blushing candidate.  "You kin sum,
ma’am—an’ spell?"

"Oh yes," she assured him.  "I graduated from high-school."

"You don’t say!"  Both trustees regarded her with intense admiration,
and Glaves said, "We didn’t expect to get that much for our money, so
we’ll jest have you go a bit easy at first, lest there’ll be some
sprained intellec’s among the kiddies."




                                 *VIII*

                       *WHEN APRIL SMILED AGAIN*


"We’ll begin right soon on the building," Mr. Glaves had said at
parting.  So when the mercury began to take occasional flights above
zero in the last days of February, a gang turned loose in the bush. For
two weeks thereafter falling trees and the bell-like tinkle of a
broadaxe disturbed the forest silence.  Then spring rode in on the back
of a Chinook wind and caught them hauling.  Ensued profanity.  Thawing
quickly, the loose snows slid away from the packed trails, causing the
sleds to "cut off"; the bush road was mottled with overturned loads.
Also the brilliant sun turned the snowscape into one huge reflector.
Faces frizzled. Dark men took the colors of raw beefsteak, fair men
peeled and cracked like over-ripe tomatoes.  Yet they persisted, and one
day in early April stood off to look on their finished work.  "Chinked,"
sod-roofed, plastered, the log school-house gleamed yellow under the
rays of the dying sun—education, the forerunner of civilization, had
settled in the land.

As his cabin was nearest the school, the honor of boarding the teacher
fell to the postmaster; and though her choice caused heart-burnings
among others who had coveted the distinction, it was conceded wise.  For
not only did the Glaves’s establishment boast the only partitioned room
in the Canadian settlement, but his wife, a tall, gaunt woman, excelled
in the concoction of carrot-jams, turnip-pies, choke-cherry jellies, and
other devices by which skilled housewives eke out the resources of an
inhospitable land.

In the middle of April school opened; a dozen small thirsters after
knowledge arranged themselves in demure quiethood before authority that
was possessed of its own misgivings.  Teacher and scholars regarded one
another with secret awe.  But this soon wore off and they toiled
amicably along the road which winds among arithmetical pitfalls and
grammatical bogs to academic glories.  It was milestoned by deputations,
that road, said visitations generally consisting of one person—mostly
unmarried and very red in the face—who inquired if the "kids was minding
their book," then went off chuckling at his own hardihood.  Also it
seemed as though all the stray cattle for fifty miles around headed for
the school.  Helen grew quite expert in ringing variations on the fact
that she "had not seen a strawberry steer with a white patch on the left
flank."  Her smile always accompanied the answer, and the owners of the
hypothetical estrays would carry away a vision of a golden and glorified
school-ma’am.  What of these pleasant interests, and an unexpected
liking which she had developed for the work itself, she became very
happy in a quiet way as time dulled the edge of her sorrow.

But during the three months that preceded school opening the fates had
not been idle.  Attending strictly to their knitting, they had run a
tangled woof in and out the warp of several lives.

"She’s so good!" Helen had exclaimed, in her gratitude of Mrs. Leslie;
but analysis of that lady’s motives would have shown them not altogether
disinterested.

Excluding a certain absence of principle that was organic, and therefore
hardly chargeable against her till philosophers answer the question,
"Can the leopard change his spots or the Ethiop his skin?" Mrs. Leslie
was not fundamentally vicious.  Like the average of men and women, she
would have preferred to have been good, and, given a husband whom she
feared and loved, she might have developed into a small Puritan mightily
jealous for their mutual prestige.  Lacking this, however, she was as a
straw in a corner, ready to rise at the first wind puff.  If, so far,
she had lived in the fear of Mrs. Grundy, her conformity inhered in two
causes—no man in her own set had stirred her nature, and, till Helen
came, the winds of Opportunity had blown away from Carter.

What drew her to him she herself could hardly have said; and if the
cause is to be found outside of the peculiar texture of her own nature,
it must be in the natural law which makes opposites attract.  Nature
wars incessantly against the stratification which precedes social decay.
Whether of blood or water, she abhors stagnation.  Her torrential floods
cleanse the backwaters of languid streams; passionate impulses, such as
Mrs. Leslie’s, provide for the injection into worn-out strains of the
rich corpuscles that bubble from the soil. Carter’s virile masculinity,
contrasting so strongly with the amiable effeminacy of her own set,
therefore attracted Mrs. Leslie, and, having now lassoed Opportunity—in
the shape of Helen—she hitched the willing beast and drove him tandem
with inclination.

Either by intuition or knowledge subtly wormed from himself or others,
she learned Carter’s habits, and no matter the direction of the drives
which she and Helen took together, it was pure accident if they did not
come in touch with him.  Also at intervals they called at his cabin,
after one of which visits Mrs. Leslie put the house-cleaning idea into
Helen’s head, insinuating it so cleverly that the girl actually thought
that it originated with herself.

"Did you _ever_ see anything _so_ untidy?" she exclaimed, as on that
occasion they drove homeward.  "Harness, cooking-pots, provisions, all
in a tangle.  Bachelors are such grubby creatures!  But really, my dear,
he deserves to be comfortable.  Couldn’t we do something?—hire some one
to—"

If she had counted on the girl’s grateful enthusiasm, it did not fail
her.  "Let’s do it ourselves!" she exclaimed.  "I’d love to!"

So, in Carter’s absence, the two descended upon the cabin with soap,
pails, and hot water.  Mrs. Leslie, the delicate, white-armed woman who
kept a girl to do her own work, rolled up her sleeves and fell to work
like a charwoman; and it is doubtful if she were ever happier than while
thus expending, in service, her reserve of illegal feeling.  There was,
indeed, something pitiful in her tender energy.  When, the cleaning
done, she sat demurely mending a rent in Carter’s coat, she might have
been the young wife of her imaginings.

Her sentimental expression moved Helen to laughter. "You look _so_
domestic!" she tittered.  "So soft and contemplative.  One would think—"

Mrs. Leslie was too clever for transparent denial. "I don’t care," she
answered.  "I like him.  He’s awfully dear."  And her expressed
preference affected Helen—helped to break down the last barriers of
caste feeling between herself and Carter.  Till then she had always
maintained a slight reserve towards him, but when, coming in
unexpectedly, he caught them at their labors, she was as free and frank
with him as she had ever been with a man of her old set.  The change
expressed itself in her hand-shake at parting, though it fell far short
of Mrs. Leslie’s lingering pressure.

In his surprise at the quantity and quality of the latter, Carter may
have returned it, or Mrs. Leslie may have mistaken the reaction of her
own grip for answer. Anyway, she thought he did, and on the way home
plead weariness as an excuse to indulge luxurious contemplations. She
fed on his every look, tone, accent, coloring them all with her own
feeling, an indulgence for which she would pay later; indeed, she was
even then paying, in that it was eating away her weak moral fibre as
acid eats a metal, preparing her for greater licenses.  At first,
however, she was timorous—content with small touches, accidental
contacts, the physical sense of nearness when, as often happened, they
coaxed him to take them for a drive behind his famous ponies.

But such slight fare could not long suffice for her growing passion.
Having observed, outwardly, the laws of social morality only because, so
far, they had consorted with inclination; knowing, inwardly, no law but
that of her own pleasure, it was only a question of time until she would
become desperate enough to balance reputation against indulgence.

This came to pass a couple of months after Helen had opened up school,
and would have happened sooner but that even a reputation cannot be
given away without a bidder.  Not that Carter was ignorant or
indifferent to her feeling.  Two thousand years have failed to make man
completely monogamous and he is never displeased at a pretty woman’s
preference.  A condition had interposed between the fire and the tow.
In every man’s life there comes a time when, for the moment, he is
impervious to the call of illicit passion.  A first pure love bucklers
him like a shining ægis, and while certain pure eyes looked out upon
Carter from earth, air, and sky, wherever his fancy strayed, he would
not barter a sigh for the perishable commodity Elinor Leslie offered.
Having, however, formed her judgments of men from the weak masculinity
about her, she could not realize this.  Imagining that he would come at
the crook of her finger, she tried to recapture Opportunity.

"Mr. Carter was so kind and considerate of Helen that I think we ought
to take him up," she said to her husband one day; and Leslie, whose
good-natured stupidity lent itself to every suggestion, readily agreed.

Unfortunately for her scheme, Carter proved unfelicitously blind to his
interest—as she saw it.  Negatively, he refused to be "taken up,"
offering good-natured excuses to all of Leslie’s invitations.  So
nothing was left but the occasional opportunities afforded by Helen’s
week-end visits.  And these did not always lend themselves to Mrs.
Leslie’s purpose.  When Molyneux brought her up—as happened half the
time—he made full use of his monopoly; while Carter, in his turn, often
drove her down to see Jenny in Lone Tree.

To do the young lady justice, she held a fairly even balance between
those, her two cavaliers.  According to the canons of romance she ought
to have fallen so deeply in love with one as to hate the other.  Instead
she found herself liking them both.

There was, of course, a difference in the quality of her feeling.
Strange feminine paradox! she was drawn to Molyneux by the opposite of
the qualities on which she based her feeling for Carter.  At heart woman
is a reformer, and once convinced of his sincerity towards herself, the
fact that Molyneux was reputed something of a sinner increased rather
than lessened her interest. She experienced the joys of driving the lion
in leading-strings, ignoring the danger of the beast turning upon her
with rending fangs.  Feeling her power, she tried to exercise it for his
good, and felt as virtuous over the business as if it were not a form of
vanity, and a dangerous one at that.  Anyway, she rode and drove with
him so much that spring and summer that she practically annihilated Mrs.
Leslie’s chances of seeing Carter.

That lady could, however, and did observe him in secret.  Riding from
home while Leslie was busy seeding, she would make a wide détour,
keeping the lowlands, and so bring up, unobserved, in a poplar clump
that afforded a near view of Carter’s fields.

One day will example a score of others.  It was, as aforesaid,
seeding-time.  Stripped of her snowy bodice, the earth lay as some brown
virgin, her bosom bared to man’s wooing and the kisses of the sun and
rain.  From her covert Mrs. Leslie could see his ox-team slowly crawling
upon the brown fields which, as yet, had known no bearing yoke.  Those
days love was suggested by everything in nature.  The air quivered in
passionate lines down the horizon.  Warmth, light, love were
omnipresent.  By every slough the mallard brooded. Overhead the wild
goose winged northward to bring forth her kind on the rim of polar seas.
Prairie cocks primped and ruffled on every knoll before their admiring
hens. To her it seemed that birds and beasts, flesh and fowl were
happier than she in their matings.  Passionately, with bursting sighs,
she strained at her chains, wildly challenging the marriage institution
which has slowly evolved from the travail of a thousand generations.

Hers was the old struggle between the flesh and the spirit, the struggle
that gave the sexless desert its hermit population.  With this
difference: Ancestry had bequeathed to her no spirit.  She had nothing
to pit against the flesh but her own unruly inclination.  For her the
battle offered no meed of victory in the form of chastity triumphant.
The "dice of God were loaded"; she was striving against the record of
foolish or vicious fathers.  And she played so hard!  At times, little
heathen in spite of her culture, her eyes looked out upon him from the
spring greenery with the tender longing of a mother deer; again they
blazed with baffled fires; often she threw herself down in a passion of
tears.  So, feeding upon its very privations, her distemper waxed until,
one June evening, it burst all bounds.

Returning through late gloaming with his weekly mail, Carter came on her
holding her horse by the trail. Her voice, low yet vibrant, issued from
the gloom.

"I’m afraid I shall have to trouble you for a ride, Mr. Carter; my
saddle-girth has burst."

"Your hand is wet.  It’s blood!" he exclaimed, as he handed her in.

"I fell on a sharp stone.  Will you please tie this handkerchief."

Bending to comply, he saw that the wound was clean-cut, and this may
have caused him to examine the girth before he threw the saddle on
behind.  Then he knew—was certain as though he had seen her slash it
with the penknife that lay in the scrub near by.

Picking up a stone, he pounded the severed edges on the wheel-tire;
pounded them to a frazzle while she looked on, her pupils dilated in the
half light, large, soft, black as velvet, intensifying a curious mixture
of expectation and content.  But if she read consent in the pains he was
at with her excuse, alarmed surprise displaced expectation when,
climbing in, he drove on without a word.

She glanced up, tentatively, once, twice, a dozen times at the erect
figure, but always he stared ahead. Again and again her scarlet lips
trembled, but she choked; sound halted on its bitten thresholds.  Once
she touched his arm, but he drew sharply away and his hand rose and
flung beaded sweat from his brow.  So, for a tumultuous age it seemed to
her, they whirled through the gathering night, rattled on until a slab
of light burst through the darkness.

Followed Leslie’s voice.  "Hullo, Elinor!  What’s the matter?"

She stiffened—Carter felt her stiffen as in a mortal rigor—but she
answered, in level tones: "Oh, nothing much.  My saddle-girth burst and
Mr. Carter kindly drove me home.  Won’t you come in?  Well—I’m ever so
much obliged.  Good-night."

Whirling homeward through the soft dusk, the tumult which had confused
Carter resolved into its elements, shame, chagrin, wonder, and disgust.
Each swayed him in turn, then faded, leaving pity.  Flaring up in his
cabin, his match revealed only concern on his sunburned face.  Taking a
packet from under the pillow of his bunk, he unfolded it upon the table,
exposing a glove, a ribbon, and some half-dozen hairs that gleamed,
threads of gold, under the lamplight.  One by one he had gleaned them,
picking the first from the back of Helen’s coat one day coming out of
Lone Tree.

As he leaned over the trove there was no mawkish sentimentality in his
look, rather it expressed wonder, wonder at himself.  For his life had
not always jibed with the canons.  To him in their appointed seasons had
come the heats of youth; and if now they had merged in the deeper
instinct which centres on a single mate, the change had been
sub-conscious.  The house he had built, the land he tilled, the herds he
had gathered about him were all products of this instinct, provision
against mating, for the one—when he should find her. Yet, though found,
he wondered; wondered at the powerful grip which that small hand had
wound into his heart-strings, that those golden threads should be able
to bind with the strength of cables.

He did not puzzle long.  Presently concern again darkened his
countenance, and he murmured, "Poor little woman! poor little thing!"

Could he have seen her just then!  Leslie was out talking horse with
Molyneux at the stables, so no eye saw her when, in the privacy of her
bedroom, she snatched the mask from her soul.  At first stupefied, she
stared dully at familiar objects until her glance touched a portrait of
Helen on the dresser.  That fired her passion, started the wheels of
torture.  Dashing it to the floor, she ground her heel into the smiling
face, raving in passionate whispers; then flinging at length on the bed
she writhed like a hurt snake, struck her clinched fists into the
pillows, bit them, her own hands, soft arms.  She agonized under the
scorn that belittles hell’s fury.  Truly, out of her indulgences, her
pleasant mental vices, the gods had twisted whips for her scourging!

But if whips, as claimed, are deterrents of physical crimes, they
stimulate moral diseases; and whereas, previously, Mrs. Leslie had been
merely good-naturedly frivolous, she came from under the lashes a
dangerous woman—the more dangerous because there was no outward
indication of the inward change.  With Helen, whom Molyneux brought up
at the next week-end, she was, if anything, kinder in manner, loving her
with gentle pats that gave no suggestion of steel claws beneath the
velvet.  These, however, protruded, when the girl borrowed her horse to
pay a visit to Carter.

Mrs. Leslie and Molyneux watched her away from the door.  The lady had
plead a headache in excuse for staying at home, but her eyes were devoid
of weary languor.  They had flashed as she averted them from the mended
saddle-girth.  They glittered as she now turned them on Molyneux.

"Calvert, you amuse me."

"Why?" he asked, flushing.

"Such devotion in that last lingering glance.  It was worthy of a boy in
a spasm of calf-love rather than the dashing cavalryman who has tried to
add my reputation to the dozen that hang at his belt."

Molyneux shrugged denial.  "That’s not true, Elinor. I’m too good a
hunter to stalk the unattainable."

She laughed, bowing.  "Do I sit on such high peaks of virtue?"

"Or of indifference.  It amounts to the same.  Anyway, I saw that there
was no chance for _me_."

Again she laughed.  "What _significance_!"

"Well—I’m not blind, as—Leslie, for instance.  I only wonder."

"At what?"

"Your taste."

She made a face at Helen’s distant figure.  "I might return your
thought.  After all, Calvert, from our viewpoint, you know, she’s only a
higher type of native—dreadfully anthropomorphic."

"Exactly," he answered.  "And that’s why I"—pausing, he substituted an
adverb more in accordance with Mrs. Leslie’s ironical mood—"like her.
She’s fresh, sound, and clean of body and mind.  Clings to the ideals we
chucked overboard a hundred years ago—lives up to them with all the vim
and push of her race. She stirs me—"

"As a cocktail does a jaded palate," Mrs. Leslie interposed.  "And a
good enough reason; it will serve for us both, since you are so frank,
Calvert.  It is not your fancy I am laughing at, but your diffidence,
the morbid respectability with which you wait till it pleases her to
give that which you have been accustomed to command from others.  It is
quite touching....  But why this timidity?  Why do you linger?"

"Because—"  He paused, feeling it impossible to yield the real reason up
to her mockery; to tell that the girl had touched a deeper chord of
feeling than had ever been reached by a woman’s hand; that she had
broken the cynical crust which had been formed by years of association
with the sophisticated women of the army set.  He threw the onus back on
her.  "That’s rich, Elinor.  Here, for months, you have fenced her
about; given her steady chaperonage; warned me to tone down to avoid
giving offence.  Now you ask why? Have you forgotten how you rated me
for my violence in pressing her under the mistletoe?"

"Pish!"  She contemplated him scornfully.  "I only advised caution.  And
then—"  She also paused; then, thrusting reserve to the winds, went on:
"And then she hadn’t come between me and—my wish.  Now she has.  And let
me tell you, my friend"—she returned to her "cocktail" simile—"that
while you linger, inhaling virginal aromas, a strong hand will slip in
and drain the glass.  Will you stand by and see her sweetness sipped by
another?  Now, don’t strike me."

He looked angry enough to do it, but contented himself with throwing
back her question, "Why do you linger?"

"Because I cannot drain my cup"—her lips quivered thirstily—"till yours
is out of the way.  He has the bad taste to prefer her spotlessness to
my—"

"Sophistication?" he supplied.

She nodded.  "Thanks.  And he will continue to do so until you take her
out of the way.  So—it is up to you, as the boys say.  I think, too,
that she suspects that my interest is not altogether platonic, and as a
commodity enhances in value as it is desired by others, her liking may
be spurred into love.  At present she’s balanced.  Likes you, I know.
Better strike while the iron is hot."

"I would if I thought—" he began, then went on, musingly: "But I’ve
sized it up as slow-going.  Didn’t think she was the kind that can be
rushed."

Mrs. Leslie snorted her disdain.  "You?  With all your experience!  To
set her on a pinnacle!  How long before you men will learn that we would
rather be taken down and be hugged.  While the saint worships at the
shrine the sinner steals the image.  I warrant you my big American won’t
waste any time on his knees. However, I’ve warned—here comes Fred from
the stables."

That was not the end of their talk.  It recurred at every opportunity;
and by the time Helen returned Molyneux was persuaded against his better
judgment that he had gone too easily about his wooing.

"What thou doest, do quickly," she whispered, as he went out to hitch to
take Helen home.  And as they drove away she gazed long after them from
the door.

What was she thinking?  Given a woman of firmer texture, one whose acts
flowed from steady impulses, in turn the effects of settled character,
thought may be guessed.  But Mrs. Leslie’s light nature veered to every
wind of passion.  She could not even hate consistently. Was she swayed
altogether by revenge, or, as hinted by her talk with Molyneux, was hope
beginning to rise from the ashes of despair?




                                  *IX*

                              *THE DEVIL*


If, as said, the devil can quote Scripture for his own purposes, it does
not follow that said purposes are always fulfilled.

Molyneux had better have followed his intuition and "gone slowly."  But
if, in brains and capacity, he towered above the average of his
remittance-fellows, the taint of his ancient blood yet showed in a
pliability to suggestion, a childish eagerness to snatch unripe fruit.
Whereas, by a quiet apology, he had long ago repaired his error in the
Christmas games, he must now commit greater foolishness.

Consciously and unconsciously, in varying degrees, Helen aided his
blundering.  She could not help looking her prettiest.  But her
delicacies of cream and rose, the tender mouth, the bosom heaving under
its lace, did not require the accentuation of coquetry.  It was the
healthy coquetry of the young animal, to be sure, unconscious, as much
as can be.  She need not, however, have authorized his gallantries with
laugh and smile—would not, had she realized his limitations, his
confused morality, subordinance to passion, emotional irresponsibility.

Afterwards she had but a confused notion how the thing came to pass.
They laughed, chatted, jested, while the tenderness in his manner
bordered more and more on the familiar.  He had been telling her of the
strange marriage custom of an Afghan tribe and had asked how she would
like such a forceful wooing.

"I think," she answered, "that a strain of the primitive inheres in our
most cultured women.  I’m sure I could never love a man who was not my
master."

She spoke thoughtfully, considering the proposition in the abstract; but
he, in his blind folly, interpreted concretely.  In the sudden lighting
of his face she read her mistake.  But before she could put out a hand
in protest, his arms were about her, his searching lips smothered her
cry.  She fought wildly, spent her strength in a desperate effort, then
capitulated—lay, panting, while he fed on her face, neck, hair, her
lips. And it was well she did.  Prolonged resistance would only have
provoked him to freer license.  As it was, mistaking quiescence for
acquiescence, he presently held her off that his hot eyes might share
the spoil.

She now fully realized her danger.  His expression, the glassy look of
his eyes filled her with repulsion, but she summoned to her aid all the
craft that centuries of dire need have bred in her race.  She smiled up
in his face, rather a pallid smile, but sufficient for his fooling. A
playful hand held him back from another kiss.

"You are very rough," she whispered.

"Consider the provocation," he answered, dodging the hand.

She tried not to shrink.  "You upset me," she murmured. "I am quite
faint.  Is there any water near by?"

She had noticed a slough ahead.  Driving into it, he bent over and wet
her handkerchief.

"Now if I could only drink."

He stepped ankle-deep into the water.  "Out of my hands."  But as he
stooped, with concave palms, there came a rattle behind him.

Uttering an oath, he sprang—too late.  As he waded to dry land she swung
the ponies in a wide circle and reined in about fifty yards away.  While
he looked sheepishly on, she wiped her face with the kerchief, rubbed
and scrubbed till the skin shone red where his lips had touched, then
tossed the kerchief towards him and drove on.

A prey to remorse, shame, he stood gazing after. All said, a man’s
ideals are formed by the people about him.  A virtuous woman, a leal
friend, raise his standard for the race; and just then Molyneux would
have given his life to place himself in the friendly relation that
obtained between them a half-hour ago.

But he could not.  Nor could all of Helen’s vigorous rubbing remove the
memory of those shameful kisses. Her bitten lips were scarlet when, a
quarter-hour later, she rattled up to Carter’s shanty; her eyes were
heavy with unshed tears.

Now here was a first-class opportunity for him to play the fool.  An
untimely question, a little idiotic sympathy would have put him in a
worse case with her than Molyneux.  But though inwardly perturbed,
shaking with anxiety, he kept a grip on himself.

"Such reckless driving!" he exclaimed, harking back to her own words on
that first drive from Lone Tree. Then solemnly surveying Molyneux’s hat,
which was perched funnily on the seat beside her, he went on, "Looks
like you’ve lost a passenger."

His twinkle removed the tension.  Looking down on the hat, she laughed;
and if, a minute later, she cried, the tears that wet his shoulder were
not cast against him.

"If you will return the ponies," she said, when her cry was out—she had
already told him enough to explain the situation—"I’ll stay here till
you come back and then you may drive me home—if you will?"

"And I’ll find him?"  She laughed at his comical accent as he intended
she should.

"About three miles back."

"Any message?"

She sensed the menace.  "Oh no!  If you quarrel, I’ll never, never
forgive you.  Now, please!"  She placed her hand on his arm.

"All right," he agreed, and, five minutes later drove off with the Devil
pony in leash behind.

From afar Molyneux saw him coming and braced for the encounter, but
Carter had gotten himself well in hand.  "Miss Morrill," he said, "is
real sorry she couldn’t hold the ponies.  But, Lordy, man, you oughtn’t
to have gone picking flowers."

"He’s lying!" Molyneux thought, but followed the lead.  "Yes, it was
careless.  But, you know, it is always the unexpected that happens."

"You’re dead right there."

The significance caused Molyneux to redden; but he tried to carry it off
easily.  "And I’m much obliged to you, Mr. Carter.  Can’t I drive you
home?"

Turning from cinching his saddle, Carter regarded him steadily.
"Obliged to you, sir.  I’m a bit particular in my choice of company."

The contempt stung Molyneux to retort: "You are plain-spoken, but I’m
told the trait is common in Americans.  Fortunately for us outsiders,
your women are more complaisant."

It only led him deeper.  Giving a last vicious tug at the cinch, Carter
vaulted into the saddle.  "Yes," he shot back, as he arranged his
bridle, "they make a mistake now and then, but it don’t take ’em long to
find it out."  And he galloped away with easy honors.

Reining in at his own door half an hour later, he regarded with
astonishment a transformation which had occurred in his absence.
Instead of the woman, beautiful in her angry tears, a demure girl came
out to meet him.  While he was gone she had bathed her red eyes, then,
to relieve a headache, had let down her hair and braided it into a plait
of solid gold.  Thick as Carter’s wrist, it hung so low that, obedient
to his admiring suggestion, she easily knitted it about her waist.

"You look," he said, "more like school-girl than school-marm."

With that simple coiffure displaying the girlish line of her head and
neck, she might, indeed, have easily passed for eighteen.  It
accentuated a wee tip-tilt of her pretty nose, a leaning to the
_retroussé_ that had been the greatest trial of her youth and still
caused her occasional qualms.  Could she have realized the piquancy it
lent to features that, otherwise, had been too regular or have known the
sensation it caused her companion as he looked down on it and her
eyelashes fluttering up from eyes that were wide and grave with
question.

One glance reassured her.  His unruffled calm, the ironic humor of his
mouth, all expressed his mastership of the late situation.  Satisfied,
she mounted beside him when he had hitched the ponies and settled in
against him with a sigh of relief.  Not that she had so easily forgotten
her late trouble.  The injured droop of her mouth, the serious face
moved him to vast sympathy and anger.  He longed to smooth the knit brow
with kisses, to take her in his arms and soothe her as a little child.
For a second time that day her mouth stood in hazard, but, bracing
himself against temptation, he tried to wean her from her brooding by
ways that were safer if less sweet.

"Any one," he said, twinkling down upon her, "would think you’d lost
your best friend—"

"Instead of my worst," she anticipated.

"Glad you put it that way."  He nodded his satisfaction. "And since you
do, why waste regrets?  Jest wipe him clean off your books."

"It is bitter to learn that you have been deceived," she answered.
"More bitter to feel yourself misread. Most bitter"—her voice dropped to
a whisper—"to learn it in such a shameful way."

He did not say, "I warned you."  Only his big brown hand closed on hers
with a sympathetic squeeze that almost expelled the pain in her heart.
She did not withdraw it; rather she drew in closer, and thus, hand in
hand, they rattled south over the vast green prairies which now were all
shotten with the iridescence of myriad flowers.  The trail wound through
seas of daisies, bluebells, white tuft.  Slender golden-rod trembled in
the breeze; dandelions and tiger-lilies flaunted their golden beauty
under turquoise skies.  It was, indeed, difficult to remain sad with
such company in such surroundings; for not content with mute sympathy,
he strove to divert her thought by talk of the animals or plants which
they saw or passed, astonished her with his wide knowledge of curious
traits in their nature or history.  So, gliding from subject to subject,
he weaned her from her trouble, and so, by easy stages, came to speaking
of himself, modestly introducing the subject with a letter.

It was from the office of the traffic manager of the trunk line
acknowledging a bid for tie and trestle contracts for the projected
branch through Silver Creek. While Cummings, Hines, and their confrères
were fulminating against the railroad pantheon, Carter had ridden over
the spruce ranges of the Riding Mountains, had secured options on
cutting permits from the provincial government, had driven down the old
survey, and then submitted an estimate which caused the construction
department of the railway to gasp its astonishment.

The chief engineer even carried the estimate to the traffic manager.
"Ties and timbers, this fellow Carter comes within a few thousand feet
of old Sawyer’s estimate," he said.  "Moreover, he is ready to deliver
the goods.  Gives references to the Bank of America, which is to finance
his enterprise.  Who is he?"

One would hardly expect the traffic manager to have remembered, but he
had; and thus it came about that the postscript of the letter was in his
own big sprawl. He regretted the fact that construction had been put off
for another year, "but," he added, "I have placed your bid on my own
files and shall see that it receives the earliest consideration when we
are ready for construction."

Helen exclaimed her satisfaction.  "I’m so glad.  I never knew that—you
could do this kind of work. Why didn’t you tell me?  I’m so interested.
Will it be a large contract?"

Her eyes testified to her words, and as, obedient to her wish, he ran on
giving details, they grew larger and more luminous.  A touch of awe
dwelt in their hazel depths.  Feeling always the attraction of his fine
physique, respecting his strength of will, clean character, he now
commanded her admiration on another score. Was he not proving himself
"fit" in the iron struggle of an economic age?  And she, delicate bloom,
crowning bud of the tree of evolution, being yet subject to the law
that, of old, governed the cave maiden in her choice of a mate, felt the
full force of this last expression of his power.

As never before, she responded to his thought and feeling.  When, after
a sudden lurch, he left his supporting arm on the rail across her waist,
she did not draw away; nay, she yielded to a luxurious sense of
protection and power, leaning in against his shoulder. That day all
things had conspired in his favor—even her pique at Molyneux—and now the
rapid movement, caressing sweep of the wind, riot of color and sunlight,
all helped to influence her judgment in a situation that was rapidly
approaching.

It lay, the situation, in a deep pool, ten feet below the bank of Silver
Creek.  As before noted, Death and the Devil, those lively ponies, were,
as Carter put it, "worth watching" any and all the time on the dead
level, and the fact that he held a loose line on them running down trail
into the valley proved how very, very far he had departed from his usual
imperturbable mood.  Small wonder, for the hazel glances he had
sustained this last hour would have upset the coolest head.  But if his
condition was perfectly natural, so also was the innate deviltry that
caused the ponies to bolt the trail and plunge over the aforesaid bank.

Helen could never tell just how it happened.  After two seconds’ furious
bumping, she felt herself lifted bodily.  Followed a crash as they fell.
That was the impact of the buggy wheel with Carter’s head.  The arms
loosened as she took the icy plunge, then came a half-minute’s
suffocating struggle while the current was carrying her out to the
shallows.  Wet, draggled, she stumbled shoreward; then, as the water
cleared out of her eyes, she turned and plunged wildly back.  Face
downward, Carter was floating over a two-foot shallow and another second
would have carried him into a longer and deeper pool.

As for him, returning consciousness brought him sensations of something
soft under his splitting head—that was Helen’s bosom; of arms about his
neck; lips that wildly kissed his and which opened with a glad cry when
he moved.

"Oh, I thought you were dead!"

For one blissful moment she allowed him to gaze in at the clear windows
of her soul; then remembering the unusual but effective restorative she
had used in the case, she flamed out in sudden colors, the banners of
discovered love.  Never was maid in such a predicament! Was it fair to
expect that she would let fall a head that had been damaged in her
cause?  She could only wait until, having fed his eyes full on her sweet
distress, he reached up and pulled her blushing face down upon his own.
The sun, the wind, the rippling water alone witnessed her surrender.
After a while a grizzled badger peered at them from his hole, pronounced
them harmless, and so came forth upon his errands.  A colony of gophers
laid aside serious business to note, heads askew, loves that differed so
little from their own. A robin cried shame upon them from a willow near
by. But they were not ashamed.  An hour slid by without either thinking
of such sub-lunary matters as damaged heads or wet clothing; at the end
of which Death and the Devil, having accomplished the complete
destruction of the buck-board, came back to look for their
master—probably associating him with the evening feed of oats—and fell
to cropping the grass along the creek.

Then she spoke, softly, blushing again.  "You must think me shameless,
but—I did—I really thought you were dead."

"Ain’t you glad I’m not?"  She never noticed the "ain’t," this young
lady who had originally sized him as an underbred person.

She did not answer, but he mightily appreciated the sudden tightening of
her arms.  "But what must you think of me?"

He told all—of his resolution the moment he saw her on the Lone Tree
platform; of his hope, fears, dark despair, the hell he had suffered on
Molyneux’s account. A soft hand cut short this last revelation, and
immediately they fell again into one of love’s deep silences, an
eloquent pause that endured until the westering sun threw long shadows
across the creek.  Then, rising, he caught the ponies and arranged
saddles with blankets and straps from the broken harness, while she
looked on with soft attention.

Mounted, they paused and looked back at the stream, ruby red under the
dying sun, the clay bank, the bordering willows, then they kissed each
other soberly and rode on.  Dusk was blanketing the prairies when they
drew up at Flynn’s cabin, yet it was not too dark for Mrs. Flynn’s sharp
eyes to pick their secret.

"It’s the new school-ma’am ye’ll need to be looking for," she told
Flynn.  "Why?  Man, didn’t ye see him look at her, an’ her that lovely
red, her eyes pretty as a mother deer’s, an’ her voice soft an’ cooing
as a dove’s. Flynn, Flynn! ye’ve forgotten your own courting."


One fine morning, two months later, Molyneux’s drivers spun out of his
stable enclosure and rattled south at a pace that did not keep up with
their driver’s impatience.

These two months had certainly been the unhappiest of his life.  A man’s
opinions, philosophy, must, if they have vitality at all, be formed upon
the actions of those about him, upon the phenomena which life presents
to his reason.  This, however, does not altogether annul the force of
those ideals of conduct for himself and others which were learned at his
mother’s knee. Always they persist.  Granted that loose life may smother
the plant so that it produces neither fruit nor leafage, yet the germ is
there—the assurety that beyond the rotten pale of fast society lies a
fair land where purity, chastity, goodness, the virtues one firmly
incarnates in the person of mother, sister, or girl friend, do grow and
flourish.  Under the foulness of the most determined roué lies the
ineradicable belief that had Lot sought righteousness among the women of
Sodom that wicked city had never been destroyed.  One clean, wholesome
girl will shake a man’s faith in baseness, torture him with a vivid
sense of his own backslidings, and now that passion’s scales were fallen
from his eyes, Molyneux appreciated at their full worth the naïve
mixture of innocence and womanly wisdom, the health, strength, and
wholesomeness of character that set Helen apart from his light
acquaintance.

"Fool! fool!" he had told himself again and again. "She is worthy of a
king—if one could be found worthy of her.  And you had a fair chance!
Oh, you fool!"

Nor had he failed to write her a letter of apology.  He had done that in
the first agonies of repentance, six weeks ago, and, receiving no
answer, had taken the ensuing weeks to screw his courage to the point of
asking pardon in person.  But now that it was there he was possessed of
a wild exhilaration that took no thought of refusal. She could hardly
fail to pardon a suppliant for crimes that were instigated by her own
beauty, and one so becomingly repentant!  Full of the consciousness of
his own virtuous intention, it was quite easy for him to credit Helen
with the magnanimity that would be its reciprocal feeling; and this once
established, himself pardoned in thought, he passed to day-dreams.  Her
smile, the sweet tilt of her pretty nose, her glory of golden hair, her
every physical and mental charm, passed in mental review, beguiling the
tedium of the trail till the school-house thrust up over the horizon.

Then his mood changed.  Its squat, obtrusive materiality thrust into his
consciousness, shattering the filmy substance of his dreams, and as he
noticed the closed windows, shut door, doubt replaced elation,
depression, the black antithesis of his late mood, settled down upon
him.

As he sat staring a voice hailed him.  "Been riding ahint of you this
half-hour, but you never looked back. Fine haying weather, ain’t it?"

Startled, Molyneux turned to find Jed Hines surveying him with an
irritating smile.  His expression plainly revealed that not only did he
know Molyneux’s errand, but that he was viewing it under the light of
humorous secret knowledge.  Restraining an impulse to remodel the
expression, he said, nonchalantly as he could: "What is the matter here?
School closed?"

Hines nodded.  He had all the Canadian’s traditional hate of the
remittance-man; Molyneux, in especial, he detested, because, perhaps by
his superior shrewdness, he gave less cause for contempt than the race
in general. That he had paused to speak was proof sufficient that he had
unpleasant news.  He would, however, take his own time in delivering
it—prolong the torture to the limit.

"Midsummer holidays," he laconically answered.

Molyneux ignored his curtness.  "Miss Morrill at Glaves’s place, do you
know?"

Jed’s grin widened.  "You hain’t heard, then?"

"Heard what?"

Jed gazed off and away over the prairies.  "No, you won’t find her at
Glaves’s."

How Molyneux longed to spoil the grin.  But a deadly anxiety constrained
him.  "Where is she, then?"

"Nowheres around here."

"Do you know?"

"You bet!"  The grin gave place to malignant satisfaction. "Yes, I
know—that is, I kin guess, though I wouldn’t if I thought it would do
you any good.  As it won’t—Let me see—she was married a week ago by the
Roman priest.  Jedging by averages, I reckon as you orter find her in
Carter’s arms."

If he had expected his news to produce a disagreeable impression he was
not disappointed, for its visible manifestation landed full in his face,
and he dropped flat on his shoulders.  Not lacking a certain wolf
courage, primitive ferocity of the cornered rat, he sprang up, lunged at
Molyneux, and went down a second time.  Then he stayed, watching until
the other had jumped into his buggy and driven away.

"I never saw the devil!" he muttered, shaking his fist, "but your face,
jes’ then, came mighty near the preacher’s description."




                                  *X*

                               *FRICTION*


Once upon a time a man wrote a book that proved how easily a cultured
Eastern girl might fall in love with and marry a Western cow-boy.  It
was a beautiful story, about people who were beautiful or picturesque
according as they were good or bad, but it ended just where, in real
life, stories begin.  After the manner of fairy tales, the author
assured us that the girl and the cow-boy lived happily ever after.  Now
I wonder if they did?

A year later a big bull-fly thudded at the screen door of Carter’s cabin
in vain efforts to enter and take toll of Helen’s white flesh.  By the
gentlemen who ordain the calendar, a year is given as a space of time
between points that are fixed, immutable as the stars.  Sensible folk
know better.  Years vary—are long or short according to the number,
breadth, and depth of the experiences their space covers.  This year had
marked Helen.  She was fuller lipped, rounder, enveloped by the sensuous
softness of young wifehood.  Sitting at table with her white blouse
tucked in at the neck for coolness, she had never looked prettier.  But
granting these attributes of her changed condition, a keen observer
would have missed that gentle brooding, ripe fruit of content which
exhales from the perfectly mated woman.  As, time and again, her glance
touched Carter, sitting opposite, she would sigh, ever so gently, yet
sigh; the direction of her glance told also that her discontent was
associated in some way with his shirt-sleeves, rolled to the elbow, and
his original methods in the use of his knife and fork. Grasping these
implements within an inch of their points, he certainly secured a mighty
leverage, yet undoubtedly lost in grace what he secured in power,
besides pre-empting more elbow-room than could be accorded to one person
at a dinner-party.

"Tut! tut!" she observed, timidly, after tentative observation.

"Oh, shore!  There I go again!"  His quick answer and the celerity with
which his hands crawfished back to the handles told of many corrections;
yet five minutes later they had stolen out once more to the old familiar
grip.

She sighed again.  It was not that she had wished to hobble her
frontiersman, to harness him to the conventions.  Her feeling flowed
from a larger source. Believing him big of brain and soul as of body,
she would have had him perfect in small things as he was great in large,
that her ideal should be so filled and rounded out as to leave no room
for sighs.  To this end she had, from the first, attempted small
polishments, which he had received with whimsical good-humor that took
no thought of how vital the matter was with her. Had he realized this he
might have made a determined effort instead of a slack practice which
flows from easy complaisance; but, not realizing it, he made no headway.
In these last months she had gained insight into that philosophical
axiom: It is easier to make over a dozen lovers than one husband.
Unlike the girl in the aforesaid beautiful story, she had begun
reconstruction at the wrong side of the knot.

Not that this unwelcome truth would or could, of itself, have affected
her love in quality or quantity. At times she agonized remorsefully over
her tendency to criticism, tutoring herself to look only for the large
things of character.  Again, when, of nights, she would slip to his arms
for a delightful hour before retiring, she would wonder at herself:
every last vestige of discontent evaporated with her murmured sigh of
perfect happiness.  These were great moments for both.  Lying so, she
would look up in his bronzed face and listen while, in his big way, he
talked and planned, unrolling the scroll of their future—listen
patiently until he became too absorbed, when she would interrupt with
some kittenish trick to draw him back into the delightful present.
Pretty little tricks, loving little tricks, that one would never have
dreamed lay hidden under the exterior of the staid young school-ma’am.

But these, after all, were moods, and there had been other and real
cause of discontent.  First, the railway gods had again broken faith
with the settlers; and every cent that Carter could raise or borrow had
been required to meet rents on his timber concessions.  Though not in
actual want, they had had to trim expenses, reduce their living to the
settler scale.  Having all of a pretty woman’s natural love of finery,
Helen could see no way of restoring her depleted wardrobe.  Moreover,
there was the choring, washing, milking of cows, feeding of calves,
inseparable from pioneer settler life—a burden that was not a whit the
less toilsome because self-assumed.

Carter would have spared her all that—was, indeed, angry when, coming in
late one night, he caught her toiling at the milking.  "I didn’t know it
was so hard," she pleaded, holding up her swollen wrists.  "But I
couldn’t bear to see you come in, tired, at dark, then go on with the
chores while I sat in the house."

He had made her promise not to do it again.  But she did, and his
protests, vigorous at first, slackened, until, finally, the choring had
come to be regarded as hers as a matter of course.

Even the climate was against her, conspiring against her peace of body
if not of mind.  The previous winter had been the bitterest in a score
of years, temperatures ranging from forty below zero, with a yard of
snow on the level, fifty-foot drifts in the bluffs, and hundred-mile
winds to drive cold and snow through the thickest of log walls.  For
days she had sat in her furs by the red-hot stove, while the blizzard
roared about the cabin, walling it in fleecy snows—sat listening to the
agonized shout of wind-blown trees, the squeal of poplar brake, the
smash of rent branches, the thunderous storm voice that was spaced only
by distant crashes as the lords of the forest went down to stiff ends.
North, south, east, west had veered these terrible winds, freighting
always their inexhaustible snows.  The trails were blown from earth’s
face; solitary blotch, their cabin rose like a reef from an ocean of
whiteness; and they, castaways, were practically divorced for days, and
sometimes weeks, from all communication with their kind.  Hardly less
terrible had been the calms, the vast frozen silences as of
interplanetary space that followed the blizzard, ruling the snowy
steppes.  They filled her with a terrifying sense of the illimitable,
those silences, vivid as though she, a lonely soul, were travelling
through vast voids of time and space.  She shrank under them, afraid.

Followed a mosquito year in a mosquito country. Fattened by the heavy
snows, stagnant sloughs held water till late in the summer and so bred
the pests by myriads of myriads.  Of nights the tortured air whined of
them.  By day their cattle hung about the corrals, cropping the grass
down to the dust, or if they did wander farther afield, came galloping
madly back to the smudges.  For two months any kind of travel had been
impossible; clouds of the pests would settle on hands, face, neck
quicker than one could wipe them off. Milking and choring had to be done
under cover of a thick reek to an accompaniment of lashing tails, with
frequent and irritating catastrophes in the way of overturned pails.
The acrid odor of smoke clung to everything—hair, clothing, flesh; the
cabin was little better than a smoke-house until the heat had mitigated
the pests while adding its own discomforts.

It was a dull life enough for men whose tasks were broken by periodical
trips to market; it was martyrdom for housefast women.  Always around
the shanty mourned the eternal winds of the plains.  Wind!  Wind! Wind
in varying quantity, from a breeze to a blizzard, but always wind.  Its
melancholy dirge left a haunting in the eyes of men.  Its ceaseless moan
prepared many a plainswoman for the madhouse.

With bright hope at heart to gild the future, she might have endured
both discomfort and drudgery, but the postponement of construction work
on the branch line had killed immediate hope.  With dismay she realized
a certain coarsening of body and mind, a thickening of finger-joints,
roughness of skin, an attenuation where milking had turned the plump
flesh of her arms into gaunt muscle.  And to her the thought of that
far-off summer day recurred with increasing frequency—would this
equilibration with environment end by leaving her peer to the scrawny,
flat-chested women of the settlements?  She who had excelled in the
small arts—music, painting, modelling in wax and clay?  Her past, in
such seasons of depression, seemed now as that of some other girl—a girl
who had worn pretty dresses and been admired and petted by father,
brother, and friends. Of all her gifts, her voice, a sweet contralto,
was only left her; and of late it had naturally attuned itself to her
sadder moods.  So she had felt her life shrink and grow narrow, until
looking down the vista of frozen winters, baking summers, they seemed,
those weary years, to draw to a dull, hard point, the wind-swept acre
with its solitary grave.  Conditions had certainly combined to produce
in her a subconscious discontent that might develop into open revolt
against her lot at the touch of obscure and apparently insignificant
cause; they reinforced and made dangerous the irritation caused by his
little gaucheries.

As aforesaid, her dark moods alternated with spasms of remorse—fits of
melting tenderness in which she condemned herself for her secret
criticism of him.  Peeping through their bedroom window only the
preceding night, the moon had caught her bending over his sleep.  The
tender light absorbed his tan, softened the strong features without
taking from their mobility; deeply shading the hollows, it gave his
whole face an air of clear-cut refinement.  Its wonderful alchemy
foreshadowed the possibilities of this life, lying so quiescent beneath
her eyes.  For a long hour she held the vigil, while thought threw
flitting shadows athwart her face; then, stooping, she softly kissed him
under cover of her clouding hair.

It was a momentous caress, registering as it did her acceptance of a
lowered ideal, marking her realization of the friction which follows all
marriages and is inevitable to such as hers.  Yet it had not removed the
cause; that remained.  It is easier far to overlook a great sin than a
daily gaucherie, to rise to vast calamity than to brook the petty
irritations which mar and make life ugly.  The cause remained, surely!
To see her quiet and pensive at table this day, who would have dreamed
that the morrow would see the thin edge of the wedge driven in between
them?

"There’s to be a picnic in the grove by Flynn’s lake to-morrow, Nell,"
he said, as he rose from dinner. "Let’s take a day off?"

"All right!" she agreed; and the kiss with which she rewarded the
prospect of even such a slight break in the dulness of life may easily
be regarded as the first tap on the wedge.

How quickly personality responds to atmosphere! When, next morning,
Helen climbed into the buck-board beside Carter, she was frankly happy
as a woman can be in the knowledge that she is looking fit for the
occasion. Cool, clean, and fresh in a billowy white dress of her own
laundering, excitement and Carter’s admiring glances intensified her
naturally delicate color.  As they rattled over the yellow miles, doubt
and misgiving vanished under the spell of present happiness.  She
returned him eyes that were lovingly shy as those of their honeymoon;
was subdued, sedate, sober, or burst out in small trills of song as the
mood seized her.  Not until she was actually upon the picnic-ground did
she realize the real nature of this, her first appearance at a public
function since her marriage.

A clear sky and a breeze that set yellow waves chasing one another over
the far horizon had brought out the settlers in a fifty-mile circle—even
the remittance-men, who had been wont to spell amusement in the red
letters of the London alphabet, were there.  Like most country picnics,
it was pseudo-religious in character, with a humorous speech from the
minister figuring as the greatest attraction.  Amusements ran from
baseball and children’s games for youth to love-making in corners by
shamefaced couples.

Leaving Carter to put up his team, Helen carried their basket over to
where a crowd of officious matrons were arranging tables under the
trees, and so gained first knowledge of what was in store for her.  The
latest bride, she was the centre of attraction, target for glances.
Approaching a group of loutish youths, she felt their stares, flushed
under the smothered laugh which greeted her sudden change of direction.
Girls were just as unmannerly.  Ceasing their own rough flirtations,
they gathered in giggling groups to observe and comment on one who had
already achieved that which they contemplated.

Nor was she more comfortable among the matrons. While she was teaching
school, the halo of education had set her apart and above them, but now
they wished her to understand that her marriage had brought her down to
their level.  They plied her with coarse congratulations, embarrassed
her with jokes and prophecies that were broader than suggestive.  Time
and again she looked, for rescue, at Carter, but he was talking railroad
politics in an interested group, did not join her till lunch was served,
and afterwards was hauled away to play in a baseball game—married men
_versus_ single.

So she had but a small respite.  With his departure the women renewed
their onslaughts, as though determined to beat down her personal reserve
and reave her nature of its inmost secrets.  No subject was too sacred
for their joking—herself, her husband, the intimacies of their lives.
There was no satiating their burning curiosity; her timid cheeks,
monosyllabic answers, served only to whet their sharp tongues.  Shocked,
weary, cheeks burning with shame, she sat on, not daring to go in search
of Carter and so brave again the fire of eyes, until, midway of the
afternoon, she looked up to see Molyneux and Mrs. Leslie approaching.

It was the crowning of her humiliation.  With the exception of a
duty-call on her return to Silver Creek, and which she had not returned,
it was the first time that Helen had seen Mrs. Leslie for more than a
year. "As you think best," Carter had said, when she had debated the
advisability of renewing the friendship. "You wouldn’t care to meet
Molyneux again, would you?  He’s sure to be there."  And, departing from
his usual sane judgment, he made no further explanations, said nothing
of his drive in the dusk with the love-sick woman, knowledge of which
would surely have killed Helen’s friendly feeling.  Lacking that
knowledge, she had pined for the one woman who could give her the social
and intellectual companionship her nature craved, pined with an
intensity of feeling that was only equalled by her present desire to
avoid a meeting.

If they would _only_ pass without seeing her, she prayed, bowing her
head in shame.  But Mrs. Leslie had been watching from afar.  "Poor
little thing!" she had exclaimed to Molyneux.  "Alone among those
harpies!  Come, let’s rescue her!"  And whatever her motive, the kiss
she bestowed on the blushing girl was warm and natural.  "Why, Helen,"
she said, "whatever are you doing here?  Come along with us."

"We are going to organize a race for three-year-old tots, Mrs. Carter,"
Molyneux explained.  "We really need your assistance."

His deferential air as he stood bareheaded before her, the languid
correctness of his manner, even the aristocratic English drawl, pierced
that atmosphere of vulgarity like a breath of clean air.  The easy
insolence with which he ignored the settler women was as balm to her
wounded pride.  She recovered her poise; her drooping personality
revived.

"I should like to—very much," she answered, adding, a little timidly,
"But I was waiting for my husband."

"Dutiful child," Mrs. Leslie laughed.  "Well, he is so busy running up
the batting average for the Benedicts that he has forgotten you.  Come
along!"

"We might go round—" Helen began, tentatively,

She would have finished "his way," but, glancing over at the game, she
saw that in his interest he really had forgotten her.  "Very well!" she
substituted; and, rising, she strolled off between the two, passing
within a few yards of Carter.  Busy with his game, he did not see her,
nor would have known what company she was keeping but for Shinn, a near
neighbor of Jed Hines and fellow of his kidney.

"Your wife," he remarked, "seems to be enjy-ing herself."  His sneer
caused a titter among both players and spectators, but before it
subsided Carter came quickly back.  Throwing a careless glance after
Helen, "That’s more’n I can say for yourn."

The titter swelled to a roar that caused Helen to look back.  Mrs.
Shinn, poor drudge, had not strayed twenty feet from her cook-stove in
as many squalid years, as every one knew well.  Grinning evilly, Shinn
subsided, while, after carelessly waving his hand at Helen, Carter
returned to his batting.  If he disapproved of her escort, not a lift of
a line betrayed the fact to curious eyes—not even when he drove around
and found her still with Molyneux and Mrs. Leslie.

They were both silent on the homeward drive.  In Helen’s mind Carter was
associated with the coarse and sickening humiliations of the day.  As
never before, she felt the enormous suction from below; she battled
against the feeling with the desperation of the swimmer who feels the
whirlpool clutching at his heels.

Her mood was defiant, and if, just then, he had taken her to task for
her truancy, she would have flamed up in open revolt.  But he did not.

"You are tired," he said, very gently, when the ponies had run them far
out from the press of teams and rigs. She appreciated that; yet when he
slipped an arm about her waist she moved restlessly within its circle.

The wedge was well entered.




                                  *XI*

                              *THE FROST*


One noon, a week after the picnic, Carter stood and looked out over his
hundred-acre field of wheat from his doorway.  A golden carpet, sprigged
with the dark green of willow bluffs, it ran back into a black,
environing circle of distant woodland.  As a vagrant zephyr touched it
into life, Helen remarked, looking over his shoulder:

"The serrated ears in restless movement give it the exact appearance of
woven gold.  Isn’t it beautiful!"

The dramatist loves to make great events follow in rapid sequence.  It
is the need of his art.  But in life the tragic mixes with the
commonplace.  Even Lady Macbeth must have, on occasion, joked or talked
scandal with her handmaidens.  And as these two looked out over the
wheat, there was naught to indicate the shadow which lay between them.

"Finest stand I ever saw," Carter answered.  "Five-foot straw, well
headed, plump in the grain; ought to grade Number One Extra Hard.  We’ll
make on that wheat, little girl."

"Do you really think so?"

He turned quickly.

"Those women at the picnic—-"  She explained her dubious tone.  "They
said you were foolish to put in so much wheat.  ’What kind of a darn
fool is your husband, anyway?’ that Mrs. MacCloud asked me.  ’He kain’t
never draw all that wheat to Lone Tree.  Take him a month to make two
trips.  ’Tain’t no use to raise grain without a railroad.  We folks
hain’t put in more’n enough for bread an’ seed.’"

He laughed, as much at her clever mimicry as at Mrs. MacCloud’s
frankness.  "If they had put in more I wouldn’t have sown any.  Could
have bought it cheaper from them.  But as they didn’t—  Do you know that
every man in this settlement makes at least one trip a month to Lone
Tree during the winter?  Well, they do, and they’ll be glad to make
expenses freighting in my wheat.  With grain at seventy a bushel, a load
will bring thirty dollars at the cars, and I can hire all the teams I
want at three a trip."

"Why"—his foresight caused her a little gasp—"how clever!  I should
never have thought of that."

His eyes twinkled his appreciation of her wifely admiration, and, taking
her chin between his hands, he looked down into her eyes.  "What’s more,
when that wheat money comes in, you an’ me ’ll jest run down to Winnipeg
an’ turn loose on the dry-goods stores."

It was the first hint of his knowledge of the turning, dyeing, the
shifts she had made with her wardrobe, and he made a winning.  The
knowledge that he had seen and understood caused the wedge to tremble
and almost fall out.

"Can we—afford it?" she asked, willing now to go without a thing.

"Don’t have to afford necessities.  Breaks me up to see you going shy of
things."

For the last three days he had bestowed the parting kiss.  This morning
he received it—a warm one at that—and as he strode off stableward, her
burst of singing echoed his cheerful whistle.  She was quite happy the
next few days planning for their descent on the shops. She sang at her
work—warbling that was natural as that of the little bird which prinks
and plumes for its mate in the morning sunlight.  Reflecting her happy
mood, Carter was humorously cheerful—so pleased and satisfied that she
stared when, one evening, he came in, gloomy and depressed.

His black mood had come out of the east with a moaning wind that now
herded leaden clouds over dun prairies.  For one day rain pelted down,
then, veering north, the bitter wind blew hard for a second day. That
evening it died, and a pale sun swung down a cloudless sky to a
colorless horizon.  Under its cold light the wheat stood erect,
motionless, devoid of its usual sighing life.  A hush, portentous of
change, brooded over all.

From their doorway Helen heard Hines, three miles away, rating his dog.
"Hain’t no more gumption than an Englishman, durn you!  Sick ’em, now!"
followed the maligned animal’s bark and the thunder of scurrying hoofs.

"How clear and calm it is!" she commented, as Carter came up from the
stables.

He glanced at the thermometer beside the door.  "Too clear.  I’m afraid
it is all off with the wheat."

"Why?  What do you mean?"

He turned from her astonished eyes.  "Frost."

"Frost?  You are surely mistaken?  See how sunny it is!"

Shaking his head, he laid a forefinger on the thermometer. "Six o’clock,
and the silver is down to thirty-five."

At dusk it had lowered another degree, and throughout the northland a
hundred thousand farmers were watching, with Carter, its slow recession.
On the fertile wheat plains of southern Manitoba, through the vast gloom
of the Dakotas, to the uttermost limits of Minnesota, the mercury
focussed the interest of half a million trembling souls whose fire-fly
lanterns dusted the continental gloom.  Prayers, women’s tears, men’s
agonized curses marked its decline, that, like an etching tool, graved
deep lines on haggard faces in Chicago, Liverpool, and London far away.

At thirty-two Carter lit the smudges of wet straw, and simultaneously
the vast spread of night flamed out in smoke and fire.  "I don’t go much
on it," he told Helen. "But some believe in it, and I ain’t agoing to
miss a chance."

He was right.  Pale thief, the frost stole in under the reek and
breathed his cold breath on the wheat.  Holding his instrument, at ten
o’clock, in the thickest smoke, Carter saw that it registered
twenty-seven.  Five degrees of frost and the cold of dawn still to come!
Raising the glass, he dashed it to pieces at his feet.

It was done.  Reverberating through the land, the smash of his glass
typified the shattering of innumerable fortunes, the crash of business
houses.  The pistol-shot that wound up the affairs of some desperate
gambler was but one echo.  Surging wildly, the calamity would affect far
more than the growers of wheat.  Iron-workers, miners, operatives in a
hundred branches of industry would shiver under the cold breath of the
frost. For now the farmer would buy less cotton, the operative pay more
for his flour, the miner earn a scantier wage.

True, the balance swings ever even.  This year ryots of India, Argentine
peons, Egyptian fellaheen would reap where they had not sown, gather
where they had not strawed.  Another year a Russian blight, Nile drouth,
hot wind of Argentine would swing prices in favor of the northland.  But
in this was small comfort for the stricken people.

"All gone!" Carter exclaimed at midnight.  "The feathers are frozen
offen them bonnets."

Helen sensed the bitterness under his lightness. "Never mind, dear," she
comforted.  "I really don’t care.  You did your best."

_He had done his best_!  To a strong man the phrase stabs, signifying
the victory of conditions.  He winced, as from an offered blow.  It was
the last drop in his cup, the signal of his defeat.  It marked the
destruction of this his last plan for her.  He had not, in the
beginning, intended that she should ever set her hand to drudgery.  His
love was to come between her and all that was sordid, squalid.  If the
railroad contract had materialized, she should have had a little home in
Winnipeg where she might enjoy the advantages of her early life.  He had
planned for a servant—two, if she could use them—and all that he asked
in return was that she should bring beauty into his life, adorn his
home, sweeten his days with the aroma of her delicate presence.  In this
small castle of Spain he had installed his beauty of the sweet mouth,
golden hair, pretty profile; and now, out of his own disappointment, he
read reproach in the hazel eyes that looked out from the ruins.

Long after her sleep-breathing freighted the dusk of their bedroom, he
lay gazing wide-eyed into the black future.  A sudden light would have
shown his eyes blank, expressionless, for his spirit was afar, questing
for other material with which to rebuild his castle.  In thought he was
travelling Silver Creek, from its headwaters in the timber limits to its
source where it flowed into the mighty Assiniboin.  It was a small
stream—too small to drive logs except for a month on the snow waters.
But with a dam here—another there—a third on the flats—rough structures
of logs with a stone and gravel filling, yet sufficient to conserve the
falling waters!  The drive could then be sent down from dam to dam!
During the night he travelled every yard of the stream, placing his
dams, and at dawn rose, content in his eyes.

Slipping quietly from the house, he saddled the Devil and led him
quietly by while Helen still slept, and an hour later rode up to
Bender’s cabin.  The Cougar was also there, and from dubious
head-waggings the two relapsed into thoughtful acquiescence as Carter
unfolded his plans.

"She’ll go down like an eel on ice!" Bender enthusiastically agreed.
"All you want now is backing.  Funny, ain’t it, that nobody ever thought
o’ that before?  Say"—he regarded Carter with open admiration—"you’re
particular hell when it comes to thinking.  If I’d a headpiece like
yourn—"

"You hain’t," the Cougar coldly interrupted, "so don’t waste no time
telling us what you might ha’ done. Get down to business.  I know a
man"—he thoughtfully surveyed Carter—"that financed half a dozen big
lumbering contrac’s on the Superior construction work. He’ll sire
anything that looks like ten per cent. an’ this of yourn will sure turn
fifty.  Come inside an’ I’ll write you a letter."

What of the Cougar’s inexperience with the pen, the morning was well on
when Carter rode back to his cabin. If Helen had looked closely she
might have seen the new resolution that inhered in his smile, but she
had been concerned with her own reflections.  Somehow, things had not
appeared this morning as they did last night. Crude daylight shows
events, like tired faces, in all their haggardness, and their complexion
was not improved by the steam from her wash-tub.  Time and again she had
paused to survey her hands, creased and wrinkled by cooking in hot
water.  Her bare arms recalled her first party-dress, and set her again
in the sweet past. Beside it the present seemed infinitely hopeless,
squalid, dreary.  As she rubbed and scrubbed on her wash-board, life
resolved itself into an endless procession of wash-days, and tears had
mingled with the sweat that fell from her face to her bosom.

Noting her red eyes, Carter was tempted to disclose his new hope, but
remembered the failure of previous plans and refrained.  As yet nothing
was certain.  He would not expose her to the risk of another
disappointment. He rightly interpreted her sigh when he told her that he
would have to go down to Winnipeg on business about the timber limits,
and his heart smote him when, looking back, he saw her standing in the
door.  Dejection resided in the parting wave of her hand, utter
hopelessness.

That lonely figure in the log doorway stuck in his consciousness
throughout his negotiations, causing him to hustle matters in a way that
simply scandalized the Cougar’s man, a banker of the old school.  Yet
his hurry served rather than hurt his cause.  While the very novelty of
it made him gasp, the banker was impressed.  In private he informed his
moneyed partners that such a chance and such a man rarely came together.
"He’s a hustler, and the profit is there," he said, in consultation.  "A
big profit.  We can cut lumber ten per cent under the railroad price and
yet clear twenty-five cents on the dollar."

That settled it.  Half a day later Carter was on his homeward way,
bearing with him the power to draw on Winnipeg or Montreal for moneys
necessary for supplies, men, and teams.  Running home from Lone Tree, he
whiled away the miles with thoughts of Helen’s joy. He pictured her,
radiant, flushed, listening to his news, and, quickening to the thought,
he raced, full gallop, the last mile up to his door.

His face burst into sunshine as, in response to his call, he heard her
cross the floor.  Then his smile died, and he stared at Mrs. Leslie.
With the exception of an occasional glimpse as they met and passed on
trail, it was the first he had seen of her since the soft summer evening
when she laid illicit love at his feet.  But no hint of that bitter
memory inhered in her greeting.

"How are you, Mr. Carter?" she cried, in her old, gay way.  "I think you
are the meanest man in Silver Creek. Married a year, and neither you nor
Helen have set foot in our house.  You are a regular Blue beard.  But
you needn’t think that you can hide from us forever.  I just pocketed my
pride, ignored your snub, and made my third call.  Yes"—she emphatically
nodded her pretty head—"the _third_, sir.  But I forgive you; come in
and have some tea.  Helen is down at the stables hunting eggs to beat up
a cake."

Covering his vexation with some light answer, he drove on to the
stables, the life and light gone out of him, his face the heaviest that
Helen had ever seen.  "She called," she answered his abrupt question,
"and I have to entertain her."  Then, piqued by his coldness, she went
on: "For matter of that, I do not see why you should try to cut me off
from her companionship!  She is the only woman I care for in the
settlements!"

If he had only told her!  But causes light as the falling of a leaf are
sufficient to deflect the entire current of a life, and it was perfectly
natural that, in his bitter disappointment, he also should give way to a
feeling of pique. The reason trembled to his lips, and there paused,
stayed by the resentment in her eyes.

"As you see fit," he answered.  "Now I have to drive over to see Bender,
on business."

"Won’t you wait for some tea?"

"No.  And don’t wait supper.  I may be late."

Hurt, she watched him drive away; then, as he suddenly reined in, she
dashed the tears from her eyes. "Here’s a letter for you," he called.
"Got it from the office as I came by."

He nodded in answer to Mrs. Leslie’s cheery wave as he rolled by the
cabin.  It was more than cold, yet, sitting chin on hands, that lady
smiled cheerfully when Helen came up from the stable.  "Don’t apologize,
my dear," she laughed.  "Men are _such_ fools.  Always doing something
to hurt their own happiness.  Just banish that rueful expression and
read your letter."

"What’s the matter?"  The question was called forth by Helen’s sudden
cry of dismay.  She glanced at the wedding-cards that Helen offered.
"Hum!  Old flame of yours, eh?  These regrets will assail one."

However, she knit her straight brows over the enclosure. In part, it
ran: "We were so pleased to hear of your wonderful marriage from your
auntie Crandall.  It was just like you to announce the bare fact, but
she told us all about it.  A railroad king!  Just fancy!  He must be
nice or our delicate Helen would never consent to bury herself in the
wilderness.  Do you know I have been just _dying_ to see him, and now I
shall, for we are passing through your country on our way to the Orient.
Which is your station?"  Followed sixteen pages of questions,
description of trousseau, and other feminine matters which Helen
reserved for future consumption.

Could she have laid tongue, just then, on Auntie Crandall, that lady had
surely regretted her enlargements on Helen’s modest statement of her
husband’s prospects. Lacking that easement of feeling, she cried.  This
visit capped her misery, brought the long record of misfortune,
discomfort, disaster to a fitting climax.

"Poor child!"  Mrs. Leslie patted her shoulder.  "But why did you tell
her such crammers?  It was the good auntie?"  She tilted her nose.  "For
the honor of the family, we lie, eh?  Heaven help us!  Your
friend—what’s her name?—Mrs. Ravell—she’s rich, of course?  Thought
so—couldn’t be otherwise—trust the malignant fates for that.  Well—"
She glanced meditatively about the cabin.  Instead of lime-washing the
logs, settler fashion, Helen had left them to darken with age,
ornamenting them with a pair of magnificent moose horns and other
woodland trophies. Tanned bear-skins covered a big lounge that ran
across one end; buffalo robes and other skins took the place of mats on
the floor.  Mrs. Leslie nodded approval.  "Not bad.  Quite wild-westy,
in fact.  You will simply have to live up to it.  You have given up your
town-house for the present and are rusticating while your hubby directs
some of his splendid schemes for the regeneration of this section—"

"Oh!" Helen burst in.  "I couldn’t say that.  It would be—"

"Lying?  Nonsense, child!  Have you a town-house? No!  Well, what are
you kicking about?"  Mrs. Leslie’s descent to the vernacular was as
forcible as confusing. Before Helen had time to differentiate between
the status involved by "not having a town-house" and giving one up her
temptress ran on.  "That is it.  You are rusticating.  Now, I can lend
you some of my things—glass, china, and so on.  When do they arrive?"
She consulted the letter.  "Hooray!  Your husband will be gone all next
week, and they come—let me see: one, two, three—next Friday.  Couldn’t
be better."

Helen blushed under her meaning glance.  "No, no! It would be wicked."

"Why not?"  Mrs. Leslie laughed merrily.  "They just dropped in and
there’s no time to send for him. Quite simple."

"Do you think I’m ashamed of him?" Helen asked, flushing.

Mrs. Leslie trimmed her sails to the squall.  "Certainly not.  He’s a
dear.  You know I always liked him. But—if your friends were to make a
long stay it would be different.  You couldn’t hide his light under a
bushel. But a two days’ visit?  What could they learn of him in that
time?  The real him?  They would no more than gather his departures from
the conventional.  I wouldn’t expose him to unfriendly criticism.
Frankly, I wouldn’t, dear, at the cost of a little fib!"

The flush faded, yet Helen shook her head.

"As you will."  Rising, the little cynic shrugged as she drew on her
riding-gloves.  "But at least take a day to think it over."

"No!"  Helen shook vigorous denial.  "I shall tell him to-night."

She was perfectly sincere in her intention, and if Carter had returned
his usual good-natured self she would certainly have told him.  But Mrs.
Leslie’s presence had angered him and destroyed his native judgment.  He
remembered that this was the outcome of Helen’s invitation to Mrs.
Leslie at the picnic, and his heart swelled at the thought that she
should, of her own volition, go back to friends whom she knew that he
despised.  He felt the folly of his brooding, even applied strong
language to himself for being many kinds of a fool.  But his reasonable
intention to open his budget of good news on his return was never
carried out because of the coldness of her reception.  Nervous from her
own news, piqued by his curt leave-taking, she served his supper in
silence or answered his few remarks in monosyllables.  Nothing was said
that night, and he retired without offering the usual kiss.

There he offended greatly.  Her woman’s unreason would, for that, accept
no excuse.  So when, after working off his own mood next morning, he
came in to breakfast, he found her still the same.  Really offended, she
served him, as at the previous meal, in silence, and as, afterwards, she
went about her work, her lashes veiled her eyes, her lips pouting.

It was their first real quarrel, and the very strangeness, novelty of
her mood made it charming.  But when, under urge of sudden tenderness,
he tried to encircle her waist, she drew away, and, afflicted with a
sense of injustice, he did not try again.  There again he made a
mistake.  Justice has no concern with love. It is empirical, knows no
law but its own.  She wanted to be taken and kissed in spite of herself,
as have all women on similar occasions, from the cave maidens down.

It so happened that she was in the bedroom when he left the house, and
she did not see that he had taken with him the bundle she had packed the
preceding night. She still intended to mention the letter.  Indeed, as
she heard his step on the threshold, she thought, "He’ll stop at the
door for his clothes."

But he did not; and hurrying out at the sound of scurrying hoofs, she
was just in time to see him vanish behind a poplar bluff.  She called,
called, and called, then sat down and wept, the more miserable because
of a secret, guilty feeling of relief.




                                 *XII*

                              *THE BREAK*


For three days a brown smoke had hovered over the black line of distant
spruce.  It was far away, fifty miles at least.  Yet anxious eyes turned
constantly its way until, the evening of the fourth day, the omen faded.
Then a sigh of relief passed over the settlements.  "Back-fired itself
out among the lakes," the settlers told one another.  Then, being
recovered from their scare, they invidiously reflected on the Indian
agent who permitted his wards to start fires to scare out the deer.  Nor
did the fact that the agent was blameless in the matter take from the
satisfaction accruing from their grumblings.

That evening five persons sat with Helen at supper, for she had invited
the Leslies and Danvers, Molyneux’s farm pupil, to meet her guests.  For
her this meal was the culmination of days of anxious planning.  To set
out the table she and Mrs. Leslie had ransacked their respective
establishments, and she blushed when Kate Ravell enthused over the
result.

"What beautiful china!" she exclaimed, picking up one of Mrs. Leslie’s
Wedgwood cups.  "We have nothing like this."  Then, glancing at the
white napery, crystal, and silver, she said, "Who would think that we
were two thousand miles from civilization?"

It was, indeed, hard to realize.  Obedient to Mrs. Leslie’s orders, her
husband and Danvers had fished—albeit with reluctance—forgotten
dress-suits from bottom deeps of leather portmanteaus.  She herself
looked her prettiest in a gown of rich black lace superimposed on some
white material, and, carrying her imperative generosity to the limit,
she had forced one of her own dinner-dresses upon Helen.  Of a filmy,
delicate blue, it brought out the young wife’s golden beauty.  From the
low corsage her slender throat and delicate face rose like a pink lily
from a violet calyx.  Usually she wore her redundant hair coiled in a
thick braid around the crown of her head for comfort; but to-night it
was done upon her neck in a loose figure of eight that revealed its mass
and sheen.  Looking from Mrs. Leslie to Helen, Kate Ravell had secretly
congratulated herself upon having, despite her husband’s protest,
slipped one of her own pretty dresses into his valise.

His laugh, a wholesome peal that accorded with his good-humored face,
followed her remark.  "She didn’t think that at Lone Tree," he said.  "A
lumber-wagon was the best the liveryman could do for us in the way of
conveyance, and when Kate asked if he hadn’t a carriage he looked
astonished and scratched his head.

"’Ain’t but one in town,’ he answered, ’an’ it belongs to Doc Ellis.
’Tain’t been used sence he druv the small-pox case down to the Brandon
pest-house.  I ’low he’d let you have it.’"

His wife echoed his laugh.  "It was a little rough, but this—it’s
great!"  She pointed out through the open door over the wheat, golden
under the setting sun, to the dark green and yellow of woods and
prairies. "You are to be envied, Nell.  Your house is so artistic. The
life must be ideal—"

Inwardly, Mrs. Leslie snorted: "Humph!  If she could see her milking, up
to ankles in mud on rainy days—or feeding those filthy calves?"  Aloud,
she said, "Unfortunately, Helen isn’t here very often—spends most of her
time in Winnipeg."  Ignoring Helen’s pleading look, she ran on, "Did you
store your things, my dear, or let the house furnished?"

Thus entrapped, Helen could only answer that her goods were stored, and
her embarrassment deepened when Mrs. Leslie continued: "It is such a
pity, Mrs. Ravell, that you could not have met Mr. Carter!  He is such a
dear fellow, so quiet and refined.  Fred"—Leslie’s grin faded under her
frown—"what is the matter?"

"A crumb, my dear," he apologized.  "Excuse me, please."

"We shall have to return you to the nursery."  Her glance returned to
Kate Ravell, and, oblivious of the entreaty in Helen’s eyes, she ran on
in praise of Carter. He was so reserved!  The reserve of strength that
goes with good-nature!  Resourceful—and so she flowed on with her
panegyrics.  She was not altogether insincere. Helen caught herself
blushing with pleasure whenever, leaving her fictions, Mrs. Leslie
touched on some sterling quality.  Twice she was startled to hear put
into words subtilties that she herself had only felt, and on each
occasion she narrowly watched Mrs. Leslie, an adumbration of suspicion
forming in her mind.  But each time it was removed by absurd praise of
hypothetical qualities or virtues Carter did not possess.  So Mrs.
Leslie praised and teased.

What influenced her?  It is hard to answer a question that inheres in
the complexities of such a frivolous yet passionate nature.  Naturally
good-natured, she would help Helen out in all things that did not cross
her own purposes.  The sequel proves that she had not yet got Carter out
of her hot blood.  Given which two things, her action, teasings, and
panegyrics are at least understandable.

"We are very sorry," Kate Ravell said when Mrs. Leslie gave pause.  "We
did wish to see him.  Do you suppose, Helen, that we might if we stayed
another day?"

It was more than possible, but Ravell relieved Helen of a sudden deadly
fear.  "Can’t do it, my dear.  We are tied down by schedule.  Should
miss the Japan steamer and have to lay over in Vancouver two weeks."

Kate sighed.  Newly married, she had all of a young wife’s desire to see
her girl friend happy as herself; nor would aught but ocular
demonstration satisfy the longing.  She was expressing the hope that
Carter and Helen should some day visit them in their Eastern home, when
she suddenly paused, staring out-doors.  Following her glance, Mrs.
Leslie saw a man, a big fellow in lumberman’s shirt and overalls.  The
garments were burned in several places, so that blackened skin showed
through.  His eyes were bloodshot, his face sooty, which accounted for
Mrs. Leslie’s not recognizing him at once.

"Mr. Carter!" she exclaimed, after a second look.

Helen was pouring tea, but she sprang up at the name, spilling a cup of
boiling tea over her wrist.  She did not feel the scald.  Breathless,
she stood, a hand pressed against her bosom, until Mrs. Leslie, the
always ready, burst into merry laughter.

"What a blackamoor!  How you frightened us! Where _have_ you been?"

Coming up from the stables, Carter had heard voices, laughter, the
tinkle of teacups, and the sound had afflicted him with something of the
feeling that assails the wanderer whose returning ears give him sounds
of revelry in the old homestead.  He had suffered, during his absence,
remorse for his own obstinacy mingling in equal proportions with the
pain of Helen’s coldness. Absence had been rendered endurable by the
thought that it would make reconciliation the easier; but now that he
was returned, ready to give and ask forgiveness, to pour his good news
into her sympathetic ear, he found her merrymaking.

His was a hard position.  Between himself, rough, ragged, dirty, and
these well-groomed men in evening dress, there could be no more
startling contrast.  He felt it.  The table, with its snowy napery,
gleaming appointments, was foreign to his sight as the _décolleté_
dresses, the white arms and necks.  Yet his natural imperturbability
stood him bravely in place of sophistication.

"Been fighting fire," he answered, with his usual deliberation.
"Suppose I do look pretty fierce."

His glance moved inquiringly from the Ravells to his wife.

But she still stood, eyes wide, breath issuing in light gasps from her
parted lips.  For her also the moment was full of bitterness.  There was
no time for thought. She only felt—a composite feeling compounded of the
misgiving, discontent, humiliation, disappointment, disillusionment of
the last few months.  It all culminated in that moment, and with it
mixed deep shame, remorse for her conduct.  Also she had regret on
another score. If she _had_ told him, he would at least have been
prepared, have achieved a presentable appearance.  Now she was taken in
her sin!  Foul with smoke, soot, the dirt and grime of labor, he was
facing her guests.

Starting, she realized that they were waiting, puzzled, for
introductions—that is, Kate was puzzled.  Ravell was busily employed
taking admiring note of Carter’s splendid inches.  Poor Helen!  She
might have been easier in her mind could she have sensed the friendly
feeling that inhered in Ravell’s cordial grip.

"We were just deploring the fact that we were not to meet you, Mr.
Carter," he said.  "We felt sure of finding you home after the notice we
gave Mrs. Carter.  We were really quite jealous of your affairs, but now
we shall go away satisfied."

Given a duller man, the word "notice" supplied the possibilities of an
unpleasant situation.  But though he instantly remembered the letter,
Carter gave no sign till he and Helen had passed into their bedroom.
Even then he abstained from direct allusions.

"Friends of yourn?" he questioned, as she set out clean clothing.

"Kate is an old school-fellow.  Wait; I’ll get you clean towels."  She
bustled about, hiding her nervousness from his gray inquisition.  "They
are on their honey-moon.  Going to the Orient—Japan, China, and the
island countries.  They stayed off a couple of days to see us."

"To see you," he corrected.

She colored.  Her glance fluttered away from his grave eyes.  She
hurried again into speech.  "Wait, dear!  I’ll get you some warm water."

He refused the service, he who had loved to take anything from her
hands.  "Thanks.  I think the lake fits my case.  Give me the towels and
I’ll change down there after my swim."

The meal was finished, and she, with the others, had carried her chair
outside before he came swinging back from the lake.  He was wearing the
store clothes of her misgivings, but the ugly cut could not hide the
magnificent sweep of his limbs.  She thrilled despite her misery. As she
rose to get his dinner, Mrs. Leslie also jumped up.

"Poor man, you must be famished!" she exclaimed. "No, Helen, you are
tired.  Stay here and entertain the men.  Mrs. Ravell and I will wait on
Mr. Carter.  And you, Mr. Danvers, may act as cookee."

Thus saved from an uncomfortable téte-à-téte, Helen suffered a greater
misery than his accusing presence. While chatting with Ned Ravell, her
ears were strained to catch the conversation going on inside.  She
listened for Carter’s homely locutions, shivering as she pictured his
primitive table manners.  As a burst of laughter followed his murmured
bass, she wondered whether they were laughing _with_ or _at_ him.

She might have been easy, for the laugh was on Danvers.  As yet that
young gentleman was still in the throes of the sporting fever which
invariably assails Englishmen new to the frontier.  Any day he might be
seen wriggling snakelike on the flat of his belly through mud towards
some wary duck, and an enthusiastic eulogium on the shooting qualities
of a new Greener gun had drawn from Carter the story of Danvers’ first
kill.

"Prairie chicken’s mighty good eating an’ easy shooting," he remarked,
with a sly look at Kate Ravell. "But nothing would satisfy his soaring
ambitions but duck.  Duck for his, sirree! an’ he blazed away till the
firmament hereabouts was powder-marked and riddled. Burned up at least
three tons of powder before he got my duck."

"_Your duck?_" Danvers protested.  "Just hear him, Mrs. Leslie.  It was
a wild duck that I shot down here by the lake."

Carter chuckled and went on with his teasing.  "I came near being called
as a witness to that cruel murder, for I was back-setting the thirty
acres down by the lake when I heard a shot an’ a yell.  I read it that
he’d got himself, an’ was jes’ going after the remains, when up he comes
on a hungry lope, gun in one hand and a mallard in the other.  The bird
was that mussed up its own mother couldn’t have told it from a cocoanut
door-mat. Looked like it had made foolish faces at a Gatling; yet he
tells me that he gets the unfortunate animal at eighty yards on the
wing."

"You know how close that old gun of mine used to shoot," Danvers
interrupted.  "It was choke-bored, Mrs. Ravell.  At eighty-yards it
would put every shot inside of a three-foot circle."

"The feather marking looked sort of familiar to me," Carter went calmly
on.  "An’ he admits, on cross-examination, that he murders this bird in
front of my cabin."

"What of it?" Danvers eagerly put in.  "Wild ducks light any old place."

"But it jes’ happens that the confiding critter has raised her brood in
the sedges there, being encouraged an’ incited thereto by my wife, who
throws it bread an’ other pickings.  Taking Danvers’ gun-barrel for some
new kind of worm, when he pokes it through the sedge she sails right up
and is examining the boring thereof, when, bang! she’s blown into a
railroad disaster."

"Don’t believe him, Mrs. Ravell," Danvers pleaded. "It was a wild duck,
and I shot it flying."

"So if the new gun’s what you say it is," the tormentor finished, "you’d
better to practise on prairie chicken an’ don’t be misled by Mrs.
Leslie’s hens."

"As though I couldn’t tell a hen from a prairie chicken!"

Carter joined in the laugh which Danvers’ indignant remonstrance drew
from the women, yet under the laugh, beneath his humorous indifference,
lay a sad heart.  "She knew they were coming!  She didn’t tell me!"
Down by the lake he had reasoned the situation out to its cruel
conclusion—"She’s ashamed of me!"  How it hurt!  Yet the flick on the
raw served him well in that it set him on his mettle, nerved him to
carry off the situation.

He did not try to transcend his limitations, to clog himself with
unfamiliar restrictions of speech or manners.  But within those
limitations he did his best, and did it so well that neither woman was
conscious of social difference.  He showed none of the bashfulness which
might be expected from a frontiersman sitting for the first time at
table with fashionable women in dinner-gowns. On the contrary, he
admired the pretty dresses, the white arms, the hands that handled the
teacups so gracefully; and when he spoke the matter so eclipsed the
manner that it is doubtful whether Kate Ravell noticed a single
locution.  His shrewd common-sense, quaint humor, the quickness with
which he grasped a new point of view, and the freshness of his own
impressed her with his strong personality.  Pleased and amused, she had
no time to notice grammatical lapses or small table gaucheries that had
irritated Helen by constant repetition.

"He’s delightful," she told her husband, in a conjugal aside.

In the conversation which ensued after they joined the others outside,
Carter also took no mean part.  Of things he knew, and these ranged over
subjects that were the more interesting because unfamiliar to the
town-bred folks, he spoke entertainingly; and on those foreign to his
experience he preserved silence.  On every common topic his opinion was
sound, wholesome.  His keen wit punctured several fallacies.  The quaint
respect of his manner to the women served him as well with the men.

"Big brain," Ravell told his wife in that conference which all married
folk have held since the first pair retired to their bedroom under the
stars at the forks of the Euphrates.  "That fellow will go far."

"So gentle and kind," Kate added.  "I think Helen is lucky.  Those
English people are nice," she went on, musingly; "but if I were Helen
I’d keep an eye on Mrs. Leslie."

"Yes," she answered his surprised look, nodding vigorously.  "She is in
love with Mr. Carter.  How do I know?"  She sniffed.  "Didn’t I see her
eyes—the opportunities she made to touch him while handing him things at
supper?  Helen is safe, though, so long as she treats him properly.  He
doesn’t care for Mrs. Leslie."

He shook his head reprovingly.  "You shouldn’t make snap judgments,
Kate."

Had he witnessed a little scene that occurred just before the Leslies
drove away!  Good-byes had been said, and Helen had gone in-doors with
her guests. Danvers, who was riding, had galloped away.  Then, at the
last moment, Leslie remembered that he had left his halters at the
stable.  While he ran back Carter stood beside the rig.  Brilliant
northern moonlight showed him Mrs. Leslie’s eyes, dark, dilated, but he
ignored their knowledge till she spoke.

"_I_ wouldn’t have done it."

"Done what?"

His stoicism could not hide the sudden flash of pain. She saw it writhe
over his face like the quivering of molten lead ere his features set in
stern immobility.

"It is very chivalrous of you."  She smiled bitterly. "But why wear a
mask with me?"

"You have the advantage of me, ma’am," he stiffly answered, and moved
round to the ponies’ heads.

Leslie was now returning, but she spoke again, quickly, eagerly, with
the concentration of passion.  "It is always the way!  The more we spurn
you the hotter your love, and—"  She paused, then, hearing her husband’s
foot-fall, whispered: "Vice versa.  Remember!  _I_ wouldn’t have done
it!"

After their departing rattle had died, Carter threw himself on the grass
before the house and lay, head on clasped hands, staring up at the moon;
and Helen, who was using unnecessary time making a temporary bed, paused
and looked out from the open door.  The dark figure loomed stern and
still as the marble effigy of some crusader.  There was something awful
in his silence; the soft moonlight quivered around and about him, seemed
a sorrowful emanation.  Frightened, remorseful, she sat locking and
unlocking her fingers.  What was he thinking?

Part of his thought was easy to divine.  It would be common to any man
in his situation—the hurt pride, jealous pain, misgiving, unhappiness,
but beyond these was an unknown quantity, the product of his own
peculiar individuality.  His keen intellect had already analyzed the
cause of her shame.  He was rough, crude, unpolished!  Any man might
also have reached that conclusion.  It was in the synthesis, the
upbuilding of thought from that conclusion, that he branched from the
common.  He was humble enough in acknowledging his defects.  Yet his
natural wit showed him that humility would not serve in these premises.
Forgiveness for the crime against his personality would not remove the
cause of the offence.  Far-sighted, he saw down the vista of years his
and her love slowly dying of the same similar offences and causes.
That, at least, should never be! He had reached a decision before she
came creeping out in her night-dress.

"Aren’t you coming to bed, dear?"

He sensed the remorse, sorrow, pity in her voice, but these were not the
feelings to move his resolution.  Pity! It is the anodyne, the peaceful
end of love.  Rising, he stretched his great arms and turned towards the
stables.

"Where are you going?" she called, sharply, under the urge of sudden
fear.

"To turn in on the hay."

She ran and caught his arm, and turned her pale face up to his.  "Why?
I have made our bed on the couch. Won’t you come in?"

"No!"

"Why?" she reiterated.  "Oh, why?"

"Because it is shame to live together when love has fled."

She clasped his arm with both hands.  "Oh, don’t say that!  How _can_
you say it?  Who says I do not love you?"

"Yourself."  His weary, hopeless tone brought her tears.  "In love there
is no shame, an’ you was ashamed of me."

"I did mean to tell you."  Desperate, she caught his neck.  How valuable
this love was becoming, now she felt it slipping from her!  "I did!  But
you went away without saying good-bye."

"There was opportunity, plenty.  You could have sent for me."

His sternness set her trembling.  "Then—I thought—I thought—they were
only to be here for one day.  Such a short visit.  I thought they might
misjudge—I didn’t want to expose you to hostile criticism."

"You’ve said it.  Love knows no fear.  Good-night."

"Oh!—please—_don’t_!" she called after him, as he strode away.  Pity,
woman’s weakness, the conservative instinct that makes against broken
ties, these were all behind her cry, and his keen sensibility instantly
detected them.  He closed the stable door.

According to the canons of romance, it would have been very proper for
that jarring echo to have unstoppered the fountains of her love and all
things would have come to a proper ending.  But, somehow, it did not.
After a burst of crying into her lonely pillow, she lay and permitted
her mind to hark back over her married life.  Hardship, squalor,
suffering, misfortune passed in review till she gained back to the days
when Molyneux had also paid her court.  What share had anger and pique
in affecting her decision?  Angry pride was, just then, ready to yield
them the larger proportion.  Later came softer memories.  She was
troubled as she thought of his generous kindness.  Under the thought
affection, if not love, revived, and conscience permitted no sleep until
she promised to beg forgiveness.

However, circumstance robbed her of the opportunity. Before the Ravells
retired, Carter had said good-bye, as he intended to start back for the
woods before sunrise. "You needn’t to get up, either," he had told her.
"I’ll take breakfast with Bender."  But now she promised herself that
she would rise, get him a hot meal, and then make her peace.  But at
dawn she was awakened by his wheels, and, running to the door, she was
just in time to see him go by.  She would have called only, as the cry
trembled to her lips, his words of the night before recurred to
memory—"Marriage without love is shame!"  Suddenly conscious of her
night-gear, she shrank as a young girl would from the eye of a stranger,
and the chance was gone.

"I’ll tell him when he returns," she murmured, blushing.


But he did not return; and two days later Bender and Jenny Hines drove
up to the door.

In the neatly dressed girl, with hair done on top of her head, it was
difficult, indeed, to recognize the forlorn creature whom Bender had
picked up on that night trail.  Though she was still small—a legacy from
her drudging years—she had filled and rounded out into a becoming
plumpness.  Her pale eyes had deepened, were full of sparkle and color.
Two years ago she would have been deemed incapable of the smile she
turned on Helen.

"I’m so glad to see you, Mrs. Carter; an’ I’m to stay with you all
winter while your husband’s up at the camp. The doctor didn’t want to
let me go," she said, not noting Helen’s surprise, "an’ he wouldn’t to
any one but you."

"The camp?  What camp?"

It was Jenny’s turn to stare.  As for Bender, he gaped, while his colors
rivalled those of a cooked beet.  Sweating under her questions, he
looked off and away to escape the spectacle of her white misery as he
explained Carter’s new enterprise and its glorious possibilities.  He
finished with an attempt at comfort.

"I ain’t surprised that he didn’t tell you.  I allow he was going to
spring it on you all hatched and full-fledged. Me an’ Jenny here was
real stupid to give it away.  Might just as well have said as she’d come
on a little visit.  I allow he’ll be hopping mad at the pair of us.  An’
now I’ll have to be going after the Cougar.  He’ll do the chores till we
kin get you a hired man."

If the fiction eased the situation, it deceived neither her nor them.
Having, a week later, delivered the new hired man, a strong young Swede,
Bender delivered his real opinion with dubious head-shakings while
carting the Cougar away.  "Don’t it beat hell, Cougar?  Him that
straight an’ good, her that sweet an’ purty, yet they don’t hitch.  It’s
discouraging."

"Well," the cynic grunted, "take warning."

Bender eyed him wrathfully.  "Now what in hell do you mean?"

But he blushed under the Cougar’s meaning glance.

"I reckon he’ll drop in on his way up," Bender had assured Helen.  But
he did not.  She yet allowed herself to hope—hoped on while the weeks
drew into months, each of which brought a check for household expenses.
Soon the snows blanketed the prairies; heavy frost vied with the cold at
her heart; and he had not come. Jenny’s reticence kept the truth from
leaking out; but such things may not be hid, and about Christmas-time it
was whispered through the settlements that Carter had left his wife.




                                 *XIII*

                               *THE CAMP*


That was a hard winter.  From five feet of snow the settlements thrust
up, grim, ugly blotches on the whiteness.  And it was very cold.  Once
the spirit dropped down, down, down to seventy-two below zero—one
hundred and four degrees of frost.  Fifty was normal, forty, rather
warm.  Also it stormed, and when the blizzard cut loose, earth, air, or
sky was not merged in blanched chaos.

Nestling snugly in the heart of the spruce, Carter’s camp, however, was
free of the blizzard.  Let the forest heave to upper air-currents,
tossing skeleton branches with eerie creakings, yet the gangs worked in
comfort, cutting and hauling logs, while outside a hundred-mile wind
might be herding the drifts.

By New Year’s his work was well in hand.  Eight million feet of logs lay
on the ice, filling Silver Creek bankful like a black flood for a long
half-mile.  Not that this had been accomplished without friction.  Such
jettison of humanity as drifts to a lumber-camp does not shake down to
work in a day.  From earth’s four corners a gallows crew of Swedes,
French, Russians, Irish, Canadians, Yankees drifted in, and for one
month thereafter internecine war raged in the bunk-houses.  Then, having
bit, gouged, and kicked itself into some sort of a social status, the
camp concentrated upon the boss.

The choppers, strangers to him, soon took his measure. A swift answer to
a mutinous glance, an order quietly drawled, and the relation was duly
fixed.  But it was different with the teamsters.  They, with their
teams, were all drawn from the settlements and knew him personally or by
report.  Even Hines had condescended to accept three dollars a day and
board at the hand of his enemy.  But than this no man can greater offend
against his neighbors—to rise superior in the common struggle for
existence.  From them he obtained no credit for the initiative which had
conjured the camp out of nothing. Now that it was in full swing, each
man felt that he could have done the trick himself.  A man may have no
honor in his own country; so, as always was, always will be, they, the
weak, snarled at him, the strong carrying their envious spite to the
length of trying to kill the goose which was laying the golden egg.
Though the money earned this winter would make an easy summer, they
struck at the source of supply—wasted his fodder, tipped over his sleds,
cast logs off to lighten their loads, manifested their jealousy in a
hundred mean ways.

The matter of the fodder he easily corrected. Discovering the teams one
evening bedded to their bellies with his choicest hay, he sent for
Bender, who expressed himself profanely over the waste.

"If this keeps up we’ll be out of hay an’ a job in another month,"
Carter said.  "What’s got into them?"

"Search me," the giant foreman answered.  "They know a heap better.
Pure malice, I reckon."

"Got a good man in your gang?"

"Big Hans, the loader.  He’s licked every man in his outfit."

"Well, put him in charge of the stables, with fifty cents a day raise."

"Don’t need the raise," Bender suggested.  "He’d sooner fight than eat."

"Oh, give it to him."

Events justified the expenditure.  At the end of a week it were, indeed,
difficult to locate a feature of Big Hans’s face—to distinguish nose
from cheek or discover his mouth.  But beyond this uncertainty of visage
there was nothing undecided about Hans.  He had worked steadily through
the teamsters and come out on top. The waste stopped.

The derelict logs and loads were not so easily settled. Once, sometimes
twice, a month business called Carter to Winnipeg, and, though Bender
ruled the camp with an iron fist, one pair of eyes cannot keep tab on
fifty teamsters.  Driving in one evening, Carter counted fifteen
cast-off loads between the dumps and the skidways. The last lay within
three hundred yards of the skids, where a halloo would have brought the
Cougar—loading boss—and a dozen men to the teamster’s aid.

That was the last straw.  Through gray obscurity of snowy dusk Carter
stared at the dark mass as though it incarnated the mulish obstinacy
which dogged his enterprise.  Perhaps it did, to him, for he muttered:
"I’m real sorry for you.  Must have troubled you some to make back to
the stables.  Guess you wasn’t late for supper."

Vexed, indignant, he drove slowly by the  skidways, where the sleds
stood loaded for the morning trip. Enormous affairs, built on his own
plans, fourteen feet across the bunks, they were loaded squarely with
four tiers of logs, then ran up to a single log.  In the gloom they
loomed like hay-stacks, and a stranger to the woods would have sworn
that no single team could start one.  But they ran on rounded runners
over iced tracks, and Carter knew that they were not overloaded.

"No kick there," he muttered.

Farther on a rise in the trail gave him a view of the camp across a wide
slough: a jumble of log buildings that shouldered one another over the
inequalities of a narrow, open strip between slough and forest.  Under
the rising moon the sod roofs, flat and snow-clad, gleamed faintly.
Patches of yellow, frosted windows blotched the mass of the walls.
Beyond, dark spruce towered against the sky-line.  It spread, that
gloomy mantle of spruce, illimitable as night itself, northward to the
frozen circle, its vast expanse unbroken by other centre of warmth and
light.  Solitary splash of life, the camp emphasized the profundities of
environing space, accentuated their loneliness.

Reining in, Carter gazed thoughtfully at this, the work of his hands.
The clear air gave him many voices.  He could hear Big Hans swearing
quaintly in the stables. A teamster sang on his way to the cook-house.
An oblong of brighter yellow flashed out of a mass.  That was the
cook-house door opening to admit the singer. Came a murmur and clatter
of dishes; then light and sound vanished.  Suddenly, far off, a long
howl troubled the silence.  Wild, mournful, tremulous, it was emblematic
of his problem.  Here, a hundred miles beyond the stretch of the law’s
longest finger, the law of the wolf pack still obtained—only the strong
hand could rule.

The howl also signalled his arrival at a conclusion. "They’re at
supper," he muttered.  "I’ll tackle them there an’ now."

First he went to the office, a rough log-hut which he shared with
Bender.  The giant lay, smoking, in his bunk, but he sprang up at
Carter’s news.  "An’ I busted the head of the Russian on’y yesterday for
pitching off a load!  Who’s at the bottom of it?  Now you’ve got me.
Michigan Red’s as mean as any.  Jes’ this morning he busted two
whiffle-trees running, an’ I happened along jes’ in time to save the
third.  Of course, his runners was froze down hard, an’ him snapping his
heavy team like all get out.

"’From your looks,’ I says to him, ’I’d have allowed you’d sense enough
to loosen your bobs!’  He on’y grinned.  ’Clean forgotten, boss.  Kick
that hinter bunker, will you?’  That man," Bender finished, "has gall
enough to fix out a right smart tannery."

Carter frowned.  The man, a red-haired, red-bearded fellow, with a
greenishly pale face and cold, bleak eyes, had come in from the wheat
settlements about the Prairie Portage, driving a huge team of blacks.
The one, a stallion, rose sixteen and a half hands to the crest of his
swelling shoulder.  Reputed a man-killer, he wore an iron muzzle in
stable or out.  His mate, a rat-tailed mare, equally big, differed only
in the insignia of wickedness, wearing a kicking-strap in harness, a
log-chain in the stable.  Man and team were well mated.

"If he’d make his pick on me!" Bender growled on, "’twould have been
pie-easy.  I’d have smashed him one, an’ you could have handed out his
walking-papers. But no!  It’s you he’s laying for.  ’Your boss ain’t big
enough to do it,’ he says, when I tell him that there’ll be other things
than busted whiffle-trees if he don’t look out.  ’You’re a privileged
character till I’m through with him.’  An’ that’s just the way of it.
He’ll swallow all I kin give him while waiting for you."

Carter’s nod confirmed Bender’s reasoning.  No one else could play his
hand in this game of men.  The giant had deferred to that unwritten law
of the woods which reads that every man must win his own battles.  "Know
anything of him?" he asked.

"Cougar ran acrost him once in Michigan.  Don’t lay no stress on his
character, but says he’s mighty good with his hands."

"Well, come along to the cook-house."

As they opened the cook-house door a hundred men looked up from the
three tables which ran the length of the long log-hut.  These bristled
with tinware, and between them and the stove three cookees ran back and
forth with smoking platters of potatoes, beans, and bacon.  At the upper
end a reflector lamp shed a bright light over the cook and his pots; but
tables were dimly lighted by candles stuck upright at intervals in their
own grease.  Their feeble flicker threw red shirts and dark, hairy faces
into Rembrandt shadow.  Hot, oily, flushed from fast and heavy eating,
intensely animal, they peered through the reek of steaming food at
Carter.

’"I won’t keep you a minute," he answered the resentment which his
interruption had called to all the faces. "I jes’ want to say that too
many logs have been dumped by the trail of late.  Now if any teamster
thinks that the loaders are stacking it on him, he can report to the
foreman, who’ll see him righted.  But if, after this—"

"More beans!"  A laugh followed the harsh interruption. The faces turned
to Michigan Red.  When the others paused he had continued eating, and
now, his greenish face aglow with insolence, he was holding an empty
platter out to the nearest cookee.

It was a difficult situation.  There was no mistaking his intent, yet
the interruption was timed so cunningly as to leave no actual cause of
offence.  Behind Carter, Bender bristled with rage, ready to sweep
casuistical distinctions aside with his fist.  Malignantly curious, the
faces turned back to Carter.

He waited quietly till the red teamster was served; paused even then,
for, as the latter fell to his eating, shovelling beans into his mouth
with knife loaded the length of the blade, Carter experienced an
uncomfortable twinge of memory.  The squared elbows, nimble knife, bent
head grossly caricatured himself in the first days of his marriage, and
vividly recalled Helen’s gentle tutelage.  For a second he saw himself
with her eyes, then pride thrust away the vision.

"After this"—he began where he had left off—"any teamster who dumps a
load without permission or good cause will be docked time and charged
for his board."

"More pork!"  It was the red teamster again.  Resting an elbow on the
table while he held out the plate behind him, he permitted his bleak
glance to wander along the grins till it brought up on Carter.

Choking with anger, Bender stepped, but Carter laid a hand on his arm
while he spoke to the cook.  "This man has a tape-worm.  Send him the
pot."

Blunt and to the point, the answer exactly suited lumberman primitive
humor.  As the door closed behind them Bender’s chuckles echoed the
men’s roaring laugh. "Fixed him that time," he commented.  "But he come
back right smart."

"Can’t come too soon.  It all helps to fill in."

Bender sensed the sadness in his tone, and the big heart of him was
troubled.  These months past he had seen Carter pile task on task,
seeking an anodyne for unhappiness in ceaseless toil.  Every night the
office lights burned unholy hours.  Waking this particular night, long
after twelve, Bender saw that Carter was still at his desk.

"Time you hired a book-keeper," he remonstrated. "Trail you are
travelling ends in the ’sylum."

"Book-keeper couldn’t do this work."

"No?"  Bender sat up.  "What’s the brand?"

"Figuring—grading contrac’s, bridges, trestles, timbering."

"For what?"

"A railroad."

Bender snorted.  "Shore!  You ain’t surely calculating on the C.P.’s
building the branch?"

"No."

The monosyllable discouraged further questioning, but Bender stuck to
his main objection.  "Well, if you keep this gait you’ll railroad
yourself into the graveyard. It is two now; at five you’ll be out with
the loaders."

"Correct."

The giant straightened up in his bunk.  "Good God, man!  Don’t you never
sleep?"

"I’ll sleep to-morrow night.  Now, shut up!"

Growling, Bender subsided, and long after he had slid again into the
land of dreams, Carter stared at the opposite wall with eyes that gave
him neither the bales, boxes, ranged along its length, nor the shirts,
socks, overalls, and other lumbermen’s supplies on the rough shelving.
He saw only Helen’s flower face blossoming out of the blackness of the
far corner.

The replica of himself that he had seen that night in Michigan Red was
but the climax of similar, if milder, experiences.  Naturally enough,
his Winnipeg trips had brought him in contact with people of more or
less refinement.  He met them at hotels, or in the parlors of his
business acquaintances when, as sometimes happened, they invited him to
dinner.  Such circumstances had simply forced him to set a guard on his
speech and manners—to imitate those about him.  There had been nothing
slavish in his imitation—no subtraction from the force of his
personality.  It was rather the grafting of the strong, wild plant with
the fruit of hot-house culture. It inhered in a dawning realization that
manners, courtesy, social customs were based on consideration for
others’ happiness, besides being pleasant of themselves.

Not that he was ready to admit the fact as sufficient excuse for Helen’s
treatment of himself.  Hurt pride forbade.  "She didn’t give me a
chance," he murmured. "I’d have come to it—in time.  She was ashamed."

Yet each concession to social custom became an argument for her, and was
turned against him in the nightly conflict between pride, passion, love,
and reason.  Often love would nearly win.  While her face smiled from
the corner, love would whisper: "She is yours.  Six hours’ ride will
take you to her."

But pride always answered, "Wait till she sends for you."  And he would
turn again to his figuring.

For pride had enlisted ambition in its aid.  Long ago his clear sight
had shown him the need of a competing railroad, and gradually a scheme
had grown upon him. What man had done, man could do.  If a great trunk
road could develop from the imagination of one man, a transverse line
that should strike south and find an outlet on the American border could
hatch from the brain of another.  He would build it himself.  Already he
had broached the matter to his financial backers, and they had given it
favorable consideration—more, were interesting other capitalists in the
project.  So, in camp, on trail, his every spare moment was given to the
working out of construction estimates.

Only once was his resolution shaken.  From Lone Tree the camp "tote"
trail slid due northeast, passing the settlements a half-dozen miles to
the east.  Save on this one occasion, when the need of men and teams
caused him to take the other, he always used the "tote" trail. And even
this time he did not dally in the settlements. Having advertised his
need at the Assiniboin mission, Flynn’s, and the post-office, he headed
up for the camp as dusk blanketed the prairies.  Dark brought him to his
own forks, where, reining in, he gazed long at a yellow blotch on the
night, his own kitchen light.  A five-minute trot would put him with
her!  Love urged go!  Pride said nay!  And while they battled his ponies
shivered in the bitter wind.  He waited, waited, waited. Which would
have won out will never be known, for presently a cutter dashed out of
the gloom, swung round on his trail, and, as he turned out to let it by,
he caught voices, Helen’s and Mrs. Leslie’s, in lively chatter.

Leaning over, he lashed his ponies, raced them into the camp.

After that he turned with renewed assiduity to his figures.  Still, they
are dry things, matters of intellect, useless for the alleviation of
feeling.  One emotion requires another for its cure, and the trouble
with Michigan Red promised more forgetfulness than could be obtained
from the most intricate calculations.  That is why he had said, "He
can’t come back too soon."

He quickened at the thought of the coming struggle. In himself the red
teamster embodied the envy, spite, disaffection which, from the first,
had clogged Carter’s enterprise.  He materialized the vexatious forces,
impalpable things that Carter had been fighting, and he felt the relief
which comes to the man who at last drives a mysterious enemy out to the
open.




                                 *XIV*

                           *THE RED TEAMSTER*


As Bender prophesied, Michigan Red came back "right smartly."

The following Sunday was one of those rare winter days when the mercury
crawls out of its ball sufficiently to register a point or two.  At noon
the silver column indicated only four below zero, and, accustomed to
sterner temperatures, the men lolled about the camp bare-headed and
shirt-sleeved.  One hardy group was running a poker game on a blanket
under the sunny lea of a bunkhouse; the younger men, choppers and
teamsters, skylarked about the camp essaying feats of strength: some
tossed the caber, others put the shot, a third squad startled the forest
with the platoon fire of a whip-cracking contest.  Standing in his
doorway, the cook, autocrat of the camp, remarked patronizingly on the
latter performance.

"Pretty fair," he judicially observed, as one young fellow raised the
echoes—"pretty fair, Carrots, but Sliver there has you beat.  Needn’t to
look so cocky, though, Sliver," he qualified his praise, "or I’ll call
up Michigan to teach you how to crack a whip."

"Oh, shucks!  I ain’t scared o’ him," Sliver grinned. Then, rising to
his slim height, he writhed body and arm and let forth a veritable _feu
de joie_.

"You would, would you?" the cook warned.  "Here, Red!" he called to the
gamblers.  "Get up an’ give this kid a lesson."

"You go plumb to—"  The location was drowned by Sliver’s second volley.

"Oh, come, Red!" the cook urged.  "This kid makes me tired."

The red teamster went on playing, and would, no doubt, have indefinitely
continued the game but that, looking up to curse the importunate cook,
he saw the stable roustabout interestedly watching the whip-crackers. A
man in years, the latter was a child in intellect, simple to the point
of half-wittedness.  Picking him up, starving, in Winnipeg, Carter had
brought him up to the camp early in the winter, and ever since he had
served as a butt for the camp’s jokes.

Michigan rose.  "Lend me your whip, Carrots!"

"Now you’ll see!" the cook confidently affirmed, as the long lash
writhed about Michigan’s head.  Exploding, it sent a trail of echoes
coursing through the forest. As is the pop of a pistol to the roar of a
cannon, so was his volley compared to that of Sliver.  Then, to prove
himself in accuracy, Michigan snapped a fly from the cook’s bare arm.

"A trifle close," he exclaimed, rubbing the spot.  "Do it ag’in, Red,
an’ I cut out your Sunday pudding."

Grinning, Michigan swung again, turned, as the lash writhed in mid-air,
and cracked it explosively within an inch of the roustabout’s ear.
"Stan’ still, you son of a gun!" he swore, as the poor simpleton
flinched.  "Keep him in, boys.  Stan’ still, or I’ll take it clean off
nex’ crack....  Now we’ll play you’ve a fly on the tip of your nose."

The play was too realistic, drawing a spot of blood. Yelling with pain,
the roustabout swore, begged, pleaded piteously to be let alone.  But a
circle of grinning teamsters hedged him in on all sides save where the
red teamster stood with his whip.  Man, in the aggregate, is always
cruel.  Let a few hundred blameless citizens, fathers of families,
husbands, brothers, be gathered together and flicked with passion’s
whip, and you have a mob equal to the barbarities of Caligula.  And
these men were raw, wild as the woods.  Shoving the simpleton back
whenever he tried to break, they stood grinning while Michigan cut
cracking circles about his head. Sometimes his hair moved under the wind
of the lash; sometimes it grazed his nose.  There was no telling where
it would explode.  He could not dodge it. Trying, the whip drew blood
from his neck.

"Stan’ still, then!" the red teamster answered his yell of pain.  "I
ain’t responsible for your cavortings."

"Spoiling Red’s aim!" the cook admonished, severely. "I never seed your
like!"

"Now open your mouth wide," the tormentor went on. "I’m agoin’ to put
the tip in your mouth without techin’ your lips—if you don’t move.  Open
wide!"

But the man’s small wits were now completely gone. He opened his mouth
obediently, then, uttering a scream, a raucous, animal cry, he sprang at
his tormentor.  But a dozen hands seized and dragged him back.

"Hold him, boys!  I’ll skin the tip of his nose for that."

As Michigan swung his whip the roustabout sent forth scream on scream.
Foam gathered on his lips.  Terror had driven him insane.

"No, no!" the cook remonstrated.  "That’s enough, Red—that’s enough!"

Unheeding, the teamster took aim, swung, then—another lash tangled in
his.  Yelling with the sudden pain of a twisted wrist, he swung round on
Carter. Unobserved, he had run across from his office, snatched up
Sliver’s whip, tangled Michigan’s lash, and jerked it over his shoulder.

"Boys"—he now faced the flushed crowd—"I don’t allow to mix up with your
fun, but what do you call this?"

One glance at the bloody weal on the roustabout’s neck and the brutal
mob resolved into its individual components, each a unit of sorrow for
its share in the torture.

"Jest a poor fool at that."  Carter laid his hand on the simpleton’s
shoulder.

"Shore, shore!  Yes!" the cook agreed.  "It’s too bad. We didn’t go to
do that.  No.  We jest calculated to have a little fun, an’ carried it a
leetle too far."

"That’s so!  That’s so!"  Carrots, Smith, and Sliver all seconded the
cook, all voicing repentant public opinion.

"No, Red didn’t go to do that," the cook continued. "He moved.  Red
didn’t mean it; did you, Red?"

After that one yell of pain the red teamster’s eyes had glued to a
handspike which lay near by.  But the useless wrist checked the impulse,
and he stood, sullenly noting changed opinion.

"Is this a Sunday-school?" he answered, sneering. "Or mebbe a Young
Folks’ Christian Endeavor?  Sliver, what’s the golden text?"

"Oh, shore, Red!" Sliver remonstrated.

"It’s this."  Carter looked round the group.  "Any man who lays a hand
on this poor lad again gets his time."  His glance fixed on Michigan
Red.

The red teamster shrugged.  His chance had gone by, and he was acute
enough to recognize the fact.  Not that he lacked courage or strength to
try it out, man for man—bite, gouge, kick, in the brutal fashion of the
lumber woods.  Taken by surprise, he had lost his vantage, and now saw
that his adversary had cleverly ranged against him an adverse opinion.

"It’s not him I’m laying for," he growled.  "Some other day!"


The "other day" came a week later.  Entering the stables at noon in
search of Brady, the water-hauler, Carter saw the red teamster perched
on the top rail of the black stallion’s stall, in his hand the iron
muzzle which he had unstrapped that the brute might feed with ease.  As
the beast snapped, rather than ate, his oats, he cast vicious, uneasy
glances from the tail of his eye at Red; but, indifferent to the brute’s
mood and the anxious glances of his fellows, the teamster calmly chewed
his tobacco.

It was by just such tricks that he had gained ascendency over his
fellows.  Whereas it was worth another man’s life to step into their
stall, the blacks would stand and sweat in rage and fear while Michigan
slapped and poked their ribs.  The devil in the beasts seemed to
recognize a superior in the pale-green fiend in the man.

"Brady here?" Carter asked.  "Oh, there you are!"

He stood immediately behind the stallion, and as he spoke Michigan
brought the iron muzzle down with a thwack an the brute’s ribs.
Snorting, it lashed out, just missing Carter.  One huge, steel-shod
heel, indeed, passed on either side of his head.  Under such
circumstances a start was a little more than justifiable; yet after that
tribute to surprise Carter stepped quietly beyond range and went on
talking to Brady.

"This afternoon you can hitch to the water-cart an’ ice the track in to
them new skidways."

Then, turning, he eyed Michigan Red.  "That’s a techy beast of yourn,
friend."

"Techy?" Michigan sneered.  "There ain’t another man in this camp as kin
put the leathers on him!"

"No?"

"No!"  Swinging his heels against the stall, Michigan added, "Not a
damned man."

Picking up a spear of hay, Carter chewed it while he looked over the
beast, now foaming with rage.  It was a dare.  He knew it—saw also the
amused interest in the on-lookers.  They felt Michigan had him in the
door. "The leathers," he remarked, "are on him."

It was a skilful move, throwing the initiative back to the teamster.
Not one whit fazed, however, he exclaimed, in mock surprise, "Why,
damme, so they are!"  Sliding down, he laid a hand on the stallion’s
crest. Instantly the brute ceased his plunging, uneasy stepping, and
while the man stripped off the harness only long, slow shivers told of
smothered fury.

"There you are!"  He threw collar and harness at Carter’s feet.

"Look here, boss!" Brady remonstrated, as Carter picked them up.  "I
wouldn’t go to do it.  Shure I wouldn’t.  The baste is a man-killer be
Red’s own word.  Luk at him for the proof."

Ears laid flat to his neck, glossy hide shivering, the whites of his
eyes showing viciously, chisel teeth protruding through grinning lips,
the stallion’s appearance bore out his reputation.

"I wouldn’t!" a dozen teamsters chorused.

Unheeding, Carter entered the stall.  As he ranged alongside, the
stallion tried to rear, but was snapped back by his halter-chain.  So
foiled, he humped his shoulders, dropping his head between his knees;
then, just when the teamsters expected to see the sixteen hundred pounds
of him grind Carter against the stall, he suddenly straightened and
stood still as before, save for the slow shivers.

"Mother of God!" Brady exclaimed.  "What ’ll that mane?"

Carter’s hand rested on the beast’s crest.  What did it mean?  Only the
red teamster knew.  But whether the animal shook to the memory of some
torture, or merely mistook the firm hand for that of his master, he
moved but once while Carter adjusted and buckled the harness.  That was
at the cinching of the bellyband; but he quickly quieted.  The click of
the breeching-snaps sounded like breaking sticks through the stable, and
as he stepped out from the stall a score of breaths issued in one huge
sigh.

"Now hurry, Brady," he said.  "The job will keep you humping till
sundown."

Respectful glances followed him away from the stable. He had touched his
men in a vulnerable spot, and though, hereafter, they might growl and
grumble—the lumberman’s sole relaxation—he could count on a fair amount
of obedience from all but such malingerers as Shinn and Hines, or a
natural anarchist like Michigan Red.  The latter took on the yoke of
authority only to defy it; and though even his bleak face lit up as
sunlight struggles through frost of a winter’s morning, he soon found
cause for further trouble.

Dropping into the smith’s shop a few days later, Carter found Seebach,
the German smith, ruefully contemplating a half-dozen disabled sleds.
"Herr Gott!" he exclaimed.  "In one half-day these haf come in. Alretty
yet I works like t’ree tefils, an’ this iss the leedle games they play
on me.  It is that you gifs me a helper or I quit—eh?"

Too surprised to laugh over the other’s ludicrous anger, Carter puzzled
over the breakage.  As aforesaid, the sleds had been built on his own
plans to carry enormous loads.  To four-by-six runners, shod with an
inch of steel, hardwood bunkers a foot square were fastened with solid
iron knees braced with inch iron.  Every bolt and pin was on the same
massive plan. The best of a dozen patterns of as many logging-camps had
gone into the making of those sleds.  Yet, though they ought to have
been good for twenty tons oh the roughest kind of a road, they were
racked, split, or twisted, bunkers torn off, ironwork on all badly
sprung.

Carter whistled.  "How did they do it?"

"Brady, he says it vas the new roat into the pridge timbers.  In one
place it goes like hell over a pank down to a lake, with a quick turn at
the pottom.  ’The Pig Glide,’ Brady calls it."

"I’ll go out an’ look at it."

A half-hour’s walk brought him to the hill.  Debouching from heavy
timber, the trail inclined for two hundred yards, then sheered down at
an angle of forty-five degrees to a lake below.  As the smith had said,
an abrupt turn at the bottom added to the trail’s difficulties.  Too
steep for ice-sledding, hay had been spread over the face of the hill,
and with this to ease the descent Carter could see no reason for the
broken sleds.

A man had been told off to respread the hay after each passage, and he
grinned at Carter’s question. "Bust ’em here?  You bet!  How?  Well,
they come down on a gallop.  Teams is coming now, so if you set down in
the scrub there you’ll see ’em do it."

It was as he said.  One after the other the teams emerged from the
forest, gathered speed on the incline, and came flying down the hill,
the great sleds cracking and groaning under the strain of enormous loads
as they skidded around the bottom turn.  Michigan Red came last, and
Carter’s anger could not altogether drown a thrill as he watched the red
teamster take the hill. Whooping, whip-cracking, blacks stretched on the
gallop, he tore down that plumb hill-side and skidded round the turn,
load balanced on one runner.  It split, with a pistol report, but the
steel shoe held and he passed safely on and down the lake.

"He was the first to cut loose," the trackman explained.  "T’others
followed his dare."

"Well, they’ll have to quit it.  Warn each man, Joe, an’ report all to
me that disobey."

When, that evening, Joe reported that all but Michigan Red had obeyed
the order, he sensed hot anger under the boss’s calm.  Expecting an
explosion, he was the more surprised when, after a thoughtful pause,
Carter dismissed him with an order to take a couple of hand-rakes out on
the job the following morning.  To the Cougar he gave orders that the
red teamster was to load last.  Obedient, the Cougar sent Michigan Red
to break track into a new skidway; thus all of his fellows had passed on
down the glide while Michigan was still loading.

"Load him light—dry logs, an’ not too many," Carter had ordered.  But,
incensed at the delay, the teamster indulged in such sarcastic allusions
to the frailty of the loaders’ female ancestors that the ribald crew
piled the logs on till his load bulked like a hay-stack.  None other
than the blacks could have started the sled out from the skids; and
while, with jerks and sudden snatches, the fierce brutes worked it out
of deep snow to the iced tracks, the loaders looked admiringly on.  It
was a triumph in driving.  Man and team worked like a clock, and,
returning blasphemous answers to the loaders’ compliments, Michigan slid
off down the trail.

To make up for his lost time, he urged the blacks to a trot, and so came
swinging down the incline at twice his usual speed.  Not till he reached
the very edge did he see that the hay had been raked off the face of the
hill. A mask of ice, it glittered in the sun.

Half-way down Carter stood with Joe.  Looking up, they saw Michigan
poised on the top log, a red, sinister figure against the sky.  He
seemed to pause, throw back on his lines—a quick, involuntary movement.
Then, craning forward, he glanced down that glittering stretch—a
comprehensive look that took in Carter, Joe, and their plan.

"Give him a forkful under the runners as he goes by," Carter whispered.
"Otherwise we’ll kill his team."

A second, as aforesaid, the red teamster paused; then, loosing his
lines, he leaned over and lashed the stallion under the soft of the
belly.

"My God!" Joe cried.

He saw the black brute rear, snorting—saw the blacksnake bite the mare’s
flank—saw the pair plunge over the grade; then water bathed his eyes.
He heard, however—heard the rush and roar, a thunder of hoofs as the
long, steel calkings cut through the ice and struck fire from the face
of the hill.  He felt the wind as the sled passed, and waited for the
crash—which did not come.

A voice, cold, deliberate, restored his vision.  "I didn’t think it was
in horse-flesh."  Carter was gazing after team and sled, now a black
patch on the snow of the lake.  "Beat us this time, Joe," he continued;
"but we’ll fix him to-morrow."

That evening, however, the red teamster enjoyed the fruits of his
exploit.  It seasoned the beans at supper, sweetened the stable choring.
Opinion agreed that it was now "up" to the boss, but split on his
probable action, one-half the stable agreeing with Hines that Michigan
surely earned his discharge, the other half holding that settlement by
battle would be the certain ending.  Neither event, however, had come to
pass by bedtime, and the mystery was intensified by the chucklings of
the road gang, which came in from work long after the teamsters retired.
Next morning, too, the loaders—evidently in the secret—added to the
suspense by asking the teamsters if they intended to toboggan down the
glide that trip.

"Bet you don’t!" they yelled after Michigan Red.

Though not exactly nervous, the mystery yet affected the red teamster.
As his load slid through the forest uneasiness manifested itself in
thoughtful whistlings, broken song snatches, unnecessary talk to his
horses. Not that he was a whit afraid.  The half-dozen or so men whom he
expected would try to enforce the new order could not have prevented him
from at least sending his team at the grade.  The fierce soul of him
thrilled at the thought of opposition, and, coming out of the forest, he
set a pace that would have ridden down opposition.

But he reined in at the hill.  Instead of the force of his imaginings,
only Joe Legault stood at the foot of the glide.  The hay had been
respread on its face, but—the road gang had built a rough bridge over a
deep gully, and now the glide led, straight as an arrow, out to the
lake.  The racking curve was utterly abolished.

Grinning, Joe said: "The boss allows that it’s your privilege to kill
your own horses.  So go it if you wanter.  Hain’t going to hurt his
sleds none."

Michigan walked his horses.

Carter had won out.  Moreover, he had done it without the loss of
prestige that would have ensued by the usual brutal methods in vogue in
lumber-camps.  Law, of a man or people, cannot endure, of course,
without force behind it.  Yet behind his imperturbability, quiet
taciturnity, the men felt the power to enforce his commands.  So his
authority was no more called in question. Not that envious spite ceased
to dog him.  Hines, Shinn, and their coterie stood always ready to stir
up discontent, foment trouble.

It was their sympathy that caused the cook to maintain one can of poor
baking-powder to be valid excuse for leaving.  But Carter disposed of
minor troubles with the same easy good-humor that he had given to big
ones.

"I reckon you’ve been scandalously mistreated," he told the cook.  "I’m
right sorry to lose you.  Must you go?"

Mollified, the cook stayed.

Then Baldy, chief of the "tote"-trail teamsters, rose to the point that
"thirty hun’red was load enough for drifted trails."

"Thirty it is, Baldy," Carter cheerfully answered, and Baldy yanked
forty and forty-five hundred all winter over the worst of trails.

He had proved himself in the mastership of men just at the time that
opportunity was holding out her hand, and proof and fruit of his winning
came the very day that saw the last load delivered at the dumps.  "It is
a go!"  The wire which announced, with this bit of slang, the successful
financing of his railroad projects was brought in by Baldy from Lone
Tree, and with it buttoned against his heart Carter made his way to the
stables where the teamsters were, as they thought, bedding up for the
last time.

"We have feed for three months left," he said, "and I can promise work
through the summer.  At what?"  He turned, smiling, on Brady.  "Never
mind; all those that want it kin have it till freeze-up.  In the mean
time I’ll feed an’ care for your teams till the log-drive is down."

Grumblers from the cradle, kickers born, teamsters and choppers had
looked forward to this last day in camp, swearing all that ten dollars a
day would not hire them for an hour longer.  No, sirree—not an hour!
Now they looked their doubt.

"What’s the pay?" Brady asked.

"Half a dollar a day more’n you’re getting."

"That beats farming in these parts.  You kin sign me, boss."

And me—me—me!  The answers floated in from all over the stable.  Only a
few of the older men elected to return to their farms, and after all had
spoken Carter turned to Michigan Red, who occupied his old perch on the
stallion’s stall.

"Well, Red?"

"Didn’t s’pose you’d need me."

Carter went on writing.  He could afford to be generous.  He had beaten
the man at every point; to retain him where another would have
discharged him was, indeed, the crowning of his victory, and Michigan
knew it. Had he doubted, he had but to read it in the countenances of
his fellows.  A good gambler, however, he hid resentment, and where a
poor loser would have taken his discharge he accepted re-employment.

His red beard split in a sneering grin.  "Oh, guess I’ll trouble you for
a little longer."

The day was eventful for another reason.  Coming up from a short visit
to the settlements, Bender handed Carter a letter that evening, the
superscription of which sent the dark blood flooding over his neck, for
it was the first he had seen of Helen’s writing these months. Was this
the answer of his longing?  Had she sent—at last?  His fingers trembled
as he tore the wrapping, then he paused, staring.  It was his last
check, returned without an explanatory scrap.

"She’s hired to teach her old school again."  Bender answered his blank
look.




                                  *XV*

                               *TRAVAIL*


If the white months seemed to lag with Carter up at the camp, they
dragged wearily with Helen down in the settlements.  Christmas had been
particularly dreary, for it did not require a woman’s marvellous memory
for anniversaries for her to live over again every incident and
experience of last Yuletide.  In their living-room Carter had built a
chimney and fireplace of mud, Cree style, and on Christmas Eve she had
cuddled in against his broad breast and talked of a sweet possibility.
They had the usual pretty quarrel over sex and names—has the tongue one
good enough for the first-born? Then he had hung her stocking, and none
other would suit him, forsooth, but the one she was wearing.  He had
laughed away her blushing protestations, and had kissed the white foot
and toes that squirmed in his big hand. Sitting alone this Christmas,
she had blushed at the memory; then a gush of tears had cooled her hot
cheeks, tears of mingled sorrow and thankfulness that their pretty dream
had not taken form in flesh.

One January morning she sat, chin in hands, and stared across the
humming stove at the white drift outside.  Nels, the Swedish hired man,
had killed three pigs for winter meat the day before, and with a touch
of humor that was foreign to his bleached complacency had set them on
all-fours in the snow.  Stiff, frozen—so hard, indeed, that the
house-dog retired disconsolately after a fruitless tug at an iron
ear—they poked marble shoulders out of a drift.  The eye of one was
closed in a cunning wink.  His neighbor achieved a grin.  The mouth of
the third was open and thrown back, as though defying death with
derisive laughter.

Steeped in thought, Helen did not see the grim grotesques. These months
she had undergone three distinct changes of feeling.  First she was
becomingly repentant. Viewed under the softening perspectives of time
and distance, Carter’s crudities waned, while his strength and virtues
waxed.  The insignificant sloughed away from his personality, leaving
only the strong, the virile. During this stage she formed small plans
towards reconciliation, and bided patiently at home, ceasing her visits
to Mrs. Leslie.  Not that she felt them wrong, but, besides the shame
natural to her position, she liked to feel that she was gratifying what
she deemed her husband’s prejudice; she experienced the satisfaction
which accrues from a penance self-imposed.

When, however, he did not return, she relapsed into hurt silence—would
not speak of him to Jenny, nor listen when Bender dropped in on one of
his periodical visits with news from the camp.  Lastly came cold
resentment, anger at the grass-widowhood that was being thrust upon her,
a feeling that was the more unbearable because she secretly admired his
boldness in cutting the knot of their difficulties.  She recognized the
wisdom of the act.  Had he not taken the initiative, the process of
disenchantment would have continued till she herself might have taken
the first step to end their misery.  But the knowledge did not mitigate
the sting.  He had forced the separation!  The thought rankled and grew
more bitter day by day.

This morning she was in a particularly dangerous mood. Conscious of her
original good intention, knowing that her fault had been the product of
conditions as much as her own weakness, she was ripe for revolt against
the entire scheme of things that had forced the lot of crabbed age upon
her flushed youth, compelling her to sit by a lonely fire.  And as she
sat and brooded a clash of bells broke up her meditations; the door
opened, letting in a bitter blast that froze the warm interior air into
chilly fog, from the centre of which Mrs. Leslie emerged, heavily furred
and voluble as ever.

"Anchorite!" she screamed.  "Or is it anchoress? Three, four—no, six
visits you owe me.  Explain!  Bad weather?  Hum!"  She tilted her pretty
nose.  "If I couldn’t fib more artistically, Helen, I’d adhere to the
painful truth.  You were afraid—of hubby."

"I—I wasn’t!"

Mrs. Leslie surveyed the girl’s flushed anger with sarcastic pity.
"Tut! tut!  More fibs.  Huddled over that stove, you make the loveliest
study of despair.  You have been crying, too."

"I—I haven’t!"  The lines of Huddled Despair flowed into Radiant Anger.

"Your eyes are red?"

"Well, if they are—if I did—it was through anger."

Mrs. Leslie accepted the modified admission.  "That’s right, my dear.
He—no man is worth the compliment of regretful tears.  They are all
foolish, selfish, fickle as children.  They cry for love like a child
for the moon, throw it away when the toy wearies, howl if another tries
to pick it up.  They only value the unattainable.  Bah!"

The ejaculation was comical in its feigned disgust, but just then Helen
had ears only for the serious or sympathetic—preferably the latter.
"Tell me, Elinor," she asked, "do you really think I have deserved this
at his hands?"

"No."  For once in her life Mrs. Leslie dealt in undiluted
truth—because, perhaps, lying would not serve her purpose.  "One could
understand his pique—"  With incredible hardihood, considering the part
she herself had played, she commented: "Really, my dear, you ought not
to have done it.  But he has been altogether too severe—unforgiving.  I
don’t see how you stand it. I should freeze these cold nights without
some one to warm my feet on."

"To think"—speech was such a relief after months of bitter silence, and
Helen never even noticed the other’s funny climax—"to think that this
should be dealt to me by a man of whose very existence I was unconscious
a short two years ago!  Is he a god to exercise such power—to command me
to eat the bread-and-water of affliction during his pleasure?  Why, I
was twenty-two before I ever saw him!  Doesn’t it seem ridiculous—silly
as though one pebble on a beach were to establish limits for another?
They roll and rub where and with whom they list, and why shouldn’t I?"
Ignoring the fact that monogamy was her sex’s greatest achievement, and
that the first woman who bartered love for protection, cookery for
maintenance, had not driven such a bad bargain, she finished: "Wouldn’t
it be funny if pebbles were condemned to rub and roll in definite pairs
till winds and waves had buried one or other affinity deep in the sands.
Why—"

"In other words," Mrs. Leslie interrupted, "why should vertical
distances count for more than horizontal—death for more than
distance—seven feet under the sod carry advantages and opportunities
that do not go with seventy miles above?  There isn’t any reason.  It is
just so."

"Well, I won’t stand it!"  Rebellion inhered in Helen’s stamp.  "I
won’t!  I won’t!  I won’t!"

Mrs. Leslie shrugged her hopelessness.  "Thousands of women have to.
What _can_ you do, my dear?"

"Do?" the girl answered, hotly.  "I have already done it—applied for and
secured my old school.  Unfortunately, I must remain here till the
spring term opens."

Now to accuse Mrs. Leslie of trailing a definite purpose were to reveal
lamentable ignorance of her ruling traits. She was no fell adventuress
of romance, stealthy of plot, remorseless in pursuit.  Persistence was
foreign to her light character.  Unstable as water, she veered like a
shuttlecock under the breath of emotion, yet, withal, grasped speedily
at such straws as the winds of opportunity brought within reach.  If she
lacked force to plot Carter’s capture, or to revenge herself for his
slight through Helen, she was willing enough now that the wind served.

"In the mean time," she said, "you will stay with me?"

"Oh, I couldn’t do that!"  Oh, complex feminine nature!  Helen balked at
the freedom of her agonizings. The quick earnestness of her answer told
of the hope that still glowed in the ashes of despair.

But Mrs. Leslie turned hope against her.  "Oh yes," she mocked.  "You
were not afraid of him; certainly not.  But that is not the way to get
him back, my dear. If you would regain your recreant, give him a rival."

Now, though this piece of worldly wisdom was strictly in line with
Helen’s crooked parable of the pebbles, the idea sounded grossly common
in plain words.  Hastily she said, "You don’t suppose that I would—"

"No! no!"  Mrs. Leslie skilfully retrieved her error. "I only meant that
it would be as well to keep him on the anxious seat.  Never let a man
feel too sure of you—it isn’t healthy, for him or you.  I wouldn’t wait
here till it pleased him to extend magnificent forgiveness for so small
a fault.  Go out—visit—let him see that you can be happy without
him—that you have still attractions for others."

"But I don’t care.  Why do you persist, Elinor, in hinting that I still
love him?  I don’t."

"Then you’ll come with me?"

"I’d like to, but I can’t leave Jenny alone with Nels."

Mrs. Leslie might have replied that this was exactly what she would have
to do when school opened; instead, she contemplated the love which
masqueraded behind this unparalleled obstinacy from sphinxlike eyes.
"Jenny must be dying to see her friends in Lone Tree," she suggested.
"Let her take a vacation.  As for Nels—he can bach it."

Helen looked troubled.  It was really astonishing to see how she ran
from liberty.  But she had, perforce, to make some show of living up to
her professions, so she called Jenny and anxiously inquired if she
_didn’t_ want to visit her friends.  Unfortunately, Jennie had been
oppressed these many days with a longing to see the good doctor, and the
expression of her wish carried the day for Mrs. Leslie.

"Oh, well," she sighed; and Mrs. Leslie prudently confined her laugh
within her own hollow sepultures.

Accepting the invitation with misgivings, she was astonished, on her
return home, to find how thoroughly she had enjoyed her two weeks’
visit.  Yet it was only natural.  Besides the change, Mrs. Leslie had
been at pains to amuse and entertain her.  There were cosey chats over
the teacups on matters dear to the feminine heart, and daily
sleigh-rides—mad dashes over hard-packed trails to music of jingling
bells.  Once the drive was extended as far as Regis barracks, twenty
miles to the west, and Helen was introduced to captains of the mounted
police in scarlet splashed with gold, their ladies, the agents and
clerks of the government land office—pleasant people at first sight, of
whom she was to learn more.  Of nights, Molyneux and other
remittance-bachelors would drop in, and, with drawn curtains excluding
the vast arctic night, there would be music, songs, games.  Small wonder
that she enjoyed herself, or that, the ice thus broken, she gravitated
between home and the Leslies’ during the remainder of that winter.

Speaking of Molyneux, a greater surprise inhered in the fact that she
had been able to meet him without embarrassment, a condition that was
due to the tact and real consideration which he displayed.  At their
first meeting he paused only for a pleasant greeting; next, he ventured
a chat; and these lengthened until he felt safe in staying out an
evening.

He marked his greatest gain the day that—Leslie being under the weather
with a cold—she allowed him to drive her home.  By those gentlemen, the
romanticists, this fact would not have been accorded a tender
implication.  They paint love in colors fast as patent dyes: good girls
love once; or, if a second passion be grudgingly allowed, it is only
after the first is safely bestowed in cold storage underground.  In face
of the fact that the little god occasionally shoots a double arrow, that
the sigh of many a wife would be unwelcome if intelligible to her
husband, that many a maid has slipped into spinsterhood between two
passions, they lay down as the basic principle of ethical romance the
canon that neither wife nor maid can entertain two loves other than in
sequence.

Now Helen may not have been in this case, and if she had it goes without
saying that she would never have admitted the preference even to
herself.  For she had been raised in the very shadow of the aforesaid
canon. Yet he had certainly won on her—for good reason.  In person he
was above the average of good looks; his manners touched standard.  In
that he, alone of the English set, had been able to wring a living from
the stern northland without the aid of a fat allowance, he commanded her
respect.  Also she thought that he was trying to sink his past—he
entertained the same illusion—and as every good girl loves to imagine
herself as an "influence," the thought gave her satisfaction.  Molyneux
had no cause of complaint.

To do him justice, he tried, in a slovenly fashion, yet still tried, to
live up to this, the one pure love of his life—purity must be
interpreted as applying to his intention rather than motive.  Of all the
remittance-men who frequented Mrs. Leslie’s house, he, at this time,
showed the least moral taint.  Often he thrust in between Helen and
things offensive.  Though, during Helen’s visits, Mrs. Leslie made some
attempt to put her house in order, she could not always bridle her male
guests, who smoked Leslie’s imported tobacco and offered herself veiled
love. But Molyneux sterilized most of their blackguardism, nipping
entendre with a chilly stare, destroying double meanings by instant and
literal interpretation—did it so effectually that she never noticed the
pervading sensualism.  Indeed, he did it so much as to draw Mrs.
Leslie’s fire.  "Virtuous boy," she said, teasing him one day. "You
almost convert me to the true-love theory."

His grimace gauged the depth of his reformation.  To him as to Mrs.
Leslie the text could be fitted: "Can the leopard change his spots or
the Ethiop his skin?"  Really he had not changed in quality or purpose;
it was the same Molyneux in pursuit of the same end. His tactics were
merely altered to suit his game.  He would, of course, have denied
this—probably with the warmth of honest conviction.  At times his
reflections on the subject attained highly moral altitudes.  He had
known from the first that Helen could never live with Carter!  Duty
certainly called him to end her bondage! Yes, he believed himself
honest, and would continue to so believe until some unexpected check
loosed the Old Adam again.  This was proved by the flashes of passion at
the very thought of failure.  It would have been much more natural for
him to have attempted a raid on Carter’s Eden.  But, warned by previous
experience, he waited, waited, waited, and watched as the snake may have
watched the maiden Eve over the threshold of Adam’s garden.  Now that
time seemed to have verified his prediction, that, albeit with hesitant
steps, Helen was approaching the gate of her own accord, he held back
the hot hand that fain would have plucked her forth lest he should
startle her into flight.

There were many watchers of the girl’s progression during the winter
months: Mrs. Leslie, who might be said to await the moment when a shove
might throw the girl off her balance headlong into Molyneux’s arms; the
settlers, who anticipated such a denouement with scandalous tongues; the
remittance-men, who betted on the result, basing odds on her lonely
condition.  To these there could be but one end.  Always the human soul
reaches for happiness, and the fact that she had once mistaken Dead Sea
fruit for love’s golden apples would not prevent her from tiptoeing to
pluck again.  Would she pluck?

Molyneux, for one, was sure that she would, and, having the courage of
his conviction, put his hope into speech, choosing an opportune time.
Nels always drove her over to Leslie’s, and at first brought her home.
But by the middle of February the latter part of the task fell by
consent of all to Molyneux, and he spoke while driving her home one
afternoon.

"Read this," he said, handing her a telegram that called him to his
father’s death-bed.

"Oh, I’m so sorry!" she exclaimed, impulsively.

"For what," he questioned, "his sickness or my absence?"

"Both," she frankly answered.  "You have been—very nice to me.  I shall
miss you."

Now this was all very proper, but when he stated that he should be gone
at least seven weeks she ought to have veiled her concern.  But she did
not, and the regret that swam in the hazel eyes strengthened his
purpose.  "Before I go I must say something.  How long is our present
relation to last?"

The raise of her eyebrows might have meant anything. He took it as
encouragement, and ran on, "You know that I love—have always loved you."

Here, according to the canons, she ought to have withered him.  Instead
she gave him the truth.  "I am not blind."

"Thanks for your candor.  Now, a step further—do you intend to remain
his bondwoman?"

This was harder, yet her answer correctly interpreted her feeling.
"I—I—really don’t know."

The doubt spurred him.  "You do not love him.  You could not—after the
way he has treated you.  You must have love.  A glance at your face
would tell a dullard that it is as necessary to your existence as air or
water. You cannot be happy without it.  It is life to you; more than
sustenance.  You must be wrapped in it, touch it at every point, feel it
everywhere around you.  Your being cries out for a passion
all-absorbing; you will take nothing less.  I would—"

"Give me such love?"  She had thrilled under his truthful analysis of
her nature, and now she cried out the passion of her sex, the eternal
desire for a love everlasting as that of a mother.  "Is such possible?—a
love that never stales, that endures after the hot blood cools and
beauty fades?  Could you love me through old age? No, no!  A woman can,
but never a man!"

"I can!  By God!  I can!" he cried, blazing in response to her passion.
"I’ll prove it, for sooner or later you are going to love me."

She laughed a little wearily.  "There spake the bold man.  Well—you have
my good wishes."

"Your—good—wishes?"

"Don’t flatter yourself."  Her staying hand checked his enthusiasm.
"You said just now that I didn’t love—my husband.  Perhaps you are
right.  I don’t know. I have no standard by which to judge, and only
love could supply one.  So far—you have failed to do so. I like you—very
much; but—if I ever love again, the man must lift me out of myself, make
me forget—him, myself, the whole world."

"I’ll do it!" he confidently exclaimed; then, sobering, added: "I want
you to promise one thing.  It isn’t much—simply to give serious thought
to your position while I am away—to remember what I have just told you
and to forget that first foolish mistake that cost me so much.  Now will
you?"

"Surely," she honestly answered.

"And—if possible—give me an answer?"

She nodded, and he was content to leave it there. They were now on the
last mile, and they made it in silence, he plunged in delicious reverie,
she very thoughtful.  Looking up as the cutter rolled and bumped over
the frozen stable-yard, he caught her looking at him with soft
compassion.

"Well?"

She smiled.  "Did you really—suffer?"

"Hell!"

Grasping her hand, he had almost kissed it when she jerked it suddenly
away.  "There’s Karl—and Jenny—standing in the door."  Noting his sudden
discomposure, she added: "Never mind, she didn’t see you. Won’t you come
in?"

"Can’t—put me late for the choring."

This was only one of a dozen times that he had refused the invitation.
A little surprised, she watched him turn and drive away, then she saw
Nels coming up from the stable, and the thought was lost in wonder as to
whether or no he had seen Molyneux take her hand.

Now, as a matter of fact, Nels had; moreover, he mentioned it to Jenny
as he helped her wipe the supper dishes, and thereby earned much
trouble.  "I tank," he observed, "something is doings.  Cappan he taken
the mistress hand.  Pratty soon the boss no have womans."

His chuckle died under her wrathful stare.  "Mention that to any one,
Nels, an’ Mr. Bender ’ll break every bone in your body."

It was not so easy to dispose of her own misgivings. As, that evening,
she arranged the dishes in the homemade plate-rack, she turned sombre
eyes on Helen, musing by the stove.  Often her lips opened, but sound
trembled on its thresholds.  She kept her own counsel till Bender
dropped in on his next visit.

It was perfectly natural for her to turn to him for counsel.  Coming to
her as he did, in the moment of her sore trouble, her girl’s heart had
opened and vented on him the love that had been prisoned since the death
of her mother; and ever since a perfect understanding of kindred natures
had obtained between them.

"They’re talking about her in the settlements something scan’lous," she
told him.  "Tongues is clacking from here to Lone Tree.  Why _don’t_ Mr.
Carter come home?  Kain’t you persuade him?"

But Bender shook his head.  "No, he’s stiffer’n all he—  Beg your
pardon!  I mean he’s dreadful sot in his mind.  I wouldn’t envy the one
that went to advise him."

Before going away Bender touched on a matter that was now old history in
their intercourse.  "Changed your mind yet, little girl?"

It was now Jenny’s turn to sorrowfully shake her head. "It would be my
an’ pleasure to be wife to a big, good man like you.  But I just kain’t
bring myself to put you where any man could cast my shame in your face."

"Oh, shore!" he protested.  "You was that little—a teeny bit of a thing,
jes’ seventeen—on’y a baby.  Who’d be holding it agin you?  Besides—he’s
in England."

"Yes—he’s in England," Jenny slowly repeated.  "But—"

He did not see the queer look she sent after him as he rode away.




                                 *XVI*

                            *A HOUSE-PARTY*


One morning, some three weeks after Molyneux’s departure, Helen sat in
her doorway reading, as certain an indication of coming spring as the
honk of the wild geese speeding northward on the back of the amorous
south wind.  As yet the prairie sloughs wore mail of ice, but from dizzy
heights those keen-eyed voyagers discerned tricklings and wee pools
under sheltered forest banks, sufficient till the laggard sun should
smite the snows and fill the air with tinklings and gurglings, loose the
strange sound of running waters on the frozen silence.  Another month
would do it.  Already the drifts were packing, and the hard trails
traversed the sinking snows like mountain chains on a relief map. In
Helen’s door-yard stratas of yellow chips, debris of the winter’s
furious firing, were beginning to appear; with them, lost articles;
indeed, Nels was gobbling joyously over the retrieval of an axe, when
Leslie’s team and cutter came swinging into the yard.

Mrs. Leslie was driving, and, seeing Helen, she screamed from a hundred
yards: "They are coming!  All of ’em!"

"Who?" Helen asked, when the ponies stopped at the door.

"Why, Edith Newton, Mrs. Jack Charters, Sinclair Rhodes—you remember?  I
told you that I should give a house-party for the Regis folks when the
frosts let up. Hurry and pack up your war-paint!  They’ll be here
to-morrow, and I need your help.  No refusal!  Fred is going in to Lone
Tree to-morrow and Jenny can go down with him.  Nels will cook for
himself, won’t you, Nels?"

"I tank I can cook, yes."  Nels ceased his jubilations over the axe long
enough to season his assent with a bleached grin.

"There!  It’s all fixed."  Bustling inside, she talked volubly while
assisting in Helen’s selections.  "Yes, take that; you look your
sweetest in it; and I imported Captain Chapman especially for you.  That
also; you’ll need it evenings.  No, Captain Charters isn’t coming. Some
Indian trouble called him west.  Oh, Mrs. Jack won’t care—I’m the loser,
for he was always my cavalier."

Driving home, she rattled steadily, entertaining Helen with descriptions
of her expected guests, giving their pedigrees, aristocratic
connections, while she spiced her discourse with malicious fact.
Sinclair Rhodes had secured his appointment as land agent at Regis
through distant cousinship to the governor-general.  And why not?  The
offices ought to go to well-bred people!  He had money, must have, for
his salary and expenses were out of all proportion—so much so as to
cause comment by malicious people, envious souls!  What if he did make a
little, as they said, on the side?  The government could afford it; and
every one knew what Canadians were in office!  People who live in glass
houses, and so forth!  It was simply racial envy!  She was also
becomingly indignant over the action of certain Canadians who had made
trouble for Captain Chapman in the matter of mounted-police supplies.
What figure did a few tons of provisions cut in a gentleman’s accounts?
These commercial intellects, with their mathematical exactness, were
horrid.  Newton?  He was an appointee of Rhodes. No, no relation.  She
waived further description of the Newtons, omitted the pregnant fact
that Charles Newton’s presence cut as little figure in his wife’s social
calculations as Captain Charters’ absence did in those of Mrs. Jack.

Caution, doubtless, counselled the omission.  The quail is not flushed
till the net be spread.  Yet the reservation was hardly necessary in the
light of Helen’s condition.  Judgment of another’s action is colored by
one’s own mental state, and she was not so likely to be shocked by one
who had defied the conventions against which she herself was in open
mutiny.  Anyway, she liked Mrs. Jack at first sight, despite the
scandalous manner in which she flirted with Charles Newton the first
night at table.  Big, tall, and fair, large eyes expressed her saving
grace, an unparalleled frankness that seemed to sterilize her
flirtations and rob them of impropriety.  Twice during the meal she
retailed Newton’s tender asides to his wife, asking, laughingly, if she
recognized the vintage.

However, being as yet in happy ignorance of many things that would soon
cause her serious disquiet, Helen thoroughly enjoyed that first evening.
The well-appointed table, with its sparkling glass, silver, snowy
napery; the well-groomed people and their correct speech alike fed her
starved æsthetic senses while they aroused dormant social qualities.
She laughed, chattered, capped Mrs. Jack’s sallies, displaying animation
and wit that simply astonished Mrs. Leslie.  Her wonder, indeed, caused
Edith Newton to whisper in Mrs. Jack’s ear:

"Elinor looks as though she had imported a swan in mistake for a
duckling.  Look at Sinclair—positively smitten.  Giving her all his
attention, though he took Elinor in.  The girl seems to like him, too."

Mrs. Jack’s big eyes turned to the laughing face that was raised up to
Rhodes.  "Don’t believe a word he says, my dear," she suddenly called
across the table. "And look out for him.  He’s dangerous."

Though she laughed, Rhodes must have sensed a serious motive, for he
glanced up in quick annoyance.  "Do I look it?" he asked, turning again
to Helen.

Nature does not lie.  His narrowly spaced eyes, salient facial angles,
dull skin, heavy lips carried her certificate of degeneracy.  A
physiognomist would have pronounced him dangerous to innocence as a wild
beast on less evidence, but to Helen’s inexperience he appeared as a man
unusually handsome, profile or front face. The significant angles did
not alter the good modelling of his nose and chin or affect the
regularity of his features.  Tall, slim, irreproachable in manner and
dress, there was no scratch to reveal the base metal beneath his
electroplate refinement.

"You certainly don’t," she answered, laughing.

"Then," he said, with mock gravity, "I can patiently suffer the sting of
calumny."

"Calumny?" Mrs. Jack echoed, teasingly.  "_Calumny_? What’s that?"

"Synonyme for conscience," Edith Newton put in, with a spice of malice.
For though the conquest of Rhodes—to which Regis gossip wickedly laid
Newton’s presence in the land office—was now stale with age and tiresome
to herself, she was selfish enough to resent his defection.

"Sinclair found it while rummaging Fred’s coat for matches," her husband
added.  Leslie’s simplicity was as much of a joke to them as it was with
the Canadian settlers, and, under cover of the laugh, Chapman—a big
blond of that cavalry, mustached type which wins England’s cricket
matches while losing all her wars—leaned over and whispered in Newton’s
ear: "Leslie will lose more than his conscience if he doesn’t look out.
La belle Elinor is madly smitten."  Aloud, he said, "Sinclair would
hardly know what to do with it, Mrs. Newton."

"Hearken not to the tongue of envy, Mrs. Carter," Rhodes retaliated upon
his tormentors.  "I’m a very responsible person, I assure you."

She laughed at his mock seriousness, and, believing it all fooling, gave
him so much of her attention that evening as to cause more than one
comment.  "Rhodes is making heavy running," Newton remarked once to
Chapman, who replied, conceitedly stroking his mustache, "Wait till I
get in my innings."

"After me," Newton answered.  "I come next at the bat."

Ignorant of this and other by-play, however, Helen thoroughly enjoyed
the first days of the party.  On the frontier, amusement is a home-made
product, and shares the superiority of domestic jams, jellies, and
pickles over the article of commerce.  They caught the fickle damsel
Pleasure coming and going, reaping the satisfaction of both spectator
and entertainer.  By day they skated, drove, or curled on a rink which
the male guests laid out; nights, they sang, danced, played games, and
romped like children.

Apart from a certain freedom in their intercourse, which she attributed
to long acquaintance, Helen found nothing objectionable in the demeanor
of her new friends during those first few days.  On the contrary, she
thought them a trifle dull.  Their preglacial and ponderous humor
excited her risibility; she laughed as often at as with them.  At other
times she could not but feel that they regarded her as alien, a pretty
pagan without their social pale, and she would revolt against their
enormous egotism, insolent national conceit.  She broke many a lance on
that impregnable shield.

"You English," she flashed back when, one evening, Newton reflected on
American pronunciation of certain English family names—"you English
remind me of the Jews, with their sibboleth and shibboleth.  Is your
aristocracy so doubtful of its own identity that it is compelled to
hedge itself against intrusion by the use of passwords.  You may call
’Cholmondeley’ ’Chumley,’ if you choose, but we commit no crime in
pronouncing it as spelled."

Again, when Edith Newton rallied her on some crude custom which she
maintained was peculiarly American, Helen delivered a sharp _riposte_.
"No, I never saw it done at home; but I have heard that it is quite
common among English emigrants on transatlantic liners."  Such tiffs
were, however, rare; and, to do them justice, men and women hastened to
sacrifice national conceit on the altars of her wounded
susceptibilities.

Offence came later, and on quite another score.  At first she liked the
attentions paid her; the gallantry of the men put her on better terms
with herself, renewed the confidence which had diminished to the
vanishing-point during her months of loneliness.  But when constant
association thawed the reserve natural to first acquaintance, and
freedom evolved into familiarity, her instincts took alarm.  Distressed,
she observed the other women to see if she had been singled out.  But
no, they seemed quite comfortable under similar attentions, and they
rallied her when she unfolded her misgivings at afternoon tea.

"You shouldn’t be so pretty, my dear," Mrs. Jack said, laughing.  "What
can the poor men do?"  Then they made fun of her scruples, satirizing
conventions and institutions which she had always regarded as necessary,
if not God-ordained.

"Marriage," Edith Newton once cynically exclaimed, "is merely a badge of
respectability, useful as a shield from the slings and arrows."  Then,
from the depths of her own degeneracy, she evolved the utterance: "Men
are all beasts beneath the skin.  Wise women use them for pleasure or
profit."

Helen revolted at that; it transcended her mutiny. But few people are
made of martyr stuff—perhaps fortunately so; martyrs are uncomfortable
folk, and, wise in her eternal generation, nature sprinkles them lightly
over the mass of common clay.  The average person easily takes the color
of environment, so why not Helen? Thinking that perhaps she was a little
prudish, she stifled her fears, tried to imitate the nonchalance of the
others.  She even made a few tentative attempts at daring.  Alas! as
well expect a rabbit to ruffle it with wolves.  Such immediate and
unwelcome results followed that she retired precipitously behind
ramparts of blushing reserve.  But the damage was done. Thereafter
Chapman, Newton, Rhodes, one or another, was constantly at her elbow;
she was unpleasantly conscious that, having let down her fences, they
looked upon her as free game.

The thought stirred her to fight.  Chapman she disposed of with a single
rebuff that sent him back to Mrs. Jack’s side.  But Newton proved
unmanageable. Impervious to snubs, his manner conveyed his idea that her
modesty was simply a blind for the others.  His familiarities bordered
on license.  A good singer, he always asked her to play his
accompaniments of evenings, and she would sicken as he used the pretence
of turning a leaf to lean heavily upon her shoulder.  At other times he
made occasion to touch her—would pick threads from her jacket; lean
across her to speak to her neighbor at table.

By such tactics he brought her, one morning, to great confusion.  A Cree
Indian had driven in from the Assiniboin reserve with bead-work,
moccasins, and badger-skin mittens which he wished to trade for flour or
bacon.  With the other women Helen was bending over to examine his
wares, when Newton entered the kitchen.  Stepping quietly up from
behind, he laid a hand on Helen’s hair.  Taking him for one of the other
women, she suffered his fondling till Mrs. Leslie, who knew he was
there, asked his opinion on a tobacco-pouch. Then, before she could
move, speak, cast off his hand, he pressed her head against his wife’s
dark curls.

"Just look at the contrast!" he admiringly exclaimed, and so robbed her
anger.

Yet so evident was the intent behind the excuse that even the Cree
detected the sham.  From Helen his dark glance travelled to Newton and
back again.  "He your man?" he asked.

Vexed to the point of tears, she shook her head and bent over the
bead-work to hide her embarrassment. But the Cree’s rude notions of
etiquette had been jarred. "He touch your hair!"

So simple, his comment yet pierced to the heart of the matter.  Newton
had fondled her hair, crown and symbol of her womanhood, a privilege of
marriage.  In an Indian tribe the offence would have loosed the slipping
knife; a settler would have resented it with knarled fist. But here the
women tittered, while Chapman, who just then sauntered in, laughed.

Emboldened, perhaps, by immunity, the man’s offensiveness developed into
actual insult the evening of that same day.  They had all been pulling
taffy in the kitchen, and, passing through a dark passage to the
living-room, Helen felt an arm slip about her waist. Newton’s face was
still tingling from a vigorous slap when she confronted him before them
all in the living-room. Even his hardihood quailed before her flushed
and contemptuous anger; he was not quite so ready with his excuse.

"I _beg_ your _pardon_, Mrs. Carter!  Really, I mistook you for my
wife."

It was a lie on the face of it, and, barbed with stinging truth, her
retort drew a peal of laughter from the others. "Indeed?  Your excuse is
more remarkable than your mistake."

Offended as much by the laugh as the insult, she seated herself on a
lounge by Leslie, the one man with whom she always felt safe.  In him
the stigma of degeneracy took another form; the tired blood expressed
itself in a prodigious simplicity.  He lacked even the elements of vice.
As his wife put it, "Fred is too stupid to be wicked."  Yet, withal, he
was very much of a man as far as his chuckleheadedness permitted, and
now he offered real sympathy.

"It was a caddish trick, Mrs. Carter, and I mean to tell him so."

"Oh no!" she pleaded.  "It wouldn’t improve matters to make a scene, and
he’s not likely to offend again. Please don’t?  Stay here—with me."

"But I’m your host.  Really, he deserves a thrashing."

"No, no!  Stay here!  I don’t feel equal to the others."

"I never do."  Sitting again, he turned on her a look of beaming
fellowship.  "The girls all yawn and look terribly bored when I try to
amuse them—except you. They don’t seem to care for horses and dogs, the
things that interest me."

If, as a conversationalist, he did not shine, he at least brought her
the first easy moments she had known that day, and she turned a
sympathetic ear to some of his prattle.  Indicating Rhodes, who was
leaning over Mrs. Leslie, he said: "You know I don’t like that sort of
thing.  Elinor says I’m old-fashioned, and I suppose she knows.  Of
course she wouldn’t do anything that wasn’t proper, but a fellow has his
feelings, and it doesn’t take a crime to hurt them, does it?  She’s up
on the conventions; but it does seem to me that if a fellow has anything
to say to another fellow’s wife he ought to say it aloud."

Astonished that his dulness should have sensed the pervading sensualism,
she studied him while he watched his wife, in his eyes something of that
pitiful pleading one sees in those of a beaten dog.  His words banished
her doubts as to whether her own misgivings did not root in
hypercritical standards—restored her viewpoint. All week the atmosphere
had thickened, as constant association banished reserve, and to-day
freedom had attained its meridian.  It was not the matter but the manner
of conversation that filled her with a great uneasiness—the whispers,
asides, smiling stares, conscious laughter.  The vitiated atmosphere
caused her a feeling of suffocation, and in the midst of her sick
revulsion Leslie dropped a remark that came to her like a breath of
ozone.

"I was awfully sorry to hear of the trouble between you and Carter.  I
always thought him _such_ a fine fellow.  He hadn’t much use for me—any
of us—still I liked him.  He was a bit on the rough, of course; but, I
tell you, character counts more than culture, strength than refinement."

Character counts more than culture, strength than refinement?  To his
simplicity had been vouched wisdom worthy of a philosopher.  The phrase
stabbed her. Before her rose a vision of her husband as she had seen him
that last miserable night, cold, stern, inexorable, in the loom of the
moonlight.  In view of that colossal memory, the Englishmen about her
dwarfed to effeminate insignificance.  Vividly her own doubting
recurred. And she had traded him—for this!  The thought brought
wretchedness too great for concealment.  Her uneasiness was so manifest
as to form the theme of a bedroom conversation.

Though comfortable—the one frame house in the settlements, a palace to
Canadian eyes—Leslie’s house boasted only two bedrooms; so while the men
made shift on shake-downs, Helen shared Mrs. Leslie’s rooms, Edith
Newton and Mrs. Jack the other.

As she braided her hair for the night, the latter lady opened the
conversation.  "Did you notice how uncomfortable little Carter was this
evening?  She is a nice little thing, but she doesn’t mix.  I don’t see
why Elinor invited her."

"You don’t, eh?"  Edith Newton mumbled a mouthful of pins.  "You are
slow, Maud."

"No—only lazy.  Why should I puzzle over things when you are here?  I’ll
bet you have pumped everybody dry long ago.  Now—dispense!"

"I don’t go round with my eyes shut," the other calmly answered.  "To
begin: Calvert Molyneux is completely gone on little Carter, whose
husband, it seems, left her because of some slight."

"Hum!"  Mrs. Jack elevated her straight brows. "Foolish man to leave her
to Calvert.  So that is why he went home!  Exits till the tarnished
pearl be regulped by the conjugal oyster?  Clever!"

"On the contrary"—she curled a full red lip—"he contemplates _honorable_
marriage—dalliance, Dakota, divorce, everything that begins with D, down
to eventual desertion, if I know anything of Calvert.  But fancy—HE!"

"’The devil in love, the devil a husband would be,’" Mrs. Jack
misquoted.

"’The devil married, the devil a husband was he,’" Edith Newton
finished.  "But he is not married yet. She holds him off—foolishly.  For
you know Calvert, good in streaks, but ruled by his emotions and
ruthless when they command.  If she turns him down—"

"She’ll need to keep him at longer distance than this house affords.
But Elinor?—this doesn’t explain her. She’s beastly selfish under her
jolly little skin.  Why is she posing as aid and advocate of love?"

"In love with Carter hubby—or was would be more correct, in view of her
carryings-on with Sinclair.  But the Carter attack, I understand, was
very severe while it lasted. Think of it, Maud, Elinor to fall in love
with a settler!"

Mrs. Jack elevated naked shoulders.  "Not at all surprising.  Just the
itch of her rotten blood for a few sound corpuscles.  I’ve felt it
myself at times.  Don’t look so shocked—you know we are rotten."

"Maud!  Maud!"

Humming a bar of "La Boheme," Mrs. Jack regarded her companion through
narrowed lids.  "I believe, Edith, you keep up appearances with
yourself.  Why not be natural for a change?  But, as you say, Elinor
seems to have made a complete convalescence.  Did you _ever_ see a woman
make _such_ a projectile of herself?  Positively hurls herself at
Sinclair.  But tell me more about the Carter man.  How did he treat her
rabies?"

"Cold-water cure.  Turned her down—flat."

"So in revenge she’s trying to besmirch the wife? The little devil!  I
call that pretty raw, Edith."

The other shrugged.  "Oh, well, it is her pie, and if she prefers it
uncooked it is none of our business. Better keep your fingers out of it,
Maud.  Struggle with your good intentions."

Mrs. Jack smiled sweetly.  "My dear, am I in the habit of messing alien
pies?"

"Not unless you covet the meat."

"Well, I’m not hankering after either Calvert or Carter hubby, though I
must say that I like his specifications. Showed awfully good taste both
in selecting his wife and rejecting Elinor.  Fancy! a virtuous man—in
this day!"

By this time Edith Newton was disposed in bed.  A sleepy answer came
from under the clothing.  "Proves he hadn’t the honor of your
acquaintance."

"Nor yours," Mrs. Jack retorted.

Her flippancy masked a disquiet so grave as to drive away the desire for
sleep.  Clad only in her bed-gown, she drew a chair up to the stove,
which returned her thoughtful gaze through two red monocles of
isinglass. In her fair-play was associated with its companion virtue
frankness, and in no wise could she read a mite of the former quality
into Elinor Leslie’s intent towards Helen.  After many uneasy
shruggings, she rose, took the lamp, and walked into the other bedroom.

"Misplaced my comb," she answered Mrs. Leslie’s sleepy inquiry.  "Lend
me yours."  Then she paused at the foot of the bed.

Helen had coiled her hair for the night, but its unruly masses had
loosened and ran, a perfect cataract of gold, over her pillow.  Against
that auriferous background lay her head and face, with its delicate
creams and pinks sinking into the plumpness of one white arm.  The other
was folded over the softness of her bosom.  Mrs. Jack thought her asleep
till her eyes opened, then, returning the girl’s smile, she tiptoed back
to her fire.

"It’s a damned shame," she told herself, profanely, but truly, and with
such vigor that Edith Newton sleepily asked: "What’s the matter?  Aren’t
you ever coming to bed, Maud?"

"Saying my prayers.  Go to sleep."

"Put in a word for me," the other murmured.

"The Lord knows that you need it."  Mrs. Jack glanced at the bed, then
returned to her musings.  "Of course she’s a little fool.  If she goes
back to her husband she will have to settle down to the humdrum of
settler life—raise calves, chickens, pigs, and children in the fear of
the Lord, with only a church picnic or some such wild dissipation to
break the deadly monotony.  A pleasing prospect, I must say.  But if it
suits her—well, I’m not going to see her delivered, bound and bleating,
into the hands of the devil, _alias_ Calvert Molyneux. It seems a shame,
either way, but she undoubtedly loves her settler hubby, and she’s just
the kind to eat her heart out through remorse and shame.  And here is
Elinor blackening her reputation with the pig settlers to whom she must
look for a living, making reconciliation impossible!  Well, I’m going to
speak to the little fool to-morrow."

This she did, making her opportunity by carrying Helen off to her
bedroom, where, having disposed her victim in a comfortable chair, she
herself snuggled down upon the bed and went with customary frankness
straight to the heart of her subject.  "I want to know, Helen Carter,
why you are here?"

Puzzled, Helen stared; then, interpreting by the smile, she answered,
"I—really, I—don’t know."

"A—pretty—poor—reason!"  She shook her finger in affected anger.  "Don’t
you _know_ that you don’t belong? Now don’t flare up!  If I were Edith
Newton, or Elinor, the cat, you might suspect a reflection.  It isn’t
that you are below grade—just the opposite.  Frankly, my dear, we are a
rotten lot.  A sweet girl, with conscience and morality has no business
among us.  We couldn’t scrape up enough of either article to outfit a
respectable cat.  Don’t blush.  I’m not envying you your conscience.  It
is a most uncomfortable asset, and, given choice of two evils, I’d take
a harelip.  But, as you have one—well, you’d better mizzle—go home, you
know."

Having eased herself by this delivery, Mrs. Jack sighed, sat up, rolled
herself a cigarette, and went on, after a contented puff: "Don’t tell on
me, my dear.  Not that I care a whoop—that’s American, isn’t it?  I love
your slang; it is so expressive and comfortable to the feelings. But,
you see, rakishness has no attractions for the fool male of our species.
He resents any infringement of his monopoly.  Even such a degenerate ass
as Charles Newton prefers school-girl simplicity.  So one must needs
simulate virgin innocence, however painful.  That’s more of your
delightful slang.  Now—when are you going?"

The question anticipated the conclusion of Helen’s midnight tossings;
but, if unchanged in substance, this had nevertheless been modified by
cooler morning reflections.  She stated the qualifications—Jenny was
visiting in Lone Tree, and would not return till Saturday. Only two more
days!  Her visit would then come to a natural end, so why offend by
abrupt departure?

Mrs. Jack laughed.  "I don’t think Elinor would be so very dreadfully
offended.  Why?  Well, it is ungracious to criticise one’s hostess,
but—you have trapped her rabbit."

"Her—rabbit?"

"Yes—Sinclair Rhodes."

"Why, he paid me less attention than any of the others; was less—you’ll
pardon me—offensive.  I even thought he tried to keep them away."

"As the lion drives the jackals.  Avoid him, my dear. Well, I suppose
that a couple more days won’t hurt. We are to stay a week longer, and if
Elinor asks you—which she won’t—you _must_ refuse.  Now let us go out
before they begin to suspect a conspiracy."

"But first let me thank you.  I have been so miserable, and you have
done me _so_ much good."

Mrs. Jack gently patted the hand that caught her arm, an action totally
at variance with her answer. "Self-interest, I assure you.  Elinor is
not the only sufferer. You have depleted the entire preserve.  Not a man
has looked at me the last three days.  There, there!  You needn’t
believe it if you don’t want to."

Could Mrs. Jack’s frank eyes have pierced the immediate future, she
would have made her warning against Rhodes more specific.  On Thursday
of that week Leslie drove his heavy team and bobs into Lone Tree for
supplies, and, what of the thawing trails, could not possibly be back
till all hours Saturday night.  Not knowing this, Mrs. Jack made no
objection when, Saturday morning, Danvers drove over with Molyneux’s
double cutter and carried off herself and the Newtons to visit a friend
west of the Assiniboin.

"You’ll be here till after supper," she said to Helen, leaving.  "So I
won’t say good-bye."

But she miscalculated both the warmth of the friend’s welcome and the
heavy sledding.  When she returned, long after dark, she found Mrs.
Leslie reading a novel by her bedroom stove.  In a loose wrapper,
crossed feet comfortably propped on the plated stove-rail, a plate of
red apples at her elbow, and the light comfortably adjusted on the table
behind her, she was the picture of comfort.  "Having a jolly good time
all by myself," she explained.  "Fred’s not home yet, and Captain
Chapman went over to win a little from Ernest Poole at poker. Helen?
Just gone.  She waited and waited and waited, but you were so late that
we both thought you had concluded to stay the night.  Didn’t you pass
her at the Forks—or hear the bells?  That double string of Fred’s can be
heard to heaven on a still night."

"Oh, was that she?  Hired man came for her, I suppose?" Mrs. Jack
indifferently inquired, as she laid off her furs.

"No.  Sinclair drove her with our ponies.  What’s the matter?"

Eyes dark and dilated with fear, Mrs. Jack faced her. "Do you mean to
tell me—"  Breaking hastily off, she ran through bed and living rooms,
almost upsetting Newton on her way to the outer door.  "Mr. Danvers! Oh,
Mr. Danvers!  Mr. Danvers!  Mr.—Danvers!" she called.

But the night returned only the clash of his bells.

Sweeping back in, she faced Mrs. Leslie, flushed with the one righteous
emotion of her fast life.  "You let her go out—alone—with that—"
Choking, she ran into her own room and slammed the door, leaving the
other two women staring.

Edith Newton answered the lift of the other’s eyebrows.  "Another of
Maud’s raves."




                                 *XVII*

                           *—AND ITS FINALE*


But for the bells and groan of runners, which drowned sound for them
even as it did for Danvers, Helen and Rhodes were near enough to have
heard Mrs. Jack’s call.  Interpreting the latter’s warning morally,
Helen had accepted Rhodes’s escort as the lesser of two evils, or, if
she had speculated on tentative attempts at flirtation, had not doubted
her own ability to snub them.

A sudden frost, winter’s last desperate clutch at the throat of spring,
had hardened the sun-rotted trails; and as the cutter sped swiftly over
the first mile, she chatted freely, without thought of danger.  Of the
three male guests, Rhodes had, as aforeseen, pestered her least, so,
ignorant of the pitiless brutality masked by his reserve, she was
paralyzed—almost fainted—when his arm suddenly dropped from the
cutter-rail to her waist.

Recovering, she spoke sharply, "Take it away!"

Instead, he drew her tighter.  She could not see his face; but as she
struck, madly, blindly, at its dim whiteness, his laugh, heartless,
cynical, came out of the dusk, "Kick, bite, scratch all you want, my
little beauty," he said, forcing his face against hers, "your struggles
are sweet as caresses."

Yet, withal his boast, he found it difficult to hold her. Twice she
broke his grip and almost leaped from the sleigh; and as she fought his
face away, her hand suddenly touched the reins that were looped over his
arm.

In the black confusion he was unable to specify just what happened
thereafter.  He knew that, alarmed by the scuffling, the ponies had
burst into a gallop; but, though he felt her relax, he could not see her
throw all of her weight into a sudden jerk on the left rein.  Ensued a
heaving, tumultuous moment.  Pulled from the trail, the ponies plunged
into deep drift.  The cutter bucked like a live thing, and as it dropped
from the high trail a runner cracked with a pistol report.
Simultaneously they were thrown out into deep, cold snow.

They fell clear of each other, and Helen heard Rhodes swearing as he ran
to the ponies’ heads.  The sound spurred her to action.  She could only
count on a minute, and, rising, she ran, stumbling, falling headlong
into drifts to rise and plunge on, in her heart the terror of the hunted
thing.  Each second she expected to hear his pursuing foot.  But he had
to tie the ponies to a prairie poplar, and by that time she had gained a
bluff two hundred yards away, and was crouched like a chased hare in its
heart.

That poor covert would not have sufficed against a frontiersman.
Tracking by the fainter whiteness of broken snow, he would soon have
flushed the trembling game, but it was ample protection from Rhodes’s
inefficiency.  Alarmed when he saw that she was gone, he ran back and
forth, shouting, coupling her name with promises of good behavior.  As
her line of flight had angled but slightly from the trail, she heard him
plainly.

"My God!  You’ll freeze!  Mrs. Carter!  Oh, Mrs. Carter! Do come out!  I
was only joking!"

She did not require his assurance as to the freezing. Already her limbs
were numb, her teeth chattered so loudly she was afraid he would hear.
But she preferred the frost’s mercy to his, and so lay, shivering,
until, in despair, he got the ponies back to the trail and drove rapidly
away.  Then she came out and headed homeward like a bolting rabbit.
Twice she was scared back into the snow: once when Rhodes turned about
and dashed down and back the trail; again just before she picked
Leslie’s voice from passing bells.  He was merely talking to his horses,
but never before had his voice fallen so sweetly on pretty ears.

As at some wan ghost, he stared at the dim, draggled figure that came up
to him out of the snows; indeed, half frozen and wholly frightened, she
was little more than the ghost of herself.  "The cad!" he stormed,
hearing her story.  "I’ll punch his head to-morrow!"  And he maintained
that rude intention up to the moment that he dropped her at her own
door.

"Don’t!" she called after him.  "Elinor won’t like it."  But the caution
was for his own good, and she was not so very much cast down when he
persisted.

"Then she can lump it!" he shouted back.

The proverb gives the trampled worm rather more than due credit when one
remembers that a barrel-hoop can outturn the very fiercest worm, but it
should be remembered in Leslie’s favor that he mutinied in the cause of
another.  Having all of the obstinacy of his dulness, he went straighter
to his end because it was allied with that narrow, bull-dog vision which
excludes all but one object from the field of sight.  Meeting Rhodes,
Chapman, and Newton, with lanterns, at the point where the sleigh had
capsized, he rushed the former and was living in the strict letter of
his intention when the others pulled him away.  They could not, however,
dam his indignant speech.  On that vast, dark stage, with the lanterns
shedding a golden aureole about Rhodes and his bleeding mouth, he gave
them the undiluted truth, as it is said to flow from the mouths of babes
and sucklings.

Arrived home, moreover, he staggered his wife by his stubborn
opposition.  "It is no use talking, Elinor," he said, closing a bitter
argument.  "To-morrow I go to the bush for a load of wood, and if that
cad is here when I return I’ll break a whip on his back."  Then,
ignoring her bitten lips, clinched hands, the bitter fury that was to
produce such woful consequences, he went quietly off to bed.

Of all this, however, Helen remained in ignorance until after the
denouement that came a few days later along with a scattering of new
snow.  Those were days of misery for her—of remorseful brooding,
self-reproach, hot shame that set her at bitter introspection that she
might find and root out the germs of wickedness that had brought these
successive insults.  As hundreds of good girls before her, as thousands
will after her, she wondered if she were really the possessor of some
unsuspected sensuousness.  Comparisons, too, were forced upon her.
Revolting from the rough settler life, she had turned to the English set
only to find that their polished ease was but the veneer of their
degeneracy, analogous to the phosphorescence given off in the dark by a
poisoned fish, and equally indicative of decay. She could not fail to
contrast her husband’s sterling worth with their moral and intellectual
leprosy.

The nights were still more trying.  She would sit, evenings, and stare
at the lamp as though it were the veritable flame of life, while her
spirit quested after the cause of things and the root of many enigmas.
Why, for instance, is it that pitilessness, ferocity, ruth, which were
good in the youth of the world, should cause such evil in its old age?
For what reason the cause of the lily willed also its blight?  Why
conditions make fish of one woman, flesh of another, and fowl of a
third, and wherefore any one of them should be damned for doing what she
couldn’t help in following the dictates of her nature?  In fact, from
the duration of her reveries, she may have entertained all of the
hundred and odd questions with which the atom pelts the infinite, and,
judging from her dissatisfaction, she received the usual answer—Why?  It
is nature’s wont to deliver her lessons in parables, from which each
must extract his or her own meanings; and a momentous page was turned in
Helen’s lesson the day that she rode over to Leslie’s to verify a rumor
which Nels had brought from the post-office.

As sleighing was practically over and wheeling not yet begun, she went
horseback.  As aforesaid, a scattering of new snow covered the prairies,
and she rode through a bitter prospect.  Everywhere yellow grass
tussocks or tall brown weeds thrust through the scant whiteness to wave
in the chill wind.  Under the sky’s enormous gray, scrub and bluff and
blackened drifts stood out, harsh studies in black and white.  Nature
was in the blues, and all sentient things shared her dull humor.
Winging north, in V or harrow formations, the wild ducks quacked their
discontent.  Peevish snipe cursed the weather as they dipped from slough
to slough. A lone coyote complained that the season transcended his
experience, then broke off his plaint to chase a rabbit, of whose red
death Helen was shuddering witness.

The settlement was even less cheerful.  Such houses as she passed rose
like dirty smudges from the frozen mud of their dooryards.  Moreover,
the looks of the few settlers she met were not conducive of better
spirits. MacCloud, a bigoted Presbyterian of the old Scotch-Canadian
school, gave her a malignant grin in exchange for her nod.  Three Shinn
boys, big louts, burst into a loud guffaw as their wagon rattled by her
at the forks of Leslie’s trail.  Their comment, "Guess she hain’t
heard!" increased her apprehension.

She could now see the house, smokeless, apparently lifeless, frowning
down from a snow-clad ridge.  But when, a minute later, she knocked,
Leslie answered, and she entered.  The living-room, with its
associations of gayety, was dank, cold, cheerless.  Ash littered the
fireless stove; the floor was unswept; the air gave back her breath in a
steamy cloud.  Through the bedroom door she saw drawers and boxes wide
open, their contents tossed and tumbled as though some one had rummaged
them for valuable contents.  And amid these ruins of a home Leslie sat,
head bowed in his hands.

"You poor man!" she cried.  "You poor, poor man!"

He turned up his face, and its sick misery reminded her of a worm
raising its mangled head from under a passing wheel as though questing a
reason for its sudden taking off.  His words strengthened the
impression: "I couldn’t seem to satisfy her, and she was angry because I
took your part against him.  Of course she isn’t so much to blame.  I
did as well as I could, but I’m neither clever nor ornamental, like
Rhodes.  But I tried to treat her well, didn’t I?  You shall judge."

"You did—of course you did, poor man!" she sobbed.

"Then why did she leave me?"

Somehow his blind questioning raised the prairie tragedy in her mind.
The rabbit’s death-scream was equally sincere in its protest against
inscrutable fate in the coyote’s green eyes.  Its innocence was
blameless as this. Yet—how could she answer problems as unsolvable as
her own?

"I have been a fool," he went on; and his next words helped to lessen
the astonishment, though not the pain, which his calamity had brought
her.  "A blind fool! When we used to drive out to Regis last summer it
was going on—I can see it now.  They did their billing and cooing under
my very eyes.  Yet they were not so clever, after all, were they?  I
trusted her—with my honor, expecting her to protect it as I would have
defended her virtue.  Was I at fault?  If a man can’t trust his wife,
what can he do?  Surely not lock her up. What could I do?"

Puzzled, she stood and looked down upon him.  But under its delicate
complexities the feminine mind is ever practical, and her attention
quickly turned to his physical welfare.  He must be taken away—weaned
from his sick brooding, blind questioning.  "Have you eaten to-day?" she
asked.  "Not for _three_ days!  Go out and harness your ponies at once,
and come home with me to supper."  Anticipating objection, she added,
"Really, you must, for I am too tired to ride back again."

Her little fiction was hardly necessary, he found it so easy to let her
do his thinking.  He obeyed as one in a trance; and not till they drove
away, leading her pony behind, did action dissipate his lethargy.  Then
he began to display some signs of animation.

It was a silent and uncomfortable drive.  Instead of the usual lively
jingle, pole and harness rattled dully, the light snow hushed the merry
song of the wheels to a slushy dirge.  The raw air, bleak sky, slaty
grays of the dull prospect were eminently oppressive.  Nature had shed
her illusions and, fronting her cold materialism, there was no dodging
issues.  Facts thrust themselves too rudely upon consciousness.  Leslie
spoke but once, and the remark proved that the chill realities had set
him again at the riddle of life.

"I shall sell out," he said, as the ponies swung in on Carter’s trail.
"Go to South Africa.  My brother is a mining superintendent on the
Rand."

She sighed.  "I can’t go to South Africa."

Rousing from his own trouble, he looked at her. "You don’t need to.
You’ll see.  Carter will come home one of these days."  And during the
few days that he stayed with her he extended such brotherly sympathy
that she felt sincerely sorry when, having placed the sale of his farm
and effects in the hands of Danvers, he followed his faithless wife out
of her life and this story.




                                *XVIII*

                  *THE PERSISTENCE OF THE ESTABLISHED*


Save for a few dirty drifts in the shadows of the bluffs, the snow was
all gone when, one morning a week or so after Leslie’s departure, Helen
went south under convoy of Jimmy Glaves to open school.  The day was
beautiful.  Once more the prairies wore the burned browns of autumn, but
to eyes that had grown to the vast snowscape during a half-year of
winter the huge monochrome rioted in color.  In fact it had its values.
There a passing cloud threw a patch of black.  Bowing to the soft
breeze, last year’s grass sent sunlit waves chasing one another down to
the far horizon.  Here and there a green stain on the edge of cropped
hay-sloughs bespoke the miracle of resurrection, eternal wonder of
spring, the young life bubbling forth from the decay and death of parent
plants.  Also the prospect was checkered with the chocolate of ploughed
fields.  On these slow ox-teams crawled, and the shouts of the drivers,
the snapping crack of long whips, alternated as they drove along with
the cheep of running gophers, the "pee-wee" of snipe, song of small
birds.  Noise was luxury after the months of frozen silence.  The warm,
damp air, the feel of balmy spring, the sunlight on the grasses were
delightfully relaxing.  Helen gave herself up to it—permitted sensation
to rule and banish for the moment her tire and trouble.  She chatted
quite happily with the trustee, who, however, seemed gloomy and
preoccupied.

A philosopher coined a phrase—"the persistence of the established"—to
explain the survival of phenomena after the original cause lies dead in
the past.  It admirably defines the trustee’s mental condition, which
was a product of causes set up by Helen in these last months. Ignorant
of the change in her feeling towards her English friends, he was vividly
aware of the prejudice which her dealings with them had aroused in the
settlers.  In the beginning he and Flynn had earned severe criticism by
giving her the school.  Since the Leslie scandal he doubted their
ability to keep her in it.  At meeting, "bees," on trail, her name was
being coupled with grins or gloomy reprobation according to the years
and character of the critics.  The women had plucked her character clean
as a chicken, and were scattering their findings to the four winds.
Just now, of course, the heavy work of seeding sadly interfered with
these activities and diversions, but Jimmy looked for trouble in the
slack season.  If, in the mean time, she could be weaned from her liking
for the English Ishmael, they might be able to weather the prejudice.
To which end he steered the conversation to the greenness, credulity,
and execrable agriculture of the remittance-people.

"I kain’t see," he said, among other things, "what a fine gal like you
kin see in ’em.  They’re dying stock, an’ one o’ these days the
fool-killer will come along an’ brain the hull biling.  Brain, did I
say?  The Lord forgive me!  Kedn’t scratch up the makings of one outen
the hull bunch."

Had she known his mind she might easily have laid his misgivings.
Instead, she tried to modify his bitter opinion.  "They are certainly
inefficient as farmers. But as regards their credulity, don’t you think
it is largely due to a higher standard of business honor? Now when a
Canadian trades horses he expects to be cheated, while they are only
looking for a fair exchange."

Jimmy’s face wrinkled in contemptuous disparagement. "Hain’t that jes’
what I said?  A man that expects to get his own outen a hoss-trade
kain’t be killed too quick.  It’s tempting Providence to leave him
loose. As well expect a nigger to leave a fat rooster as a Canadian to
keep his hands off sech easy meat.  ’Tain’t human natur’.  As for their
honor—"  He sniffed.  "Pity it didn’t extend to their morals."

"It is, indeed."

Afterwards they had many a tilt on this same subject. Smoking in his
doorway of evenings, Jimmy would emit sarcasms from the midst of furious
clouds, while she, as much for fun as from natural feminine perversity,
took the opposite side.  And neither knew the other’s mind—until too
late.  But placated by her low answer, he now let the subject rest.

Three feet of green water was slipping over the river ice when they
forded Silver Creek, and they had to dodge odd logs, the vanguard of
Carter’s drive. "Another week," the trustee remarked, "an’ we couldn’t
have crossed."

He was right.  That week a warm rain ran the last of the snows off
several thousand square miles of watershed, feeding the stream till it
waxed fat and kicked like the scriptural ox against the load Carter had
saddled upon it.  Snarling viciously, it would whirl a timber across a
bend, then rush on with mad roar, leaving a mile of logs backed up
behind.  But such triumph never endured.  With axe, pevees, cant-hooks,
Bender and his men broke the jams; whereupon, as though peevish at its
failure, the river swept out over the level bottoms and stranded timbers
in backwaters among dense scrub.

To see this, the first log-drive on Silver Creek, the children who lived
near the valley scuttled every day from school, and they would gaze,
wide-eyed, at Michigan Red riding a log that spun like a top under his
nimble feet, or watch the Cougar, shoulder-deep in snow-water, shoving
logs at some ticklish point.  Then they would hang about the cook’s
tent, while that functionary juggled with beans and bacon or made
lumberman’s cake by the cubic yard.  Also there were peeps into the
sleeping-tents, where men lay and snored in boots and wet red shirts,
just as they had come out of the river. Of all of which they would
prattle to Helen next day at school, reciting many tales, chief among
them the Homeric narrative of the cutting of a jam—in which she had a
special interest, and which proved, among other things, that Michigan
Red was again at his old tricks.

It was Susie Flynn who brought this tale.  Dipping down, one end of a
bridge timber had stuck at an acute angle into the river-bed.  A second
timber swung broadside on against its end, then, in a trice, the logs
had backed up, grinding bark to pulp under their enormous pressure.
"Mr. Bender," Susie said, "he was for throwing a rope across from bank
to bank so’s they ked cut it from above.  But one wasn’t handy, an’
while they was waiting a big red man comes up an’ hands Mr. Carter the
dare.

"’If you’re scairt, gimme the axe an’ I’ll show you how we trim a jam in
Michigan.’

"But Mr. Carter wouldn’t give it.  ’No,’ he says, awful quiet, yet
sorter funny, for all the men laughed—’no. They’ll need you to show ’em
again.’  Then he walks out on the jam an’ goes to chopping, with Mr.
Bender calling for him to come back an’ not make a damn fool of
himself."

The scene had so impressed the child that she reproduced every detail
for her pale audience of one—Carter astride of the key-log; his men,
bating their breath with the "huh" of his stroke; Bender’s distress; the
cynical grin of Michigan Red.  Once, she said, a floating chip deflected
the axe, and he swore, easily, naturally, turning a smile of annoyance
up to the bank.  It drew no response from eyes that were glued to the
log, now quivering under tons of pressure.  A huge baulk, it broke with
a thunderous report when cut a quarter through, and loosed a mile of
grinding death upon the chopper.

Then came his progress through the welter.  As the jam bore down-stream,
timbers would dip, somersault, and thrash down on a log that still
quivered under the spurn of his leap.  Young trees raised on end and
swept like battering-rams along the log he rode.  Yet, jumping from log
to log, he came up from death out of the turmoil in safety to the bank.

"Brought his axe erlong, too!" Susan triumphantly finished.  "An’ you
should have jes’ seen that red man—he looked that sick an’ green through
his wishy-washy smiling.  But Mr. Carter!  Ain’t he a brave one?  You
must be awful proud of him, ain’t you, Miss Helen?"

What could she answer but "Yes," though the trembling admission covered
only a small portion of her psychology?  Misery, fear, regret made up
the rest. The remainder of that day dragged wearily by to a distant
drone of lessons.  She, who had tried to eject her husband from her
life, shuddered as she thought how nearly her wish had come to
accomplishment. Death’s cold breath chilled resentment, expunged the
memory of her months of weary waiting.  It would return, but in the mean
time she could think of nothing but his danger.  Hurrying home, she
asked Glaves to saddle her a horse, saying that she would try to gallop
off a headache.

Heartache would have been more correct; but she certainly galloped, rode
westward, then swung around north on a wide circle that brought her, at
dusk of the short spring day, out on a bald headland that sheered down
to the river.  Beneath her lay the camp, with its cooking-fires
flickering like wind-blown roses athwart the velvet pall of dusk, and in
either direction from that effulgent bouquet a crimson garland of
sentinel fires laid its miles of length along the valley.

Men moved about the nearer fires, appearing to her distant eyes as dim,
dark shapes.  But what sight refused hearing supplied.  She heard the
cook cursing his kettles with a volubility that would have brought shame
on the witches in Macbeth—the imprecations of some lumber-jack at war
with a threatened jam.  Above all rose the voice of a violin, quivering
its infinite travail, expressing the throbbing pain of the world; then,
from far up the valley, a lonely tenor floated down the night.

    "He went to cut a key-log an’ the jam he went below,
    He was the damnedest man that ever I did know."


Some lumberman was relieving his watch by chanting the deeds of a hero
of the camps, and as, like a dove of night, the voice floated high over
the river’s growl through a score of verses, it helped to drive home
upon Helen a sense of the imminent jeopardy Carter had passed through
that day.  While her beast pawed its impatience, she sat for an hour
trying to pick his voice from the hum of the camp.  It was easy to
distinguish Bender’s.  His bass growl formed the substratum of sound.
She caught, once, the Cougar’s strident tones. Then, just as she was
beginning to despair, a command, stern and clear, rose from the void.

"Lay on there with that pevee!  Quick! or you’ll have ’em piled to
heaven!  Here!—Bender, Cougar!—lend a hand! this fellow’s letting them
jam on him!"

She started as under a lash.  All that day she had lived in a whirl of
feeling, and, just as a resolvent precipitates a chemical mixture, the
stern voice reduced her feeling to thought.  Unfortunately, the tone was
not in harmony with her soft misery.  If it had been—well, it was not.
Rather it recalled his contempt under the moonlight, her own solitary
shame.  Whirling her bronco, she cut him over the flank and galloped, at
imminent risk of her neck, over the dark prairies in vain attempt to
escape the galling recurrence of injured pride, the stings of
disappointment.

"He doesn’t care for me!  He doesn’t care for me!"  It rang in her
brain.  Then, when she was able to think, she added, in obedience to the
sex instinct which will not admit Love’s mortality, "He never did,
otherwise he couldn’t have left me!"  Her conclusion, delivered that
night into a wet pillow, revealed the secret hope at the root of her
disappointment.  "I won’t ride that way again."

But she did, and her changed purpose is best explained by a conversation
between Carter and Bender as they stood drying themselves at the cook’s
fire after averting the threatened jam.

Carter began: "I reckon you can get along well enough without me.  Of
course I’d have liked to seen the drive down to the Assiniboin, but in
another week the frost will be out enough to start prairie grading. I’ll
have to go.  Let me see....  One week more on the creek, two on the
Assiniboin—three weeks will put the last timber into Brandon.  In less
than a month you’ll join me at the Prairie Portage."

Turning to bring another area of soaked clothing next to the fire, his
face came under strong light.  These seven months of thought and
calculation had left their mark upon it—thinned and refined its lines,
tooled the features into an almost intellectual cast.  His mouth,
perhaps, evidenced the greatest change, showing less humor, because,
perhaps, self-repression and the habit of command had drawn the lips in
tighter lines.  Deeper set, his eyes seemed darker, while a straight
look into their depths revealed an underlying sadness.  Sternness and
sadness, indeed, governed the face, without, however, banishing a
certain grave courtesy that found expression in pleasant thanks when,
presently, the cook brought them a steaming jug of coffee.  Lastly,
determination stamped it so positively that only its lively intelligence
saved it from obstinacy.  One glance explained Bender’s answer to Jenny:
"He’s stiffer’n all hell!"—his attitude to Helen.  In him will dominated
the emotions.  Summed, the face, with its power, dogged resolution,
imperturbable confidence, mirrored his past struggles, gave earnest for
his future battles.

A hint of these last inhered in a remark that Bender slid in between two
gulps of coffee.  "They’re saying as the C.P. will never let you cross
their tracks?"

Carter smiled.  "Yes?  Who’s saying it?"

"Oh, everybody.  An’ the Winnipeg paper said yesterday as ’Old
Brass-Bowels’"—he gave the traffic manager his sobriquet—"will enjoin
you an’ carry the case through the Dominion courts to the British privy
council.  The newspaper sharp allows that would take about two years,
during which the monopoly would either buy out or bust your crowd by
building a competing line."

This time Carter laughed heartily, the confident laugh of one sure of
himself.  "So that’s what the paper said?  Well, well, well!  That
scribe person must be something of a psychic.  What’s that?  Oh, a
fellow who tells you a whole lot of things he don’t know himself.  Now,
listen."  (In view of what occurred six months later, his words are
worth remembering.)

"Courts or no courts, privy council to the contrary, we’ll run trains
across ’Brass-Bowel’s’ tracks before next freeze-up."

"Hope you do," Bender grinned.  "But the old man ain’t so very slow."

They talked more of construction—tools, supplies, engineering
difficulties, the hundred problems inherent in railroad-building.
Midnight still found them by the fire, that twinkled, a lone red star,
under the enormous vault of night.

But, though interesting and important, in that the success of the
enterprise involved the economic freedom of a province, the
conversation—with one exception—is not germane to this story, which goes
on from the moment that, two days later, a Pengelly boy carried the news
of Carter’s departure to Helen at school.

The exception was delivered by the mouth of Bender, as he rose,
stretching with a mighty yawn, to go to his tent.  "Of course it’s none
of my damn business, but do you allow to call at the school as you go
down to-morrow?"

Carter’s brows drew into swift lines, but resentment faded before the
big fellow’s concern.  "I didn’t reckon to," he said, gently; yet added
the hint, "—since you’re so pressing."

But Bender would not down.  "Oh, shore!" he pleaded. "Shore! shore!"

Carter looked his impatience, yet yielded another point to the other’s
distress.  "If Mrs. Carter wished to see me, I allow she’d send."

"Then she never will! she never will!" Bender cried, hitting the crux of
their problem.  "For she’s jes’ as proud as you."

With that he plunged into the environing darkness, leaving Carter still
at the fire.  From its glow his face presently raised to the valley’s
rim, dim and ghostly under a new moon, ridged with shadowy trees.  It
was only six miles to Glaves’s place, a hop, skip, and jump in that
country of distances.  For some minutes he stood like a stag on gaze;
then, with a slow shake of the head, he followed Bender.


"An’ he ain’t coming back till winter," the small boy informed Helen.
"He’ll be that busy with his railroading."

After two days of embittered brooding, Helen had come to consider
herself as being in the self-same mood that had ruled her the January
morning when Mrs. Leslie broke in on her months of loneliness.  But this
startling news explained certain contradictions in her psychology—for
instance, her startings and flushings whenever her north window had
shown a moving dot on the valley trail these last two days.  Moreover,
her pallor was hardly consistent with the assertion, thrice repeated
within the hour, that even if he did come she would never, never,
_never_ forgive him _now_!  Not that she conceded said contradictions.
On the contrary, she put up a gorgeous bluff with herself, affected
indifference, and—borrowed Jimmy’s pony that evening and rode down to
the ford.

Bender had built a rough bridge to serve traffic till the drive should
clear the ford.  Reining in at the nearer end, Helen looked down on the
pool, the famous pool wherein her betrothal had received baptism by
total immersion—at least she looked on the place where the pool had
been, for shallows and sand-bar were merged in one swirl of yellow
water.  But the clay bank with its bordering willows was still there,
and shone ruddily under the westering sun just as on that memorable
evening.  Here, on the straight reach, the logs floated under care of an
occasional patrol.  A rough fellow in blue jeans and red jerkin gave her
a curious stare as he passed, whereafter there was no witness to her wet
eyes, her rain of tears, convulsive sobbing, the break-up of her
indifference—that is, none but her pony.  Reaching curiously around, the
beast investigated the grief huddled upon his neck with soft muzzle,
rubbing and sniffing "cheer up," and she had just straightened to return
his mute sympathy when a voice broke in on the bitter and sweet of her
reverie.

"Well met, fair lady!"

Turning, startled, she came face to face with Molyneux.  The heavy mud
of the bottoms had silenced his wheels, and now he sat smiling at the
sudden fires that dried up and hid her tears.  "Not there yet," he
answered her question as to his return home.  "Do you imagine I could go
by without calling?  The school was closed, but a kid—a Flynn, by his
upper lip—told me that you had ridden this way; and as it was Friday
evening I judged you were going north to Leslie’s, and so drove like
Jehu on the trail of Ahab.  Better turn your horse loose and get in with
me.  He’ll go home all right. Why not?"

Again she shook her head.  "Didn’t Mr. Danvers write you—?"  Remembering
that a letter would have crossed him on the Atlantic, she stopped.

"What’s the matter?  No one dead?  Worse?"  He laughed in her serious
face when she had told.  "Oh, well, that’s not so bad.  After all,
Leslie was an awful chump.  If a man isn’t strong enough to hold a
woman’s love he shouldn’t expect to keep her."

He was yet, of course, in ignorance of all that had transpired in his
absence—the house-party and the complete revulsion it had wrought in
Helen’s feelings. He knew nothing of her shame, vivid remorse, passion
of thankfulness for her escape.  To him she was still the woman,
desperate in her loneliness, who had challenged his love two short
months ago.  Withal, what possessed him to afford that glimpse of his
old nature?  It coupled him instantly in her mind with her late
unpleasant experience.

Not understanding her silence, he ran gayly on: "I can now testify to
the truth of the saying, ’Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’  How is
it with you? Have I lost or gained?"

Laughing nervously, she answered: "Neither.  We are still the same good
friends."

He shook his head, frowning.  "Not enough.  I want love—must, _will_
have it."

Any lingering misapprehension of the state of her feelings which she may
have entertained now instantly vanished.  How she regretted the weakness
which entitled him to speak thus!  She knew now.  Never, under any
conditions, could she have married him, but, warned by dearly boughten
experience, she dared not so inform him.  Frightened, she fenced and
parried, calling to her aid those shifts for men’s fooling that
centuries of helplessness have bred in woman’s bone.

"Well, well!" she laughed.  "I thought you more gallant.  I on
horseback, you in a buggy.  Love at such long distance!  I wouldn’t have
believed it of you!"

It was a bad lead, drawing him on instead of away. "That is easily
remedied.  Get in with me—or, I’ll tie up to that poplar."

She checked his eagerness with a quick invention. "No, no!  I was only
joking.  No, I say!  There’s a man, a river-driver, just behind that
bluff."  How she wished there were!  Praying that some one might come
and so afford her safe escape, she switched the conversation to his
journey, and when that subject wore out enthused over the sunset.  How
beautiful was the sky—the shadows that fell like a pall over the
bottoms—the lights slow crawling up the headlands!

Preferring her delicate coloring to the blushes of the west, he feasted
on her profile, delicately outlined against a golden cloud, until she
turned.  Then he brought her back to the point.  "Well—have you
forgotten?"

"What?"  She knew too well, but the question killed a moment.

"The answer you promised me?"

She would dearly have loved to give it, to cry aloud: "I love!  I love!
I love—him, not you!"  Ay, she would have flaunted it in all the proud
cruelty of love—had she dared.  Instead, she answered: "You forget! I am
a married woman."

"No, I don’t," he urged.  "That is easily settled. Three months’
residence across the line, in Dakota, and you are free of him."

"But not of myself."

"What do you mean?"

Alarmed by the sudden suffusion of venous blood on his face and neck,
the reddish glow of his eye, she forged hasty excuses.  "You see, I
never thought of it—in that way.  I must have time to get used to the
idea.  Won’t you give me a week?"  Her winning smile conquered. He had
stepped his ponies alongside, and, snatching her hand, he covered it
with kisses.

"By God, Helen, you must say yes!  I’m mad—mad with love of you.  If you
refuse—"

"Hush!"  She snatched away her hand as a man came in sight from behind a
bluff, coming up-stream. "It is Mr. Bender!" she exclaimed—so
thankfully.  Then, mindful of her part, she added: "What a nuisance!  I
wonder if he—saw you?"

"Oh, he’ll go by."

"No, no!  Leave me the shreds of my character.  You must go.  _Must!_ I
said, sir."

"Very well.  But remember—one week."  Nodding significantly, he drove
off, leaving her struggling with mixed feelings of relief and
apprehension.  She wondered if Bender had seen Molyneux kiss her hand.

Though in a few minutes of shy conversation Bender showed no knowledge
of the cause that had set her to rubbing the back of her hand against
her skirt, it nevertheless formed the subject of a rough scrawl that
Baldy, the tote-trail teamster, delivered to Jenny in Lone Tree two days
later.  "You said I was to tell if I saw or heard anything more.  Well,
he is back, and—"  Followed the kisses, and the scrawl ended, "If you
kin do anything like you thought you ked, do it quick, else I shall have
to tell the boss and give him a chance to look after his own."

Jenny did "do it quick," and thereby initiated a sequence of cause and
event that was to entirely change the complexion of a dozen lives.  An
extract from her letter to Helen explains itself: "’Twas on the tip of
my tongue to tell it to you every time he druv you home last winter, but
’twas so much easier for me to have you all believing as it was the man
that went back to England. But ’twasn’t, Miss Helen; ’twas him—Capen
Molyneux."

Poor Jenny!  She alone knew the magnitude of the man’s offence against
her weak innocence, but, small stoic, she had hugged the knowledge to
her soul while waiting in dull patience for the punishment she never
doubted.  Immunity would have challenged the existence of the God on
whom, despite small heresies of speech, she devoutly leaned.  She read
his sentence in that most tremendous curse of the oppressor, the One
Hundredth and Ninth Psalm, the bitter cry of David: "For he hath
rewarded me evil ... hatred for my love. When he shall be judged, let
him be condemned; and his prayer become sin....  Let his children be
continually vagabonds, seek their bread in desolate places.  Let the
extortioner catch all that he hath; the stranger despoil his labor.  Let
there be none to extend mercy to him.... Let his posterity be cut off
and his generation blotted out ... that He may cut off the memory of
them from the earth."  Ay, she had believed that it would come to pass
in some way—by lightning-flash, sudden sickness, a weary death.  But she
had never imagined herself as the instrument which this letter was to
make her.  What the confession cost her!  Tears, shameful agonizings!
Small wonder that, in her trembling confusion, she mis-shuffled notes
and slid Helen’s into Bender’s envelope.




                                 *XIX*

                           *THE WAGES OF SIN*


On the afternoon following Baldy’s delivery of the shuffled notes, the
May sun diffused a tempered warmth upon Molyneux’s veranda, thereby
intensifying certain comfortable reflections which accompanied his
after-dinner pipe.  He had material cause of satisfaction. To begin, his
father’s death placed him in possession of a sum which—a mere pittance
in England—loomed large as a fortune in the thrifty settlements. Next,
Messrs. Coxhead & Boxhead, exploiters of the Younger Son, and his London
solicitors, had forwarded through that morning’s mail indentures of
apprenticeship to colonial farming of three more innocents at one
thousand dollars a head per annum.  This more than made up for the
defection of Danvers, who, having learned how little there was to be
learned in the business, was adventuring farming for himself.  It also
permitted the retention of the bucolic Englishman and wife, who
respectively managed Molyneux’s farm and house.

With their service assured, the life was more than tolerable, infinitely
superior to that which he would have led at home.  There he would have
been condemned to the celibate lot of the younger son—to be a "filler"
at dinners and dances, useful as the waiters, ineligible and innocuous
to the plainest of his girl partners as an Eastern eunuch; or, accepting
the alternative, trade, vulgar trade, his pampered wits would have come
into competition with abilities that had been whetted to a fine edge
through centuries on time’s hard stone.  Like a leaden plummet, he would
have plunged through the social strata to his natural place in the
scheme of things. Here, however, he was of some importance, a magnate on
means that would hardly have kept up his clothes and clubs at home.  A
landed proprietor, moreover, he escaped the stigma of trade, and the
resultant prejudice, should he ever return to live in England.

Then the life glowed with the colors of romance.  His farm occurred on
the extreme western edge of that vast forest which blackens the Atlantic
seaboard, and so marches west and north over a thousand rugged miles to
the limit of trees on the verge of the Barren Lands. Within gunshot the
old ferocious struggle for life continued as of yore.  Through timbered
glades the wolf pursued and made his kill; echo answered the clash of
horns as big elk fought for a doe; over lonely woodland lakes, black
with water-fowl, the hoo-haugh crane spread ten feet of snowy pinion;
across dark waters the loon’s weird lament replied to the owl’s midnight
questioning. In winter the moose came down from their yards to feed at
his prairie hay-stacks; any night he could come out on the veranda and
thrill to a long howl or the scream of a lynx.

Opening before him now, the view was pleasantly beautiful.  His house, a
comfortable frame building, and big barn and corrals, all sat within the
embrace of a half-moon that prairie-fires had bitten out from the heart
of a poplar bluff.  Southward his tilled fields ran like strips of brown
carpet over the green earth rolls. Beyond them spread the Park Lands,
with his cattle feeding knee-deep in the rank pasture between clump
poplar.  Further still, his horses scented the wind from the crest of a
knoll, forming a dull blotch against the soft blue sky.  These were
growing into money while he smoked, and what of free grazing, free hay,
and labor that reversed the natural order of things and paid for the
privilege of working, he could see himself comfortably wealthy in not
too many seasons.  He would still be young enough for a run through
Maiden Lane, London’s Mecca for the stage and _demi-mondaine_.  However,
he put that thought behind him as being inconsistent with contemplation
of the last thing necessary for perfect happiness—a pretty wife.
Through the haze of sunlit tobacco reek, he saw himself in possession of
even that golden asset, and thereafter his reflections took the exact
color of those of the rich man before death came in the night: "Soul,
soul!  Thou hast much goods laid up in store!  Eat, drink, take thine
ease, and be merry!"

"It is really time that I settled," he murmured. "Thirty-four, my next
birthday.  By Jove! six more years and I shall be forty!"

The thought deflected his meditation into channels highly becoming to a
person of the age he was contemplating, and from virtuous altitudes he
looked back with something of the reproving tolerance that kindly age
accords to youthful indiscretion.  He maintained the
"you-were-a-sad-dog" point of view till a sudden thought stung his
virtuous complacency through to the quick.  "Oh, well"—he ousted
reproach with exculpatory murmur—"if the girl had only let me, I would
have got her away from here and have done something handsome for her
afterwards.  But it was just as well—seeing that it passed off so
quietly.  I wonder how she managed it?  Nobody seems to know."  Then,
ignoring the fact that every seeding brings its harvest, not knowing
that the measure of that cruel sowing was even then coming home to him
on a fast trot, he smothered conviction under the trite reflection, "A
fellow must sow his wild oats."

Still the thought had marred his reverie, and, tapping his pipe on the
chair-rung, he rose.  He intended a visit to the barn, where his man was
dipping seed wheat in bluestone solution to kill the smut; but just then
a wagon, which had been rattling along the Lone Tree trail, turned into
his private lane.

"It is Glaves," he muttered.  "And his wife.  What can they want?  Must
have a message—from her; otherwise they would never come here."

His thought did not malign the trustee, who had positively refused the
commission till assured that its performance would sever Helen’s
relations with his natural foes.  Yet he did not like it, and though
retribution might have presented herself in more tragic guise, she could
not have assumed a more forbidding face than that which he now turned
down to Molyneux.

Than they two there have been no more violent contrast.  Beak-nosed,
hollow-eyed, the hoar of fifty winters environed the trustee’s face,
which wind and weather had warped, seamed, and wrinkled into the
semblance of a scorched hide.  He was true to the frontier type; and
beside his bronzed ruggedness, the Englishman, though much the larger
man, seemed, with his soft hands, smooth skin, and polished manner, to
be small and effeminate.

As might be expected, the trustee refused Molyneux’s invitation to put
in and feed.  "No; me an’ the wife is going up to see her brother, north
of Assissippii, an’ we have thirty miles to make afore sundown."

He did, however, return curt answers to a few questions, though it would
be a mistake to set his scant conversational efforts to the account of
politeness.  Rather they were the meed of malignance, for, while
talking, he secretly exulted over the thought of Molyneux’s coming
disappointment.  They would be gone a week, he said. The mails?  Mrs.
Carter would attend to sech letters as straggled in.  She’d be there
alone?  Yes.  Lonesome? Mebbe, but she was that well-plucked she’d
laughed at the idea of spending her nights at Flynn’s.  A fine girl,
sirree!  Having accorded five minutes to Helen’s perfections, the
trustee drove off, but turned, as he rattled out of the yard, and nudged
his wife, grinning, to look at Molyneux.

Stark and still as one of his own veranda-posts, the man stood and
stared down at Jenny’s pitiful letter. Across the top Helen had written,
"This explains itself," and that scrap of writing represented three
letters now torn up and consigned to the flames.  The first antedated
her receipt of Jenny’s letter, and had run: "I want you to believe me
innocent of coquetry, and you must pardon me if I have, by speech or
action, seemed to sanction the hope you expressed the other day.  I now
perceive that it was my desperate loneliness that caused me to lean so
heavily upon your friendship.  I might have told you this personally but
for certain experiences which have made me timid."  There was
more—regret, pleasant hope that the future might bring with it friendly
relations, wishes for his happiness.  This letter she had withdrawn from
the mail to burn, along with one that was full of reproach, and a third
that sizzled with indignation.

Suffused with dark, venous blood, Molyneux faced discovered sin.  If
ever, this was the accepted time for his attempts at reconstruction to
bring forth fruit.  He had pictured himself remorseful, but now that the
wage of sin was demanded, he flinched like a selfish child, reneged in
the game he had played with the gods.  It was not in him to play a
losing hand to the logical end. Instead of remorse, anger possessed him,
for, tearing the letter, he cried in a gust of passion:

"She sha’n’t throw me a second time!  By God, she sha’n’t!"

Needs not to follow his turbulent thought as he hurried out to the
barn—his flushes, the paroxysms that set his face in the colors of
apoplexy.  Sufficient that flooding passion swept clean the
superstructure of false morality, sophistical idealism, that he had
erected on the rotten foundation of his vicious heredity.  A minute of
action explains a volume of psychology.  Hitching his ponies, he drove
madly southward, one idea standing clearly out in his whirl of
thought—she would be alone that night.


Just about the time that Molyneux swung out on the Lone Tree trail,
Helen arrived home from school with the eldest Flynn boy, who had
volunteered to help her with the chores, her undertaking of which had
made possible Mrs. Glaves’s rare holiday.  Under distress of their
bursting udders, the cows had come in of their own accord from the fat,
rank pastures, and now called for easement, with low, persistent
"mooing," while she changed her dress.  When she finally came out, with
sleeves rolled above elbows that had regained their plump whiteness,
they even fought for precedence, horning each other aside until the
bell-cow made good her prerogative as leader; then frothing streams soon
drew tinkling music from her pail.  For his part, the boy fed pigs and
calves, carried in the milk, then departed, leaving her to skim and
strain, and wash pans and pails, itself no light task in view of Mrs.
Glaves’s difficult standards of cleanliness.  That done and her supper
eaten, she placed a lamp on the table and sat down to think over the
events of the day.

A little fatigued, she leaned a smooth cheek on her hand, staring at the
lamp, whose golden light toned while it revealed the changes these
distressful months had wrought in her appearance.  Her eyes were weary,
her face tired; but if she was paler than of yore, the pallor was
becoming, in that it was altogether a mental product and accorded well
with her plump, well-nourished body.  Her mouth, if wofully pouted in
agreement with her sad thought, was scarlet and pretty as ever. In every
way she was good as new.

At first she had found it extremely difficult to realize the full
meaning of the letter which the Cougar had brought in from the camp
early that morning.  For Bender would trust it in no other hand; whereby
he discovered not only his wisdom, but also an unexpected fund of tact
in his rough messenger.  Anticipating some display of emotion, the
Cougar discharged his office in the privacy of Helen’s own room; and if
her red eyes afterwards excited Jimmy Glaves’s insatiable curiosity,
only the Cougar witnessed her breakdown—sorrowful tremblings, blushes,
tearful anger.  Not that she had doubted the girl’s word.  Only it had
seemed monstrous, incredible, impossible, until, through the day, jots
and tittles of evidence had filtered out of the past.  She had connected
Jenny’s gloomings on the occasions that Molyneux drove her (Helen) home
with his refusals to enter and warm himself after their cold drives.
Even from the far days of the child’s trouble, small significances had
come to piece out the solid proof.  So now nothing was left for her but
bitter self-communion.

These days it did seem as though the fates were bent on squeezing the
last acrid drop into her cup; for to the consciousness of error was now
added knowledge of the utter worthlessness of her tempter.  She burned
as she recalled their solitary rides; writhed slim fingers in a passion
of thankfulness as she thought of her several escapes; was taxing
herself for her folly when a sudden furious baying outside brought her,
startled, to her feet.

It was merely the house-dog exchanging defiances with a lone coyote;
but—after she had satisfied herself of the fact—it yet brought home upon
her a vivid sense of her lonely position.  Sorry now that she had not
gone home with the Flynn boy, she glanced nervously about the room,
which, if small, was yet large enough to own shadowy corners.  On top of
the pigeon-holed mailing-desk, moreover, a few books were piled in such
a way as to cast a shadow, the silhouette of a man’s profile, upon the
wall.  Lean, hard, indescribably cruel, its thin lips split in a
merciless grin as she moved the lamp, then suddenly lengthened into the
semblance of a hand and pointing finger.  Then she laughed, nervously,
yet laughed because it indicated one of the hundred summonses, writs of
execution, and findings in judgment that were pasted up on the walls.

"By these summons," Victoria Regina called upon her subject, James
Glaves, to pay the moneys and taxed costs herein set forth under pain of
confiscation of his goods and chattels.  Usually recording debt and
disaster, the instruments certified, in Jimmy’s case, to numerous
victories over implement trusts, cordage monopolies, local or foreign
Shylocks.  "Execution proof," in that his wife owned their real property
in her own right, he could sit and smoke at home, the cynosure of the
country-side, in seasons when the sheriff travelled with the thresher
and took in all the grain.  To each document he could append a story,
the memory of such a one having caused Helen’s laugh.

Indicating this particular specimen with his pipe-stem one evening, he
had remarked: "Yon jest tickled the jedge to death.  ’Mr. Glaves,’ he
says, when he handed it down, ’they’ve beat you on the jedgment, now
it’s up to you to fool ’em on the execution.’  An’ you bet I did."

Reassured, Helen returned to her musings, only to start up, a minute
later, with a nervous glance over her shoulder at the window.  Is there
anything in thought transference?  At that moment Molyneux was rattling
down into the dark valley, and is it possible that his heated imaginings
bridged the miles and impressed themselves upon her nervous mental
surfaces?  Or was it merely a coincidence of thought that caused her to
see his face pressed against the black pane.  Be this as it may, she
could not regain her composure.  Taking the lamp, she locked herself in
her bedroom; then she sought that last refuge of frightened femininity,
the invulnerable shield of the bedclothes.




                                  *XX*

                              *—IS DEATH*


Though Silver Creek still ran fat and full, its sources were now nearly
drained of flood-waters; any day might see it suddenly shrink to its
usual summer trickle.  Anticipating the event, Bender went miles
down-stream that morning to superintend the building of the first dam,
and so did not see the Cougar till that worthy came into camp at night
from his own place at the tail of the drive.

This, the hour for changing shifts, was the liveliest of camp life—the
social hour, one might term it, replete with a certain rough comfort.
With them, from up and down river, the reliefs poured in, a stream of
red shirts, drowning with oaths, song, and laughter the rattle of
tin-ware in the cook-tent.  Spread over fifteen miles of river, the
arrival was equally irregular, and those who had already eaten were
grouped about a huge camp-fire, the red glow of which enriched weathered
skins and softened the corrugations of iron faces. After the cold and
wet of the day, its warmth spelled luxury in capitals—luxury such as no
millionaire may command from his palatial clubs, for pleasure may only
be measured in degrees of health with accompanying intensity of
sensation.  As they moved and turned like huge red capons on an
old-style spit, bringing fresh areas of soaked clothing under the blaze,
they smoked and revamped the day’s haps, its dips, jams, duckings, while
the river—the river that yielded their hard bread in exchange for annual
toll of a life or two—rebuked with angry growl their jokes and jestings.

A candle in Bender’s tent showed the giant squatted upon his blankets,
chin on hands, big torso hunched between knees and elbows.  A night and
day of heavy brooding had sunk his eyes; despair had cross-ploughed and
deepened the furrows across his blue, scarred face. The attitude bespoke
deepest dejection, and his look, when the Cougar entered, caused the
latter’s weird fierceness to flux in vast sympathy.

"Well?" Bender inquired.

The Cougar pulled a paper out of his shirt-bosom. "Here’s your letter
that she got by mistake."

It was only a scrap to say that she would do her best—she had done it,
too, poor girl!—that and an admonition to be careful in drying his
clothes at nights.  Usually the warning would have dissolved Bender’s
grimness, but it caused no relaxation of his gravity.

"How did she take it?"

"Hard.  Cried an’ said as ’twas more’n she deserved at the little gal’s
hands.  Blamed herself—dreadful cut up.  Seems, too, as ’twasn’t
necessary, as she’d already mailed Mr. Man his walking-papers."

"Too late—now.  It’s done."

The Cougar looked awkwardly down upon him.  Pity had been foreign to
their rough comradeship; it was, indeed, nearest of kin to shame; the
words of sympathy choked in his throat.  "Come, come!" he presently
growled.  "Chipper up!  ’Tain’t any worse than it was."

A convulsion seized and shook the big body.  "You don’t know, Cougar.
You don’t know what it is—"  He stopped, aghast at the sudden appalling
change in the other.  He had straightened from his crouch, and his eyes
flared like blue, alcohol flames in his livid face. As at the touch of a
secret spring, the man’s fierce taciturnity raised, exposing the
tortured soul behind.

"I—don’t?"  The whisper issued like a dry wind from drawn lips.
"Me?—that saw my wife an’ baby—"  Though frontiersmen tell, shivering,
of the horror he mentioned, no pen has been found callous enough to set
it forth on paper.  "God, man!"  His arms snapped outward and his head
fell forward in the attitude of the crucifixion.

"Cougar!" Bender grasped his shoulder.  "Cougar! Cougar, man!  I’d
forgotten."

But as one in a trance the man went on: "It’s always with me—through
these years—day an’ night.  I’d have killed myself—long ago—on’y
whenever I’d think of that, she’d come—sweet an’ smiling—with a shake of
her pretty head.  She wouldn’t let me do it."  The thought of her smile
seemed to calm him, and he continued, more quietly: "I never could make
out why ’twas done to her.  A sky-pilot tol’ me onct as ’twas the will
o’ God, but I shocked him clean out of his boots.

"’I’ll know on the Jedgment Day, will I?’ I asks him.  ’Shorely,’ he
answers, pat.  ’An’ I’ll be close in to the great white throne you was
talking about?’  He nods.  ’Then do you know what I’ll do?’ I asks him
again.  ’If I find out as how that God o’ yourn ordered that done to my
little gal, I’ll stick a knife into Him an’ turn it round.’

"At that he turned green an’ tried to saddle the dirty business onto the
devil.  But, Lordy, he didn’t know. She does, though, else she wouldn’t
come smiling.  She knows; so I’ve allus reckoned as if she could bear
her pain I can worry through to the end.  There! there! I’m all right
again.  You didn’t go to do it.  An’, after all, I don’t know but that
you are right.  For while my gal’s at peace, yourn has to live out her
pain.  It’s puzzling—all of it.  Now there’s _him_.  Where does he come
in?  What about him?"

"What about him?"  Bender’s bulk seemed to swell in the dim light to
huge, amorphous proportions.  "That’s simple.  He’s got to marry her."

What the conclusion had cost him!—the suffering, self-sacrifice.  To the
sophisticated, both sacrifice and conclusion may seem absurd, provoking
the question as to just how wrong may be righted by the marriage of a
clean girl with an impure man; yet it was strictly in accord with
backwoods philosophy.  As yet the scepticism of modernity had not
infected the plains, nor had the leprosy of free thought rotted their
creeds and institutions.  To Bender’s simplicity, marriage appealed as
the one cure for such ills as Jenny’s, while both he and the Cougar had
seen the dose administered with aid of a Colt’s forty-five.  So, absurd
or not, the conclusion earned the latter’s instant approval.

There was something pathetic, too, in the serious way in which, after
discussing ways and means, they spoke of Jenny’s future.  "She’ll be a
lady," the Cougar commented.  "Too big to look at you an’ me."

Bender’s nod incarnated self-effacement, but he bristled when the Cougar
suggested that Molyneux might not treat her rightly, and his scowl
augured a quick widowhood in such premises.  "We’ll go up for him
to-morrow."

"An’ after it’s all over?"

"Oregon for you an’ me—the camps an’ the big timber."

The big timber!  The Cougar’s bleak face lit up with sudden warmth.
Giant pines of Oregon woods; rose-brown shade of cathedral redwoods; the
roaring unrest of lacy cataracts; peace of great rivers that float the
rafts and drives from snow-capped Rockies down to the blue Pacific;
these, and the screaming saw-mills that spew their product over the
meridians, the pomp of that great piracy; the sights, sounds, resinous
odors that the Cougar would never experience again were vividly
projected into his consciousness.

"Man!"  He drew a deep breath.  "It can’t come too quick for me.  I’m
sick of these plains, where a man throws a shadow clean to the horizon.
I’m hungry for the loom of the mountains."  After a pause, he added,
"Coming back to yourself—have you eaten to-day?"

The language he accorded to Bender’s negative would shake the type from
a respectable printer’s fingers, yet, in essence, was exactly equivalent
to the "You poor dear!" of an anxious wife or mother.  Striding off, he
quickly returned with coffee and food, which Bender was ordered to eat
under pain of instant loss of his liver, lights, and sundry other useful
organs.  Then, being besotted in his belief in action as a remedy for
mental disorders, he suggested a visit to the turn above the bridge
where the logs had jammed twice that afternoon.

Another day would put the last log under the bridge and see the
temporary structure dismantled and afloat; but though only the tail of
the drive remained above, the jams had backed it up for a couple of
miles, so that the logs now filled the river from bank to bank.  They
floated silently, or nearly so, for the soft thud of collisions, mutter
of grinding bark, merged with the low roar of the stream.  But a
brilliant northern moon lit the serried array; when the men crossed they
could pick the yellow sawed ends from the black of the mass.

Under urge of the same thought, they paused on the other side and looked
back along the northern trail. With the exception of the cook, whose
pots proclaimed his labors with shrill tintinnabulation, the camp now
slept, its big watch-fire burning red and low.  Beneath that bright moon
scrub, bluff, scour, ravine, and headland stood out, lacking only the
colors of day, and they could see the trail’s twin ruts writhing like
black snakes across the ashen bottoms into the gorge by which it gained
the prairies.

The Cougar’s quick eye first discerned a moving blot, but Bender gave it
identity.  "That’s shore Molyneux’s rig.  He’d a loose spoke when he
went by t’other day. Hear it rattle."

It was clear and sharp as the clatter of a boy’s stick along a wooden
paling, and the Cougar whispered: "It’s sure him.  Where kin he be
going?  Do you reckon—"

The same thought was in Bender’s mind.  "An’ she there alone.  No one
ever starts out for Lone Tree this time o’ night."  After a grim pause,
he added, "But that’s where he’s going."

A strident chuckle told that the Cougar had caught his meaning.  "That’s
right.  Saved us trouble, hain’t he?  Kind of him.  Jes’ step into the
shadow till he’s fairly on the bridge."

If they had remained in the moonlight he would never have seen them.
Dusk had brought no surcease of his mad thought; rather its peace
stimulated his excitement by shutting him out from the visible world.
What were his thoughts?  It takes a strong man to face his contemplated
villanies.  From immemorial time your scoundrel has been able to justify
his acts by some sort of crooked reasoning, and Molyneux was no
exception to the rule.  "Why do you muddy the water when I am drinking?"
the wolf asked of the lamb.  "How could I, sir, seeing that the stream
flows from you to me?" the lamb filed in exception.  "None of your
insolence!" the wolf roared as he made his kill.

In the same way Molyneux excluded from thought everything that
conflicted with his intention—the first rudeness that lost him Helen’s
maiden confidence, his insidious attempts to wean her from her husband,
her undoubted right to reject his advances.  He twisted his own crime to
her demerit.  "She didn’t know about that when she was drawing me on!"
he exclaimed, whenever Jenny’s letter thrust into his meditation.  "Why
should it cut any ice now?  It is just an excuse to throw me a second
time.  But she sha’n’t do it, by God! no, she sha’n’t, she sha’n’t!
She’s a coquette!—a damned coquette!  I’ll—"  Then a red rage, a
heaving, tumultuous passion, would drown articulate thought so that his
intention never took form in words.  But one thing is certain—he was
thoroughly dangerous.  In that mood Helen would have fared as illy at
his hands as the lamb at the paws of the wolf.

The sudden stoppage of his ponies, midway of the bridge, broke up his
reverie.  As the moon struck full in his own face, he saw the two men
only as shadows; but there was no mistaking Bender’s bulk, and, after a
single startled glance, Molyneux hailed him.  "Is that you, Mr. Bender?"

"It’s me, all right.  Where might _you_ be heading for?"

It was the usual trail greeting, preliminary to conversation, but
Molyneux sensed a difference of tone, savor of command, menace of
authority, that galled his haughty spirit.  Vexed by the impossibility
of explanation, his disdain of the settler tribe in general would not
permit him to lie; from which conflict of feeling his stiff answer was
born.

"I don’t see that it is any of your business."

"You don’t?"  Equally stiff, the reply issued from the huge, dim shape.
"Well, I’ll make it mine.  You’re going to Lone Tree."

Puzzled, Molyneux glanced from Bender’s indefiniteness to the Cougar’s
dim crouch.  He was not afraid. In him the courage of his vices was
reinforced by enormous racial and family pride—the combination that made
the British fool the finest of officers until mathematics and
quick-firing artillery replaced the sword and mêlée.  Mistaking the
situation, he attempted to carry it off with a laugh.

"What have you chaps been drinking?  Here; pass the bottle."

"Not till we wet your wedding," the Cougar interjected, dryly.

Astonished now, as well as puzzled, Molyneux yet rejected a sudden
suspicion as impossible.  Out of patience, galled by this mysterious
opposition, he said, testily: "Are you crazy?  I do not intend—"

"—To go to Lone Tree," Bender interrupted.  "Yes, we know.  You was
heading up for Glaves’s place."

Seriously disconcerted, Molyneux hid it under an ironical laugh.  "I
must say that I marvel at your intimate knowledge of my affairs.  And
since you are so well posted, perhaps you can tell me why I am going to
Lone Tree?"

"I kin that."  The huge, dim figure, with its crouched, attendant
shadow, moved a pace nearer, then the man’s stern bass launched on the
quivering moonlight, reciting to an accompaniment of rushing waters this
oldest of woodland sagas.  Beginning at the night he picked Jenny up on
the trail, he told all—Jed Hines’s cruel fury; birth and burial of his,
Molyneux’s child; the outcast girl’s subsequent illness; Helen’s
kindness; the doctor’s philanthropy; the kindly conspiracy that
protected her from social infamy.  "An’ us that saw her through her
trouble," he finished, "are bound to see her righted."

If the lime-lights of history and fiction were thrown more often upon
motives and psychology, and less on deeds and action, characters would
not appear in such hard colors of black and white.  It were false to
paint Molyneux irredeemably black.  "_Your child!_"  He winced at the
phrase, and, perhaps for the first time, an inkling of the enormity of
his offence was borne in upon him.  _His_ child?  It was the flesh of
his own loins that had suffered midnight burial at the hands of Carter
and the kindly priest!  The thought struck with enormous force—then
faded.  For back of him was that vicious generation whose most cultured
exponent wrote to his own son that a seduction or two was necessary to
the education of a gentleman.  Through pride of family, the dead hands
of haughty and licentious forebears reached to throttle remorse.

Was he to be called to account by common settlers, the _savages_ of the
scornful English phrase?  Anger colored his next remark: "Waited till
you were good and ready, didn’t you?  Your diligence falls short of your
zeal, my friends, or—"

"Don’t flatter yourself," Bender sternly interrupted. "You kin thank her
for the delay.  If we’d known, you’d long ago have been either dead or
married.  But she kep’ her own counsel till she thought as some one
else’s welfare called her to speak.  ’Twasn’t needed. T’other’d already
found you out for herself."

Molyneux blinked under the savage contempt, but answered, stiffly
enough: "Now listen.  I deny nothing, though she received attentions
from one of my pupils, and it might very well have been—"

"You lie!"

The lie never comes so unpleasantly as when asserting a truth; so,
though he knew that he had lied, Molyneux’s eyes glinted wickedly, his
hand tightened on his whip. A glance right and left showed him the
river, only a light hand-rail between him and dark waters.  There was
not room to turn; the giant blocked the way. Under constraint, he spoke
quietly: "Neither do I profess sorrow.  What is done is done.  If the
girl had taken me into her confidence—"

"Likely, wasn’t it?"

A line of Jenny’s letter, a damnable fact, flashed into Molyneux’s mind,
but he went on: "—I’d have taken care of her—am willing to do so yet, in
a certain way. Marriage, of course, is out of the question.  We are
unfitted for each other—"

"No one’s denying that."

He ignored the sarcasm.  "—could not be happy together."

"Who said anything about your living together?"

The interruptions were most disconcerting, but he continued: "Now if
you, as her representatives, self-appointed or otherwise"—he could not
refrain from the sarcasm—"if you will name a sum—"

"_What?_"

Twenty rods away the camp now slept, steeped in the drug of labor—all
but the cook, who came running out of his tent and was thus witness of
the event.  Looking up-stream, he saw them blackly silhouetted against
the moonlit sky, a shadow show, play of marionettes upon the bridge.

"Out of my way!  Let go!"

Followed the swish and crack of Molyneux’s whip, as he lashed Bender
over the face, then fell to flogging his horses.  But stinging pain
freed in the giant those bulldog passions that had made him king of the
camps in other years.  He hung on, while the plunging beasts drowned the
river’s roar in thunder of iron hoofs. Unable to break his grip, they
reared—their smooth, elongated bodies conveying to the cook an odd
impression of slugs reaching upward through moonlit dew—then, stooping
quickly under the nigh beast, the mad giant took its full weight on his
shoulder and with a mighty heave sent team and rig crashing sideways off
the bridge.

A quick leap saved Molyneux—for the moment.  All through the action had
moved with kinetoscopic quickness, and it accelerated so that the cook
could scarcely establish its sequence.  Like an angry bull, Bender shook
the hair from his eyes; then, as he rushed, came a report; a puff of
smoke curled bluely up from Molyneux’s hand; the giant thudded at length
on the bridge. Followed a yell, a piercing cry suitable to the animal
after which the Cougar was named.  As Bender fell, he rushed. The pistol
spoke again.  While the cook was running twenty yards, a black, furious
tangle writhed over the bridge, and as he came darting out from behind a
bunch of willow scrub he saw that it was gone.  Bender lay alone under
the moonlight.


Now this was the cook of a lumber-camp, equivalent to saying that he was
a man of parts.  He had cooked on B Contract, Superior Construction
Division of the Trunk Line, and so had seen a liberal sprinkling of his
grumblers go into the dump—a grisly foundation for track, surely yet
what better could the builders of the road desire than to be cradled
under the ties and sleep, sleep, sleep, to the thundering lullaby of the
fast express?  Which intimacy with the pale terror is responsible for
his prompt action in these unusual premises. Molyneux’s bullet had
merely grazed Bender’s temple. He rose, staggering, as the cook made the
bridge, and, seeing that he was too sick and dizzy to handle the
situation, the latter took it into his own able hands.

As before mentioned, a drive camp sleeps in its boots, and the shots had
brought a score out from their sleep on a hunt for causes.  "Man drove
offen the bridge!" he yelled.  "An’ Cougar went after him!  They’re both
under the drive!  Scatter down-stream an’ skin your eyes for bubbles!"

Thus, on the spur of the moment, the cook wrote history—as accurately,
perhaps, as the run of historians; for after the drive once closed
serried ranks over the struggling men, they were never seen again, so
none could rise with an opposing theory.  When, a few days later, the
water was drawn off at the first dam, the horses floated out on the
shallows.  But the men—?  The river carried them to its secret places;
buried them in some scour or pothole, free at last, one of his
passions—the incubus of his generations—the other from his pain. That
night, if such things be, the Cougar was joined, after his years of
suffering, in perfect knowledge with his "little girl."




                                 *XXI*

                             *PERSECUTION*


Yes, the cook made history, for though the event furnished gossip for
the ninety days which, on the lonely frontier, corresponds with the
world’s nine days’ wonder, his story was never questioned.  The truth
lay buried between him and Bender, and if either visited her grave, it
was never in company with the other. Up to the time that delirium
tremens removed the cook from the snows of a Rocky Mountain camp to a
sphere where pots are said to boil with or without watching, Bender
never knew just how much or little he really knew.

To others the event appeared under varying complexions. Helen and Jenny
were shocked at Molyneux’s death, the latter without astonishment,
though her firm belief that sin had at last received its full wage was
without trace of malignance; both were sorrier than they had any right
to be; and both mourned the Cougar.  As for the settlers, they regarded
the affair rather in the light of a special dispensation of Providence.
Flocking to the auction of Molyneux’s effects a month later, they
caballed against high bidding, paid for chattels they bought at
ridiculous prices in long-time notes, for that was the "Black Year," and
throughout Manitoba nothing could be sold for cash.

Poverty, sociologists tell us, is the mother of crime, and as those hard
times subsequently influenced the settlers in their attitude towards
Helen, they are surely worthy of mention.  To begin, the country was
practically bankrupt.  The frost of the preceding fall had left the
wheat useless, and but for the fact that the provincial government had
imported and distributed free seed, not an acre of grain would have been
sown that year.  The seriousness of the crisis may be gauged by the
legislature’s further action in enacting an exemption law that
practically excluded all of a farmer’s goods and chattels from legal
execution.  This was good, but in that it was not, nor could be made
retroactive, it benefited only the new-comers and left the pioneers, who
had spent their little all opening up the country, still liable to
foreclosure and execution.

On the northern settlers times had borne particularly hard.  During boom
years all had assumed loan indebtedness, and whereas creditors had bided
patiently successive lean seasons on the chance of a branch railroad and
bumper crop, now that the country’s credit, its very future was
trembling in the balance; implement-men and store-keepers raced with
twenty-per-cent. Shylocks to grab what they could from the wreck.  That
spring the sheriff of Brandon was the busiest man in the country-side.
He and his deputies sowed summonses, executions, foreclosures broadcast
over the land.  Wolves of the law, they harried the farmers till the
optimism of the brilliant emigration pamphlets was swamped, submerged
beneath inky pessimism.  Small wonder that—coupled with idleness,
breeder of mischief, in the slack season that Glaves feared between
seeding and haying—small wonder that some of the rancor bred by hard
conditions should be vented upon Helen.

She may be said to have stood in an uncomfortable position as lightning
conductor between this cloud of spleen and the earth, upon which it
should have properly been discharged.  And looking back, one may see the
storm gathering over her fair head, observing in its approach all of the
natural phenomena: first the cold wind, social disfavor, the whispers;
next, heavy drops thudding in the dust, the snubs and slights; lastly,
thunder, lightning, rain, downright persecution.

The whispers, of course, she did not hear, but she could not overlook
the difference in trail greetings, which were either far too warm or
much too cool, according to the years and disposition of the greeter.
Coldness was endurable, but the rude stares, conscious laughter of the
younger boors often caused her to fly the hot colors of angry shame.
Yet even this hurt less than the sudden, shy suspicion of her pupils.
Whereas they were wont to hang upon her skirts, they now held aloof in
play hours, and ran straight home from school.

"Mother says I’m not to walk with you any more," one tot explained her
haste.  How that stung!  Having only the faintest of ideas, little more
than a suspicion of the strength and nature of this uncomfortable
prejudice, she resented it as bitter injustice, and held a proud head
until a thing happened that almost broke her spirit.

Of all the settler women, Ruth Murchison was the one girl with whom
Helen had been, or could be, on anything like terms of intimacy.  Quiet
and thoughtful, Ruth had gone through the English common schools, and
had taken the Junior Oxford Examination, to which passable education a
taste for good reading had formed a further bond.  Wherefore Helen was
delighted when, one day, news drifted into the post-office that Ruth was
to be married to the Probationer, the young minister who preached
Merrill’s funeral sermon.

Borrowing a beast from Glaves, she rode north one evening to offer
congratulations, and as the Murchisons lived several miles north of
Silver Creek Valley, night fell while she still lacked half a mile of
the homestead. From that distance the windows’ yellow blaze advised of
fuss and busy preparation.  Drawing nearer, voices, laughter, the whir
of an egg-beater, clatter of cooking-gear came down the trail merrily
freighting the dusk. Infected by the cheer, she gave a shrill halloa,
spurred to a gallop, and drew in at the door with a clatter of hoofs.

"Ruth!  Oh, Ruth!" she called.  "Ruth-y!"

Instantly the voices hushed, then, after an uncomfortable pause, she
heard Mrs. Murchison say, in thin, constrained tones, "Mrs. Carter is
out there, father."

Followed a shuffling, and the door opened revealing Murchison framed in
yellow light.  Stout, robust, ruddy, with that mottled-beef English
complexion, he came of that stout yeoman stock whose twanging long-bows
sounded France’s knell at Crecy and Poitiers, of that rich blood the
slow drainage of which to her colonies has left England flabby, ensemic,
flaccid.  He had not wished to leave, but the motherland had become
industrial without further place for her yeoman.  Over fields that were
enriched by the tilth of thirty Murchison generations, a thousand
factories were depositing soot and blighting acids.  American wheat and
beeves had wiped out profits, while enormous rents ate up the farmer’s
substance.  So Murchison, England’s best, had become partner in exile
with the remittance-men, her worst. Undoubtedly, there was no symptom of
remittance weakness in the scowl he turned on Helen.

Behind him Helen could see Ruth, red and embarrassed, hanging her head
over the egg-beater.  A half-dozen girls and neighboring women, who had
come in to help in the baking and brewing, were exchanging meaning
glances across the table.

"Ruth?  She’s well," Murchison answered her question.

She knew what to expect now, but nerved herself to face the situation.
"Can’t I see her?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Because she don’t run with your kind."

"Oh, Mr. Murchison!"

He felt the heart sickness, yet glowered relentlessly, for it had been
the habit of his forebears to thrash their women into good behavior.  He
itched to do it now for the good of her soul, but, lacking the power, he
growled:

"If you don’t like it—keep better company."

If he had been alone, she would undoubtedly have challenged his reproach
and, while clearing herself in his eyes, have turned away future
trouble.  But a titter from within fired her pride.  "Very well, please
give her my congratulations."  And turning she rode away.

Good-hearted as rough, Murchison stared after, stricken with sudden
compunction.  He knew that she must have intended to stay the night, and
here she was a timorous woman riding out into the darkness.  "Here!" he
shouted.  "Come back!"

But she held on, eyes snapping, cheeks aflame, throat convulsed under
the strain of suppressing imminent hysteria.  Beyond earshot she broke
down, venting her injured loneliness in broken speech between bursts of
sobbing.  "They hate—me.  Condemn me—because—my husband left me.  It
wasn’t my—fault—that is, altogether."  She hastily corrected herself.
"Of course—I failed him.  But I was—sorry—would have done better—if he
had—given me a chance.  He’s so stern—and stiff—"  She would not even
let this undoubted truth pass unmodified.  "But then—he thought I
didn’t—love him.  Perhaps I didn’t—then.  I was a little fool.  But I
do!  I do!"  She stretched wild arms to the darkness.  "I do!  I do!  I
do!"  But the velvet night returned nothing to her embrace and she
collapsed, sobbing, upon the pony’s neck.  Still the cry did her good,
tided over hysteria, composed and quieted her so that she was able to
meet the trustee’s glance of spectacled inquiry as she entered the
cabin.

Kindliness as well as curiosity inhered in his glance, for, besides the
cash and educational prestige which she had brought to his cabin, Jimmy
had come to like her for herself.  The frost and grizzle of fifty
winters thawed under his smile as he threw a Winnipeg paper across the
table.  "Catch!  Just kem in.  Yes, there’s a story ’bout him.  Now,
don’t eat it."

Metaphorically, she did, indeed, devour the article, and while she read
the trustee watched with something of puzzled astonishment the lovely
tide that flowed out from the lace at her neck, and drowned her pale
creams to the roots of her hair.  He had ample opportunity for study as
the article was long.  Just then Carter’s line, with its promise of
competition, focussed the interest of the entire province, and some
enterprising scribe had risen to the opportunity afforded by a visit
west of the general manager of the trunk line, to interview him upon the
probable action of his road in proceedings to condemn a crossing of its
right of way. Time, however, had not abated one iota of the manager’s
sphinx like quality.  While affable, he had declined to discuss railroad
politics, remarking that his company did not "cross bridges before they
were built."  Interviewed in his turn upon the significance of the
aforesaid remark, Carter had ventured the opinion that the trunk-line
people would not oppose the crossing, and thereby had provoked a flaming
editorial upon his artlessness.

"If the people behind Mr. Carter imagine that the greediest monopoly in
history will loose its grip on this province till the law’s crowbar
pries off its fingers one by one, they are mightily mistaken," the
editor hotly declared.  "Forewarned is forearmed, and we hereby present
them, gratis, with this piece of information—while they are running
their grades in peaceful confidence that will be most appropriate in the
innocent age when lion and lamb lie down together, the monopoly is
gathering men and means, preparing to crush their enterprise by force
should the crooked enginery of the law fail its purpose.  Why else have
five hundred extra men been distributed among the sections on either
side of the proposed crossing?  Why does a gravel-train stand there
permanently across the proposed right of way?  Soon Mr. Carter will
receive unmistakable answer to these questions."

"He’s dead right there, that editor man," the trustee said when, all
rosy red, Helen looked up from her reading.  "Old Brass-Bowels was born
with a nateral insight into the nater of a dead cinch."

"But won’t the law support my"—she paused, then proudly finished—"my
husband?  Can’t he compel a crossing?"

"The law?"  Sniffing, Jimmy indicated the legal patchwork on the wall
with a comprehensive sweep of his pipe.  "The law said as I was to pay
them, but did I?  Humph!"

"But they’ll hardly dare to fly in the face of the province?  Public
opinion is a great moral force."  She quoted a sentence from the
editorial with gusto.

"Yes, but ’tain’t much of a club.  Did you ever see one of my hawgs
stan’ aside, even when he was full, to let another have a go at the
trough?  Not till I hit him on the snout.  Well, they ain’t agoin’ to
cross the trunk line these two years, an’ for my part I don’t care if
they never cross."

"Why?"  Her eyes dilated widely.  "Wouldn’t a competing line benefit
you—all of the province?"

Nodding, he regarded her from half-shut eyes.  "Oh, I ain’t expecting to
walk on gold this side o’ the pearly gates.  As for my reasons, they
ain’t a mile away from here.  I’m not wishing too much success for a man
that deserts his wife."

Touched and very much flushed as to the face by his genuine, if crabbed
sympathy, the Reasons yet shook her head and spoke up for the recreant
husband stoutly as she had defended him against herself. She made,
however, small headway against his obduracy.

"Well, that’s the way I see it.  By-the-way," he added, heading off a
disposition for further argument, "did you see the evangelist?  Pitched
his tent over by Flynn’s.  You want to go.  Beats a three-ring circus
when old man Cummings hits up to his gait."

"Jimmy!  Jimmy!"  His wife looked up from her ironing; then daunted,
perhaps, by his twinkle, she addressed Helen.  "He hadn’t orter talk
that away, my dear.  If Mr. Cummings does go on the rampage a bit when
he gets het up, at least he’s sincere.  As for him—"  She turned a
severe eye on her husband.  "We’ll get him yet."

"Yes, I see myself.  Her idea of heaven"—he shrugged at the
ironing-board—"is an eternal class-meeting with everybody giving their
experience—love-feast she calls it.  I like something solider.  Give me
plenty to eat, a pipe by a warm fire, an’ something to read, an’ I’ll
sign away my harp an’ crown."  Ignoring his better-half’s remark that he
would not lack the fire, he finished: "She’s going.  Wouldn’t miss a
meeting. Kedn’t keep her away with a club.  So if you’d alike to see
some fun—"

"If ’twas jes’ out of curiosity I’d ask her to stay at home," his wife
interrupted.  "But she’s not that kind, an’ I’ll be glad to take her."

"If you will?" Helen assented, and so, returning to the analogy, placed
herself directly beneath the leaden belly of the lowering storm.




                                 *XXII*

                             *DENUNCIATION*


A molten sun was smouldering in the ashes of day when, the following
evening, Helen with Mrs. Glaves, drove up to the gospel-tent.  It still
lacked half an hour of meeting-time, so, while her companion joined the
early arrivals who were passing time by holding a service of song
inside, Helen remained in the buckboard and watched the sunset, observed
herself by a group of remittance-men and a scattering of settler youths
who sprawled near by on the grass.

Enthralled, she scarcely saw them; had eyes only for the ruby sun that
stained the prairies with amber incandescences, the ribbed glories of
the fiery cloud pillars that seemed to uphold the darkling vault above.
As the orb slid into his blankets of rose and gold, shy stars peeped
down at the violet shadows that crawled slowly up the slopes and knolls;
over all fell the hush of evening.

It was one of the moments when the Riddle of Infinity, Puzzles of Time,
Space, Eternity appear as concrete though unthinkable realities; weigh
down and oppress the soul with a sense of its insignificance. Against
the black-blue vault the stars loomed as worlds; she could see beyond,
around them.  Through vast voids planets were rushing on their courses;
suns with attendant systems swung on measured arcs obedient to—what? ...
A thin minor, querulous plaint stole out on the hush:

    "Poor crawling Worm of Earth,
    A Child of Sin am I—"


It was an honest attempt at the riddle, but its incongruity, futile
insufficiency caused her to shrug with sudden annoyance.  She wondered
if, somewhere in planetary space, other "pinches of sentient dust" were
equally afflicted with a sense of their central importance in the scheme
of things.  The apologetic whine spoiled the sunset; she impatiently
turned to watch the arrivals—the wagons, buck-boards, horsemen—that were
streaming in on every trail.

"How are you, Mrs. Carter?"

It was Danvers, Molyneux’s old pupil.  An honest lad and merry, she
always liked him, and now made him welcome to the seat beside her, and
laughed at his fire of chaff.  Indicating Cummings, whose ovine
expression had sustained no diminution since the day he bearded the
general manager, he remarked: "He’s great, Mrs. Carter; puts it all over
Henry Irving.  And there’s the sky pilot!  What a Jovelike port!"

There was, of course, little wit and less humor in his chaff, but his
intentions were honorable, so, ignoring the sour looks of the arriving
settlers, she gave him smiling attention up to the moment they entered
the tent together, and so prepared the way for what followed.  For
though, going in, she left levity without, her modest and devout bearing
could not mitigate her offence in allying herself with the English
Ishmael.  It was aggravated, moreover, by her remaining with him in
close proximity to the remittance crowd on the back benches.  Thereafter
nothing could save her; she remained a target for sour glances
throughout the service.

This was on the usual pattern—rousing hymns, prayer, testimony, and
exhortation—then when groans and ejaculations testified to the spiritual
temperature, the evangelist, a stout man of bull-like build, proceeded
to cut off yards of the "undying worm," and to measure bushels of the
"fire that quencheth not" for the portion of such as refused to view the
problems of Infinity through aught but his own wildly gleaming
spectacles. His discourse, indeed, bristled with those cant terms which,
while entirely devoid of meaning, are still eminently conducive of
religious hysteria, and his efforts were the more successful because of
the absence of the Probationer, a thoughtful young fellow whose rare
common-sense could be depended upon to prevent religious emotion from
degenerating into epilepsy.

Lacking his wholesome presence, the evangelist paced the platform under
the yellow lantern-light, stretching long, black arms, hovering over the
people like some huge, dark bird as he pleaded, threatened, thundered,
launching his fiery periods on a groaning wave of "amens" and
"hallelujahs."  As he went on, painting heaven and hell into his lurid
scheme of things, sighs and exclamations grew in volume, flooding
feeling pulsed through the audience, wild settler youths, who had come
to scoff, exchanged uneasy glances on the back benches, sure sign of a
coming stampede.

This was the psychological moment, and, skilled in his trade, the
revivalist pounced upon it.  Stilling the groaning chorus with upheld
hand, he solemnly invited all who were not _against_ the Lord Jesus to
stand, an old revival trick and one which now, as always, turned. For,
as before said, the plains were not yet infected with the leprosy of
agnosticism, and, Episcopalians to a man, even the Englishmen were not
willing to pose as the open enemies of God.

Once standing and pilloried in the public eye, it was but a question of
minutes until the back benches began to yield up penitents.  One by one
the settler youths were gathered into the mourning bench, until at last
Helen stood alone with the Englishmen.

"Come ye!  Come ye to the Lord!"  The preacher pleaded, but, haughty and
coldly constrained, the remittance-men ignored the invitation; and so,
for the space of a thunderous hymn of praise, gnostic civilization and
the fervid frontier faced each other across the middle benches.  From
that dramatic setting anything might come.  Moment, feeling, atmosphere,
all pointed to the event that came to pass as the hymn died.

Leaping upon a bench, and so adding its height to unusual tallness, a
woman pointed a warning hand at the unbelievers.  Thin, family-worn, and
naturally cadaverously yellow, she was now flushed with the fever of
delirium.  "In that day," she screeched, "the Tares shall be separated
from the Wheat and cast with the grass into the oven!"  Then, while her
finger indicated man after man, she raised the grewsome hymn:

    "’I heard the Sinners Wailing, Wailing, Wailing,
    I heard the Sinners Wailing on that Great Day!’"


Travelling around the benches, her skinny finger finally fastened on
Helen, and, as the lugubrious refrain came to an end, she burst forth in
tremendous paraphrase: "Beware ye of the Scarlet Woman!  Avoid ye, for
her portals lead down to Death; her feet take hold of Hell!"

The silence of paralysis followed.  So still it was that a mosquito’s
thin whine sounded through the tent, the tinkle of a cow-bell came in
from far pastures, a dog could be heard barking a long way off.
Swinging from the tent-pole, a circle of lanterns lit dark, flushed
faces, and thus, for the space of a long breath, Helen faced the virago,
the one glowering, malignant, the other pale with astonishment, mutely
indignant.  She was not confused.  On the contrary, thought and vision
were surprisingly clear; she noted Mrs. Glaves’s shocked look, the
vindictive settler faces, the Englishmen’s blank expressions.

"We had better go.  May I drive home, Mrs. Carter?"  Danvers, the
witless, the foolish, rose to the situation.

Low-pitched, his voice yet carried to every ear, as did her clear reply:

"After the service is over."

It was defiance as well as answer, and as she threw it in the lowering
face of the congregation, her glance fixed on the evangelist who, till
then, had stood, mouth open, hand arrested midway of a gesture, a
bearded, spectacled effigy of ridiculous surprise.  Starting under her
pale scorn, he flushed, looked for a second through shining, bewildered
glasses, then strode forward and seized the virago’s arm.

"Sister, sister!  Judge not that ye be not judged!"  Then, himself
again, he swept a pudgy hand over the benches.  "Sit down, all!  Brother
Cummings will lead in prayer."

It mercifully happens that sudden calamity carries its own anæsthetic in
that it blinds, confuses, destroys feeling, numbs the faculties that
ought to register its importance.  Under Helen’s unnatural calmness she
was dimly conscious of a sick excitement, but this was unrelated with
her thought.  She saw and sensed as usual; was aware of curious backward
glances, the sympathy of the Englishmen at her side; heard every word of
Cummings’s sputtering prayer, the following hymn and benediction; only
her mind refused commerce with these things.  Divorced from the present,
it juggled the terms of an equation in that day’s lesson up to the
moment that the remittance-men came crowding about Danvers’ rig after
the meeting.

Aside from their looseness and general inefficiency, the lads were brave
enough, and though some of them had won or lost bets on her reputation,
winners were no more eager than losers to avenge the insult that had
been provoked by her association with themselves.

"Just say the word, Mrs. Carter," Danvers pleaded, "and we’ll lick the
crowd."

"And put a head on the preacher," young Poole added, sinfully licking
his chops.

From the darkness that enveloped the press of rigs and wagons rose
jeering voices, sneers, laughter, the conscious cackle of scandal.
Several times she heard her own name.  There was provocation and to
spare, but though a word would have started a racial riot, she desired
only solitude, to flutter home like a wounded bird to its nest.

"No, no!" she answered them.  "Take me home! Only take me home!"

Arrived there, she flew to her own room leaving Danvers to enlighten the
trustee.  Lying face down on her bed, she heard the rumble of their
conversation, Jimmy’s violent reflections upon revivals particular and
general, his wife’s whimpering protests when she returned.  His growl
extended far into the night, and when it was finally extinguished by a
robust snoring, the girl was afflicted with a sense of lost
companionship; thereafter she had to suffer it out by herself.

There would be more pain than profit in describing her reflections,
agonizings.  Sufficient to know that a knife in the breast hurts a woman
less than a stab at her reputation, and her thought was none the sweeter
for the knowledge that she had drawn the blow by giving way to her
pique.  Her resolve as expressed next morning to Jimmy Glaves is of more
concern.

She had turned impatiently from Mrs. Glaves’s tearful apologies, but
when the old trustee laid a kindly hand on her shoulder, as she passed
him in the garden on her way to school, she gave him honest eyes.

"Now, you ain’t to bother.  ’Twas on’y Betsy Rodd, the old harridan.
Nobody minds her."

But she shook her head in accordance with her resolution to face truth.
"She was expressing what was in everybody’s minds.  I know it, and
though I didn’t intend it, I’m partly to blame, for their suspicion."
Her mouth drew thin and firm as she finished.  "I shall live it down."

"Course you will!" he heartily agreed.  "That’s my brave girl!"  But his
face darkened after she had passed on, and he slowly wagged a grave head
as he plied his hoe in the garden.

For he knew the difficulty, impossibility of the task she had marked out
for herself.  Of Scotch descent, dogmatic, wedded to convention, intense
clannishness reinforced in the settlers bitter morality, racial hatred,
the condemnation of sin.  With them the offence of the fathers was
visited upon the children to the fourth generation.  It was remembered,
for instance, against Donald Ross that his great-grandfather had died a
drunkard, and the fact had limited his choice of a wife; the daughters
of Hector MacCloud took inferior husbands because their grandmother had
been born on the easy side of the knot.  Handing such cold charity
around among themselves, what mercy were they likely to extend to the
suspected stranger within their gates?  Jimmy was still wagging his head
when, half an hour later, the Probationer reined in at the end of the
garden.

Hearing of the scandal on the Lone Tree trail, the young man had turned
aside to express his sorrow, and now listened patiently while the
trustee drew invidious parallels between the religious movement then
proceeding and his own misfit horticulture.  "You see them?"  Removing
his pipe from between his teeth, he waved it at some half-dozen
straggling apple-shoots.  "Hardiest variety of Siberian crabs.
Professor at the gove’nment experimental station warranted ’em to grow
at the north pole.  Remind me of your revival, they do."

"Why?  Don’t they grow?"  The Probationer smiled.

"Grow?  I should swan! four feet every summer, an’ freeze off to the
roots every winter—jes’ like your converts.  Get all het up at meetings,
blossom with grace, then comes the backsliding, the frost, an’ nips the
leafage.  Where’s the sense of it?"

Now the Probationer had his own doubts.  Having turned a prentice hand
at revival work, he was painfully familiar with its characteristic
phenomena—first, hot enthusiasm, slow cooling, obstinate adherence to
the form after the spirit has fled, finally the reaction which would
leave his people less charitable, not quite so kindly, a little poorer
in the things which make for the kingdom of Christ on earth.  He had
tried to be a real shepherd to his flock—to upraise by precept, example,
counsel, and admonition.  Avoiding dogma, he had brought them together
irrespective of cult and creed on the broad basis of love and a common
humanity, and just when he was beginning to expect fruit from that
liberal sowing, this bitter theologian, the revivalist, had been loosed
upon him.  And this was first fruit of his work!

Jimmy’s illustration coincided exactly with his own experience, yet
fealty to his Church demanded some sort of defence.  "Isn’t an annual
growth better than none?" he asked.  "The green shoots certainly improve
the appearance of your garden."

Jimmy blew a derisive cloud over the few cabbages, two sickly
cauliflowers, a bed of onions, salvage from worms and spring frost of
half an acre’s planting.  "But you don’t get results.  One sound cabbage
is worth an acre of sick saplings; a cheerful sinner discounts a hundred
puckered saints.  I’m scairt as the black knot has got inter that
orchard o’ yourn, sir?"

"I’m afraid so," the young fellow sadly agreed. "Well, I must try and
prune it out."

"I’d advise the axe," Jimmy grimly commented. "An’ begin with Betsy
Rodd."

Sorrowing, the Probationer drove on to the school, where a very cold
young lady answered his call at the door.  A slant of sunshine struck in
under the porch twining an aureole about her golden head, creating an
auriferous nimbus for her shapely figure.  Standing there, so cold and
pale, she might have passed for a statue of purity, and the Probationer,
being young and still impressionable albeit engaged, wondered that any
should have dared to doubt her.  Thawing when he mentioned Ruth, she
froze again as soon as he touched, apologetically, upon the event of the
night before.

"If religion strips them of common charity, they would be better without
it," she answered his apology, and turned but a cold ear to his plea for
his people.

"They were altogether subject to emotion, incapable of a reasoned rule
of life," he said.  "With the fear of God removed from their hearts,
they would drop to unmentionable levels, to say nothing of the hope and
consolation religion brought to sweeten their hard lives."

But he made little headway.  "I don’t doubt they are not quite so bad as
they would like to be.  But there, let us drop the subject.  Won’t you
come in and examine the children?"

From this conversation it will be seen that her resolve to "live it
down" was not exactly founded upon grounds that would appeal to a
professor of ethics; yet her attitude was very natural, and not so
deplorable as would at first appear.  Was she so much to blame? Hardness
breeds hardness, opposition its like.  Fire flies from the impact of
rock and iron.  Always like begets like, heredity applies to mental
forces. Moreover, injured pride has stiffened more weak spines and given
better results than the command to turn the other cheek; the desire to
"show people" lies at the root of many a bravery.  Lastly, once
rehabilitated socially, softness comes later to the injured member,
increasing in ratio to the respect of his or her community.  And so it
would have been with Helen—with a different people.




                                *XXIII*

                            *THE CHARIVARI*


Straddling a log in his dooryard, the trustee whistled softly while he
whittled and shaped a pair of birch crooks into the ox-collars that,
with trace-chains, are preferred in the northland to the old-fashioned
bows and yoke.  The revival was over.  After passing from house to house
like measles, mumps, or other dark disease, infecting men on trail, by
fireside, at the plough-tail with the prejudice he styled religion, the
evangelist had reported so many head of "saved" to his superiors, and so
had swooped like a plague upon other settlements, leaving the
Probationer to repair, as best he might, his ravages in this.  Now, two
weeks later, symptoms in Silver Creek indicated a quick recovery; extra
meetings had altogether ceased, bi-weekly prayer-meetings languished,
remarks at the plough-tail showed signs of former vigor; the sweat and
labor of haying would undoubtedly bring complete convalescence and, with
it, danger for Helen.  For while the religious excitement had served her
by excluding all else from the settler mind, tongues would be the
sharper, prejudice the keener for the rest.  It was but a lull in the
storm, the hush that follows the first flash and crash of thunder.

It was knowledge of this fact that inspired the trustee’s thoughtful
whistling.  Already he smelled trouble on the wind, the impression being
formed on many small significances—looks, nods, winks, and whispered
asides at "bees" and "raisings."  More important: his cabin, which, as
post-office, had been a social focus, centre of news and gossip, a place
to linger and chat, had of late been almost deserted.  Calling for their
mail, his neighbors departed with the shortest of salutations. So,
having had a gray eye on trouble through all, he was not surprised when
she presently appeared between Shinn and Hines in the latter’s
buck-board.  Indeed, his comment while they were still a hundred yards
away signified profound distrust.  "Gummed if the coyotes ain’t running
in packs this weather."  His beetling brows, moreover, drew a grizzled
line across his hawk nose when the two reined in opposite; he glared
suspiciously while Hines glibly discoursed on crops, weather, the
ox-collars; nor hesitated to interrupt and reach for trouble’s forelock.

"Crops is fair to middling, nothing wrong with the hay, the crooks is
for Flynn—now, what is it?"

Hines blinked and looked silly, but the check worked oppositely on
Shinn.  Of that gaunt, raw-boned, backwoods type produced by generations
of ineffable hardship and slavish labor, he stood over six feet, and
combined great strength with mean ferocity and uncontrollable passion.
His huge mouth twitched feverishly as he answered, "Sence you’re so
pressing—it’s the talk through the settlement that we orter have a new
teacher."

"Umph!"  Grunt could not convey greater contempt. "Hain’t you got a
teacher?"

"Yes, but it’s agreed that she ain’t quite the sort to put over
innercent children."

This time the trustee snorted, "Might infect them brats o’ yourn with
her sweet manners, eh?"

Shinn flushed dully under his yellow skin.  "That or something else.
Anyway, every one’s agreed that she’s gotter go."

"Who’s everybody?"

"Meeting, held at my place."  Recovering, Hines backed up his partner.

"Yes?  First I heard of it.  Was Flynn there? Thought not; he ain’t much
of a mixer.  Didn’t ask me, did you?"

Hines shuffled uneasily.  "’Twas held after a prayer-meeting—you might
ha’ been there."

"Prayer-meeting, eh?  Real Christian, wasn’t it, to try and take the
bread out of a good girl’s mouth?"

"_Good?_"

At Hines’s sneer the trustee rose, hand gripping hard on a heavy crook,
eyes one gray glare under ragged brows, temple veins ridged and swollen.
"I said ’good.’"

On the frontier a man must usually furnish material proof of courage,
but there are exceptions from whom imminent fearlessness distils as an
exhalation affecting all who come within its atmosphere.  Carter was
such a one; Glaves another.  Though neither had found it necessary to
"make good" physically during the settlement’s short history, their
ability to do so was never at question.  Behind the reserve of one,
crabbed sarcasm of the other, danger lay so close to the surface that it
was always felt, could never be quite forgotten.  Indeed, as regards
Glaves, the feeling took form in the opinion often delivered when the
qualities of men were under discussion—"If the old man ever gets
started, some one will earn a quick funeral."  Now Hines quailed, and
even the truculent Shinn observed silence.

Glaring on the shrinking Hines, the trustee went on: "Never forgot how
Carter bluffed you out on that hay business, did you?  An’ as you wasn’t
man enough to get back at him, you ’lowed to take it out of his wife?
Well, you ain’t going to.  You kin go back an’ tell them that sent you
that so long as Flynn an’ me sit on the board she’ll teach this school."

"That," Shinn retorted, "would be till nex’ election, but she won’t stay
that long.  Sence you’re so stiff about it, Glaves, let me tell you that
you kain’t fly in the face of this settlement.  You may be big wolf, but
there’s others in the pack.  If she’s here at the end of the
month—there’ll be something doing."  Nodding evilly, he drove on,
leaving the trustee to puzzle over his meaning as he shaped and polished
the crooks.

"Bluffing, I reckon," he concluded, and that, also, was the opinion of
Flynn, to whom he carried his doubts that evening.

"There’ll be no way for thim spalpeens to fire us av the boord?" Flynn
queried.  "No?  Phwat about an opposhition school?"

"Agin the law to build one in this township."

"Thin ’tis all out av the big mouth av Shinn.  Thalk, an’ nothing more."

Both were confirmed in their opinion when the month drew to a peaceful,
if hot, end.  Tricked out in various green, woods and prairies slumbered
or sighed restlessly under torrid heat that extracted their essential
essences, weighting the heavy air with intense odors of curing grasses.
There was nothing to indicate that the virulent tide of spleen was ready
to burst its banks.  Knowing that another week would bring on haying,
with its attendant wars to provide an outlet for feeling, neither
trustee anticipated the event which occurred at the full of the moon.

Though the storm broke around Glaves’s cabin, Flynn received immediate
notice.  In pleasant weather he and his wife would sit on their doorstep
after the children were in bed, to enjoy the quiet hour while the peace
and cool charmed away the cares of the day; and this night was
particularly beautiful.  Over dewlit plains the moon emptied a flood of
silver and polished the slough beyond the dooryard till it shone like
burnished steel.  Rolling off and away under that tender light, the huge
earth waves seemed to heave, swell, sigh as a lover’s bosom under the
sweet eyes of his mistress, while from the corrals near by issued the
heavy breathing of contented kine.  Always music in the ears of a
farmer, it stimulated Flynn, set him planning for the future; but he had
hardly touched on next year’s increase before Mrs. Flynn seized his arm.

"Phwat’s that?"

At first Flynn thought that Glaves was "dogging" stray cattle away from
his grain-fields, but when the iron note of beaten pans, gunshots,
metallic thundering were added to the first clash of cow-bells, he
sprang up. "A charivari!  At Glaves’s!  A spite charivari!"

"Oh, my God, Flynn!" his wife exclaimed.  "That poor girl!"  She knew
what that orgy of sound portended. A jest at weddings, the charivari was
sometimes used as a sinister weapon to express communal dislike or
punish suspicion of sin.  The most terrible memory of her girlhood was
associated with a party of fiercely moral backwoodsmen that flogged a
man at her father’s wagon-tail and dragged a woman, who had offended
public morals, naked and screaming through a field of thistles. In
Silver Creek were men who had participated in that cruelty, forced to
emigrate to escape the law.  Small wonder that she agonized under the
thought.  "Flynn! Flynn, man!  Hurry, get your horse!"

Holding the light for him to saddle, she called after as he rode away:
"Go round be Misther Danvers’!  ’Tis on’y a mile out av your way!  Going
by here at noon, himself told me that he was to have a sthag-party the
night!  They’ll jump at the chance, an’ fight none the worse for a
smhell av the whiskey!"

A cold, with complications in the shape of rheumatic pains, sent the
trustee early to bed that evening, and Helen was sewing by the fire with
Mrs. Glaves when the charivari turned loose outside.  As, jumping up,
they stood staring at one another, he shouted for them to bolt the door;
and as, after complying, Helen returned to the fire he came limping out,
bent, warped, and twisted by sciatica, half dressed, but grimly
resolute.

"Danger?" he rasped, swinging round on his wife as the house trembled
under sudden thunder of scurrying hoofs outside.  "Listen!"  And when
pained bellows followed dropping shots, he added: "Peppering the cattle.
Scairt?  Then go an’ stick your fool head under a pillow. How is it with
you?"

As a matter of fact, Helen’s face was as white as the fluffy shawl from
which her golden head rose like a yellow crocus above soft spring snows;
but, noting the thin, scarlet line of her mouth, the trustee nodded his
satisfaction. "You’ll do.  Swing round that lounge—here, where I can
train a gun on the door.  Good!"  He eased his length along it with a
groan of relief.  "Now hand me the gun—no, the other."  Rehanging his
own long duck-gun upon its wooden pegs, she brought him the famous
double-barrelled Greener which, having disarranged the lock action in
trying to clean it, Danvers had left with the trustee for repairs.
"There, put out the light an’ take a look out at the window."

Pulling the curtain aside, she got full benefit of the brazen clamor
while learning something of its genesis, for, while easily recognizable,
the din of beaten pans, cow-bells, gunshots, and yells formed only a
minor accompaniment to a barbarous metallic roll, louder than a corps of
beaten drums, and a discordant screech that discounted the torment of a
thousand tortured fiddles. Now she saw two men rapidly vibrating long
cross-cut saws back and forth against the house, while others drew a
rosined plank to and fro across a log, concentrating the discords of the
world into a single excruciating note. Closing her ears, she took
further note of the score of dark figures that came and went in the
moonlight, leaping, shouting, gesticulating strangely, as though crazed
by the frenzy of noise.  Weird, sinister shapes, they moved, massed, and
melted to units again as in some mad carnival or distorted madman’s
dream.

The trustee pulled her skirt.  "Come away!  They might shoot at the
window."

Obeying, she knelt beside him—fortunately with her back to the pane
that, a few minutes later, shivered and flew in fine rain.  "Drunk!"
Glaves commented; and as a piercing cry, clever imitation of a cougar,
rang high over a slight lull, he said, "That’s sure Bill MacCloud."  He
grimly added—for, besides being dissolute, the man was a scoffer and
leader against religion: "Gosh! but the saints are keeping queer
company.  Bill ain’t more’n a mile ’way from his bottle."

After that one lull the tumult increased in loudness and volume, and for
a long half-hour Helen listened as some soft maid of Rome may have
hearkened to the din of Goth or ravaging Hun in the sacred streets of
the imperial city.  To her, brought up under the shadow of law, with its
material manifestation—a policeman—always within call, the brutal
elemental passion behind that huge, amorphous voice was very terrible.
Almost equally fearful was the sudden cessation that set the silence
singing in her ears, the voiceless darkness, thick night of that black
room.

Touching the trustee, more for the comfort of his presence than to draw
his attention, she whispered, "What now?"

Just then the door rattled under a heavy kick; a strident voice answered
her question: "Open, Glaves, an’ send out that —— baggage" (it was a
viler word) "or we’ll burn the house over your ears!"

"You will—" the trustee began, but was interrupted by a wail from his
wife in the bedroom.

"Jimmy!  Oh, Jimmy, don’t let ’em have her.  They’ll duck her in the
slough—mebbe drown her like they did Jenny Ross back in Huron."

"Will you shet up!" he roared, but the man outside had heard.

"You bet we will.  She needs a little cooling."

"That’s surely Mr. Shinn that’s talking so fierce!" the trustee taunted.
"Man, but you’re gaining a heap wolfish, though it did take you some
time to work up to the p’int of speech.  Why didn’t you take the
shortcut through Bill’s bottle?"  His tone suddenly altered from banter
to such stern command that they distinctly heard Shinn shuffle back a
step from the door.  "Burn this house?  Get, or I’ll blow the black
heart out of you!"

A derisive yell rose outside, then silence fell again, a hush so
complete that Helen distinctly heard the tick of the clock, her own
breathing, the chirrup of a hearth cricket.  Pulling the trustee’s
sleeve, she whispered, "I’ve brought _such_ trouble upon you!"

"Rubbish!" he snapped.  "Say that ag’in an’ I’ll spank you!"  But he
gently patted her hand.

A minute slid by without further speech; a second, third, fourth, then
she whispered, "Surely they must have gone."

Before he could reply came a rapid beat of running feet, a splintering
crash, an oblong of moonlight flashed out of the darkness at the end of
the room, and quiet reigned again.  Only the battering ram, a long log,
poked its blunt nose over the doorsill.

"Stand clear there!" the trustee sharply warned. Then, as a dim,
crouched figure appeared between the jambs, he shouted, "Fair warning!"
and fired; but as the figure fell back and out, a chuckling laugh
drifted through the smoke, Shinn’s coarse voice yelled: "His gun’s
single barrel!  In, afore he kin reload!" and a black, surging mass
trampled over the dummy and filled the doorway.  As aforeseen, the
conclusion was justified—the trustee’s long gun was familiar as his face
in the settlement—and the click of Danvers’ left trigger was drowned by
a second harsh command—"Fair warning!"

The report, thunderous, ear-splitting in the confined space, certified
to Shinn’s mistake.  His writhing mouth, Hines’s wintry visage, the
press of men in the door showed redly under the flash, then sulphurous
darkness wiped out all.  To Helen, its smothering pall seemed to pulse
with thick life, to extend clutching fingers, horrors that were
intensified by Mrs. Glaves’s sudden burst of hysterical screaming.
Crouched behind Glaves, she listened in agony to the swearing, sharp
oaths, as men tripped and stumbled over the furniture and one another.
There was no escape.  They were feeling for her all over the room, and
through a sick horror she heard Shinn’s triumphant yell—

"I’ve got her!"

A choked gurgle, snarl of rage, as Glaves fastened onto his throat,
explained his mistake.  "Hell! has no one a match?"  His strangled voice
issued from a dark whorl, crash of splintering furniture, as they swung
and staggered in that pit of gloom.  The struggle could have but one
ending.  Healthy, Glaves would have been no match for Shinn, and, as a
match scratched, came the soft thud of his body as he was thrown with
brutal force against the wall.

Flaring up, the flame revealed Helen, white, trembling, sick with that
paralysis of fear that a mouse must feel in the claws of a cat.  From
the bedroom came the hysterical whooping, terrible in its sameness.
Wide-eyed, she stared, fascinated, at Shinn, but he also was staring at
a body spread-eagled before the door, its face turned down in a black,
viscid, spreading pool.  The match went out.

"My God!" a man cried.  "It’s Hines!"

But Helen did not hear that or a cry from outside warning of approaching
hoofs.  Throughout the frenzy of noise, horror of darkness, suspense,
the attack, she had carried herself bravely; but this swift death,
following on all, broke her shaken nerves, deprived her of
consciousness.

The trustee, however, heard and saw the house vomit its black life, the
dark figures streaming under the moonlight out to the bluff where the
horses were tied, panic-stricken by sudden death and uneasy memories of
outraged law.  Leaning in his doorway, bent and bruised, he saw also
Flynn and Danvers thunder by with a score of remittance-men, a wild
cavalcade hard on their heels.  In the Irishman’s hand a neck-yoke swung
with ominous rattle of iron rings; Danvers carried a cavalry sabre he
had snatched from his wall; the others brandished clubs.  Looming an
instant in the steam of their sweating beasts, they shot on with a glad
hurrah.

"Yoicks!  Tally-ho!" young Poole shrilled as he passed.  "Sic ’em,
Flynn!"

"A Flynn!  A Flynn!" Danvers squeaked as Shinn crumpled under the
neck-yoke.

Wild lads, under wilder leadership, they fought—as Mrs. Flynn had
predicted—none the worse for a smell at the whiskey.  Those of the enemy
who made a slow mounting were ridden down, fell under the clubs, or
achieved uncomfortable leaps into briers and scrub, to be afterwards
caught and drubbed, while such as escaped were run down and brought to
bay by twos and threes.  In a running fight over miles of moonlit
prairie the grudges of years were settled; jeers, gibes, many a cheating
received payment in full, with arrears of interest.  Thus Cummings
received from Danvers the "boot" due on the mare that Carter once
described as being "blind, spavined, sweenied, an’ old enough to
homestead," payment being slapped down upon the spot where most pain may
be inflicted with least structural damage.  In like manner Poole settled
with Peter Rodd for a cannibalistic sow; Perceval with MacCloud, arrears
_not_ due on a quarter-section of scrub; Gray with Seebach for forty
bushels of heated seed wheat.  Leaving them to their rough auditing, the
story returns with Flynn to the cabin after the dropping of Shinn.

After relighting the lamp, Glaves had carried his sore bones back to the
lounge, and when Flynn entered he found the terrible old fellow
glowering upon the dead. His wife’s hysteria had slackened to a strained
sobbing, and, answering Flynn’s question, he tartly replied: "No,
’tain’t Mrs. Carter.  Had her fainting-spell an’ kem to without any
fuss, like a sensible girl.  She’s in there tending to that old fool."
Then, beetling again on the dead, he forecast the verdict of the
sheriff’s jury.  "Ye’ll bear witness, Flynn, that this man kem to his
death through running into a charge of buckshot after my winder ’d been
shot in an’ door battered down."




                                 *XXIV*

                           *WITHOUT THE PALE*


"I really believe that I _ought_ to resign!"

When, one morning a week later, Helen delivered herself of certain
secret misgivings at breakfast, the trustee looked up, startled, from
his eggs and mush, then proceeded to fish for motives.

"Scairt?  You needn’t to be.  We’ve got this settlement by the short
hairs at last."

His rude metaphor roughly set forth the truth.  Without ties, the
bachelors of the charivari party had scattered west through the
territories, while Shinn, MacCloud, and other married men had gone into
such close hiding that the sheriff had been unable to subpoena one for
the inquest.  But though she neither feared nor anticipated further
violence, Helen now knew that she never would be able to live down the
settlers’ prejudice; and without the children’s love, parents’
confidence, her day of usefulness was past.

Glaves snorted at this altruistic reason.  "Love? Confidence?  What’s
their market value?  You kedn’t hope to compete with a dollar note for
the first; as for the second—  Danvers hit it off exactly when he stuck
that sign on his stable door—’No more trading here!’  Now, from my p’int
of view, it isn’t a question of love or confidence, but one of faith."

"Faith?" she echoed.

Nodding, he went on.  "Me and Flynn backed you up—stood by you through
all, didn’t we?"

"Indeed you did!"  She grew rosily red under warmth of feeling.  "I
shall never—"

"An’ now you allow to throw us down?  For Shinn and MacCloud will
shorely tell how that they scared you an’ beat us out."

It was bad argument, poor ethics—a bald statement of his grim intention
of bending the stubborn settlers to his inflexible purpose.  She felt,
however, that it would be still poorer ethics for her to desert and
disappoint these, her champions, defenders.  It was one of these
peculiar situations where any course seems wrong, and if she chose that
which seemed most human, she did it with a mental reservation.  She
would resign just as soon as she could persuade him to look at things
her way.

"Of course I’ll stay—to please you.  But—"

"No ’buts,’" he interrupted.  "Haying begins Monday, an’ by fall it’ll
all be ol’ hist’ry."

But Monday brought justification of her doubt, proving that, if cowed,
the settlers were by no means conquered.  Only the young Flynns attended
school, and the array of empty benches loomed in her troubled vision
like a huge face, vacant, mulishly obstinate as a blank wall, vividly
eloquent of the invincible determination that would have none of her.
Her heart sank, and when the week passed without further attendance she
gave up, handed her resignation to Flynn and Glaves in council at the
latter’s cabin.

Both, as might be expected, registered strenuous objections.  "’Tain’t
your fault if they cut off their nose to spite their face," Glaves
argued.  And when she replied that the children would suffer, he rasped:
"What of it?  ’The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children
to the fourth generation.’  Ye have Scripter for that."

"But not the sin of the stranger," she gently objected. "I have myself
to blame for the prejudice."

Now, though neither trustee would admit her confession, both were
afflicted with a sneaking consciousness of its truth.  For not only had
she offended by consorting with that public enemy, the remittance-man,
but the cause of Carter’s desertion had escaped from Elinor Leslie’s
indiscreet tongue.  Every man, woman, and child in the country-side was
informed as to the events which led up to and followed the Ravells’
visit.  Their denials, therefore, were negated by that profuseness of
expression which accentuates the truth it seeks to conceal.

"You know it," she answered them, and opposed further argument with that
soft feminine obstinacy which wears out masculine strength.

"But what else kin you do?" Glaves cried at last, in despair.

"Go to Winnipeg and take a place in an office or store."

Though she affected brightness, she could not altogether hide the
dejection, homesickness that inhered in the thought.  Now that she was
to leave it, that rude cabin, with its log walls, legal patchwork,
home-made furniture, glowed with the glamours of home.  Even Mrs.
Glaves’s gaunt ugliness became suddenly dear in the light of an
indefinite future among strangers.

Detecting her underlying sadness, Flynn exclaimed: "Phwat?  Wurrk in a
sthore?  Sell pins, naydles, an’ such truck while I’ve a roof over me
head?  Ye’d die in thim lonesome hotels.  Ye ’ll just come right home
wid me."

"Likely, ain’t it?" Glaves broke in, jealous for his prerogative.  "In
the first place, if she goes, she ain’t agoing to stop at no hotel, but
with my own sister that keeps a boarding-house on Main Street.  An’ if
she stays, it’ll be right here, with me—eh, old woman?"

His wife’s warm assent brought Helen to tears without, however,
affecting her resolution.  For the settlement would be by the ears, she
said, just as long as she stayed in it.

"Humph!" Glaves growled.  "It’ll have itself be the throat afore long.
Yesterday Poole an’ Danvers ran their mowers into Shinn’s five-acre
swamp, an’ if that don’t bring that big Injin a-kiting from the tall
timber, I’m Dutch."

She was not, however, to be moved, and after an embarrassed pause Flynn
said, hesitatingly: "Thim cities, now, is mighty ixpinsive.  A lone girl
without money—ye’ll let me—"

Digging a shabby bill-book from the bottom depths of his overalls, he
precipitated a second kindly quarrel. Glaring at it, Glaves snorted,
"When she knows she kin draw on me for the vally of my last head of
stock down to the dog!"

Having means for some months, this storm was more easily laid than that
which burst when Flynn offered to drive her in to Lone Tree.

"An’ her living with me?" Glaves stormed.

"’Tis meself that knowed her longest," Flynn argued.

"Humph!" Glaves sneered—"three days.  Thursday she stopped at your house
coming out from Lone Tree. Sunday I saw her at meeting—went a-purpose
an’ never tended sence.  No, she goes with me."

"Anyway, I knowed her longest," Flynn persisted. "But ’tis herself shall
say.  Which shall it be, ma’am?"

"Both," she laughed; and so, with a grizzled champion on either hand,
she rattled southward the following day.

By one of those strange coincidences of ironical fate, this, the day of
her departure, occurred on the third anniversary of her first drive out
with Carter, and all things, season, sight, sound, conspired to vividly
recall that memorable occasion.  Rank growths in uncut sloughs bowed
under warm winds that freighted a distant metallic rattle of many
mowers; beyond the settlements the Park Lands stretched to the
Assiniboin with only the chimneys of the burned Cree village to break
their spangled undulations.  As before, they came suddenly upon the
valley, rugged, riven, with its bald, buttressing headlands, timbered
ravines; the river, writhing in giant convolutions along the level
bottoms. As before, they dropped with jolts, jerks, skidding of wheels
to the ford that now tuned its hoarse voice to a melancholy dirge in
harmony with her mood; and from the door of the log mission Father
Francis bowed his silver head in courtly farewell.

After the valley came the "Dry Lands," the tawny plains, barren of
trees, cabin, or farmstead; finally Lone Tree impinged in that huge
monochrome, its grain-sheds reminding her, as before, of red Noah’s arks
on a yellow carpet.  To her the hour of departure restored the fresh,
clear vision of the stranger.  The town appeared as on that first
occasion—its one scanty street of clapboard hotels and stores with false
fronts fencing the railway tracks that came spinning out of the western
horizon to flash on over the east; the wise ox-teams rolling along the
street; the squaws with ragged ponies hitched in big-wheeled Red River
carts; the cows pasturing amid tomato-cans that strewed vacant lots; the
loafers, omni-present riffraff of the small frontier, holding down
nail-kegs and cracker-boxes under store verandas.

It was a trying drive.  Every turn of the trail brought its
reminiscences; mud chimneys, the Indian graveyard, a lone coyote,
recalled the beginnings of her love, and now that she was leaving she
vividly realized how she had grown to this land of white silences, grave
winds, vast, sunwashed spaces.  But if she had need of the heavy veil
that she pinned on that morning, that marvellous feminine restraint
enabled her to turn a composed face to the doctor and Jenny, who came to
the station to see her off.

As she passed up street, the riffraff exchanged nods and winks, but Lone
Tree furnished still other champions.  The store-keeper, he who had
loaded Carter’s buck-board with jams and jellies, came hurrying across
the tracks with good wishes and protestations.

"Shinn, MacCloud, Cummings—the hull gang—go off my books," he swore to
Glaves.  "Not another cent’s credit to keep ’em from starving."

"They can rot in their beds for me," the doctor added. "I strike Silver
Creek from my practice."  And though the train was even then whistling
for the station, Hooper, the agent, stole time for friendly greetings.

If roughly expressed, their sympathy was at least genuine; it eased the
parting so that she was able to lean out and give them a last smile as
the train rolled by the water-tank with long, easy clickings, carrying
her away beyond their tough pale.  Good enough as a farewell, it was
not, however, a success as a smile, and the woe behind its wanness
formed the subject of an indignant caucus that convened as soon as Jenny
left the platform.

"I can’t figure out jes’ what Carter means," the storekeeper fretfully
exclaimed.  "Granted that she throwed him that onct—the charivari?—that
business at the revival?  If it had been my wife, I’d been smelling
round for—"

"Blood!" the agent interjected; and though he had intended "trouble,"
the store-keeper accepted the amendment.

"What’s the man looking for?" the doctor roared. "She has beauty,
amiability, intelligence, almost every quality that a man can desire in
a wife, yet he goes off in a pout because she falls short of the angels.
He’s a damned fool.  He ought to be—"

"Aisy, aisy wid ye."  Flynn stemmed the tide of wrath.  "’Tis no
throuble at all to condimn whin a purty girl’s at t’other ind of the
argymint.  She’s sweet, an’ I’ll break the face av the man as says she
isn’t good. But—give the man toime.  Let be till we know that he’s heard
av the rhuctions.  Thin, if he does nothing—"

"Well," the doctor interrupted, "he’ll hear, all right—from me, this
very night."

"Me, too," the store-keeper added.

"An’ don’t forget to give him partickler h—l!" the agent called after as
they strolled away.

Nor did they.  Dipping his pen in scorn, the doctor opened his epistle
with a timely question as to the exact number and kinds of fool that
Carter considered himself, and finished with a spirit that transcended
even Glaves’s difficult requirements.  Equally thorough in his
beginnings, a rush of business prevented the store-keeper from making an
end that evening; but his default had its advantages in that he was thus
enabled to deliver the remainder, _viva voce_, to Carter himself, when
he stepped off the train next morning.  Served hot, with good frontier
adjectives sizzling among the nouns and articles, his opinion gained the
admiring attention of Hooper, the agent, who stood ready to offer advice
and assistance.

For his part, Carter listened quietly until the storekeeper paused for
breath.  Then he turned to the agent. "If you’d like five minutes with
my character and attainments, don’t be bashful!  I’ve got it coming.
After that please oblige with a little information on this charivari? I
only heard yesterday morning of that revival through Bender’s coming
into camp."

As he listened, his natural sternness deepened to dark austerity, then
fluxed in sad pity as the store-keeper told of Helen’s departure.
Murmuring "Poor thing!—poor little thing!" he asked for her address.

His face fell when the store-keeper answered: "You’ll have to go to
Glaves for that.  The doc’ might have it, but him an’ Miss Jenny went
north this morning to settle up her father’s affairs."  Noting Carter’s
disappointment, he kindly added: "You kin drive my sorrels.  They’re a
third faster than the livery teams.  On’y, remember they’re fresh off
the grass."

"I’ll _try_ not to misuse them," Carter answered, brightening, a remark
that plentifully illustrates his impatient feeling.

Agent and store-keeper helped him hitch; and as he headed the sorrels
out on the Silver Creek trail—the trail that for him, as for Helen, was
one long heartache—the agent drew a deduction from his sombre sternness.

"I heard that MacCloud an’ Cummings were back. Je-hosh-a-phat!  There’ll
be something doing if they cross his track."


Stepping out of his stable, after feeding the noon oats next day, Glaves
"lifted up his eyes," in biblical phrase, and saw Carter "a long way
off."  A hot morning at the hay, and the loss of two sections of his
mower-sickle by impact with a willow snag, did not tend to alleviate his
natural crustiness.  As he recognized the tall figure behind the
sorrels, the hoar of his fifty winters seemed to settle in the lines of
his weathered visage; his eye took the steely sparkle of river ice; his
nod, when Carter reined in opposite, was curt as his answer.

"Your wife’s address?  Yes, I know it."

Forewarned by the store-keeper of the old man’s bitterness, Carter was
not surprised.  "Meaning that you won’t give it to me?"

"Not till I know as she wants you to have it."

Tone and manner were superlatively irritating, but the man had taken
blood on his soul in Helen’s defence, and Carter spoke quietly.  "Don’t
you allow that she’s a right to decide for herself?"

"Now, ain’t that exac’ly what I said?"

It was not, but contradiction would merely inflame his obstinacy.  At a
loss how to proceed, Carter switched the heads, one by one, from a patch
of tall brown pig-weeds, using his left hand, for the right was roughly
tied up in his handkerchief.  On his part Glaves looked steadily past
him.

It was a beautiful day—sensuous, soft, one of the golden days when warm
winds flirt among rustling grasses breathing the incense of smiling
flowers.  Heat hung in quivering waves along the horizon like an
emanation from the hot, prolific earth over whose bosom birds,
bumblebees, the little beasts of the prairies, came and went on errands
of love and business with songs and twitterings.  And there, in the
midst of this joy of life, the grim old man bent frowning brows on
Carter, who was lost in bitter meditation.

He was laboring under an unhappy sense of error, for his contumacy,
determined absence, was not altogether a product of hurt pride.  As he
himself had dissolved their relations, it was Helen’s privilege to renew
them, and he had waited, yearning for her word.  But now that he was
dragged under the harrows of remorse, in an agony of pity for her, he
stood before Glaves as in the presence of Nemesis, convicted of a huge
mistake.

The initiative, after all, had lain with him.  If he had owned to his
fault, had apologized for his summary desertion, she could have been
trusted to do the rest. Now he doubted that he was too late, for it was
but reasonable to suppose that the trustee’s determined opposition had
origin with her.  He squared his big shoulders to this burden of his own
packing.

"Will you forward a letter?"

Frowning, Glaves answered without looking at him, "You kin leave your
address."’

"But you will forward it?"

"If she wants it."

Carter flushed, but checked a sharp answer.  "You ain’t extending too
much grace to a sinner."

"Any less than you extended her?  What d’ you expect of me that saw her
name dragged in the mud, herself insulted—that took a life to save her
body from violence?  G—d d— you!"  His pent-up feelings exploded, and
for three minutes thereafter hot speech bubbled like vitriol through his
clinched teeth in scathing denunciation of Carter’s remissness.

"Part of what you say being true, we’ll pass the rest," the latter said,
when the trustee had drained his phials of wrath.  "Now—without
conceding your right to withhold her address—will you forward some
money?"

Glaves stared.  He had expected a blow, a violent quarrel, at least;
nay, had lusted for it.  But he was too much of a man himself to mistake
a just imperturbability for fear, while the mention of money checked his
anger by switching his ideas.  Jealous for her honor, he looked his
suspicion.  "Whose money?"  But if accent and tone declared against the
acceptance of favors, he took the proffered greenbacks after Carter
explained that they covered her share of the cattle he and Morrill had
owned in common—took them, that is, with a proviso.

"Let me see," he mused, counting five of ten bills of one-hundred-dollar
denomination.  "You’d forty head of stock when Morrill died.  Five
hundred covers her share.  Take these back."  And to further argument he
sternly answered, "I don’t allow that she’s looking for any presents
from you."

"No, I don’t allow that she is."

Sadness of look and tone caused Glaves to glance up quickly, but he did
not relax in his grimness up to the moment that, having left his
address, Carter drove away. Then a shade of doubt crept into his steel
eyes.  "If it had been myself—" he muttered; then as Helen’s parting
smile recurred in memory, he added: "No, damn him! Let him suffer!"  But
this was not the end.  Pausing in his doorway as he went in to dinner,
he saw the buckboard, small as a fly, crawl over a distant knoll, and by
some association of ideas remembered Carter’s hand and wondered why it
was bandaged.  And when he learned from Poole and Danvers, who called
round for their mail that evening, his first small doubt was raised
almost to the dimension of regret.

Since the charivari, Glaves’s opinion of the remittance-man—as a
fighting animal, at least—had risen above zero, and he lent first an
indulgent, then a rapt ear to the boys’ story.  As he himself had
prophesied, the piracy of the five-acre swamp brought Shinn out from his
hiding, but the latter’s evil fate arranged matters so that as he
descended upon the remittance buccaneers from one end of the swamp,
Carter appeared on the Lone Tree trail which cat-a-cornered the other.
The result bubbled forth from the mouth of first one boy, then the
other, in eager interruptions.

"Shade of my granny!" Danvers swore.  "You never saw such a fight!"

"No preliminaries," Poole declared.  "Carter just leaped from his buggy
and went for him like a cat after a mouse."

"And little good it did him.  He might have been a gopher in the paws of
a grizzly."

"Lay like a dead man for a long half-hour—"

"And looked like a snake that had mixed with a streak of lightning."

"Blind, battered, bruised, we carried him home on his shield—that is, on
our hay-rake—"

"And that poor squalid wife of his looked rather disgusted when she
found that he wasn’t dead."

While they thus poured the tale of Shinn’s discomfiture into Glaves’s
thirsty ears, Carter rattled steadily on towards Lone Tree.  Passing
Flynn’s, he had been tempted to put in, but remembered that the Irishman
would be out at the hay, and so ran on and by the one person who could
have furnished an approximation of Helen’s address.  For she had merely
promised to write Jenny as soon as she was settled, as he had learned
when he met the doctor, back-trailing alone, early that morning.

"But you’ll surely find her at one of the hotels!" the agent called to
him, on the platform of the freight-train that carried him away at
midnight.

But Helen had gone straight to the trustee’s sister. And having wasted
two days scanning hotel registers, wandering the streets, he concluded
that perhaps she had changed her mind and gone straight through to her
friends back East.  Charging his friends and financial backers to keep
on with the search, however, he returned to his labors in that
unenviable condition of mind which romanticist writers describe as
"broken-hearted."

In a city of twenty thousand it ought not to be so very difficult to
locate a young lady whose style and beauty drew the eyes of the street.
But if the search failed, the cause inhered in other reasons than lack
of diligence—in a reason that largely accounted for Glaves’s reluctance
to give her address.  Sick at heart, hopeless for the future, she had
sunk her surname with the bitter past; resumed her maiden name while
keeping the married title.  Even with Glaves’s sister, a big,
good-natured woman, she passed as a widow.




                                 *XXV*

                           *THE SUNKEN GRADE*


The "Ragged Lands!"  Seamed, rugged, broken, gloomy with dark spruce,
sterile as a barren woman, they cumber the earth from Lake Nipissing a
thousand miles westward to the edge of the prairies, and in all their
weary length no stretch of meadow-land occurs. Pock-marked with sloughs,
muskegs, black morasses, peppered with sand-hills that rise suddenly
like eruptive boils in the sparse beard of its dwarf-growths, it is a
wicked country, and was held accursed by trappers and Jesuit fathers
who, of old, _portaged_ or paddled upon its borders.  Yet in
construction days men poured into its dark environs; one may still see
Carter’s camps, moss-grown, roofless, rotting by the right of way, for
his line split a fifty-mile breadth from the western verge of that
mighty forest.

On the day after Carter’s return from Winnipeg the westering sun gilded
a long scar, brown with the sere of felled trees, that shore thirty
miles of forest.  Ten more miles and this, his right of way, would
debouch on the Park Lands, a day’s drive southward from Silver Creek; at
its other end fifty miles of prairie grading would carry it down to the
American border.  Northerly, the cut was masked in rolling smoke of
burning brush; but where, farther south, the spruce mantle had been torn
from the bosom of mother earth, it gaped yellow as a gangrened wound.
Over this earth-sore men and teams swarmed with the buzz and movement of
flies, coming and going about a steam-digger that bit hungry mouthfuls
from the bowels of a sand-hill and spat them, with hoarse coughing, upon
a train of flat-cars.  Beyond them a pile-driver sputtered nervously
upon a lean trestle; and still farther south a track gang laid and
spiked rails with furious energy, adding their quota of noise to the
roar that combined with heat and dust to produce a miniature inferno.

Dipping still lower, the sun poked a golden finger down a thin
survey-line that slit the forest at the head of the right of way, and
touched into flame the yellow head of a young man who sat on a log near
Carter. There slim poplar-brake enclosed a mossy dell, into which the
frenzy of work and noise came faintly as the hum of a passing bee.  It
was, indeed, so cool and pleasant that the surveyor shrugged unwillingly
when the advancing shadows emphasized Carter’s remark that it was "time
to be moving."

"What a demon of unrest!" he laughed.  "Can’t keep still for five
minutes."

His mock disgust drew Carter’s smile.  "That’s all very well—for you.
When your transit is cased, you’re done.  I have a few hundred men to
look after."

"Oh, confound them!" the other said.  "I’ll never make a philosopher of
you."  And as, shouldering his transit, he followed, he commented
humorously on Carter’s tiresome energy, affirming that he was reminded
of a steam-engine that had slipped its governors. "Couldn’t be more
grovellingly industrious if you were qualifying for a headline on a
child’s copy-book.  Early to bed, early to rise, makes your boss
healthy, wealthy, and wise," he misquoted.  And as, a few minutes later,
they came out upon wood-choppers who were driving the right of way into
the forest, he grimaced, "More misguided zeal."

For all his sarcasm, his eyes betrayed his appreciation, and as,
pausing, they looked on, his face lit up with professional pride.
Following the choppers, sawyers were cutting sizable timber into logs,
piling small trees with the brush; behind them a stumping outfit
practised rough dentistry upon the road-bed.  All were putting in the
last "licks" of a good day’s work; the air whistled of falling trees,
hummed to the ringing saws; the woods echoed laughter, shouts, cheery
curses.

"Good boys," Carter murmured.  "Regular whales. Jest eat it up, don’t
they?"

"Peculiar idiosyncrasy."  The surveyor resumed his chaffing.  "They
ought to have eased up while you were away.  Can’t account for it,
unless—yes, it’s beans! Beans, sir!  You feed them beans and they work
or—die. Query: What effect would a bean diet have on a philosopher?
Ugh!  I must avoid them."

"No"—Carter indicated a figure, gigantic in the loom of the smoke, "it’s
not beans; it’s Bender.  Without him we’d have plenty converts to your
theory."

"And now tired nature pities them."

In their coincidence, the last red ray might have signalled Bender’s
shrill whistle, or _vice versa_.  Anyway, sudden silence fell like a
mantle over the clearing. While choppers and sawyers cached tools under
brush away from rusting dews, teamsters dropped bows and yokes, and all
followed the patient ox-teams down the right of way.

"Joking aside," the surveyor said, as they fell in behind, "what has
life for these fellows?  Ill-fed, worse clothed, only an occasional
spree breaks the monotony of grinding toil."

Carter’s nod was non-committal.  "They work hard—yes, but then work is
only terrible to the young and shiftless; your grown man loves it."

"If congenial."

"Generally is.  You see, there’s always something that a fellow thinks
he can do a bit better than any one else—Bill, there, planes his stumps;
Ole, that big Swede, is chain lightning on a cant-hook; Michigan Red
rides a log down a rapid like a ballet-dancer, and has Jehu beat out on
the reins; Big Hans lifts more’n any other man in camp.  Summing it,
from whip-cracking to stable-cleaning every job has its professor, who
gets a heap of fun out of proving his title.  Looking a bit closer,
these chaps get more sunshine, fresh air, and sleep than your city
workers, and if the grub is rough they ain’t bothered none with
indigestion.  Hans finds a flavor in his beans that your big financial
gun doesn’t get out of his canvas-back.  As for amusement, the regular
lumber-jack does blow a year’s salary on a week’s bust, as you say; but
most of these are farmers, some of ’em neighbors of mine. If they’re
rushed in summer they have time to burn in winter, and what of socials,
dances, picnics, they strike a fair balance with pleasure."

"But what is ahead of them?"

Carter shrugged.  "Death, of course; in the mean time, hard work, harder
living, a family, and a mortgage to keep ’em from oversleep.  But
they’ll breathe clean and live clean, work in the sun and outlive two
generations of city people.  Barring accidents, they’ll average
fourscore years, and so, when the last word is said, I don’t know but
that happiness lies down instead of up the ladder."

The surveyor curiously studied his thoughtful face. "You are climbing?"

But Carter was equal to the contradiction.  "We was talking of
averages—"

"_Were_," the other interrupted.

Grimacing, Carter repeated: "_Were_ talking of averages. The exception
gets his fun climbing, and don’t find out how much of a fool he is till
he looks down from the top."

"_Doesn’t_," the other put in, and Carter resaid the word.

The corrections sprang from a compact that was now as old as their
acquaintance.  A graduate in engineering, the young fellow was widely
read and cultured far beyond the needs of his profession, and as they
talked, smoking, in their office-tent of evenings, his allusions to and
illustrations from the realms of science, literature, art had given
Carter glimpses of Helen’s world, a universe in which touch, taste,
smell, sight, and other things gave place to feeling, memory,
perception.  And so he had been stimulated to conscious attempts at
improvement.

"I feel like a two-year-old!" he had exclaimed one evening early in
their acquaintance.  "I ’d like to know more of that.  D’ you suppose I
could get that book in town?  An’ say, if you catch me straddling the
traces—manners, speech, an’ so forth—I wish you’d lam me one. Of course
I’m pretty set, but if I could just tone down a bit on a few of the big
things, the little ones might slip by unnoticed."

In the nature of things a construction-camp is bound to suffer a chronic
drouth of news, and in default of other subjects Carter’s marital
troubles had received exhaustive and analytical treatment at the hands
of the Silver Creek men and others.  Filtering through many strata,
enough of the gossip had reached the surveyor to inform him of the
motive under this rough appeal, and he readily consented.  So, in their
talks thereafter, he had trimmed out the wilder growths of Carter’s
speech, giving rule and reason, for, as he laughingly assured him, his
big pupil had an uncanny appetite for underlying law.

"Now ’tain’t reasonable to suppose that you have to learn all the
individual cases," he would say, when the surveyor tripped him on some
expression; "what’s the law of it?"  And he would offer humorous
opinions on the eccentricities of the tongue.  "The darn language seems
to have grown from wild seed, an’ though Lindley Murray—ain’t that his
name?—lopped a bit here an’ pruned a bit there, he couldn’t straighten
the knarls and twists in the trunks.  An’ I don’t know but that it’s as
well that way Leave them grammarians alone, an’ they’d clip an’ trim the
language till it was tame as the cypress hedges that my old aunt uster
shape into crowing roosters, gillypots, an’ pilaster pillars at home
back East."  In saying which he touched a profound etymological truth
that is altogether ignored by the scientific inventors of universal
languages.

One who had not seen him for some months—Helen, for instance—could not
have failed, this evening, to notice how his faithful delving in that
wild orchard had begun to bring forth fruit in his speech.  Evincing
fewer "aint’s," it had more "ings," and even attained, on occasion, to
correct usage in "number" of verbs.  Equally forcible, as full of curt
figures, its epigrammatic quality had gained rather than lost by better
expression.

The silence which had fallen between them endured till they came in
sight of the camp, a string of tents and log-cabins under the eaves of
the forest.  Then the surveyor pointed out a girl who was watching the
tired stream from the door of the nearest tent.

"Why, there’s Dorothy!  She threatened to make the chief bring her down,
but I didn’t think she’d make it. Come along and I’ll introduce you."

As, however, he mended his pace, Carter fell behind, and the sadness
which had become habitual to his face deepened.  He had heard the young
fellow speak of this girl, his _fiancée_; and though in color and
appearance she was the opposite of Helen, the swish of her skirts as she
came to meet them, suggestion of perfume, the hundred elusive delicacies
that make up a well-bred girl’s personality, recalled his wife and
oppressed him with a vivid sense of loss.

Her voice, rich and low in its tones as Helen’s, strengthened the
impression.  "Dad said ’No,’" she laughed, after the introduction.
"But—"

"Wilful woman will have her way," a voice declared from the interior of
the tent; then the chief engineer, a hale man of fifty, appeared in the
doorway.  "Mosquitoes, alkali water, nothing would scare her."  He was
going on with inquiries of the health of a bridge that had developed
rheumatic tendencies in its feet, when she laughingly interrupted:

"Come, dad, no business till after supper.  I have already scraped
acquaintance with the cook, and he says we are to come at once.  So run
along, little boys, and get ready."

"Wash our dirty faces, to put it plainly," the surveyor echoed her happy
laugh.  "Be it known unto you, fair lady, that ablutions are held to be
effeminate, unnecessary, if not immoral, in construction work.  However,
in view of your hypersensitiveness, we will do violence to our
inclinations.  Come on, Carter—we for the tub."

But from a dozen yards she called him back.  "This is the man you wrote
me of?  I knew him at once. What a splendid fellow!"

"Gorgeous!" he returned her whisper.  "His wife must be a queer sort."

"Not necessarily."  She added, with thoughtful intuition: "The
possibilities are so many.  Your friend is handsome and has a good face,
but we girls are more complex than our mothers.  While they were
satisfied with good temper and good provision, we demand sympathy of
taste and habit; that we touch without friction at a hundred points of
contact.  Tall as Mr. Carter is, he may fall short of such a standard."

Bending, her lover gazed admiringly into her earnest eyes.  "Such a
little wisehead!  And did I pass in this difficult examination?"

Carter’s back was turned, the cook-house door had just closed on the
last teamster, her father had gone back to his calculations, so her
answer was sweet as satisfactory.

When, half an hour later, the four entered the cook-house, two cookees
were laying the table under one eagle eye of the cook, the other being
on a roast that he was liberally basting.  "Hain’t you got no nose?" he
answered Carter’s question; but he smiled as, sniffing its rich odor,
Dorothy said: "It’s venison!  And I’m so hungry!"

"Sure!" he corroborated.  "Cree hunter brought in a quarter of moose
this afternoon."

Pleased with her discernment, he seated her at the head of a table which
he himself had scoured with sand to a snowy whiteness while the cookees
were grinding a summer’s tarnish from iron knives and spoons.  Her tin
plate reflected a smile that he would willingly have paid for in turkey
and truffles, but lacking these, he served baked potatoes with the
venison, hot biscuit, cake a hand’s-breadth thick, and with a flourish
set the crowning delicacy of camp life, a can of condensed cream, beside
her tin coffee-cup.  Then he packed the cookees outside to peel the
morrow’s potatoes that her appetite might not suffer from their admiring
glances, an act which they classified as tyranny and ascribed to evil
motives.

"She’s a right smart gal," he added, after imparting a few privacies
anent their birth and breeding from the door-step.  "None a’ your
picking sort.  Knows good cooking when she sees it, she does."  Then he
left them to digest a last piece of information that the evolution of
their ancestors had been arrested in a low and bestial stage.

That supper figured as an epoch in Carter’s life, because it marked a
definite conscious change in his feeling towards his wife.  With all men
thought is more or less chaotic.  Filtering slowly from feeling under
pressure of experience, it remains fluid, turgid, until some specific
act—it may be of a very ordinary nature—clears and precipitates it into
the moulds of fixed opinion.  So, though material of a sounder, more
reasonable judgment of Helen had been gathering in his mind these
months, injured pride had held it in abeyance—in suspension, as it
were—until now that recent disappointment had left him peculiarly
susceptible to impression, a resolvent was added; that occurred which
precipitated his thought.

It took form in Michigan Red, who entered with another teamster and sat
down at the opposite table. The task that delayed them had sharpened
appetite, and their attack on the food the cook set before them was
positively wolfish.  Using fingers as much or more than forks, they
shovelled greasy beans into their mouths with knives, as stokers feed a
furnace; and as they bolted masses of pork, washed whole biscuits down
with gulps of coffee, Carter’s glance wandered between them and the
delicate girl at his side.  Here, indeed, was one of the "points of
contact" of her intuitive wisdom.  Once before he had seen, realized it.
But whereas he had thrust the thought away the night that he watched
Michigan Red eat in the lumber-camp, he now gave it free admittance,
mentally writhed as he realized how this and other gaucheries must have
ground on Helen’s sensitive mental surfaces.  Fascinated by their
gluttony, he watched until dulled eyes and heavy, stertorous breathing
signalled repletion and the close of their meal.

On her part, Dorothy was quietly observing him. Given such knowledge as
the Silver Creek teamsters had sown through the camp, it would have been
easy for her to guess the rest—if his conduct had borne out her surmise.
But he had learned so much and so quickly under the stings of injured
pride that observation failed to reveal any wide departures from the
conventional. She had to give it up—for the present.

"What a strange man!"

Her whisper dissipated his painful reflections, and, looking up, he saw
that, after lighting his pipe with a coal from the stove, Michigan Red
was surveying them with cool effrontery through the tobacco smoke.  His
fiery beard split in a sneer as Carter asked if he had finished supper.
But he did not take the hint nor move when ordered to call Bender.

"_Mister_ Bender"—he spat at the title—"is down at the grading-camp."

"I said for you to call him."  Carter’s tone, in its very gentleness,
caused the girl to look quickly so she caught his queer expression.
Compounded of curiosity, interest, expectation, his glance seemed to
flicker above, below, around the red teamster, to enfold, wrap him with
its subtle questioning.  Impressed more than she could have been by
threat or command, she waited—she knew not for what—oppressed by the
loom of imminent danger.

But it was not in the teamster’s book to disobey—just then.  Lingering
to pick another coal, he sauntered down the room under flow of that
curious, flickering glance, and closed the door behind him with a bang.
Sharp as the crack of a gun, Dorothy half expected to see smoke curling
up to the massive roof-logs.  But though her father and lover looked
their surprise, Carter resumed his eating, and there was no comment
until he excused himself a few minutes later.

Tugging his gray beard, the chief engineer then turned to the surveyor.
"Why doesn’t he fire that fellow?"

Shrugging, the young fellow passed the question up to the cook.  "You’ve
known them longest."

Thus tapped, the cook turned on a flow of information, appending his own
theory of Carter’s patience to a short and unflattering history of
Michigan Red.  "You see, Red thought he was the better man from the
beginning, an’ it was just up to the boss to give him fair chance to
prove it.  As for him, he likes the excitement.  You’ve seen a cat play
with a mouse?  Well—an’ when the cat does jump—"

"Good-bye mouse," the surveyor finished.

The cook’s significant nod filled Dorothy with astonishment.  From the
social heights upon which the accident of birth had placed her, she had
looked down upon the laboring-classes, deeming them rude, simple,
unsophisticated.  Yet here she found complex moods, a vendetta conducted
with Machiavellian subtlety, a drastic code that compelled a man to
cherish his enemy till he had had opportunity to strike.

The knowledge helped her to a conclusion which she stated as they walked
back to her father’s tent.  "Such pride!  I understand now why he left
_her_.  Just fancy his keeping on that man?"

"Damned nonsense, I call it," her father growled. "That fellow will make
trouble for him yet."

The prediction amounted to prophecy in view of a conversation then
proceeding in the bunk-house.  As Michigan’s table-mate had fully
reported the scene at supper, the teamsters were ready with a fire of
chaff when he stumbled over the dark threshold after delivering Carter’s
message.

"Been dinin’ in fash’n’ble sassiety, Red?" a man questioned.

"Nope!" another laughed.  "Voylent colors ain’t considered tasty any
more, so the boss fired him out ’cause his hair turned the chief’s gal
sick."

Hoarse chuckling accompanied the teamster’s answering profanity, but
when, after roundly cursing themselves, Carter, the surveyor, chief
engineer, he began on Dorothy, laughter ceased and Big Hans called a
stop.

"That’s right."  A voice seconded Hans’s objection. "We ain’t stuck on
the boss any more’n you are, Red; but this gal isn’t no kin of his’n.
Leave her alone."

"Sure!" the first man chimed in.  "An’ if he’s feeling his oats jes’
now, he’ll be hit the harder when we spring our deadfall.  Did you sound
the graders to-day?  Will they—"

"Shet up!" Michigan hissed.  "That big mouth o’ yourn spits clean across
the camp to the office."  And thereafter the conversation continued in
sinister whispers that soon merged in heavy snoring.  Silence and
darkness wrapped the camp.


Awaking while it was still dark, the camp rubbed sleepy eyes and looked
out, shivering, on smouldering smudges.  Outside, the air whined of
mosquitoes.  At the long hay-racks horses snorted and pawed frantically
under the winged torture; patient oxen uttered mained lowings.  Growling
and grumbling, the camp distributed itself—teamsters to feed and rebuild
smudges, choppers and sawyers to the grindstone and filing-benches.  It
was a cold, dank world.  Pessimism prevailed to the extent that a man
needed to walk straitly, minding his own business, if he would avoid
quarrel.  But optimism came with dawn—teamsters hissed cheerfully over
their currying, saw-filers and grinders indulged in snatches of
song—reaching a climax with the breakfast-call.  When, half an hour
later, Dorothy appeared in the cook-house doorway, the camp had spilled
its freight of men and teams into the forest.

Warned by the shadow, the cook looked up and saw her in Stetson hat,
short skirt, high-laced shoes, a sunlit vision with the freshness of the
morning upon its cheeks. "God bless you!  Come right in," he exclaimed.
"Your daddy an’ Mr. Hart hev’ gone down line.  Devil’s Muskeg got hungry
las’ night an’ swallered ten thousand yards of gradin’."

As yet she knew nothing of those treacherous sinks that gulp grades,
trestles, and the reputations of their builders as a frog swallows
flies, and he went on, answering her puzzled look: "Morass, you know,
swamp with quicksand foundation that goes clean down to China. Nope,
’tain’t Mr. Carter’s loss.  He ain’t such a fool as to go an’ load a
muskeg down with clay and rock.  An Easterner had it on a sub-contract,
an’ though Mr. Carter warned him, he reckoned he could make it bear a
grade on brush hurdles.  Crowed like a Shanghai rooster because it
carried trains for a week.

"Oh, I don’t know," he commented upon her pity for the luckless
contractor.  "You kain’t do nothin’ with them Easterners.  He was
warned.  Besides," he vengefully added, "he shedn’t ha’ come crowing
over us. More coffee, miss?"

Leaving the cook-house, a shadow fell between her and the sun, and
Carter gave her good-morning.  "Breaks the poor devil," he supplemented
the cook’s information, "and bothers us.  Cuts off our communications.
We shall have to move the outfits back to prairie grading till they are
re-established.  I’m going down there—now, if you’d like a hand-car
ride?"

Would she?  In five minutes she was speeding along under urge of ten
strong arms, over high trestles which gave her sudden livid gleams of
water far below, through yellow cuts, across hollow-sounding bridges,
always between serried ranks of sombre spruce.  Sometimes the car rolled
in between long lines of men who were tamping gravel under the ties.
Rough fellows at the best, they had herded for months in straw and dirt,
seeing nothing daintier than their unlovely selves, and as they were not
the kind that mortifies the flesh, the girl was much embarrassed by the
fire of eyes.  Apart from that, she hugely enjoyed the ride.  With feet
almost touching the road-bed, she got all there was of the motion,
besides most of the wind that blew her hair into a dark cloud and set
wild roses blooming in her cheeks.

She gained, too, a new view-point of Carter, who chatted gayly,
pointing, explaining, as though they were merely out for pleasure and
another had not been just added to the heavy cares that burdened his
broad shoulders.  She learned more of the life, its hardship, comedy,
tragedy, in half an hour’s conversation, than she could have obtained
for herself in a year’s experience.

These different elements sometimes mixed—as when he indicated a
blackened excavation.  "See that?  A man was sitting on the stump that
was blasted out there. Reckon he got sort of tired of the world," he
replied to her horrified question, "and wanted a good start for the
next."  Then, easily philosophical, quietly discursive, he wandered
along, touching the suicide’s motives.  There had been different
theories—drink, religion, a girl—but he himself inclined to aggravated
unsociability.  The sombre forest, with its immensity of sad, environing
space, had translated mere moroseness into confirmed hypochondria. He
had so bored the stumping outfit, to which he belonged, with pessimistic
remarks on things in general that, in self-defence, they threw something
at him whenever he opened his mouth; and so, bottled up, his gloom
accumulated until, in an unusually dismal moment, he placed a full box
of dynamite under a stump and sat down to await results.

"Why didn’t some one pull him off?" she cried.

His answer was pregnant.  "Short fuse.  Anyway, the boys didn’t feel any
call to mix in his experiments—especially as he swore a blue streak at
them till the stump lifted."

"Horrible!" she breathed.

"Just what they said."  He solemnly misunderstood her.  "They never
heard such language.  ’Twas dreadfully out of place at a funeral."

"Oh—I didn’t mean that!"  Then, considering his serious gravity,
"Was—was there—"

"Pretty clean."  He relieved her of the remainder of the question.
"Mostly translated."

Incredulous, she glanced from him to his men and received grisly
confirmation, for one thrust out a grimy finger to show a horseshoe
ring.  "I picked it up on the track, miss, forty rod from the—obseq’ses.
Didn’t allow he’d want it again."

Shuddering, she turned back to Carter, but before she could make further
comment the car rolled from a cut out on the edge of the Devil’s Muskeg.

She thought him cold-blooded until, that evening, she learned from her
friend, the cook, that he had been caught on the edge of the blast as he
rushed to save the man and had been thrown a hundred feet.  A little
disappointed by his apparent callousness, she joined her father and
lover, who, with the contractor, stood looking out over the muskeg.
Sterile, flat, white with alkali save where black slime oozed from the
sunken grade, it stretched a long mile on either side of the right of
way. Around its edges skeleton trees thrust blanched limbs upward
through the mud, and beyond this charnel forest loomed the omnipresent
spruce.  In spring-time its quaking depths would have opened under a
fox’s light padding, but the summer’s sun had dried the surface until it
carried a team—which fact had lured the contractor to his financial
doom.  A fat, gross man, he stood mopping his brow and wildly
gesticulating towards the half-mile of rails that, with their ties, lay
like the backbone of some primeval lizard along the mud, calling heaven
and the chief engineer to witness that this calamity was beyond the
prevision of man.

"’Jedgment of God,’ it’s termed in government contrac’s," he exclaimed
to the chief, who, however, shrugged at such blackening of Providence.

"Well, Mr. Buckle," he answered, as Carter came up, "the judgment was
delivered against you, not us."

"Yes, yes!" the man grovellingly assented.  "I know—mine’s the loss.
But you gentlemen orter give me a chance to make it up building round
this cursed mud-hole?"

"Round what?"

He turned scowlingly upon Carter.  "This mud-hole, I said."  With a
greasy sneer, he added: "But mebbe you kin build across it?"

"I can."

"What?" he screamed his angry surprise.  "Why, hell!  Wasn’t it you that
tol’ me it wouldn’t carry a grade?"

"I said it wouldn’t carry yours."

His quiet assurance gave the contractor pause, while engineer and
surveyor looked their surprise.  "Going to drive piles down to China?"
The contractor grew hysterically sarcastic.  "You’ll need a permit from
Li Hung Chang.  What do you know about grades, anyway?  I was building
this railroad while you was wearing long clothes."

"Likely."  Carter’s easy drawl set the others a-grin and caused Dorothy
to hide her smile in her handkerchief. "But you ain’t out of yours yet.
A yearling baby wouldn’t try to stack rock on top of mud.  But that
isn’t the question.  D’ you allow to finish the contract?"

"Think I’m a fool?" the man rasped.

"’Tain’t always polite to state one’s thoughts. But—do you?"  And when
the other tendered a surly negative, he turned to the engineer.  "You
hear, sir?  And now I file my bid."

The chief, however, looked his doubt.  As yet engineering science
offered no solution for the muskeg problem, and this was not the first
grade he had seen sacrificed to a theory.  "Are you serious?"

"As a Methodist sermon," Carter answered his grave question.  Then,
drawing him aside, he pulled a paper from his pocket—an estimate for the
work.  It was dated two weeks back, prevision that caused the chief to
grimly remark: "Pretty much like measuring a living man for his coffin,
wasn’t it?  But look here, Carter! I’d hate to see you go broke on this
hole.  I doubt—and your figure is far too low.  What’s your plan?"

"I’m going to make a sawdust fill with waste from the Portage Mills."

Whistling, the chief looked his admiration, then grinned, the idea was
so ludicrous in its simplicity.  For, all said, the problem resolved
itself into terms of specific gravity—iron sinks and wood floats in
water; and the muskeg which swallowed clay would easily carry a sawdust
bank.  Moreover, the idea was thoroughly practicable.  Situated five
miles from Winnipeg, the Portage Mills were the largest in the province
and their owners would willingly part with the refuse that cumbered
their yards.

"You’ve got it!" he cried, slapping his thigh.

"That’s not all.  If old Brass Bowels—"  Noticing that the contractor
was looking their way, he finished in a whisper, the significance of
which caused the chief’s grizzled brows to rise till lost in the roots
of his hair.

"You’ll break camp—?" he questioned.

"To-morrow.  Build a spur into the mills, then start prairie grading at
the American line and run north. Ought to make a junction about the time
the sink is filled."

And this he did.  The few miles of spur-track being quickly built, a
yellow tide of sawdust was soon flowing out to the Devil’s Muskeg, where
Bender’s wood gang directed its flow.  At first there was great argument
about this new material, some holding that one might as well try to
build a road-bed with feathers.  But it proved itself.  Tamping hard as
clay, it had greater resilience, and soon the twisted track rose like a
mained serpent from the slimy clutch of the devil.  Yes, miles of
flat-cars, boarded up till they loomed big as houses, moved between mill
and slough through that summer, and no one dreamed of their slow
procession having other significance up to the moment that Helen heard
newsboys crying a special in the hot streets—

"Monopoly refuses new line a crossing.  Section gangs tear up Carter’s
diamond."




                                 *XXVI*

                               *WINNIPEG*


By that time Helen had shaken down to a life that was new as
strange—though not without travail; shaking is always uncomfortable.

Coming in to the city, a natural nervousness—that indefinite
apprehension which assails the stoutest under the frown of new
adventures—had been accentuated by heart-sickness from her late
experiences, and was justified by some to come.  She viewed its distant
spires very much as an outlaw might contemplate far-off hostile towers.
Entering from the west, as she did, one sees taller buildings poke, one
by one, from under the flat horizon.  For the city sits by the Red
River—smoothest, most treacherous of streams—in the midst of vast
alluvial plains, its back to the "Ragged Lands," facing the setting sun.
North, south, east, and west of it they stretch, these great flat
plains.  Vividly emerald in spring-time, June shoots their velvet with
chameleon florescences that glow and blaze with the seasons, fix in
universal gold, then fade to purest white.  Dark, dirty, the city stands
out on the soft snow-curtain like a sable blot on an ermine mantle.
Withal it is a clean city, for if the black muck of its unpaved streets
cakes laboring wagons and Red River carts to the hubs after spring
thaws, the dirt is all underfoot.  No manufactures foul the winds that
sweep in from boreal seas with the garnered essences of an empire of
flowers.

Purely agricultural, then, in its functions, the bulk of its burgesses
were, as might be expected, store-keepers, implement men, bankers,
lawyers, land agents, all who serve or prey upon the farmer; for there,
also, lurked the usurers, the twenty-per-cent. Shylocks, fat spiders
whose strangling webs enmeshed every township from the Rockies to the
Red.  Spring, fall, or winter, grist failed not in their dark mills,
which ground finer and faster than those of the gods.  Scattering their
evil seed on the dark days, it was their habit to reap in the sunshine,
competing for the last straw with their fellows, the business men, in
their single season of profit—Harvest. For in summer the city drowsed
amid green wheat seas that curved with the degrees over the western
world; it slept, nodding, till the wheat, its life-blood, came in huge
arterial gushes to gorge its deflated veins.

Thus Helen found it—asleep under the midsummer sun.  Walking to her
destination, she met few people; after the hotel ’buses rattled by, the
streets were deserted save for an occasional buck-board or slow ox-team
chewing the peaceful cud at the wooden sidewalk.  When, later, she
walked those hot streets on that most wearisome of occupations, the
search for an occupation, she became familiar with the city’s more
intimate topography—the huge concrete foundations, vacant, gaping as
though at the folly which planned them and their superstructures, the
aërial castles that blew up with the boom; the occasional brick blocks
that raised hot red heads proudly above surrounding buildings, the
river, with its treacherous peace; old Fort Garry, which she repeopled
with governors, commissioners, factors, and trappers of the Hudson Bay
Company.

Also she grew sensitive to its varied life, easily distinguishing
between emigrants, who were injected by daily spurts into the streets,
the city’s veins, from the old-timers—remittance-men, in yellow cords
and putties; trappers from Keewatin, Athabasca, the Great Slave Lake, in
fringed moose-skins; plethoric English farmers, or gaunt Canadian
settlers from the rich valley round-about; Indians of many tribes—Cree,
Sioux, Ojibway; the heterogeneous mixture that yet lacked a drop of the
Yankee or continental blood which would flow, ten years later, in a
broad river over the American border. But this was after she had fallen
into her place in the household of Glaves’s big sister among a
scattering of teachers, up for the Normal course, a brace of lawyers,
three store-keepers, and a Scotch surgeon.

Just what or where that place was would be hard to say, seeing that it
varied with the view-point of each lodger, nor remained the same in the
opinion of any specific one.  Thus did she shine, for one whole week,
the particular star in the heaven of an English teacher, a mercurial lad
of twenty; then having rejected his heart with a pecuniary attachment of
thirty-five dollars per mensem, she fell like a shooting-star and became
a mere receptacle for his succeeding passions, which averaged three a
month.  His fellow-teachers swung on an opposite arc.  Canadians, and
mostly recruited from the country, the soil still clung to their heavy
boots.  The profession, its aims and objects, formed their staple of
conversation.  Deeply imbued with the sense of the central importance of
pedagogy in the scheme of things, they wore an air of owlish wisdom that
was incompatible with the contemplation of such sublunary things as
girls.  Having wives, it was not to be expected that the store-keepers
could notice a young person whose attractions so far exceeded her known
acquaintance, and though the surgeon, a young man prodigiously bony as
to the leg and neck, really worshipped her from behind the far folds of
his breakfast newspaper, thought transference still lay in the womb of
future humbuggery and she catalogued him as injuriously cold.

From this conglomerate of humanity she gained one friend, the young wife
of a lawyer who had lately come West.  Prettily dark as Helen was
delicately fair, each made a foil for the other, which necessary base
for feminine friendships being established, their relations were further
cemented by an equal loneliness, and made more interesting by the
expectation of an event.  As it was not yet fashionable to shoo the
stork away from the roof-tree, behold the pair fussing and sewing
certain small garments with much tucking, trimming, insertioning,
regulating said processes by the needs of some future mystery dight
"shortening"—all of which brought Helen mixed feelings.  The young
husband’s part in said operations was particularly trying.  Supposedly
immersed in his paper of evenings, he would watch them over the tip with
a delighted sagacity akin to the knowing look which a bull-dog bestows
on a crawling kitten.  At times, too, he would descend upon the work and
lay wee undervests out on his big palm, tie ridiculously small caps over
his shut fist, ask absurd questions, and generally display the manly
ignorance so sweet to the wifely soul; while Helen sat, a silent
spectator of their happiness.  It is a question which the acquaintance
brought her most, pain or pleasure.

The tale of the boarders would not be complete without mention of Jean
Glaves, a buxom woman, fair of hair, whose strong, broad face seemed to
incarnate the very spirit of motherhood.  With her Helen’s place was
never in doubt.  Opening her big heart, she took the lonely girl right
in, and proved a veritable fount of energy in her disheartening search
for work.

In this her first experience conformed to that usual with a
working-girl—she shivered under icy stares, shrank from the rude rebuffs
of busy men, and blushed under smiles of idle ones; sustained the
inevitable insult at the hands of a rascally commission broker at the
end of one day’s employment.  His quick, appraising glance, following a
first refusal, would have warned a sophisticated business woman, but the
innocence which betrayed Helen later proved her best protection.  The
horror in her eyes, childlike look of hurt surprise, set the dull reds
of shame in the fellow’s cheeks, but she was out in the street with hat
and jacket while he was still muttering his apology.  Yet his grossness
fell short of the vile circumspection of her next employer.  A smug
pillar of society and something in a church, caution would not permit
him to stake reputation against possible pleasure on a single throw, yet
she labored under no illusions as to the motive behind her second
discharge.

"Oh, I can’t bear it!  I just can’t try again!" she cried that night to
Jean Glaves.

"You won’t have to, dearie," the big woman comforted, and having tucked
her comfortably upon her own lounge with a wet cloth upon her aching
head, she went straight to the Scotch surgeon’s room.

Her choice of confidant may have been due either to intuition or
knowledge of what was going on behind the ramparts of the young man’s
breakfast paper.  The event proved it wise, for his giraffe neck
lengthened under his angry gulps, his bony hands and nodding head
emphasized and attested Jean’s scathing deliverence upon men in general.
"The scoundrel!" he exclaimed, when she paused for lack of breath.  "The
scoundrel! I’d flog him mysel’ but for the scandal.  But see you he’ll
no’ go unpunished.  He’s a bid in for the hospital supplies, and I’ll be
having a word with the head doctor."  And thus, later, was the smug
villain hit to the tune of some hundreds in his tenderest place, the
pocket.

Not content with future revenge, the Scotchman’s sympathy expressed
itself in practical suggestion.  "If ye’d think, Mistress Glaves"—he
always accorded Jean the quaint title, and it fell gracefully from his
stiff lips—"now if ye’d suppose the young leddy would like to try her
hand at nursing, there’s a vacancy in the hospital."

While he hesitated, Jean literally grabbed opportunity by the collar.
"You come along with me."

Introduced a few seconds thereafter to man and subject, Helen exclaimed
that she would love the work; nor were her thanks less sincere for being
couched in stereotyped form.  How _could_ she thank him?  Being sincere
to the point of pain, after the fashion of his nation, the young man had
almost answered that the obligation lay with him in that his studies
behind the newspaper would be furthered and facilitated.  He replied,
instead, that the pay would be small, the work hard.

Not to be discouraged, she was thus launched upon what, in her
condition, was the best of possible careers. For the mental suffering
which, lacking an outlet, burns inwardly till naught is left of feeling
but slag and cinders, becomes the strongest of motor forces when
expended in service for others.  Throwing herself body and soul into the
new work, she forgot the suspicion, scandal that had lately embittered
her days, and had such surcease of loneliness that in one month the
lines of pain disappeared from around her eyes, her drooping mouth drew
again into the old firm tenderness.

Besides content, the month brought her other satisfactions. Owing to
lack of accommodation at the hospital, she still slept at the
boarding-house, and dropping into Jean Glaves’s room for a chat one
evening, she found her conversing with a girl of her own age.  She would
have retired but that Jean called her back.  "Don’t go!  We were talking
of you.  This is Miss Dorothy Chester, who used to board with me.  Miss
Chester—Mrs. Morrill."

There was, of course, nothing in the names to convey the significance of
the introduction to either.  After that period of secret study which is
covered by the feminine amenities, each decided that she liked the
other.  Helen gladly accepted Dorothy’s invitation to call, and in this
ordinary fashion began a momentous acquaintance that soon developed
through natural affinity into one of those rare and softly beautiful
friendships which are occasionally seen between women.  And as
friendship means association in a city that has no theatre and few
amusements, it soon happened that any evening might see Dorothy in
Helen’s room, or Helen on the way to her friend’s hotel.  Naturally
Helen quickly learned that her friend’s father and lover were head
engineers on Carter’s road, and that she had visited them in camp; and
as Dorothy was as willing to talk of her novel experience as Helen to
listen, imagine the pair in the former’s cosey bedroom, one snugged up
on a lounge, the other coiled in some mysterious feminine fashion on
pillows at her side, fair girl hanging on dark girl’s lips as she
prattled of Carter, or joining in speculations as to what kind of a
woman his wife might be.

She positively jumped when Dorothy declared one evening: "I’m sure he
still loves her.  Ernest says that he scoured the city for her; only
gave up when he felt sure that she had gone East to her friends.  When
the road is finished, he is going back to look for her."

_He had searched for her_!  _Still loved her_!  It rhymed with her deft
fingers rolling bandages; tuned her feet as she bore medicine-trays from
ward to ward; ousted the dry anatomical terms of the daily lecture from
their proper place in her mind.  The thought illumined her face so that
maimed men twisted on their cots to watch her down the ward.  Meeting
her on the main stairs, one day, Carruthers, the Scotch surgeon, almost
mistook her for the Virgin Mother in the stained window above the
landing.  _He searched for me! is going back East to look for me_!  The
days spun by to that magical refrain.

Why, in view of all this, did she not confide in Dorothy? Though its
roots grip deep down in woman nature, the strange, contradictory,
inconsequential, yet wise woman nature, the reason lies close to the
surface.  Physically akin to the impulse which urges a shy doe to fly
from its forest mate, her feeling flowed, mentally, from injured
wifehood.  For all her natural sweetness and joy over the thought of
reunion, she was not ready to purchase happiness with unconditional
surrender; to make overtures directly, or through Dorothy, that might be
construed as a bid for executive clemency.  As he had deserted her, so
he must return; and that prideful resolution was strengthened and
justified by the suffering which had immeasurably exceeded her fault.
Yes, first he must return, then—would she instantly forgive him?  Any
lover can answer the question; if not, let him consult his sweetheart.
"I’d make him suffer!" she will cry, gritting pretty teeth.  So Helen.
_Very_ unchristian, wicked, but natural.

No, she did not confide in Dorothy, went quietly about her business,
hugging her sweet secret to her own soul, until—  But this summary of
her thought and feeling would not be complete without mention of a last,
perhaps greatest, satisfaction—her joy in reading newspaper accounts of
Carter’s progress.  Editorials, politics, reports, she read all, day by
day, glowing over red-hot denunciations of the monopoly while she
thought what good men the editors must be, and how intelligent to so
clearly discern her husband’s merits.  She was mightily troubled by the
insatiate appetite of the Devil’s Muskeg, studying its rapacious dietary
as though it were a diabetes patient.  She triumphed when Carter
successfully treated its ineffable hunger with vegetarian diet of
sawdust; shivered when he was refused a crossing of the trunk line;
thrilled over the battle when Bender and the woodmen beat back the
monopoly’s levies while the trackmen laid the "diamond," and grew sick
with fear, as before mentioned, when she heard the newsboys crying out
Carter’s final repulse as she was walking home to her room about eight
o’clock one evening.

Though very tired, she immediately turned in her agitation, and,
undeterred by the continent of blue-print uniform that spread below her
brown ulster, she hurried to Dorothy’s hotel, an old caravansary that
had survived two rebellions and the bursting of the boom.  Once chief of
the city’s hostelries, the old house still attracted people who
preferred its solid comfort to the gilt, lacquer, garish splendors of
more modern rivals.  The parlor in which she waited while her name was
taken up to Dorothy, was panelled with sombre woods; her feet literally
sank in a pile carpet, thick, green, and dark as forest moss.  Walls
were upholstered in hammered leather; chairs, heavy table, massive
furnishings, all were of black oak.  The portraits of governors, high
commissioners, and chief factors of the Hudson Bay Company, soldiers and
traders or both, seemed ready to step down from their frames to engage
in wise council and issue fiats that would set a hundred tribes in
motion. Time stood still in that solid atmosphere.  Heavy odors of
leather and wood, the pervading feeling of peaceful age combined to
soothe her fretted nerves, and she had just relaxed her tired body
within the embrace of a mighty chair when passing footsteps and a voice
brought her up, tense and rigid.

Returning just then, the bell-boy repeated her question: "Gentlemen who
just passed, Miss?  Mr. Greer and Mr. Smythe, people that are financing
the new line, and Mr. Carter, their head contractor.  They are dining
here with the general manager of the trunk line.  If you’d like to see
them," he added, interpreting her interest as curiosity, "just step this
way.  They’ve all gone in, and you can peep through the glass doors.
It’s that dark in the passage no one will see you."

As she tiptoed after him down the dark hallway he whispered
further—"Reminds me of them old Romans, the general manager; them
fellows that used to invite a man to a poisoned dinner.  He’s got those
chaps shooed up into a corner, and now he’s going to kill their
financial goose over the cigars and wine.  Sure, Miss, everybody knows
that Greer’s on his last legs.  Bit off more than he could chew when he
went to railroading; but old Brass Bowels will treat his indigestion.
That’s him, stout gent with his back this way.  Greer and Smythe’s
either side of him.  That’s Mr. Carter opposite.  T’other gentleman, Mr.
Sparks, is general superintendent of the western division."

Slipping by the others her glance glued—the term is eschewed by purists,
who ironically inquire if the adhesive used was of the carpenter
variety, but it exactly describes her steadfast gaze—her glance glued to
Carter’s face.  From above an arc lamp streamed white light down upon
him, darkening the hollows under his eyes, raising his strong features
in bold relief.  This, be it remembered, was the first she had seen of
him since he broke in upon the Ravell dinner-party, black, sooty,
smelling evilly of sweat and smoke.  And now he sat with a waiter behind
his chair, at meat with the greatest man in the north, at a table that
was spread with plate, cut-glass, linen, all of a costly elegance that
transcended her own experience.  The champagne bucket, at his elbow, of
solid silver, with gold-crusted bottles thrusting sloping shoulders out
of cracked ice, the last accessory of luxurious living, took on
wonderful significance in that it accentuated to the last degree their
changed positions. For surely the gods had turned the tables by bringing
her in print hospital uniform and shabby ulster to witness this crowning
of his development.

Be sure she felt the contrast.  How could she do otherwise?  Yet her
feeling lacked the slightest touch of humiliation.  Above such
snobbishness, she was filled by joy and pride in his achievement, joined
with tremulous fear, for the bell-boy’s remarks had quickened her
apprehension.  That distinguished company, costly appointments, perfect
service, impressed her as little as it did Carter, which is saying a
good deal, for the pomp of civilization counts more with women than men,
and he was bearing himself with the easiness of one who has conquered
social circumstance.  He chose the right fork for his salad, knife for
his butter; broke his bread delicately, trifled with green olives as if
born to the taste—though this edible presented itself as a new and
bitter experience—small things and foolish if made an end in themselves,
yet important in that, with improper usage, they become as barbed thorns
in the side of self-respect. Significant things in Carter’s case because
they showed that he had applied to his social relations the same
shrewdness, common-sense, keen sight that was making him successful in
large undertakings.

Of course she noted his improvement?  That he no longer used knife for
spoon, squared elbows over his head, sopped bread in gravy?  On the
contrary, she saw only his face, dark and stern save when a smile
brought the old humor back to his mouth.  Her hungry eyes traced its
every line, marking the minutest changes wrought by thought, care,
sorrow, time’s graving tools.  Hands pressing her breast, she struggled
for his voice with thick oak and heavy plate-glass, and so stood,
wrapped up in him and their past, till the bell-boy spoke.

"Miss Chester said you was to go right up, Miss."

She jumped, and her tremulous fear took form in words.  "You are sure
the general manager will—"

"—Do things to ’em?" he finished, as he led her upstairs.  "They’re dead
ones, Miss."




                                *XXVII*

                       *THE NATURE OF THE CINCH*


The bell-boy was not alone in his opinion.  Through that summer twenty
thousand settler farmers had kept suspicious tab on the monopoly, and
now that it felt the clutch reclosing on its throat, the entire province
had flamed up in wrath and fear.  Press, legislature, and pulpit
denounced the refusal of a crossing that was without shadow of a claim
in equity, and was plainly intended to kill competition by tedious and
costly litigation.  In town, village, on trail, at meeting, wherever two
settlers were gathered together, the general manager’s action was damned
in no uncertain terms.  Indignation flowed like a tidal-wave over the
plains.  Skimming low with the north wind, an aeronaut would have heard
the hum of speech rise from the face of the land, angry and continuous
as the buzz of swarming bees.  It had pealed out in clarion triumph,
that huge _vox humana_, when the "diamond" was laid after desperate
fighting; it swelled in furious discordance when, the previous day,
Carter’s men were forced back by sheer weight of the levies that the
general manager had gathered and brought in from the sections along
three thousand miles of track.

It was one of those situations which require only a touch of demagoguery
to wreak great harm.  Insurrection hung thick in the air.  Secession and
coalescence with the United States were openly advocated by men who
later read with astonishment their own words in the papers of that
stormy time.  Thousands of armed settlers waited only for the word to
fall upon the monopoly’s levies, but in face of united public opinion,
backed by an inflamed press, Carter and his people remained
quiescent—supinely quiescent, according to certain editorials.

A morning paper recalled its prediction of months ago: "We warned Mr.
Carter not to be deceived by the monopoly’s complaisance in bringing his
construction outfit and supplies out from the East over its tracks. The
concession was merely bait for the trap, analogous to the handing of a
rope to a fool wherewith to hang himself.  We are loath to quote the old
proverb against Mr. Carter, yet were it not for the fact that the
monopoly snaps its fingers in the face of this province through him, we
should be tempted to show satisfaction at the plight to which his
fatuous self-confidence has brought him."

The article closed with a vivid word picture of the general manager
chuckling _à la_ Mephistopheles in the privacy of his luxurious office;
which, perhaps, approximated the reality more closely than that in the
minds of the laity.  For a composite of the popular impression would
have shown the entire railroad pantheon, general manager, department
heads, with their clerks, sub-heads, assistants, and deputy assistants,
all very lofty of brow and solemn of face, in session over the crisis.

The reality was much more prosaic.  Indifferent to the newsboys, who
were crying his crimes on the streets, the general manager sat in the
office of the division superintendent that morning, chair tilted back,
feet on the table, thumbs comfortably bestowed in the arm-holes of his
vest.  It has remained for a practical business age to clothe itself in
the quintessence of ugliness. Imagine Julius Cæsar in a tuxedo, Hamlet
wearing a stove-pipe hat!  His black coat, check trousers would have
pleased a grocer’s fancy in Sunday wear, and it were difficult to
realize that their commonplace ugliness clothed a power greater than
Cæsar’s—the ability to create and people provinces, to annihilate and
build up towns, to move cities like checkers over the map; harder still
to listen to his curt speech, issuing from blue tobacco smoke, and
believe that an empire larger than ancient Rome paid him tribute, that
the blood and sweat of a generation had gone to grease his juggernautal
wheels. Yet the speech itself certified to the power.

"We made a mistake, Sparks; but who could foresee this fellow Carter?
Here’s the N.P. lusting for a chance to cut in over the border.  Give
them that crossing and old Jim Ball will place their bonds for any
amount in exchange for reciprocal running arrangements.  So we’ve got to
make a quick killing.  Buy ’em out, lock, stock, and barrel, while the
fear of God’s in their hearts.  They must sell—look at this Bradstreet
report on old Greer’s assets.  Just about at the end of his string.  So
I want you to write and invite them to dinner to-night—Greer, Smythe,
and Carter—though the order ought to be reversed; he’s the brains of the
business.  Draw it mild—conference with a view to amicable arrangement
of points at issue, and so forth.  But when we once get them there—"
His nod was brutal in its significance.

Equally wide of popular conception was the scene in the banking office
of Greer & Smythe when the invitation was delivered.  Carter, who swung
an easy leg from his favorite perch on the table, seemed to have thrived
on defeat; the most elastic imagination would have failed to invest him
with the weight of a people’s cares. Indeed, he laughed when the senior
partner handed him the general manager’s note.

"Hum!  ’Will you walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly!’  What
do I make of it?  That’s easy. Has us going—or thinks he has—and is
aching to deliver the knock-out.  A million to a minute he wants to buy
us out."

"Well, he never will!"  Red and plethoric, the senior partner sprang up.
An elderly man, his clear eyes, honest face, framed in white
side-whiskers of the Dundreary style, all stamped him as belonging to
the old-fashioned school of finance which aimed always to advance the
civic interest while turning an honest penny.  "No, sir!" he reiterated.
"We’ll break first; and goodness knows that is not so far away.
Yesterday I approached Murray, of the North American Bank, but he
answered me in his broad Scotch: ’Hoots, mon! get your crossing first.
Get your crossing an’ we’ll talk.’  And so with Butler, Smith, and
others who promised support."

"Cold feet, eh?" Carter commented.  "They’ll warm them presently chasing
themselves for a chance to come in."

The old gentleman ran on in his indignation.  "Yes, we are about at the
end of our financial string, but we would rather dangle there than yield
to these pirates. Am I right, sir?"

Smythe, a younger man, lean, laconic, and dark as the other was stout,
florid, nodded, and his vigorous answer was untainted by a suspicion of
compromise. "Surely, sir!  But if Mr. Carter’s plan fails—"  His shrug
supplied the hiatus.

Carter answered the shrug.  "It won’t fail."  He held up the invitation.
"But, say!  Fancy—to-day, of all days?"

"Of course we won’t go," Smythe frowned.

"Of course we* will*," Carter grinned.  "Think what it means?  Besides
blinding them to the trap, we shall be there when it springs, and I
wouldn’t miss Brass Bowels’ face for a thousand, cash.  Let me see; the
bid is for eight-thirty.  Western flyer is due at Portage station
nine-fifteen.  He’ll hardly broach business before the coffee, and with
any kind of luck we ought to serve him up a beautiful case of
indigestion."

"With luck?" the senior partner echoed.

"With or without.  Everything is planned beyond possibility of failure.
Mr. Chester goes with Mr. Hart on the construction-train, while Bender
keeps things humming at the crossing.  By-the-way, he’s in the outer
office now, with Hart, waiting for last orders, and if you don’t mind
I’ll have them in.  I wouldn’t take a chance even on your clerks."

In view of just such a contingency, Bender had invested his bulk with
store clothes of that indescribable pattern and cut which fulfils
lumberman ideals.  From his mighty shoulders a quarter-acre of black
coat fell half-way down worsted pantaloons that were displaying an
unconquerable desire to use the wrinkles of high boots as a step-ladder
to his knees.  As collars did not come in sizes for his red throat, he
had compromised on a kerchief of gorgeous silk, and a soft hat, flat and
black, completed a costume that was at once his pride and penance.  In
the luxurious office, with its rich fittings in mahogany and leather, he
loomed larger than ever; was foreign as a bear in a lady’s boudoir.
Uncomfortably aware of the fact, he took the chair which the senior
partner offered with a sigh of relief, and was fairly comfortable till
the position discovered its own disadvantages—while his coat announced
every movement with miniature _feux de joie_ from bursting seams, his
trousers ascended his boots as a fireman goes up a hotel escape.  To
which sources of discomfort was added the knowledge that his face mapped
in fair characters the fluctuations of the recent combat.  But he forgot
all—scars, raiment, unconventional bulk—as soon as he began to talk.

"All ready," he replied to Carter’s question.  "Buckle has been round
the camp some lately.  Only this morning I caught him talking to
Michigan Red.  It’s a cinch that he was spotting for the railroad, but
as I knew you’d as lief he’d tip us off as not, I didn’t bust his head.
Jes’ allowed I didn’t see him."

"Yes, let him talk," Carter replied, relative to the broken contractor.
"But"—he addressed the surveyor—"there’s no whispering in your outfit?"

"Couldn’t be," the young fellow laughed.  "Mr. Chester only told _me_ an
hour ago.  The men know nothing—will _know_ nothing up to the moment we
pull into Prairie."

"Good.  Now, you are to leave at dusk, and don’t forget to grab the
operator before he can rattle a key. But turn him loose as soon as you
are through and let him wire in the news.  And you, Bender, start in at
eight, keep ’em busy as long as you can, then load what’s left of you in
a flat-car and steam round for Mr. Hart."

"What’s left of me?" Bender growled, as he walked with the surveyor
down-street a few minutes later. "Hum!  Give me the Cougar and an even
hundred of old-style Michigan men, and I’d drive the last of Brass
Bowels’ tarriers into the Red and beat you out laying the diamond.  But,
Lordy, what’s the use o’ talking! The old stock petering out an’ the
new’s jes’ rotten with education.  They’d sooner work than fight, an’
loaf than either, for they ain’t exactly what you’d call perticler hell
on labor.  What’s left of me?  Well, there’ll be some fragments, I
guess.  While I was hanging round I picked up an odd score of Oregon
choppers that blew in here las’ week.  Brass Bowels’ agent tried for
’em, but they’d lumbered with me in British Columbia.  Come out an’ see
’em.  They’re beauties."

Perhaps they were, for standards of beauty, morality, of any old thing,
are merely relative and depend so much on local color.  To Hart, who
reviewed the "beauties" in Bender’s camp, they seemed the most
unmitigated ruffians in his railroad experience; but as they strut on
this small section of the world-stage for "Positively one appearance
only," let them be judged by their record in the rough work of that
night; by the way in which they bore themselves in the roar, surge, and
tumble of a losing fight, the echoes of which alarmed the dark city and
came with the soup to the general manager’s dinner; and let him deliver
their valedictory to his guests at table.

Throwing a telegram—which a waiter brought in just after Helen went
up-stairs—across to Carter, the magnate remarked: "That big foreman of
yours has been at it again.  He has put two of our heaviest engines into
the ditch and ten men into hospital.  Not bad, but—he didn’t lay the
diamond."

"Oh, well," Carter shrugged, "better luck next time."

"Ah, yes—the next time?"  Repeating the phrase with dubious inflection,
he went on with his dinner, and for an hour thereafter no one heard the
rattle of the skeleton behind the feast.  He acted the perfect host,
easily courteous, pleasant, anxious for the preference of his guests.
As he ran on, drawing from the sources of a wide and unusual experience
for his dinner chat, it was curious to note the shadings in his manner.
Addressing the partners, he seemed to exhale rather than evidence a
superiority which, on their part, they countenanced by an equally subtle
homage.  Integrity and deprecation of his policy and methods were
dominated by the orthodox business sense which forced subconscious
recognition of his title as king of their business world.  With Carter,
however, he was frankly free, as though they two had been section-men
eating their bite together on a pile of ties, and doubtless the
difference in his manner sprang from some such feeling.  For whereas the
partners were born to their station, he recognized Carter as a
product—unfinished, but still a product—of the forces which had produced
himself and a dozen other kings and great contractors of the
constructive railroad era.  Without invidious distinction or neglect of
the others, he yet made him the focus of attention.

"We heard all about your sawdust grades," he complimented, with real
cordiality.  "A mighty clever idea, sir; pity you couldn’t patent
it—though we are glad you cannot, for we intend to apply it on all our
Rainy River muskegs."

Approaching business at the close of the meal, he was equally suave.
"You are to be complimented upon your achievement, gentlemen," he said,
addressing the partners.  "We feel that while supplying a real need of
the province, you have convicted us of remissness.  But now that we do
see our duty, it would be equally criminal for us to leave you the
burden of this heavy responsibility. We know how it has taxed your
resources"—his gray eye stabbed the senior partner—"and we are fully
prepared to relieve you."  Pausing, he lit a cigar, puffed a moment, and
finished, "We will take the enterprise off your hands, bag and baggage,
on terms that will yield you a handsome profit."

A pause followed.  No man turns from an easy road to a rocky climb
without lingering backward glances, and the partners looked at one
another while the general manager leaned back and smoked with the air of
one who had faithfully performed a magnanimous duty. Greer spoke first.

"Very kind offer, I am sure."

"Most handsome," Smythe, the laconic, added. "But—"  He glanced at
Carter, who finished, "We are not on the market."

The manager raised his brows.  Expecting a first refusal, he was
slightly staggered and irritated by its bluntness, yet masked both
emotions.  "Not on your own terms?"

"On no terms," Greer emphatically answered; then, flushing, he added:
"Our chief motive in going into this enterprise, sir, was to bring
sorely needed railroad competition into this province.  It would not be
subserved by our selling to you."

The manager flicked the ash from his cigar.  Then, while smoking, he
regarded the old gentleman from under bulging lids very much as a
curious collector might note the wriggles of an impaled beetle.  "Very
laudable intention; does you credit, sir.  But you must pardon me if I
doubt that you will carry it to the length of financial hari-kari.  You
have heard of that Japanese custom? A man commits suicide, empties
himself upon a cold and unsympathetic world for the benefit of his
enemy, who is compelled by custom to go and do likewise.  In your case
the sacrifice would be foolish because we shouldn’t follow suit.  Now
when I spoke of your resources"—during an ugly pause his glance
flickered between the partners—"I did not state our exact knowledge of
their extent.  You are—practically—broke.  In addition, we have bought
up all of your paper that we could find floating on the market, and
three months from now—we shall be in a position to demand a receiver in
bankruptcy. Stop!"  Frowning down Greer’s attempted interruption, he
dropped his suave mask and stood out, the financial king, brutal,
imperious, predatory.  "I know what you would say.  Three months is a
long time.  But no one will make you a better offer—any offer—till you
can cross our line.  You can force a crossing?  Yes, but we’ll law you,
badger you, carry the case from court to court up to the privy
council—two years won’t make an end. In the meantime—"  He had thrown
himself at them, bearing down upon them with all the force of his
powerful will, of the furiously strong personality that had crushed
financial opposition to plans and projects beside which their enterprise
was as a grain of sand to the ocean.  Now, in a flash, he became again
the polished host.  "Take your time, gentlemen.  _We_ are in no hurry.
Several days, if you choose.  But—be advised."

But big, strong, and masterful as the manager was, every Goliath has his
David, and the first stone in the forehead came from the sling of
Smythe—Smythe, who had hardly opened his mouth through the meal save for
the admittance of food or drink.  Banging the table so that the glass
rang and a champagne bowl flew from its thin stem, he sprang up, his
dark face flushed and defiant. "We’ll take neither your advice nor your
time!  God knows that we are hard shoved, but damn a man who sells his
country!  And since you have been so outspoken, let me tell you that
we’ll run trains across your line, and that inside—"

"This hour."  In its quiet assurance, Carter’s interpolation came with
all the force of an accomplished fact. The manager started, and the
division superintendent upset his wine.  As their backs were to the
door, neither saw a waiter take a telegram from a messenger-boy, and
sign for its delivery after a glance at the clock, which indicated
half-past nine.  Nor could either fact have the significance for them
that their combination had for Carter.

The manager recovered his poise even as the waiter handed the telegram
to his colleague, and, though puzzled, hid the feeling behind a show of
confident contempt.  "I hardly gather your meaning, but presume you
mean—war?"

Missing the superintendent’s sudden consternation, he was going on.
"Very well.  I _had_ hoped—" when the former pulled his sleeve.  "What’s
this?"

He stared blankly at the words: "Construction-train, with men and
Gatling-guns, across our tracks at Prairie. Number ten, Western Mail,
held up with three hundred passengers."

During an astonished silence, the partners watched the manager, who
looked at Carter, who lightly drummed on the table.  "Your train?" he
went on, slowly, with words that evidenced his flashing insight into the
situation.  "Hum!  Sawdust, eh?  Came down the spur you laid to the
Portage Mills at Prairie; grabbed our operator; then extended the
mill-switch across our tracks. Know how to kill two birds with one
stone, don’t you?"

During a second silence he fenced glances, nervously fingering the
telegram, then suddenly asked: "What’s the use?  You can’t hold it?"

"With two Gatlings and five hundred men—five thousand, if I need them?"

"The law’s against you."

"As it is against you at the crossing.  Possession is said to be nine of
its points, anyway, so we have you just nine-tenths to the bad."
Slightly smiling, he quoted: "’We’ll law you, badger you, carry the case
from court to court up to the privy council—two years won’t make an
end.’"

The manager raised heavy lids.  "In three months we’ll break you."

Carter shrugged.  "Who knows?  In the mean time—your traffic will be
suspended?"

Through all the superintendent had fidgeted nervously; now he broke in:
"Pish, man!  We’ll build round your old train in six hours."

"Will you?"  Without even a glance in his direction, Carter ran on,
addressing the manager: "You see, land is that cheap since the boom that
we took options on a right of way from Prairie clean up to the north
pole and down to the American border.  No, you won’t go around us, but
we shall go round you and come into this burg south of your tracks."

"But you’re out of law," the superintendent angrily persisted.  "You
haven’t the shadow of a right—"

"Oh, shut up, Sparks," the manager impatiently interrupted.  "What has
right to do with it?  He’s got us in the door and it’s no use squealing.
Now"—the glance he turned on Carter was evenly compounded of hostility
and admiration—"terms?  You’ll release our train—"

"When you cede our legal crossing, and call off your dogs.  We’ll hold
Prairie till every man Jack of your guards is shipped out of the city."

"Could you have the papers drawn—"  He had intended "to-night," but he
paused as Greer drew them from an inner pocket and his iron calm
dissolved in comical disgust.  "Hum!  You’re not timid about grabbing
time by the forelock.  But, let me see!"

Once more the arc lights could be heard sputtering. In that tense moment
their own fortunes swung in the balance with the welfare of a province,
and while the manager read they waited in silence.  Trimming the end of
a cigar with careful precision, Carter masked all feeling, but the
partners could not hide their nervousness—Smythe fidgeted, Greer locked
and unlocked clasped fingers.  Both held their breath till the manager’s
pen made a rough scratch on the silence.

A good loser, he said, as Greer rose after buttoning his coat over the
precious document: "Don’t go, gentlemen—at least till we have drunk the
occasion.  I see another bottle there in the ice."

And his toast, "To our next merry meeting," formed the premise of the
deduction which Carter returned to Greer’s relieved exclamation when
they stood, at last, alone in the street.

"Thank God!  It is over!"

"On the contrary, it is just begun."

Passing under a street lamp, its white light revealed the pale
disturbance which banished the senior partner’s flushed content.
Stopping dead, he agitatedly seized Carter’s arm.

"You don’t suppose he will go back on his—"

"Signature?  No, he won’t repeat.  He’s done with the crossing."

"Then we can weather through," Greer said, and Smythe echoed his sigh of
relief.

"But—" Carter quoted the bucolic proverb which recites the many ways in
which a pig may be killed other than by a surfeit of butter.

"But what _can_ he do?" Greer persisted.

"Don’t know," Carter slowly answered.  "Only a man don’t have to look at
that bull-dog jaw of his a second time to know that he’ll do it, and do
it quick."

"I’d give a good deal to know," Smythe frowned, then smoothed his
knotted brow as he laughed at Carter’s rejoinder.

"I’d give three cents myself."

Not feeling sleepy, Carter walked on after he had dropped the partners
at their respective doors, aimlessly threading the dark streets that
gave back his hollow foot-fall; and so passing, by chance, under Helen’s
window, he brought a pause in the anxious meditation which had kept her
restlessly tossing, and set her to momentary speculations as to the
owner of that firm and heavy tread.  She listened, listened till it grew
fainter and died as he turned the corner.  Keeping on in the cool
silence, he presently came to the Red River suspension bridge, where he
paused and leaned on the parapet at the very spot from which she loved
to watch Indians and chattering squaws float beneath in quaint birch
canoes.  There was, of course, nothing to warn him of the fact any more
than she could have guessed him as owner of the solitary foot-fall.  He
thought of her, to be sure.  Always she stood in the background, ready
to claim him whenever press of affairs permitted reflection; and now she
thrust in between him and the twinkling lights of the sleeping city.
Where was she?  And doing—what?  How much longer before he could go in
search of her?  After long musing he swept the weary intervening days
away with an impatient gesture, and his longing took form in muttered
speech:

"How long?  My God! how much longer?"

The thought brought him back to his work and the events of the evening.
What would be the manager’s next move?  He gazed down into the dark
river intently, as though he expected its hoarse voice to give answer.
But though he canvassed, as he thought, every possibility, the
reality—which presented itself a week or so after he resumed operations
in the Silver Creek forests—was beyond the range of his thought.




                                *XXVIII*

                              *THE STRIKE*


As aforesaid, it was the unexpected that opposed Carter with a visage of
stony calm when he came from Winnipeg out to the "Ragged Lands" a week
or so later.  For whereas he had left the camp convulsed in throes of
constructive labor, the whistle of his engine raised piercing echoes; no
other sounds disturbed the sleeping forest.  In the cut south of the
camp he passed the big digger, at rest from the roar, rattle, and clank
of chains, hiss of escaping steam.  The pile-driver loomed idly on a
distant trestle.  When engine and caboose stopped opposite the
cook-house, he saw that the camp—which ought to have been empty—teemed
with men.

He shrugged when Hart, who was with him, exclaimed in wonder: "Can’t
prove it by me.  But we’ll soon know.  There’s Bender—coming from the
office."

"Strike," the giant replied to their questioning. "Teamsters, graders,
bridge and track men, all went out at noon.  What for?  God knows; but I
allow that Buckle could tell.  He wasn’t hanging round the Winnipeg camp
for nothing.  I’m sorry now—"  His bunched fists, big as mauls, fully
explained his regret, and indicating a group which was arranging its
progress so as to make the office door with Carter, he finished: "But if
you’re hankering for reasons, consult them gentlemen. It’s a
depytation—by its scowl.  An’ it’s loaded to the muzzle with statistics
to fire at you."

Following his finger, Carter noted that Michigan Red was of the
deputation, but when it ranged up at the tent door in sheepish yet
defiant array, that worthy hung modestly in the rear, permitting a big
teamster from the Silver Creek settlements to act as spokesman.  Blunt,
honest, tenacious as a bull-dog in holding to an idea, the man was an
ideal tool for unscrupulous hands; but though he instantly divined the
reasons behind his leadership, Carter listened quietly to his tale—the
old tale—overwork, poor food, underpay.

His answer was equally quiet.  "You are certainly to be pitied, Bill;
breaks me all up just to think of your wrongs.  I’ve always admired your
thrift, and I sympathize with your desire to raise the mortgage off your
farm.  Took you five years to put it on, didn’t it, Bill? And you are
calculating to pay it off in the next two months.  Well, perhaps—but
you’ll have to screw it out of some one else than me."

Shuffling uneasily, the teamster glanced at his backers, who, equally
nonplussed, gazed at one another.  For where an angry, or even a plain
answer would have merely incited them to dogged opposition, this quiet
ridicule sapped conceit in their cause, besides conveying an alarming
suggestion of strength in reserve.

"Then you don’t allow to fall in with our notions?"  The spokesman
returned after a whispered conference.

"Meaning—an hour less and a dollar more?  You’re sure a psychic, Bill;
plumb wasted on railroading. Open an office in town and go to
fortune-telling and you’d pull that plaster off your homestead inside a
month."

Assured that there was no hurry, that he could take a week to consider
the matter, he gravely added: "Obliged to you, Bill; but I don’t allow
to require it.  The world, you’ll remember, was made in six days, and
this isn’t near such a big job.  No time like the present, and here’s my
answer—same hours, same grub, same pay.  It’s fortune-telling or present
rates for yours, Bill."

Through all he entirely ignored the delegation, and now he leaned in the
door, idly watching as it made its way across the camp and was swallowed
in the crowd of strikers about the bunk-house.  But his face fell as he
stepped inside beyond eye and ear shot.  "Serious?" he repeated Hart’s
question.  "Couldn’t be worse.  Not one of those fellows could make a
quarter of the wages or live half as well on the farm, but they’d hog it
all if I died in the ditch.  But there’s more behind this than their
spite and greed.  You see, we have just about pulled old Murray in for
funds to make a clean finish, and if he gets wind of this he’ll crawfish
like a one-legged crow. I must go back at once.  And you, Bender—you,
also, Hart—see to it that not even a dog crawls out of this camp until I
return."

"To keep these chaps guessing," he added, after a moment’s dark
reflection, "I’d better slip out after dusk. You go over, Hart, and
whisper the engineer to back out and wait for me at the other side of
the cut.  Mystery is good as aces up in any old game, and we can’t fog
them too much."

Pulling out at dark, he made the run back to town—fifty miles—in an hour
and a quarter, reckless running on unballasted road.  Murray _must_ be
fully committed before the news leaked out.  _We must get him, must get
him, must, must, must_!  The wheels clicked it, the steam hissed it, the
fire roared it, the wind shrieked the imperative refrain.  But though
Bender lived in the strict letter of his instructions so that a mosquito
could scarce have escaped from the camp; though a man could not have
made the distance in two days on foot, or a wild goose have passed the
throbbing engine as it bounded along that raw track, newsboys were yet
crying the strike as he came out on Main Street.

Feeling certain that the office would be closed at that hour, he
intended to go straight to Greer’s house, but seeing a light in the
partners’ room as he came opposite the building, he went in and found
Smythe there, alone. With lean legs thrust out before him, hands deep in
his pockets, shoulders hunched to his ears, his attitude incarnated deep
dejection; gloom resided in his nod.

"Greer?" he said.  "At home—sick.  You see, we were to have closed the
deal with Murray this very evening, and the disappointment just knocked
the old man out.  He’s been running altogether on his nerve lately;
something had to give.  Why _couldn’t_ this have happened a day later?"

Answering Carter’s question, he went on: "We heard it at noon.  Papers
got out an extra.  Presses must have been running it off before you
left."

"Noon?" Carter whistled.  "Why the men didn’t quit till two!"  Then as
the significance flashed upon him, he exclaimed: "Brass Bowels for a
million!  It was all cut, dried, and laid away for us, and they served
it hot to the minute.  Don’t—it—beat—hell!"

His comical disgust caused Smythe a wintry grin, but, sobering, he said:
"I wouldn’t mind so much for myself.  I’m young enough to do it again.
But the old gentleman—with that nice family!  You know he was just about
ready to retire; only took up this business from a strong sense of
public duty.  And now, in his extremity, every rat financier in this
city runs to his hole in fear of the cat.  The poor old man!"

Carter nodded his sympathy.  On the occasions that he visited their
house, Greer’s wife, a silver-haired old lady, had vied with her two
daughters in pleasant attentions.  But it did not require that thought
to stir him to action.

"Oh, here!" he laughed.  "We are not dead yet.  To-morrow I’ll go the
round of the employment offices and—"

Smythe threw up his hands, a gesture eloquent of despair.  "Went round
myself—this afternoon.  Harvest is on and men scarcer than diamonds.
Besides, Brass Bowels has left an order with every agency in town to
ship every man they can get west to the mountains."

"Um-m!"  Carter thought a while.  "Then we’ll have to play the last
card."

"The last card?"  Smythe raised his eyebrows.

"Yes, biggest trump in the pack.  How long before—"

"Oh, they can’t touch us for two months."

"Good!  Now listen."  Glancing around as though distrustful of the very
walls, he whispered in Smythe’s ear for a minute that saw the latter’s
dejection dissolve in new-born hope.  "You must go with me," he
finished, aloud.  "While you pack your grip, I’ll drop round and see
Greer.  He must be here to-morrow to carry out the bluff.  And hurry—for
we must make it down and back before we are missed."




                                 *XXIX*

                              *THE BLUFF*


It was the fifth day of the strike, and still no sound of labor
disturbed the sleeping forest.  Quiet and calm, like that of the
Sabbath, brooded over the camp, but not its peace, for, being well
rested, the strikers chafed under inaction, moving restlessly among the
buildings.  Michigan Red, to be sure, was dealing interminable poker on
a blanket under a tree, while the younger men skylarked or tried one
another out in games, but neither forms of amusement appealed to the
older and more thrifty Canadians.  Secret disquiet, moreover, underlay
even the nonchalance of the gamblers, for Bender’s mysterious looks and
Carter’s continued absence were rapidly disintegrating the strikers’
confidence.

"He ain’t here," the giant had answered, when the committee had called
for another conference, and to further questioning he had returned an
irritating grin. "When will he be back?  That’s for us to know an’ you
to find out."  And so, shorn of its functions, the committee had
languished like a moulting peacock.  In addition, the cook’s ominous
visage at meal-times bade the strikers beware that the curse of labor
still clung to the fruits of the earth; and the fact that almost a
month’s back pay rested in Carter’s hands, served as a text and lent
force to the unpreached sermon.  What if he never came back?  The
history of Western construction abounded with cases of absconding
contractors, and the hostility of the monopoly lent substance to the
doubt.  Most of them would have hailed Carter’s advent, just then, with
real if secret pleasure, and the general uneasiness manifested itself in
a grumbling remark made as Michigan Red raked a fat "jack-pot" into his
winnings.

"You’re the only one that’s making anything these days."

"That’s right," another grumbler added.  "An’ what’s more, if we’re out
another five days the raise won’t pull us even by freeze-up.  Ten days
lost at three-fifty is thirty-five dollars.  Take the extra dollar seven
weeks to make it up—if the frost holds off that long."

Apparently indifferent, Michigan went on with his deal.  "You’re hell at
figures, Chalky.  Where’d you learn?  Figuring interest on your
mortgage?  How many cards, Bill?"

But Bill, spokesman of the committee, laid down his hand.  "Look here,
Red!  Chalky’s right.  If we hadn’t struck we’d have had a pay-day
yesterday, an’ if we’re standing to lose that much we can’t call it off
too soon for me."

"Nor me."

"Nor me."  The voices, pitched in altercation, had brought the idlers
crowding, and the support came in from all around.

Michigan’s teeth gleamed white through his red beard while his bleak
eyes took stock of the crowding faces as though calculating just how far
envy and avarice would take them.  "You don’t stand to lose a cent,
Bill. They’ve got to finish the contrac’ before freeze-up to reach the
tie an’ lumber-camps.  Otherwise the road ’ll be idle all winter, an’
what’s a few days’ pay alongside the freight on a hundred million feet
of lumber.  He’s got to finish it.  If he kain’t"—pausing, he
distributed a significant nod around the circle—"there’s others as kin
an’ will."

"But what if he don’t come back?"

To the question which expressed the most pregnant doubt, he returned a
second meaning nod.  "Same folks ’ll make good."

"Back pay?" Bill pressed.

"Back pay."

"On whose say so?"

"Ain’t mine good enough?"  Ruffling, he turned a stream of fierce
profanity upon Carrots Smith, his questioner.  "Want Bible and oath for
yours, eh?  There’s some things that kain’t be told to idiots—"

"Yes, yes, Red!" Bill soothed.  "We know—that’s all right, Red.  Don’t
mind him, he’s only a suckling kid."

"Sure, Red!  You know what you’re talking about. Go on!" others
chorused, and having gained his point by the show of anger, real or
false, the teamster allowed himself to be placated.

"If ’twas necessary," he continued, "we could tie up the road with a
laborer’s lien.  But ’twon’t be—I have somebody’s word for it.  If
Carter goes under, we jes’ go right on."

"With the raise?"

"With the raise."

"But if he comes back?"  Chalky raised another doubt. "What about lost
time?  Freeze-up is freeze-up, an’ we kain’t make it up if we’re docked
for the lay-off."

"That’s easy.  Who’s to blame for it?"  He threw it at the circle.

"Him!  He wouldn’t give the raise."

"Then let him pay for his fun.  We’ve got him coming or going, an’ we
draw time, at the new rates, for every idle day before we touch a tool.
Ain’t that right?"

It was not, yet his crooked logic exactly matched their envious
cupidity.  Confidence once more returned; the younger men returned to
their sports; Bill picked up his hand, and the game proceeded until
interrupted, a half-hour later, by a sudden shout and shrill neighing
from the horse lines.

"The stallion’s loose!"

Shouting, the roustabout tore across the clearing and just escaped the
rush of the vicious brute by nimbly climbing the projecting logs at the
cook-house corners. At his cry, a youth dropped the shot he had poised
for a throw, the gamblers their cards, and, balking in the take-off for
a broad jump, Carrots Smith led the rush for cover.  A minute saw them
all on top of cook or bunk houses, and thus defrauded of his preference,
the stallion ran amuck among the horses which were tied at long
hay-racks, kicking, rearing, biting.  Though built massively of logs,
the racks gave way with splintering crashes under the combined pull of a
hundred frightened beasts; and bunching, the string tore round the
clearing, squealing their fear.

To give the beast ease with his oats, Michigan had removed the iron
muzzle according to his custom, and now, a free, wild thing, he bounded
along in hot pursuit, curveting, caracoling, satanic in his jet-black
beauty. Tossing his wild mane, he would call the mares with stridulous
cachinnations, yet for all his exultant passion left them to chase a
belated teamster, nose lowered, ears wickedly pricked, thrice around the
cook-house.  Balked again, he reared, kicked, and was plunging once more
after the string when a whistle outshrilled his neigh, and an engine
with caboose attached rolled out of the cut south of the camp.

But for the pounding hoofs, the collective whisper, "It’s the boss!"
would have carried to Carter, who, with Smythe, stood looking out at the
door of the caboose; and his first remark, "Regular circus, isn’t it?"
was eminently applicable to the situation.  Upholding the sky’s blue
roof, black spruce cones formed bulky pillars for the natural
amphitheatre in which the horses circled and recircled, a kicking,
squealing stream, before the audience on the roofs.

"Where are you going?" Smythe exclaimed, as Carter leaped to the ground.

"To rope that beast before he runs a season’s flesh off the teams.
There’s a riata in the office."

"Better shoot him," Smythe counselled.  "Here! come back!"  But he was
already half-way across the clearing.

Choosing his time, he passed from the smithy to the bunk-house, thence
to the cook-house, and so working from building to building under the
eyes of his men, he gained the office at last and shot in, barely
escaping the mad cavalcade.  As he emerged, coiling the riata, Smythe’s
gaze drew to a second actor in this woodland drama.

When the poker players broke for cover, Michigan Red had paused long
enough to pocket the stakes along with his winnings, then picking up the
blanket he walked over to the cook-house, and had watched all from the
angle formed by the jutting corner logs.  "A bit closer would have
suited better," he had grumbled, as Carter’s last rush carried him from
under the hoofs.  Now he commented: "Going to rope him, are you?  Not if
I know it."  Knowledge of his fellows’ liability to lapses of
hero-worship inhered in his conclusion.  "If there’s to be gran’stan’
plays I’ll make ’em myself."

"Fools!" he snarled, as the beat of feet warned him that the strikers on
the roof were watching Carter, who had taken position behind the next
corner.  He heard also the swish of the circling noose, its quickened
whir as the horses swooped around on the next lap; then, just as the
band passed, he sprang out, uttering a sudden harsh command, directly in
the stallion’s path.

A desperate play, it drew gambler’s luck.  A frontier superstition has
it that the equine eye magnifies objects, and whether or no the red
teamster with his pale-green face loomed in the stallion’s sight as some
huge and passionate fiend, he reared back on strung haunches, ploughing
the sod in a desperate effort to stop; and while he hung in mid-air,
Michigan stepped and threw his blanket, matador-fashion, over the ugly
head.  As the brute settled on all-fours and stood shivering, Michigan
turned, grinning, to reap the fruit of his daring.

But his grin quickly faded, for, flashing on to his purpose, Carter had
swung and roped the rat-tailed mare, the stallion’s mate, as the band
flew by.  Worse! Michigan choked.  Almost every man in camp had a grudge
against the mare, some vicious lunge or graze from her snapping teeth,
so a dozen strikers had jumped and were helping Carter to choke her
down, while the others cheered them on with approving laughter.

Furious, he yelled: "What’s the matter with you chaps up there?  Taken
to roosting like chickens?  I’d like a picture of the bunch, it ud pass
anywhere for a Methodist convention.  An’ you fellows quit yanking that
mare. ’Tain’t tug-o’-war you’re playing."  But he made small headway
against the uproarious tide of yells and laughter, and, remembering his
snub, Carrots Smith shouted back, "She’s doin’ most of the pulling, an’
if she wants to hang, why let her."

Worst of all, it was Carter who finally interfered on behalf of the
struggling brute, and Michigan chafed at the ready obedience accorded
his orders.

"Thought you fellows was on strike?" he growled at Brady, the Irish
teamster, as he retied the stallion in the horse lines.

But wrathfully indicating a bloody bruise on his own horse, the Irishman
hotly retorted, "Faith, thin, an’ that’s no sign that we’ll be lettin’
them murthering brutes av yourn chew the necks av our teams?  If they
was mine, I’d make wolf-meat av the pair before supper."

Michigan sneered.  "Didn’t I ketch him myself?  An’ then you fellows had
to go running your legs off to suit him.  Keep it up, an’ it’s you an’
your strike that’ll be made into hash for his supper."

While Michigan thus tried to scotch incipient sympathy with rough
sarcasm, Carter carried with him to the office the comfortable assurance
that fortune had turned down to him this accidental trick in a difficult
game. Shrugging deprecation of Hart’s admiring comments on his skill
with the riata, he returned a reminiscence of his cowpunching days to
Smythe’s chidings, asserting that the stallion was not a circumstance to
a long-horn steer on an open prairie.  While talking, he helped to
arrange the contents of Smythe’s grip on the rough table, piling
greenbacks by denominations between flanking columns of silver, an
imposing array.

"No hurry," he said, when Hart asked if he should call the men, and,
lighting a cigar, he drawled a story which at one time explained his
reason and illumined his plan.  "I remember a kid who won three sizes
out of his class by a little judicious waiting.  His dad had set him a
spading stint in the back lot, and when this other boy brings-to on the
sidewalk and begins to heave belligerencies over the fence, he answers,
that calm and deliberate that you’d never think he was burying his heart
under every spadeful, ’Jes’ you wait till I finish my patch.’  And he
goes on digging so cheerfully that the other kid is a mite staggered.
As I say, he was about three sizes to the good, but as you’ll remember,
Napoleon’s Old Guard could put it all over a young lady’s seminary for
hysteria if it was kept too long waiting. Watching that slow spade, this
lad’s imagination went to working so hard that he fought that fight
thirteen times in as many minutes, and felt that used up he just ran
like a March hare when the other kid stuck his spade in the trench.  The
wise kid?"  He twinkled on Hart. "I was that glad, I played hookey from
school an’ won a licking from the old man five sizes larger than I’d
have got from the boy.  But it was worth it.  I learned that it always
pays to give it time to soak in."

Outside the strikers furnished a vivid illustration of that lesson
during the next three hours he kept them waiting.  Grouping, they made
loud mouths at first, over supposititious wrongs or affected
indifference that was belied by uneasy glances officeward.  Less
loquacious at the end of the first hour, the second left them sullen and
silent; the third, eaten by suspense.  They started, as at a sudden
explosion, when Bender finally came out; stared blankly when he
announced that the boss was waiting to pay off the camp.

Affording no time for recovery, Hart called the first name on the
pay-roll, and Bender’s stentorian bass sent it rolling into the woods.
"Anderson!  Anderson! Hurry up, Anderson!"

The name chanced to be the property of Bill, the spokesman, but though
used as little as his Sunday clothes, there was more than unfamiliarity
behind his slowness.  More tenacious of idea, as aforesaid, than quick
of wit, Bill now found himself without plan, precedent, or time for
counsel in these unexpected premises, nor could he draw inspiration from
the blank looks of his fellows.

"Hurry up, Anderson!" Bender crossly repeated; and starting as though
touched in some secret spring, Bill lurched forward and in, and so found
himself facing Carter, Hart, and Smythe behind an awesome financial
array.

Never before had Bill seen so much money at once—even in dreams; it
totalled more than the hard earnings of his forty-odd years; would have
paid his mortgage ten times over.  The substance of modern power, its
glitter challenged the loud-mouthed assertions of him and his fellows
that, given the same luck, they could have done as well as Carter.  By
the light of its golden glow, Bill saw himself very weak and small and
foolish.  At home he seldom saw a dollar; had trouble in scraping up
currency enough to pay his taxes, and effected his barterings at the
store in truck and trade.  With his doubts settled as to the solvency of
the firm, Bill was suddenly afflicted with a suspicion that he had made
the biggest kind of a fool of himself.

Correctly interpreting his glance at the table, Carter gave him a genial
smile.  "Yes, Bill; but you don’t get it by laying off.  Here’s your
bit.  Touch the pen and—  Five dollars short?  Board and feed for five
days, Bill. Man earns his bread by the sweat of his brow, you know. Pass
on, and don’t forget to remember me to your wife when you gain home."

As with Bill, so the others.  Filing in, they testified, one by deeper
sullenness, others by attempts at a swagger, to the influences which had
wrought on him.  Few attained the easy insolence of Michigan Red, who
demanded an itemized account of his store bill and insisted on signing
the roll with his own hand.  Touching the pen, railroad fashion, they
passed out, while Hart signed for them, to add their doubtings to the
general mystification.

What was forward?  Had Carter obtained new crews, or would the company
close down work?  As the line still fell thirty miles short of the
northern settlements, the latter thought filled the minds of the Silver
Creek men, who saw themselves left marketless by their own act, with
sick misery; brought pause to their envious cupidity, despite Michigan’s
assurances that it was all a bluff.

"’Tain’t," Bill Anderson contradicted him.  "I was just over to the
cook-house for a drink, an’ the cook has orders to serve no meals after
breakfast to-morrow morning."

"That so?" a dozen voices questioned.

"Ask for yourselves.  He’s at the door now calling to supper."

And the cook confirmed the report, adding, moreover, his mite to their
discomfiture by malignantly animadverting upon the ménages to which they
were about to return.  "My cooking don’t suit, eh?" demanded the
offended artist.  "It’s pertatoes an’ sow-belly for yours after this.
In a month you won’t be able to tell your ribs from a rail corral."  And
truth so flavored his railings that they saw, in fancy, themselves
looking back from their prairie farms upon his rude but plentiful
fleshpots—at which ripe moment the door opened to admit Carter, Smythe,
and Bender.

Pausing at the end of the centre table, Carter glanced over the rows of
faces which turned curiously up to him as on the occasion that marked
the beginnings of his fight for mastery in the cook-house at the winter
camp.  Very fittingly, setting and persona for this last act of a long
struggle were almost the same as the first.  Hines and the Cougar, to be
sure, were gone over the Great Divide. Strangers sat in place of Shinn
and the handful that returned to their farms after the log-drive.  But
here were the tables, a-bristle with tinware; dim lanterns, dependent
from the low pole-roof; the faces, peering from Rembrandt shadows,
fiercely animal, pregnant with possibilities such as have reddened the
snows of many a forest camp. Overlooking them now, at the climax of a
year-long play, he could not but thrill to the thought that whereas they
had opposed him at every turn, those iron _impresarios_, the Fates, had
left choice of endings with him, author of the drama.  It was his to
crush or spare—to crush and gain the cringing respect which they
accorded to frost, drought, pestilence, stern henchmen of the
illimitable; to spare and attain next place to a fair potato-crop in
their esteem; to manage them for their and his own good.

To the latter end he bent his words, addressing them, half jocularly, in
their own argot.  "Well, boys, we’ve played our game to a finish, but
before we throw away the deck let’s count tricks.  I don’t blame you for
striking.  You have a right to sell your labor in the dearest market as
I have to buy mine in the cheapest.  You simply asked more than I felt
able to pay, so while you rested I took a jaunt down to the States to
see how you stood on the market.  What did I find?  First let us take a
look at your hand.

"What do you hold?  Harvest is half over and the wheat farmers from the
Portage to Brandon and down to the Pipestone have hired their help at
two dollars a day.  No betterment there.  You can’t break prairie in the
fall, so there’s nothing at home except eating, and the lumber-camps
don’t open up before the snows.  On the other hand, your stake in this
line is as big as mine. Unfinished, you are without the markets you have
been shouting for these years; finished, it lets in American competition
and trebles your values in land."  Pausing, he shook his head, and
smiling, went on: "Looks as if some one had dealt you a miserable hand,
and I wonder if it wouldn’t pay you to shuffle, cut, and try another
deal?  Now before I bring in new crews—"

"New crews?  Where kin you get them?"

All through the men had given close attention, and after a single
impatient glance at Michigan Red the faces turned back to Carter, who
ignored the interruption. Leaning eagerly forward, they took the words
from his mouth as he ran on roughly outlining his own plans, prospecting
the coming years.  Few of them, perhaps none, were given to looking
beyond the present, and the vista to which he turned their dull eyes
glimmered like sunshine on the prairies.  This was to be no casual job!
The province, ay, and the whole Northwest, required branch roads; would
be gridironed with them before the finish!  So what of construction in
summer, logging in winter, they could look for profitable employment the
round of the seasons!

"So talk it over among yourselves," he finished, "and those who feel
that a fresh deal is in order can call round at the office after
supper."

Long before that, nods and approving murmurs had testified to his
victory, and as the burr of hot tongues followed them out through the
open windows, Bender exclaimed: "Whipped to a finish!  But what about
them new crews?"  Then catching Carter’s grin, he burst out in
uproarious laughter.  "What a bluff!"

"Not a man in Minneapolis," Carter confirmed.  "But that wasn’t what we
went down for.  So it didn’t matter."

"But will they believe it?" Smythe asked.

"Believe it?"  Bender took it upon himself to answer it.  "A frightened
man will run from his shadow, an’ they’re that badly scared ’twon’t take
them five minutes to locate them crews."

He gave them, indeed, too much time, for, as he said, fear destroys
perspective and the strikers were almost ready to believe that Carter
could conjure men from the trackless forest.

Carrots Smith led the panic with a theory, even as he had headed the run
from Michigan’s horse.  "Said he’d been prospectin’ down in the States?
Minneapolis, I’ll bet you, an’ the place jes’ rotten with whaleback
Swedes."

"Sawyer’s gang is through with the N.P.’s Devil’s Lake extension,"
another added.  "I read it in the paper Sunday.  Old Sawyer ud on’y be
too glad for a chance to finish out the fall."

Other theories were not wanting, nor could Michigan Red stem the rout.
Just twenty minutes thereafter a sheepish delegation presented itself at
the office door and delivered itself through the mouth of Bill of the
Anderson ilk.

"We’ve concluded," said Bill, "as ’twouldn’t hardly be right to leave
you ditched."

Albeit Carter’s eyes returned Hart’s twinkle, he replied in kind.  "I’m
real tickled to think that you won’t desert me."

And so, with this bit of diplomatic comedy, ended not only the strike,
but also the bitter fight which he, like every village Hampden, had had
to wage against the envious ignorance of his fellows.  For a while, to
be sure, their stiff necks would balk at the homage secret consciousness
dictated as his meed.  They would refuse it, indeed, till the world
outside sealed his success; whereafter every man of them would proclaim
himself as the particular prophet who had discerned greatness in his
humble beginnings.  But in the mean time they would refrain from further
hostilities.

"What about that Red man?" Smythe said, as the delegation made its
jubilant way back to its fellows. "You’ll surely discharge _him_?"

"Michigan Red?" Carter said.  "Not if he wants to stay.  His team is
worth any two in camp, and his teeth are drawn for good.  But he won’t
stay."

"That’s a cinch," Bender echoed.  "He’s due in Winnipeg to report his
failure sometime in the next three days."




                                 *XXX*

                                 *FIRE*


Dawn saw the strikers going about their chores with a cheerful alacrity
that was as gall to Michigan Red, who chewed the bitter cud of
unsuccessful leadership as he sat drumming his heels on a block by the
cook-house door.  He had come to the end of his rope—rather, dangled
there, an object of contemptuous pity in the eyes of his fellows.  Had
he doubted the fact, it was to be easily read in their studied
avoidance; but he knew that he had failed—in what?  He could hardly have
answered the question himself; for whether or no he had plotted in the
monopoly’s interest, the strike was merely incidental to the persistent
war he had waged against Carter, to the dogged opposition which had root
in the turbulent anarchism of his nature.  Sufficient that though his
weird face held its usual bleak calm, he writhed, mentally, under
defeat, while the few who ventured within range of his tongue sensed the
lava beneath the crust.

"Not with this crowd.  I draw the color line," he rasped, when Anderson
inquired if he were not going to work, while Carrots Smith drew a curse
along with the information, "It’s me for a better job.  I’m tired of
herding sheep."  So now he was left strictly alone, though speculative
glances travelled often his way.

"He’s waiting for the boss," a teamster remarked to his neighbor.  "Say,
I’d like to see ’em at grips!"

"Rather him nor me," the other said, expressing general opinion.  "The
boss is a tough proposition.  They say he beat Shinn up so badly that
he’ll never be more ’n half a man again.  Red ain’t no slouch, though.
Bet you I’d like to see it."

However, as tools had to be reissued and a hundred details despatched,
the men were all at work before Carter could come to breakfast, so only
Smythe and the cook witnessed that meeting.

It was a beautiful day.  Already the heat fulfilled the prediction of a
torrid sunrise, and, like an egg in a pan, the camp fried within the
encircling spruce which, on their part, seemed to lift over surrounding
birch and poplar as though tiptoeing for cooler air.  The same errand
had brought the cook out from the bowels of his own particular inferno,
and as certain phases of the encounter could not be set forth in choicer
terms than those in which he delivered himself to an interested audience
that evening, now let him speak.

"I was sitting in the doorway, that close to Red I could have pulled his
ear, when the boss kem along. Stopping opposite, he looked down on Red
with eyes dark and steady as night.  They’re blue, you know, by rights,
but they seemed to darken to pure black, an’ I never felt him so tall
before.

"’Well, Red?’ he says, quiet, like that; but Red’s eyes stayed down,
though his lip lifted clear of his corner teeth like you’ve seen a
trapped coyote, and so the pair of ’em remained for a full three
minutes."

Imagine them—the greenish face of the one reflecting murderous passion,
troubled as waves on shaken acid; the other darkly silent, yet, for all
his quiet, oppressing both Smythe and the cook with the loom of imminent
death.  So was fought out the silent duel of personalities—one minute,
two; at the third, sweat broke profusely upon the teamster’s face, and
the cook breathed once more.  Burning with Cain’s lust, his glance
travelled but once above the other’s knee, to fall as quickly again.

"What’s the matter, Red?"  Smythe actually started as Carter’s voice
broke on the quiet of the camp. "Quitting?  What for?"

"No, it isn’t _exactly_ my business," he cheerfully answered the
teamster’s growl.  "If you will, you will."  Turning back after
entering, he added: "Heading for Winnipeg, I suppose?  Then give my
compliments to Friend Buckle and tell him to please hand them higher
up."

When he came out Michigan was still there, but Carter passed without a
glance, and led Smythe down the right of way into the forest.  Even then
Michigan sat on. It was, indeed, almost noon before he loafed over to
the horse lines, after refusing the cook’s invitation to wait for
dinner.  Without returning a word of thanks for the grub-sack which the
latter sent over by a cookee, he hitched to his wagon and drove slowly
away.

A week’s rest had freshened the blacks so much that, if given their
heads, they would have covered half the distance to Winnipeg that day.
But he took a vicious pleasure in balking their inclination.  Jerking
the bits, which hinged on a cruel curb, he pulled them down to a
nervous, teetering walk.

For a while the trail paralleled the right of way, then swung on a wide
arc around a morass, and for an hour thereafter ran alternately among
sloughs, sand-hills, muskegs, through a country indescribably desolate
and which teemed with savage life.  Myriad frogs set his ears singing
with dismal, persistent croaking; a pole-cat scuttled across the trail,
poisoning the dank air.  From brazen skies a hawk shrieked a malediction
upon his head; his horses threw up their heads, snorting, as a lynx
screamed a long way off.  Here, too, dark woods shut off errant breezes
and he fell a prey to a curse of sand-flies that stung and envenomed his
flesh.  There was no escape.  They settled, by hundreds, on the hands
that wiped them off his face; stung his face as he slapped his hands.

Coming back, mad with pain and rage, from this détour, his eyes drew to
a trestle—longest, highest, most expensive of Carter’s works—and,
reining in, he allowed his glance to wander lustfully over the stout
timbers which his fancy wrapped in flame.  A single match—but reason
urged that the embers would undoubtedly furnish red lights for his
hanging, and he drove on, hotter, madder for the restraint.  He was ripe
for any mischief that offered a running chance of escape, when, midway
of the afternoon, he came on wheel-tracks that swung at right angles
from the trail into a chain of sloughs.

"Red River cart," he muttered, noticing the wide gauge; then, furiously
slapping his thigh, "Carter’s Cree, by G—!"

He meant the Indian who had brought in the venison which formed the
tidbit at Dorothy Chester’s first meal in camp.  All through the summer
he had come in with deer-meat twice or thrice a week, but though
Michigan and other teamsters had searched for his tepee during the idle
days of the strike, no one had penetrated to the woodland lake where his
squaw—a young girl, handsome, as Indian women go—was free from rude
glances, safe from insult or worse.  Now the trail lay, plain as a
pike-road, under Michigan’s nose; and, leaping down, he tied his team to
a tree and followed it along the sloughs.

Through a gully, patch of woodland, the tracks led into a second long
slough, and presently debouched on the strand of a small lake, one of
the thousands that gem that black wilderness.  Bird-haunted in spring,
lonesomeness now lay thick upon it.  Uttering its weird cry, a loon rose
on swift wing, angling in its flight over the tepee, whose bull’s hide,
raw, smoke-blacked, harmonized with that savage setting.

Just then Michigan was in fettle to exact a vicarious revenge.  Early in
summer Carter had nipped a disposition on the part of his men to joke
and make free with the Indian, giving strict orders that he was to be
unmolested, coming or going.  This girl who lived in his protecting
shadow would have fared ill at Michigan’s hands. But the tepee flaps
were thrown wide, and though he strained his eyes from a covert of tall
reeds, he saw no sign of her, without or within.  Save the lipping of
waters, sough of a rising wind, no sound broke the solitude that guarded
this, the lair of primitive man.  Only those who have experienced its
frightful loneliness can know how terrible a northern solitude can be;
how awesome, oppressive.  Some note of it caused the teamster to speak
aloud, heartening himself with sound of his voice.

"They’ll be back to-night, sure, for the ashes is banked over the
embers."

Gaining back to his team, he drove on a scant quarter-mile, then turned
into a slough parallel to those he had just left, and which had its end
in a wooded dell.  Here high banks would have effectually screened a
fire, yet he endured mosquitoes till dusk smothered his smudge. Then
tying his team in the thick of its reek, he cut across the intervening
bush and followed, as before, along the slough chain till he saw a dim
cloud quivering on the blackness ahead.

Beneath this, smoke from the Cree’s fire, presently appeared a rich
incandescence, and after worming the last yards on the flat of his
belly, Michigan peered from thick sedge out at the Cree woman, who sat
and suckled her child by the fire that enriched the bronze of her bosom
with a blush from its glow.  A free, wild thing, her deep eyes now
caressed her child, again searched the fire’s red mystery, giving back
its flame as forest pools reflect a hunter’s flare; sombre and silent,
eons of savagery flickered in her glance.

From her the watcher’s evil face turned to the Cree, who was skinning a
deer that hung by the hams from a poplar crotch.  The heavy, clammy odor
of fresh blood hung thick in the air, filled his nostrils as he lay,
like primitive man by the mouth of his enemy’s cave, watching the knife
slip around the carcass.  Savage could not have been more wicked of
intent.  Again and again his hand gripped his own knife, always to fall
again at sight of the rifle that leaned against the Red River cart,
close to the Indian’s hand.  And thus he waited, baleful glance
flickering between man and woman, till the deer was dressed and loaded
upon the cart.

That modified without changing his purpose.  "Going to camp first thing
in the morning," he thought, as he crawled away.  "Always goes alone."

Back once more with his team, he kicked the wet grass from the smudge,
and after eating ravenously of the cook’s provision by its flame, he
spread his blankets and lay down, head propped on his hand, back to his
team. He did not sleep; simply stared into the fire, or listened to the
varied voices of the night.  Now there would be a sighing, breathing
among the trees, creaking of branches, soft rustlings.  Then the night
would talk loudly on a hush as of death—a loon laughed at the owl’s
solemn questioning, a fox barked among the sand-hills; the boom of a
bittern came in from some dark lake; he heard the lynx scream again,
loudly, shrilly, as a tortured child.  Then the wind again, or a greater
hush in which he heard only the crackling of his fire as he replenished
its dying flame.

On these occasions a long trail of sparks would fly upward, and one, a
tiny ember, at last wrought a strange thing.  Passing over and behind
him, it nested in the frazzle of tow at the knot of the stallion’s
frayed halter; where it smoked and glowed, growing larger, brighter.
Lowering his ugly head, the beast sniffed at the strange red flower,
then backed away as it burst into a bouquet of flame under his coaxing
breath.

"Stan’ still!" Michigan growled, without, however, looking around.

The stallion stood—till the end of the burned rope dropped to the
ground.

Even then some time elapsed before he realized that he was free; but
when he did—he turned white, wicked eyes on the resting man.  Was that
short worm the fiend that had ruled him?  He stepped.

"Stan’ still!" Michigan growled again.

The familiar voice gave the stallion pause—a moment. For, out of the
tail of his eye, Michigan presently saw and became cognizant of a most
curious thing—of a shadow, huge, black, upreared above himself.

Uttering a hoarse cry, he tried to rise—too late.


So, in the midst of his turbulence, passed Michigan Red, but the evil
that he had done mightily all the days of his life followed him into
death, for the pounding hoofs spread embers of his fire over a leafy
carpet, where the night wind found them.  Leaping under its breath,
small flames writhed tortuously across the glade to the thing that had
been a man—touched and tasted its clothing with delicate lickings, then
flashed up and sprang from the smouldering cinder into thick scrub, and
so ran with incredible swiftness through the forest.  Crouched, like a
runner, at first, close to the ground, it suddenly straightened and
bounded high over a patch of dry poplar burned by a former fire, cowered
again, to crawl through thick green spruce, and so stole softly on, as
though to catch the Cree in his sleep.

As well try to singe a weasel.  Already the Cree was urging his ragged
pony, with squaw and papoose, towards Carter’s camp, and, balked there,
the fire swung with the veering wind into poplar woods, and flamed on, a
roaring, ebullient tide, overtopping the tallest trees.  Under its
effulgence, black lakes and sullen tarns flashed out of thick night with
scared deer, belly-deep in the water. Huge owls went flapping through
the smoke, leading the ducks, geese, vagrant flocks of the night,
leaving hawks and other day birds to circle, shrieking, ere they whizzed
down to a fiery death.  Gaining strength from its own draught and the
freshening wind, it flowed, at an angle, over the railroad and poured
down both sides, licking up bridges, trestles, culverts, leaving the hot
rails squirming like scorched snakes in empty space; and so, about
midnight, roared on to the great trestle at which Michigan had paused
that afternoon, and where Carter had lined up his men.

Roused by the Cree from a dream of Helen to a nightmare of flaming
skies, Carter first sent out a gang under command of Hart and Smythe to
back-fire around the camp, then loaded the remaining crews on flat-cars
and raced the fire down to the trestle.  Bender, who was with him in the
engine-cab, leaned to his ear as the train pulled out of the cut.

"Michigan Red?"

"Looks it."  Nodding, Carter turned to watch the rails which gleamed
under the sky-glow, running like scarlet lines on black ribbon between
dark, serried ranks of spruce.  "Lucky it is coming at an angle," he
said, as the engine thundered over the first bridge.

Bender raised his big shoulders.  "If the wind don’t shift?  But it
generally does about this time o’ night.  If she slips to the
east—p-s-st! a puff of steam, a crackle, an’ we’re gone up like flies in
a baker’s oven."

Carter returned his shrug.  "As good a way as any."  He added, grimly
smiling: "And very fit.  Give us a chance to get acclimated.  But with
luck we ought to be able to wet her down and pull out south.  Without it
we can lie down in the creek."

"I like mine wet," Bender grinned.  "Drowning ain’t exactly comfortable,
but if there’s to be any preference I’ll take it."  And in the face of
danger and disaster, Carter smiled again.

Starting out, it had seemed a toss-up between them and the fire, but the
train rolled over the trestle and drew up in a cut on the southerly
side, a quarter-hour to the good.  The creek ran under the northerly
end, with a short approach to the bank, the bulk of the trestle leading
over a quarter-mile of morass to firm ground; so Carter, with Bender,
Carrots Smith, and other half-dozen, dropped buckets from the bridge to
the stream, thirty feet below, and passed them to the men who were
strung along the plates.  Dipping, drawing, dashing, they worked
furiously under the glare of the conflagration. While still half a mile
away, its heat set the trestle steaming.  At a quarter of a mile, the
furious draught rained embers large as a man’s hand upon the men, who
turned their faces away from the blistering heat. Casting uneasy glances
over humped shoulders, they began to increase their distances, edging
along the south approach towards the train; but as they still maintained
communications, neither Carter nor Bender took notice until they
suddenly broke and ran.

"Here!  Come back!"  Bender’s angry roar drowned Carter’s shout, and was
lost, in turn, in a shrill whistling; for the engineer had seen that
which had been hid from them.

"My God!" Carrots Smith cried; and Brady broke out in whimpering prayer
to the saints.

They stood, staring.

As aforesaid, the fire was running south and westerly at an acute angle
to—in fact, almost paralleling the railroad, with its extreme point
farthest away but already beyond the trestle.  And now, veering swiftly
southeast, as Bender had feared, it swung at right angles and came
broadside on, a fiery tide high over the forest.  To the engineer it
seemed that the wind lifted a mass of flame and threw it bodily into a
tangle of poplar-brake, red willow, tall reeds, and sedge at the
trestle’s south end. Dry, explosively inflammable from a summer’s heat,
it touched off like a magazine, whirling skyward, a twisting water-spout
of flame, and as he jerked wildly on his whistle he saw, as under the
calcium of lurid melodrama, men running like wingless flies along the
wet, black trestle.  Careening, the column fell across them.

Only the few who were drawing with Carter escaped that first explosive
flame, and they gained only time to jump as the main fire came hurdling
over the trees.  Falling, Carter saw the stream, blood-red; jagged rocks
rising swiftly to meet him.  A flash blinded his eyes, then—


He rubbed them—that is, he winked, for he was far too weak for such
robust exercise.  Yes, he winked it. Was—could that be Helen’s face
bending low over him?




                                 *XXXI*

            *WHEREIN THE FATES SUBSTITUTE A CHANGE OF BILL*


Carter winked again.  The face, however, did not move.  On the contrary,
it lit up with sudden delight and said smile helped his limping
consciousness forward to the idea of a dream.  Yes, he was dreaming,
undoubtedly dreaming!  No!  Here memory took hold and gave him back the
flaming forest; wet rocks, rising swiftly from red water, carried him
back and left him at the precise moment that he had struck a projecting
timber.  He was falling!  Involuntarily he stiffened, expecting the
shock ... but—ah! a clew!  He was dead—of the fall; and this?  Must be
heaven, or why Helen?  _If_ t’other place?  ’Twas not so bad as long as
she was there!  Here his eye, through removal of the face, touched the
whitewashed ceiling, then wandered to blank walls, a stand with
medicine, covered glasses and spoons, a linen-press, two chairs—he
arrived at truth, a hospital! Then, tired out by these strenuous mental
exercises, his eyes closed once more, to the ineffable relief of the
anxious watcher, and sleep, natural sleep, replaced the coma that had
held him these two days.

For a while Helen listened to his breathing, then, once sure that he was
really asleep, she tiptoed out to the corridor and, under urge of
relief, ran, fairly flew, with her good news to the head doctor’s
office.  For these had been days of haggard waiting, as, for the matter
of that, had the last two weeks—Bender’s battles, Carter’s triumph, the
strike and forest fire had all been packed into ten short days.

Beginning at the morning after she saw Carter at dinner with the general
manager, her joyful prayer had gone with the jubilant roar of press and
people at the ceding of the crossing, and for several following days her
ears drank thirstily of the plaudits which were universal in the
hospital, on the street, at her boarding-house. When, indeed, the topic
cropped up at her first operation, her fingers trembled so over a
bandage that Carruthers excused her, thinking the sight of blood had
turned her sick.  At Jean Glaves’s table she had to veil the eager
exultance of her eyes.  The merchants who were discussing competition in
freight rates on the street would have stared could they have heard the
heart-cry of the pretty nurse then passing.

"He did it!  Yes, he is very clever—all that you say! But you cannot
have him, for he is mine!  I’ll lend him to you—for a while!  But I must
have him back!  He’s mine! mine! mine!"

From breathing the rare atmosphere of these exalted heights, she had
been precipitated by the strike into bottom deeps of despair, and while
agonizing therein over additional rumors of Greer & Smythe’s impending
failure, a morning paper came to her breakfast-table with six-inch fire
scareheads and a long tale of burns, bruises, breakages that would have
been longer but for the softness of the morass.  Carter, Bender, Brady,
Carrots Smith, all who were on the trestle, had been more or less
injured; and six bridges, five trestles, dozens of culverts had gone up
in smoke, a maleficent memorial to Michigan Red, before the
conflagration back-fired itself out among labyrinthian lakes.  But she
paused not at the tale. The injured were on the way to the hospital, and
with that piece of news clutched to her bosom she ran all the way and
broke, at one time, a rule that was as the law of the Medes and Persians
and the privacy of the head doctor’s study.

It will be easily seen that under such circumstances her hysterical
gaspings were not exactly informing, but a man does not attain to
headship of a hospital without ability to extract truth from obscure
premises—what else is diagnosis?—and when, indicating the heading that
told of Carter’s injuries, she gasped, "My husband!" the Head grasped
every detail of the situation.

"I must nurse him!" she pleaded.  "Must! must!"

A man prodigiously dignified and very solemn behind imposing glasses,
the Head offered a stereotyped objection; but it speaks for the feeling
beneath his dessicated exterior that he eventually set rules and
regulations at defiance, and outraged the discipline and morale
maintained by the Scotch head nurse, by appointing her, a novitiate, to
a capital case.

"But remember," he said.  "Only if you can forget, for the present, that
he is your husband?"

He did not believe she could, and had been astonished by her quiet,
almost mechanical performance of duty during those two harrowing days.
For he did not see her leaning over the inanimate form when alone in the
ward; her strained watching, desperate listenings for the first flutter
of the returning spirit.  Now he did see her flushed delight, and
muttered to himself as Carruthers, the under surgeon, hastened with her
to Carter’s bedside: "I suppose I ought to tell _him_! ... What’s the
use; he’ll hear soon enough."

So her secret was kept, and being uninformed of the matrimonial
complications in the case, the surgeon set her delighted flutterings to
professional interest and so joined her felicitations.  "’Twas touch and
go," he whispered.  "Few could stand such a crack on the head; must have
made an omelet of his brains and his fever was hot enough to fry it.
But he’ll pull through, Mistress Morrill, and it is good that he will,
for he’s a gran’ character, fine and useful to the province."


To indulge a pleasant conceit, that refreshing sleep may be regarded as
an intimation of the fates that comedy was about to be substituted for
impending tragedy upon the boards; and the opening of Carter’s eyes may
very well be considered as the rise of the curtain on the first, and
what would also have been the last, act had he been in the enjoyment of
his usual health and strength. Lacking these, he could only take things
as he found them; chief over all, a demure nurse who administered bitter
draughts or took his pulse without sign of recognition, compunction, or
emotion.

As her shapely back always hid the pencil when she noted her
observations on the chart, he could not see it tremble; and how was he
to know that the pulse-taking was a sham?  That she could feel only her
own heart thudding five thousand thuds to the minute?  That she had to
guess the pulse by his temperature, which cardinal crime of the nurse’s
calendar was partly condoned, because if she _had_ set down its
vibrations at the moments she held his hand, every doctor in the
hospital would have come running as to a lost cause.

Ignorant of all this, he could only lie and watch her moving about the
ward, tantalizingly trim and pretty in her nurse’s dress; wait till some
softening of her coldness would justify the clean confession he ached to
make. Always the desire was with him and it waxed with the days.  But
whether or no she discerned it lurking behind his surreptitious glances,
she afforded no opportunity, and what can a man do against a fate that
nips every approach to the tender with nasty medicine or chill
phrase—"You are not to talk."

"I believe you like to give me that stuff," he growled one day.

"Doctor’s orders," she severely replied, and her stony face effectually
repressed him while indicating that she was not to be drawn from her
vantage-ground by that or a sudden remark—"It seems strange to see you
in that uniform."

"Doesn’t feel so to me," she coldly answered, adding, with a spice of
malice, "If it did I should get used to it, for I expect to wear it for
the next three years."

He winced, and he did not see her smile as he gave her his angry
back—that or her droopings over his sleep an hour thereafter.  Alone in
the quiet ward, bent so low that her breath moved the hair on his
temples, the occasion vividly recalled the night, long ago, when she had
watched the moon etch with line and shadow the promise of the future
upon his face.  It lay there now, under her soft breath, the fulfilment.
For two years stress and struggle had tooled away every roughness and
left the accomplished promise, a man wrought by circumstance to a great
fineness.

She also had changed—from a well-intentioned if careless girl to a
thoughtful woman.  Contact with life in the rough had rubbed the scales
from her eyes and now she saw clearly—many things, but all centring on
one. Outside people were declaiming against the vindictive fate that had
joined with the monopoly against this their champion.  That morning’s
papers had it that Greer & Smythe were surely ruined.  Yet she was glad,
overjoyed.  Wealthy and honored, it would have been difficult to the
verge of impossibility for her to go back to him.  Always she would have
felt that he might doubt her motives.  But now—

"It’s time to take your medicine!"  She sprang up as he opened his eyes,
wondering if he had felt her light kiss.

Had he, it would have been "curtain" there and then, but as he did not
the play went on, and its sequence proves that, however honorable her
intentions, she had by no means relinquished her sex’s unalienable right
to bring things about in its own illogical, tantalizing, perversely
charming way.  Drooping over his sleep, hoping that he would wake and
catch her, she took care that he should not—assumed a statuesque
coldness at the first quiver of his eyelids.  Undoubtedly, and with her
sex’s habitual unfairness, she scandalously abused her position,
exercising a tyranny that was as sweet to herself as mortifying to him.

"You must not do that—must do this—now go to sleep."  She hugged her
power in place of him, and when he achieved a successful revolt against
her ban of silence by appealing to the Head for permission to talk with
Smythe, she revenged herself by injecting a personal interest into her
dealings with Carruthers.  It was madness for him to see their heads
close together over his chart; the shining eyes she brought back from
whispered conferences in the hall.  To be sure, it was all about pills
and plasters, but how was he to know that? And it was in revenge for
this shamelessly injurious conduct that he arranged the scene which
opens the second act.

On the morning that he was promoted from spoon-feed to the dignity of a
tray, behold him! head bent, elbows square with his ears, knife and fork
grabbed at their points, proving his indifference to her opinion by the
worst behavior that recent better practice permitted. Alas! he was cast
all through for a losing part.  Displaying, before his face, the
irritating curiosity which a child bestows on a feeding lion, she
privately peeped from behind the door-screen, gloated over the old
familiar spectacle.  She caught him coming and going.  Also she turned a
delighted ear when he dropped into the homely settler speech; listened
for the old locutions; but called his bluff when he overdid the part by
running amuck of the grammar in a manner frightful to behold.

"I really don’t see why you talk like that," she remarked,
patronizingly.  "You speak quite well, almost correctly, to Dr. Hammand
and Mr. Smythe."

"Yes?" he retorted.  "I didn’t notice.  Mebbe you’ll correct me if I
side-step it again?"

But the last case of that man was worse than the first.  "Thank you,"
she coldly answered.  "I have given up teaching school."

He sniffed sarcastically.  "Hum!  Shouldn’t have known it.  I always
heard that the spanking habit stuck through life.  But don’t give up.
Remember the copybook line, ’If at first you don’t succeed, try, try
again.’"  But she was going out of the door at the time and took care
that he should think she had not heard.  "You were speaking?" she
inquired, coming back.  And, of course, it would not bear repetition.

He fared just as illy when, next morning, Bender hobbled into the ward
with the aid of a crutch and cane. Having been visited by the lady
protagonist, the giant was fully informed on the situation and so
achieved a sly wink behind his chief’s sarcastic introductions. "Mr.
Bender—Mrs. Morrill."

Also her quiet answer was disconcerting.  "We have met before.  Have you
heard from Jenny lately, Mr. Bender?"

Now Bender had.  A letter, small note, simple and direct as Jenny
herself, was even then burning his pocket, and, blushing like a
school-boy caught in the theft of apples, he produced and read it.  If
he insisted—was perfectly certain that he couldn’t get well without
her—Jenny would!

"’Fraid I took a mean advantage," he confessed. "Reg’lar cold-decked
her.  You see, a busted ankle ain’t much to spread on, so I hinted at
complications. She sure thinks I’m dyin,’ an’ when she comes she’ll find
me hopping around."

"Oh, well."  Carter glanced stealthily at Helen.  "She has oceans of
time to pay you.  With any old luck you are good for eighty-five, and it
doesn’t take a loving wife that length of time to get even."  For which
insolence he paid instantly and doubly—first by a nasty dose, secondly
by loss of Bender, who was summarily ejected under pretext of its being
the patient’s hour for sleep.

So the war ran, and it did seem as though circumstance never tired of
impressing allies for Helen’s cause. Take Dorothy Chester, who called
with Hart next day. She, like Carruthers, could only take the situation
at face values, and so enthused over his luck in nurses; to all of
which—in Helen’s absence—Carter subscribed till Dorothy reached her
climax.

"And Dr. Carruthers thinks so, too.  Wouldn’t it be nice if they made a
match of it?"

She was astounded by the heat of his reply.  "No! A Scotch dromedary,
suckled on predestination and damnation of infants?  Pretty husband he’d
make!"  But she solved his vehemence for Hart’s benefit on the way home.
"He’s in love with her himself."

"Between patient and doctor?  What a mix-up!"  Hart laughed.  "Odds are
on the doctor if he’s up to his job.  I’d hate to be Carter on the
chance of an overdose."  For which flippancy his ears were well pulled.

As he said, things were undoubtedly a little tangled, and if at first
glance it would appear that Dorothy had not assisted in the unravelling,
closer scrutiny shows that her remark helped at least to bring affairs
to a head. For the remainder of the day Carter was very thoughtful, so
preoccupied that he forgot to misbehave over his supper-tray while, time
and again, Helen caught him surveying herself with a dark uneasiness.
Puzzled, she came back to the ward before leaving and stood at the foot
of his bed; but as yet his fever was confined to his mind, and he
replied that he was feeling quite well to her question.

The "good-night" she wished him was not, however, for him.  Always
darkness magnifies trouble, and through its black lens he saw suspicions
as facts.  Tossing restlessly, he heard the city clock chime the
quarters, halves, hours, until, at twelve, the night nurse’s lantern
revealed him wide-eyed, staring, and knowing the efficacy of a change of
thought in producing sleep, she stayed for a chat.

Correct enough in theory, the treatment proved about as successful as
would the application of a blister upon a sore; for he bent the
conversation to his own uses, steering it by a circuitous route through
the girl’s own experience to Helen.

She was liked in the hospital?

Indeed she was!  The night nurse was emphatic on that, and went on to
say that beauty such as Helen’s was not generally conducive of
popularity.  No, it wasn’t jealousy!  The nurse tossed her head at his
question. Simply that pretty girls didn’t have to be nice, so usually
left amiability to be assumed with a double chin; and being a frank as
well as a merry creature, she confessed to an accession of that
desirable quality every time she saw her own nose in a glass.  But Helen
Morrill?  She was sweet as she was pretty!

Dr. Carruthers thought so, too?

Well—the nurse would smile!  And everybody in the hospital was glad of
it.  They would make such a perfect couple, an ideal match!

It was as good as settled, then?

Well—not given out yet, but every one knew!  Her lantern being on the
floor, she could not see his face, and he lay so quiet she thought he
had fallen asleep, and was tiptoeing away when he spoke again.

But—_Mrs._ Morrill?  She had been married before! Her husband—dead?

If he wasn’t he ought to be—the nurse was sure of that. There was only
one place for a man who could not live with such a nice girl.  And if he
were not—divorce was about as good in ridding one of the beast!  With
which she picked up her lantern and left him in darkness and despair.
When she came next on her rounds she thought him asleep, but he resumed
his restless tossings as soon as her back was turned.  Dawn, however,
betrayed him, and sent her flying to the head doctor with his pulse and
temperature.

"He was all right last night!" the latter exclaimed. "Bring his chart
down to the office."  Studying it while he mixed sedatives a little
later, he said: "Awake at midnight—hum!  Talked, did he?  What about?
Mrs. Morrill?"  He snatched truth out of her as though it had been an
appendix.  "Spoke of her and Dr. Carruthers?—ah! ha!  Well, give him
this and send Mrs. Morrill to me when she comes in."

If short, the interview did not lack excitement when, a couple of hours
later, Helen opposed the freshness of the morning to the Head’s angry
glare.  Her delicate colors, the eyes cleared by sleep and full of
light, were enough to have softened the heart of a Gorgon, but served
only to irritate him, who looked upon them as so much material gone to
waste.

"What have you done?" he roared after her.  "Look at that!"  And went on
as her distressed eyes came back from the chart: "You have done
nothing—that’s the trouble.  Why did I appoint you to this case?
Because of your vast experience?  No, because I thought you could
administer something outside of medical practice. And now he’s dying—of
jealousy.  You have done it; you must cure him."  And taking her by the
arm as though she were a medicine-tray, he marched her to Carter’s ward,
gave her a shake at the door like a bottle that is to be "well shaken
before taken," and thrust her in with the parting admonition, "Now, do
your duty."

Here was an embarrassing position!  Surely never before had nurse such
orders—to administer love, like a dose, that, forsooth, to a patient who
had already turned his broad back on her charms.  Now did she pay toll
of blushes for the perversity that had checked his every overture.  How
should—how _could_ she begin?

Pleating and unpleating her apron, she stood at the foot of his bed, the
prettiest picture of perplexity ever vouchsafed to gaunt, unshaven man.
A week’s stubble did not improve his appearance any more than his
unnatural color, fixed, glazed eyes.  But soon as a timid glance gave
her these—she was on her knees beside him.

"Is that you, Helen?"  Before she could speak he burst out in a sudden
irruption of speech.  "I’m so glad; there’s something I want to tell
you."  Then it came, in a flood that washed away his natural reserve,
the confession—his remorse for his obstinacy, the sorrow that had tamed
his anger, his yearning through weary months for an overture from her;
his ignorance of the settler’s persecution, scorn of scandalous rumors;
his attempts to communicate with and find her; all, down to his
observation of her liking for Carruthers, finishing: "Through all, my
every thought has been of you.  But now—I see. It was a mistake, our
marriage.  It was wrong to couple roughness with refinement.  So if you
wish—"  Her face was now buried in her arms, and he gently touched the
golden hair.  "Last night I made up my mind to bring no more misery into
your life.  But now ... that I see you ... it is difficult; ... but ...
if you wish—"

He got no further, for speech is impossible when a soft hand stoppers
one’s mouth.  And while he was thus effectually gagged, she took a mean
advantage: told him just what she thought of him.  Such a stupid!  A big
man, so very strong, but oh, _so_ silly!  Did he really think that
she—any girl—would have waited upon him in such circumstances unless—
Here she had to release his mouth to wipe away the streaming tears, and
his question came out like an explosion:

"What?"

She told him, or, rather, conveyed the information in the orthodox way
with lovers.  This takes time, and becoming suddenly alive to the fact
that he was sitting up in bed, she resumed her authority to make him lie
down.  In view of his condition she was certainly justified in using
force to compel obedience; but was it right, was it proper for her, a
nurse duly accredited to the case, to leave her arms about him?  Well,
she did, and—scandalous predicament!—her golden head was lying beside
his on the pillow when the door opened for the matron, Carruthers, and
the Head on their morning rounds.

"Well—I declare!  _Fine_ goings on!"

Helen’s faint cry of dismay was drowned by the matron’s horrified
exclamation, but Carter rose to the situation.  "Miss Craig, doctor—my
wife."  He could not include Carruthers, who retired precipitously, and
was then just outside the door, swallowing hugely in vain attempts to
get what looked like a monstrous pill, but was really his heart, back to
its proper place.

"Your what?"  Having the general objections to matrimony which come with
prim old maidhood, the matron almost screamed: "Good gracious, man!
Couldn’t you have waited till you were sure you wouldn’t need a minister
to bury you?"  And she tossed a high head at his answer.

"No, ma’am.  We were that impatient we got married two years ago."

There she slid one in on him with a sniff of disdain. "Two years!  Imph!
One would never have thought it.  And just look at this ward!  Doctors’
rounds and ward unswept, bed unmade; I doubt whether you’ve had your
medicine!  I’ll send up another nurse at once. As for you,
Mrs.—Carter"—she paused, flouncing out of the door—"you are—"

She intended "discharged," but the head doctor interposed twinkling
glasses between Helen and destruction. "She was merely giving treatment
according to orders."

How the matron stared!  "Treatment?  Orders? Whose orders, pray?"

"Mine."

Her response as she bustled away, "Has every one gone mad!" set them all
smiling, and Carter’s remark, "A bit too long in the oven," eloquently
described her crustiness.

But if long study of people from interior views had left the matron
purblind as to outward signs, sympathies, and emotions, she was not so
short-sighted but that she came to a full stop at the sight of
Carruthers, who stood, hands clinched, like a naughty boy, face to the
wall.

"You poor man!"  But though her tone was gentle as her touch on his
shoulder, he threw her hand fiercely away and strode off uttering an
unmistakable "damn."

"Another lunatic!" she tartly commented, and was confirmed in that
flattering opinion when, instead of pining in romantic fashion, he fell
in love again and married a sweet girl the following summer.

Left thus alone in the case, the head doctor nodded his satisfaction at
the patient’s decided improvement, while his further instructions were
short as pleasant—"Same treatment, continued at intervals."

These orders, be sure, were faithfully observed. Indeed, he had scarcely
passed out than—but the next hour is their’s, intrusion would be
impertinent. Sufficient that its confidences left each possessed of the
other’s every thought and feeling throughout their separation.

Her eyes dancing, she broke a happy silence to say: "You were dreadfully
transparent.  Did you really think I couldn’t see through your
misbehavior?"  Then she told of how Dorothy had confided to her his
appeal to Hart and efforts at self-improvement.  "But," she added, with
a sigh that was almost plaintive, "I wouldn’t have cared."

Also she told him of her proud espionage upon him at the general
manager’s dinner; in return for which she learned how he had waited at
the forks of his own trail that winter’s night—waited while his ponies
shivered in the bitter wind until he picked hers and Elinor Leslie’s
voices from the groan of passing runners.

She remembered.  "Oh, was that you?  Why didn’t you come in?"

"I would—at least I think I would have," he corrected, "if you’d been
alone.  By-the-way, I saw her in Minneapolis the other day.  She was
taking an order from a fat Frenchman in a restaurant where Smythe and I
had turned in for dinner.  Luckily her back was turned, so we got out
without her seeing me.  But I caught her profile and she looked
dreadfully weak and thin."

"A waitress?" Helen cried.  "Oh, the poor thing! Couldn’t you have—"
Pausing, she confirmed his wisdom.  "No, it was better she did not see
you."

Silence fell between them, he thinking of the temptation in the warm
gloaming, she busy with her own memories.  Helen’s watch beat like a
pulse in the quiet; a house-fly rivalled the full boom of a bee as it
battered its head against the window-pane, a futile illustration of
Elinor Leslie’s folly.  Just so had she beaten at the invisible barriers
that held her back from free passion. Now she lay, poor soul, bruised
and beaten like a dying moth, wings singed by a single touch of the
unholy flame.

But sadness could not hold them.  Smiling, Helen suddenly relieved
herself of the astonishing remark: "I am so glad you are ruined.  Yes, I
am."  She nodded firmly, misreading his comical surprise.  "Now we can
go back to the farm—just you and I—be ever so happy."

"Why?"  He listened with huge enjoyment to her explanation, then said,
with mock concern, "It would be fine, and I’m that sorry to disappoint
you, but—who said I was ruined?"

"Oh, everybody—the papers said this morning that—what is that funny
name?  Yes, Mr. Brass Bowels—that he had bought up enough of your
liabilities to snow you under."

"They did, did they?  Well—they have another guess coming."

"Aren’t you ruined?" she asked.

But though he laughed at her naïve distress, he refused to say more,
laughingly assuring her that she would not be long in suspense.


Nor had she long to wait.  For as she was giving him his medicine the
following afternoon, he bobbed up under her hand as though set on wire
springs to the detriment of the snowy quilt, which absorbed the dose.

"Listen!"

A whistle, deep-toned, fully two octaves below the shrill hoot of the
monopoly’s locomotives, thrilled in the distance.  Drawing nearer, its
vibrant bass gave the entire city pause—clerks waited, pens poised for a
stroke; lawyers dropped their briefs; store-keepers, laborers,
mechanics, the very Indians in the camps by the river, stood on gaze;
motion ceased as at the voice of the falked siren; a hush fell in the
streets, a silence complete as that of some enchanted city.

It carried consternation into the offices of the monopoly, that whistle.
Sparks, the division superintendent, dropped his pen and stared at his
chief, who was giving last orders for the demolition of Greer & Smythe
before he went back East.  The latter’s iron nerve, however, vouchsafed
only a breathing space to surprise, then he continued in the same dry
tones: "Previous instructions are hereby cancelled.  That’s an American
whistle, Sparks—Jem Ball for a thousand.  They’ve won out; it’s all over
but the shouting."  And as eager tumult broke loose in the street, he
added, "And there it goes."

The shouting?  They poured into the streets—doctors, lawyers, clerks,
laborers; carpenters jumped from new buildings, plumbers left their
braziers burning while they swelled the stream that poured out to see
the first train, an engine with Pullman and palace-car, pull in over the
new line.

Shout?  They did—and more.  Your canny Canadian is the deil at
celebrating when his backslidings carry him that way, and next morning
many a worthy citizen sweated in thinking back to the cause of his
headache. Ay, good church-members lugged flasks of old Scotch from
blameless-appearing pockets; the carpenter exchanged news and drams with
the millionaire.  The N.P. had bought the new road!  No, only leased it!
No! no! they were merely to finance the enterprise, market its bonds in
return for reciprocal traffic arrangements!  There were other theories,
all spun round a germ of truth, but thence to the source.

As the siren sounded the second time, Carter looked at Bender, who sat
opposite Helen, having dropped in for a chat, and his remark carries
back to the strike. "Now you know why we went to Minneapolis.  What does
it all mean?"  His face lit up as he turned to Helen. "It means cars,
locomotives, rolling-stock; the use of N.P. equipment till we can instal
our own.  That we can rebuild the burned bridges this fall, and shove a
temporary line through to Silver Creek and the camps in the Riding
Mountains.  It means that the Red River Valley will send its wheat south
to Duluth this fall.  It means—victory for us, competition for the
province."

That was his hour, but Helen shared it—even when Greer and Smythe
ushered in the American railway-king. Twin to the general manager in
massive build and strength of feature, he had come from a softer mould.
His eyes, mouth were gentler, more pleasant.  In him the high, sloping
forehead—mark of the dreamer—was qualified by the strong jaw,
wide-spaced eyes of the man of practical affairs.  A glance told that
here imagination and constructive power went hand in hand.  Fun rippled
and ran over innumerable fine facial lines, and he laughed out loud when
Helen made to withdraw, assuring her that their conversation would not
tax her sex’s supposed weakness in the matter of secrets as they were
not to talk business.

"We think too much of this man to bother him with details," he said.
"These gentlemen have attended to everything, and all we require is his
signature to a few papers.  Celebrations won’t be in order till he’s
well enough to run down to St. Paul.  Then—well, you’d better not let
him come alone."  So, talking and laughing for a pleasant half-hour, he
gave off his superabundant energy until the ward was charged, then went
away leaving the patient stimulated to the verge of open mutiny.

"I’m as well as you."  He defied the Head to his face that evening.
"Send up my clothes."

"In two weeks, if you are good!" the Head calmly answered.

"_Two weeks_?  I’ll be head over heels in work by then, and there is
something I want to do first.  I’ll be out of here in one."  And, albeit
a trifle chalky as to complexion and wobbly of knee, he was.  On the
last day—

But first the record of that week; and as Bender’s bulk overshadows all
else, behold him, mid-week, hobbling into the ward with Jenny trailing
behind like a kitten in the wake of the family house dog.

"Mrs. Bender, if you please," he corrected Carter, chuckling; and for
once he permitted some one else to do the blushing.  Wherein he showed
great taste, as she did it right prettily, exhibiting, moreover, a much
superior article.

Next day, Dorothy, becomingly mortified because the good news had come
to her through her father out of Smythe.  "To hear of it in such a
roundabout way!" she declared.  "You little traitor! and when I think of
your speculations about his wife!  Positively I had resolved never to
forgive you, but—"  Kisses, of course.

Thereafter, Brady, Big Hans, Carrots Smith—all more or less singed and
nursing various breakages—ostensibly to see the boss, really to take a
look at his pretty wife, whom, they decided, shamed the specifications.

Then, to everybody’s astonishment—indeed, the Head shadowed the man
along the corridor as though he were an anarchist with a bomb in his
pocket—the _General Manager_! brisk, steel-like, yet twinkling.
"Trounced us, didn’t you?" he laughed.  "Well, one never can tell when
one has made an end.  Competition? Perhaps, for a while; but wait till
Jem Ball and I get a bellyful of fighting.  However, by that time you’ll
be well cured of your desires for the public weal and be ready to listen
to reason.  Oh yes, you will!  We all take ’em like chicken-pox or
measles, but they are not fatal—unless you get ’em late in life.  I feel
so sure of your eventual recovery that I just dropped in to bury the
hatchet.  Fifty years won’t see the finish of our plans, and whenever
you feel a yearning for fresh enterprises, just look me up."

Therewith the gray cynic hurried away to plan and scheme, upbuild, tear
down, without slack or satiety of enormous constructive appetite; to
live in travail greater than the labor of woman, and give birth
ceaselessly to innumerable works; to inundate the plains with seas of
wheat and carry bread to Europe’s teeming millions; to sow towns,
villages, cities broadcast over the north, make farms for countless
thousands; to join Occident and Orient with gleaming rails, clipper
ships, to do evil consciously all his days and work unconscious good,
crushing the individual for the weal of the race, and caring nothing for
either; to live feared and die respected, leaving the world bigger and
better than he found it.

Lastly, the cook, just down from the camp with news of Michigan Red.
Flying in front of the fire, the black stallion had come in with the
rat-tailed mare to be shot as a murderer after the Cree had tracked down
the Thing that had been his master; and so, if there be aught in Cree
mythology, the soul of the fierce brute would fight it out once more
with the fiercer man in the place of the teamsters.

While beguiling the tedium, these tales and conversations failed to
exclude from Carter’s ear a distant hammering that attended the building
of his station and freight-sheds.  Also he could hear the hoarse
coughing of locomotives going up and down his line.  And as the _materia
medica_ contains no tonics like happiness and success, small wonder
that, as aforesaid, he demanded his clothes at the end of the week.

"Once you get hold of a fellow you are never satisfied till you have
gone all through his clock-work," he replied to the Head’s objections.
"But though I sympathize with your industry, you’ll have to wait for
another go at mine.  They are needed in my business."

First—Helen with him, of course—he directed his steps, or rather the
wheels of a hack, to the new station where the ring of saws, hammering,
noise and bustle of work, acted upon him like the draught of the elixir
of life, bringing color to his cheeks, stiffness to his knees, sparkle
to his eyes.  Thence they drove for a conference to Greer & Smythe’s;
whereafter nothing would suit him but a long drive out to the prairies.
It was a strenuous beginning, but fresh air and sunshine are ever
potent.  He gained color and strength under her anxious eyes; seemed
fresher when he dropped her at Jean Glaves’s house that evening than in
the morning.

Throughout the happy day they had lived in the present.  But though he
had made no plan for the future, she had trusted, and her face lit up
with flashing intuition when he said good-night.

"Mistress Morrill, you are to take the morning train to Lone Tree."

This was the "something he wanted to do."




                                *XXXII*

                           *THE TRAIL AGAIN*


Skipping that long if happy night, peep with dawn into Helen’s bedroom,
and see her up and singing small snatches of song that presently brought
Jean Glaves, herself the earliest of birds, from bed to assist at the
toilet.  Should she wear this, that, or the other? There was the usual
doubt which beset a young lady who wishes to look her best for occasion;
but the result that went forth from big Jean’s hug?  A vision of healthy
beauty that drew tentative smiles from a brace of drummers and attracted
the stealthy regard of the entire station when she finally broke, like a
burst of sunlight, on the platform.  Continuing the figure, the smile,
its crowning asset, faded like the afterglow when her anxious eyes
refused her the tall familiar figure; and when the train pulled out
without him, her disconsolate expression filled the aforesaid drummers
with manly longings towards consolation.

Unpunctual?  On such an occasion?  And how silly she would look at Lone
Tree!  Slightly offended at first, she then grew alarmed.  Perhaps he
had suffered a relapse, was ill, dying!  Be sure that her terrors
compassed the possible and impossible during an hour’s journey, and not
until she saw a man come dashing across the tracks to the Lone Tree
platform did she realize the fulness of his inspiration.  He had taken
the freight out the night before!  If thinner, paler, he was very like
the young man who had come to meet her three years ago. There, also, was
the lone poplar that had christened the station; the ramshackle town
with its clapboard hotels, false-fronted stores, grain-sheds, sitting in
the midst of the plains that, flat and infinitely yellow, ran with the
tracks over a boundless horizon.  Lastly, there was Nels and his
bleached grin, holding Death and the Devil, sleek, fat, and sinful as
ever.

Carter’s whispered greeting helped to keep her in the past.  "Is this
Miss Morrill?"

"Mr. Carter, I believe?" she had just time for the roguish answer, then
their little comedy had to be laid aside till they were alone on trail.
For the doctor came running from his office, the store-keeper plunged
madly across tracks, Hooper, the agent, yelled, "Well, I swan!" and
jumped to shake hands, while from a grain-shed emerged Jimmy Glaves, who
had taken a lift in with Nels.

Wasn’t she glad to see them?  Yet a deeper happiness enveloped her when,
looking back, she again saw Lone Tree, shrunken in the distance, its
grain-sheds looking like red Noah’s arks on a yellow carpet; when she
heard only the pole and harness jigging a merry accompaniment to the
beat of quick feet, whirring song of swift wheels.

It was very like that first occasion.  Though stiff night frosts were
now giving timely notice of winter’s chill approach, the clerk of the
weather had made special arrangements for a south wind; so it was warm
as on that far day.  Birds, animals, scenery, too, all helped to bring
the happy past forward to the happy present, while Death and the Devil,
those wicked ones, fostered the illusion by frequent boltings.  Surely
she remembered the ridge where her first coyote had caused her to cling
to Carter, and earned a kiss by repetition of that shameful performance
and faithful mimicry of his accent.  "He shore looks hungry."
Immediately thereafter they plunged out from among scattered farms into
the "Dry Lands," but its yellow miles, generally a penance, flowed
unnoticed under the buck-board.  They were both astonished when,
suddenly as before, they rattled through a bluff and dropped over the
edge of the valley upon Father Francis at the mission door.

Nothing would suit but that they must dine with him while Louis, the
half-breed stableman, fed and watered the ponies.  But if the good
priest’s twinkle expressed knowledge that another of his day’s works was
come to fruitage, his quiet converse brought no jarring note into their
communings.

Undisturbed, they began again at the ford and continued while the Park
Lands rolled in great billows under the wheels.  The Cree chimneys,
Indian graveyards, other well-remembered objects passed in pleasant
procession ere, coming to Flynn’s, he looked at her.  A shake of the
head confirmed his doubt.  Another time! So they swept on through vast,
sun-washed spaces where cattle wandered freely as the whispering winds
under flitting cloud-shadows, and so, about sundown, came to their own
place with but a single interruption.

Passing Danvers at their own forks, he grinned his delight as he turned
out to let them by and shouted after: "Say!  I heard from Leslie!  He’s
doing well on the Rand!  Sends regards to both of you!"

While that bit of good news was still ringing in her ears, the house
flashed out under the eaves of the forest, warm and bright under the
setting sun.  All was unchanged—the lake, stained just now a ruby red,
the golden stubble fenced in by dark, environing woods. Within all was
neat and clean as Nels’s racial passion for soap and water could make
it.  So while he stabled the tired ponies, she donned one of her old
aprons, rolled sleeves above dimpled elbows, and cooked supper; rather a
superfluous performance aside from the grave pleasure he took in looking
on.

Afterwards they sat on the doorstep, she between his knees, head
pillowed against his breast, and looked at the copper moon that hung in
the trees across the lake—watched it brighten to silver; listened to the
harmonies of the night, the loon’s weird alto, the bittern’s bass, cry
of a pivoting mallard, owl’s solemn choral, a wilder, freer movement
than was ever chained in a stave.  Once a snuffle, soft-lapping, drifted
in, and he replied to her start, "Bear-drinking."  Otherwise they were
silent up to the moment she arose, shivering.

"It is getting colder.  I think I’ll go in."

He stayed a little longer, stretched luxuriously out on the grass; was
still there when, having made their bed, she came to the door.  A vivid
memory gave her pause. Just so had he looked—that night—dark, still, as
the marble effigy of some old Crusader, with the moonlight quivering
about him like an emanation.

"Are you coming, dear?"  Perhaps the memory tinged her tone.  Anyway, he
sprang up, arms extended, and as she came running, he lifted her clear
of the ground; carried her in and closed the door.


Her shiver had warrant.  Within the hour the north wind began to herd
luminous clouds across the moon. At midnight the cabin loomed darkly
through a bridal veil of white.




                                THE END