The Law-bringers/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
"GRANGE'S ANDREE."
On the next morning Dick went to church. It was not the solemnity of his late contact with death, nor the knowledge that O'Hara lay in the Roman Catholic chapel with lights at his head and feet, that disturbed him. But after he had slept and breakfasted and given in the written matter concerning that day's work to Tempest, he looked from the bunk-room window and heard the English church-bell ring, and saw a girl go by with a long coat of warm-coloured fur and copper-red hair that gleamed once under her cap. And Dick rushed himself into his outer clothes and followed her. For the flutter of a woman's dress was always a flag that blew for him, and his mind had not forgotten the dead man and the broken sled that attested to his haste to see Grange's Andree.
The church was little and bare, with a few staring Sunday-school texts on the wall. The big black stove-funnel ran its hot length down the aisle, and a handful of derelicts had drifted in for warmth, as the vagrants do in continental churches. The preacher was a young, shy man from the English Mission on the other side of Grey Wolf; Forbes, the English boy in Revillons, played the harmonium; and, scattered here and there along the funnel-line, were the half-score trader's wives and families which were all that Grey Wolf could spare to God on Sundays.
Dick felt rather than heard the little flutter caused by his entrance. It amused him, for he had no belief that the religion of the world went very deep. He chose a seat behind the girl in the long fur coat, and bent his head idly to the prayer which followed. But under his hand he was noting the thick coils of hair and the lobe of the small ear close-set to the head. The artistic temperament was strong in him, and if he had not twisted his life awry he might have done good work there. Now that power was partly derelict, like all else. But the emotions roused by it were sharp yet, and the dainty poise of the girl's head arrested him.
It was the end of that struggle begun more than a month back which had brought Jennifer to church this day. She had not come before because that sharp, painful awakening had shocked her out of all her normal beliefs, and for a while all things natural and true were distorted for her as the vision of a nine-days' kitten is distorted when it opens its eyes for the first time. Jennifer's eyes opened for the first time when she fled in unreasoning terror from Ducane through the sounding house. And when he had found her, and bullied her and kissed her with all the primitive fierceness of his nature, she had hated him—until the tenseness broke and she hated herself instead.
That mood held, standing her out in the full blaze of realisation where the nerves and fibres of her being lay unnaturally bare, quivering to each rough touch, and each coarse word. And then one night swept her outside all that for ever; one night when she heard Ducane's voice raised in the prayer of abject fear, and ran in to find the horror of it in his face and eyes, and Robison watching him in contemptuous speculation.
She had sent Robison away, and Ducane had sworn at her. And then he had come after her on his knees, hiding his face in her lap. Jennifer tasted the realities that night; and all the woman in her, all the stricken, dying love in her strove to make allowances, even as Tempest had said. Ducane's broken words, said on his knees, gave her back her values. They placed her husband and they placed herself. Ducane was a whole æon nearer the brute than she was; and because of that influence of hers of which .Tempest had spoken, he was beginning dimly to know it.
"You're so far away, Jenny," he said, gripping her waist with both his great hands. "I can hold you like this, and you're right as far away. What's the matter, Jenny? I love you. Byyou know I love you, don't you?"
She knew it, even as she knew him for what he was in the eyes of men. And he knew that his need was great; his need for her love, for her strength, for herself. And she bowed her head in the rough wood pew and offered herself steadfastly, bravely, to him and for him in the desire that Ducane might one day come to his full stature and stand upright by his own clean power.
Young Forbes stumbled out a few bars on the grunting harmonium, and Jennifer lifted her voice shakily in the quaint old hymn beginning:
"We are but little children weak,
Nor born to any high estate. . ."
And then, on the third line, a new voice surged up behind her—bold, strong and true. It broke the thread of Jennifer's thoughts, jerking her into acute knowledge of it. A man's voice: young, by the nerve of it, and yet trained. A gentleman's voice: but not Tempest's, and not the husky tones of Ogilvie, the Oxford man who was drinking himself to death on a remittance. It was not Slicker. It could not be—and then Jennifer's mind sprang to the solution. It was that new man at the barracks of whom Ducane had told her, half-whispering, that he was afraid. The confession had burned her with shame and disgust. Now, hearing the man made concrete by that verile voice, her whole nature roused to defiance and to an oversweeping desire to see him, face to face.
All through the hymn the impulse pulled at her; and with the "Amen" she turned, as though seeking a wrap on the seat-back, and caught Dick's eyes full. There was interest and bold amusement and cynical understanding in them, and she swung back instantly, with the red leaping up her face. Dick flipped open a stray Cree hymn-book; and, stooping decorously through the following prayer, made the first sketch of that sweet-crooked mouth and those wide eyes that he was to know by heart in later days.
He ripped the page away and thrust it in his breast-pocket when he followed her out. But Jennifer went down the white ways swiftly, and Dick halted to walk with the wife of the Hudson Bay factor. It was well known in the Force that Dick had his reasons for all he did; but Mrs. Leigh did not guess at the reason for this civility, even when he put it into words on the steps of her own verandah.
The factor's house led down by a clean-swept path to the side-door of the Store, where two freighters, slow-moving yet dominant with that quiet self-possession of the men of the trail, concluded a bargain with Leigh. Their rough dogs slunk round, snuffing Leigh's high moccasins and woollen stockings, and Dick watched them as he spoke.
"Seems to me I'm not keeping track of the people around, Mrs. Leigh. Where was she from—that girl in church with the Cenci eyes and the Titian hair?"
"Do you think she's as wonderful as all that?" said Mrs. Leigh, and laughed. "And have you been here a month and never seen her! Why—she's Mrs. Ducane from over the Lake."
"Mrs." Dick stared with dropped jaw. He had been so certain of the other name. So very certain that not even those eyes had shaken his belief.
Mrs. Leigh interpreted his amazement through the medium of her own two handsome daughters, now married "outside."
"Not a good match for Ducane, many people think. But they say she has a lovely mind. There she is going out now, and Slicker with her. He is like a pair of brothers to her, that boy is."
Slicker brought the sleigh round the corner of the stables; saw Dick and bellowed a greeting before Jennifer could silence him. Dick came down with long strides, and stood by the sleigh, and the change in the man startled Jennifer. The bold interest was gone, and the contemptuous understanding. In voice and manner Dick carried now all the courteous charm of the elder days. And he was good to look at; better than she had thought.
"Dick," said Slicker, with his vigorous thrust-back of conventions. "My cousin's been under the weather lately Well, honey, you've looked like it, sure enough. And I guess it would be the decent thing for you and Tempest to come right along and cheer her up. Don't you want to ask him, Jennifer?"
The understanding in Dick's grave smile pleased Jennifer this time.
"Slicker's got tact, hasn't he, Mrs. Ducane?" he said. "But Tempest talked of bringing me over some day. I'd be glad to take him your message that you could see us this afternoon."
The subtle flattery; the eager ring in the voice; Jennifer's dread of a long afternoon of Slicker's questions swayed her. She gave the invitation with more warmth than she knew, and Dick looked after her as the sleigh drew out of the yard. Slicker's round whistle piped up in the pathetic old Indian song:
"The sun shines bright on pretty Red-wing;"
and Dick, with the dazzle of Jennifer's hair yet in his eyes, drew his lips in. For he knew the end of that song.
"I was right in calling those Cenci eyes," he said. "She has a way of looking as though she had to look and was afraid of what she might show."
Jennifer asked one question as the sleigh flew over the level lake.
"What is he like that—Mr. Heriot?" she asked.
Slicker was young enough to believe that, being on the verge of manhood, he knew all that there was to know of men.
"Why, he's a real good sort," he said. "You'll like him, honey."
That afternoon Tempest learned some more concerning Dick, and it frightened him. For he read the cold-blooded purpose behind that courteous gallantry which had been Dick's heritage even at school. He saw Jennifer laugh and flush and brighten as talk of pictures and music went round, illumined by the light wit which Dick knew so well how to use when he chose. Molson's words came back to Tempest now with terrible meaning. Until this hour he had not foreseen the chance that Ducane's young wife might walk into a deeper trap than that laid for the betrayal of Ducane. The betrayal of Ducane? It was that, then? Tempest looked at Ducane sitting bluff and heavily jovial against those delicate porteres. He looked at Jennifer, down on her knees in the glow of the open fire, laughing as she quarreled with Slicker over her toast-making; and he looked at Dick, drawn a little apart, with one foot over his knee and that shadow of absorbed contemplation shut down on his lean brown face. Tempest had known that look well, once. Dick's sleuth-hound mind was on the trail again; here, in Ducane's own house; here, where that little laughing wife was to betray the husband.
He stood up with the pulses closing in his throat. It had not seemed like that before; not until he had put it outside his own control by giving it into Dick's. What was it Molson had said of Dick?
"You can't whip him off a trail once he has sensed it."
If Tempest had forgotten that from the old days he knew it again with one look at that brooding face. But he knew that when he got Dick alone he would try to do it.
The horror of the thing made his hand cold when it closed on Jennifer's and his voice stammered.
"Well—I had forgotten. I arranged to meet Randal from the Portage before he went back. Why, yes; Dick can stay if you'll keep him. I'll walk, and I imagine I'll get there as soon, for the new snow has made the surface bad for sleighing—and it's only a couple of miles, anyway."
His senses were buzzing when he got out the raw grey day, and the bleak wind and the weight of snow on the earth seemed to lie on his heart also. For the first time in his life he felt utterly alone; stunned with beating his head against that awful mystery of the Why; broken-finger-nailed with struggling to pick the lock of it; blind with the long strain of trying to see through it.
A priest went by, wrapped like a stone god on his sleigh, with twinkling eyes only clear. He overtook a half-breed woman and carried her load for her until she turned up a side-trail to her shack. And then only the wind crying in the forest and the patter of the blowing frozen snow along the trail filled up the infinite desolate silence. Tempest felt tired to his very soul; lifeless, devitalized, with his whole world lying flat before him. There was no one in all the earth who could look into his eyes and give him the sympathy of understanding. No one to whom he could tell what it meant to him to see the man he still loved degrading the law in the name of the law. He stood alone in this infinitely lonely life of his. Alone with his six-fold weekly reports; with the breeds who complained when their pigs were strayed; with the white men who complained when their yards were strayed into. He stood alone all the days of his life, with the regular patrols, the settlement of little sordid matters, the suggestion of law and order which he carried on his own body where he went. For him there was no wife to make the whole world suddenly bright with her presence; no rosy little son in the cot to which a man tip-toes on unshod feet; no home-light other than Poley's lamp to call to him.
These are some of the prices which men pay for the furtherment of Empire, and until this hour Tempest had been proud that he was paying them. Now he trod on with depression bowing his shoulders, for this contemplated sin of Dick's seemed to foul the whole work and shame it.
Then he looked up idly, and far down the streak of trail he saw her running—running straight into his sight and his life and his heart, unhesitating, unknowing. She ran with the long easy Indian lope, and she was white as the winter ermine and nearly as lithe in her long fur coat and her round fur cap with the ear-pieces.
A young moose slung beside her with long fiddle-head and loose lips up, sniffing the taint of man. She came like the strange wild breath that blows in the forest, God only knew why and where and how, and within a man's length of Tempest the moose propped stiffly, making little complaining cries like a child. The girl flung an arm over the rough crest, and the two looked at Tempest with the wide wild soft eyes of the forest-born. The girl was tall and straight. Black hair crisped in curls round the olive oval face where Tempest did not notice the faint, uneradicable stamp of the high cheek-bones. He was watching the red curve of the lips, and the perfect chin where the cap-tie went.
The moose backed, scrabbling its splay feet in the snow, and Tempest spoke like a man suddenly waked.
"I—I beg your pardon. You were in a hurry"
"No," said the girl. "I was just pretending to be the wind." Her voice was grave. For though she was used to have men look at her, Life had not taken her among those who looked as Tempest looked now.
"For God's sake," he said and moved forward. "Who are you?"
"I am Grange's Andree," she said.
The name meant nothing to Tempest, for Dick had not thought fit to speak of O'Hara's private feelings. The girl whipped off her mitten; swept up a handful of snow, and rubbed vigorously at Tempest's cheek with the colour breaking on her face and her warm breath over him.
"Frost-bite," she exclaimed. And then Tempest took her stiffened hand between his and brought life back to it with an energy that set her to laughing such a rollicking care-free laugh that Tempest laughed too, unknowing why any more than he knew of the Indian taint in her or of the wild drop that called to sky and wind and was never content with the earth.
"Bo' soir, M'sieu," she cried suddenly; pulled free, whistled the moose in the high bell-note that would call him later from his kind in the forest, and fled down the track like the wind she had pretended to be. And Tempest went home with that awakened look yet in his eyes.
Andree corralled the moose in the hotel-lot; fed it with green branches sliced down from spruce and cedar, and flung herself on the hard-wood sofa in the corner of the little back eating-room at Grange's. She thrust her cap back, idly watching Grange's half-breed wife roll her fat bulk to the kitchen and back with plates of smoking meat, with hot biscuits and with babies of various ages and sexes which she set about as indifferently as she set the plates of meat. They lay or sat, according to their size, staring on their small world of smoked log ceiling and rough walls; and suddenly Andree reached her long arms, swung a child up by its clothes and held it close, crooning over it.
"Mon bébé," she said. "Ah, mon bébé."
It took no interest in her kisses, and presently she tired of it, letting it roll back on the floor where it lay screaming until its mother stopped its mouth with a shred of moosemeat.
"It's so sore peety you no mak' marree down in Calgary, Andree," she expostulated.
Andree looked long at the fat, greasy, good-humoured face; at the high cheek-bones and the twinkling beady eyes, and the black coarse hair sleeked down behind the ears. This woman was distant kin to her; but she felt neither love nor disgust at the knowledge.
"Do you like to be married, Moosta?" she said.
"It is goot to haf one man work for me," said Moosta calmly.
"Bien! I like two boy better than one—and three boy better than two." Andree drew basin and spoon to her and began her meal. "Mais—one man all the time!" she said, and lifted her shoulders.
Moosta pulled the last baby into her capacious lap.
"Mebbe you no hear dey mak' burree O'Hara to-day," she said.
"What?"
The word was sharp as a box on the ears. It fluttered the gentle Moosta.
"It was s'pose he dead," she explained apologetically.
Andree shivered away as though she had touched something clammy and very cold.
"Akaweya! Do not say it to me! Non! Non! I did not make him dead. I will forget it. Astum, Eustace. Come, petit napasis. We will sing. We will dance."
She swept up a three-year-old who had inherited Grange's eternal giggle, and whirled through the room with him, chanting a song of the lumber-camps.
En roulant ma boule.
Trois beaux canards s'en bout baignant,
En roulant ma boule.
Eouli, roulant, ma boule rou"
Here Grange came in, and she thrust an arm through his; dancing the wild free step with flung-back head and knees bent.
"Rouli, roulant; ma boule roulant
En roulant ma boule roulant.
En . . . roulant ma boule."
She loosed Grange as suddenly as she had caught him; tossed Eustace into his astonished arms, and stood with hands on hips, swaying and buzzing the air between laughing lips.
"My," said Grange, and let his son slide out of his arms. "I guess you're feelin' good, Andree."
"Wah, wah," said Moosta, with her little eyes puzzled. "I mak' say dey burree O'Hara"
Andree wheeled and her big eyes shot fire.
"Tais'-vous," she screamed. "Shut up! There is not O'Hara any more. He is gone. We forget him. Ça, ça. We no speak of death. It is stupid. C'est abominable. I hate you, Moosta."
"Sakes; you've sure got your temper still," said Grange with a strangled giggle.
"Bah! That is not to be angry," said Andree indifferently.
She walked back to the table and went on with her soup. Presently she glanced up with the wild-animal look gone out of her eyes before demureness.
"Now I am come home I will wait at table in the dining-room," she said in her best English.
Grange and his wife crossed troubled glances. Then Moosta spoke.
"Tapwa. You no like s'pose 3ey go off rud.e wit you, Andree."
"Sure." Grange caught the suggestion eagerly. "You let that right alone, Andree. There's some raises pertickler Cain o' times. I tell you it's fierce."
"But I want to," and Andree softly, and the two were silenced. They knew Andree.
Later, when Moosta had the last baby on her knees, preparing it for the moss-bag in which generations of her forefathers had grown their tall, shapely limbs, Andree brought her glowing face to the baby's level; chuckling and cooing with it as the fat vague hands tangled the curls over her eyes and dabbed at the laughing lips. Grange, smoking his pale acrid tobacco in his seat by the stove, watched the two women in tolerant pride as their broken words came to him.
"My petit daughter," crowed Moosta. "Ah, netanis; ne waspasoo owasis."
"Mais elle n'est pas dans le moss-bag yet," struck in Andree's vivid tones. "See her toes curl like the young fern-shoots."
She stopped to kiss the soft brown, small things. And then Robison followed his knock into the room, and looked down on them. He was of Moosta's tribe, and he had known Andree all her days. And into his eyes as he looked came something that made him great and noble for the moment. It passed, swift and sharp; for though a man needs love to make him human, he is often most inhuman when he loves.
"You rustle around out o' that, Andree," he said. "I guess you ain't forgot you was wantin' to play cards wi' me an' Ogilvie."
"What'll Ogilvie do if I don't play with him?" asked the girl, and pressed her lips again to the baby flesh.
"I reckon he'll feel injured," said Robison dryly. "What will you do?"
"You are wantin' to play wi' me," said Robison.
He spoke quietly, but again there was that suggestion of primitive force. The primitive in her answered to it at once. She pushed back her crisping hair and stood up.
"Call Ogilvie in," she said. "Got any cards in that drawer, Charlie?"
"I suppose," said Grange, and tipped his chair back and jerked the drawer open. "Two decks," he said. "Good 'nough for a love-game, Andree."
Ogilvie heard from the door. He was yet enough of the English gentleman to make his bemused laugh a tragedy to those who could read it.
"Quite so," he said. "And what more would a man play for with Andree as partner?"
"By gar; you soon find I play for the dollars," said Andree, and flung the cards on the table. "Pile in, boys. Here, Charlie—Oh, I'm playing with you, eh? Damn!"
She took the tone of those about her unconsciously and faithfully as a mirror, and her soft face hardened like the man-faces as the dirty bills showed on the table. But for Ogilvie the game was not upon the table. Twice his arm slid round Andree's waist and was repulsed. The third time she looked at Robison.
"Pick him off," she said, as a child might say of an insect.
Then Robison saw; and he came to his feet with shaggy forehead and red eyes lowering like the buffalo of his own land. Ogilvie took the hint and his departure, leaving two dollars of his money on the table. Grange rolled it up.
"Hands off, Andree," he said. "I guess he's gotter have this back." He rubbed his nose, staring at her. "You sure are a hornet," he said. "What you want to go spoil our game fer, eh?"
"I guess there are others," said Andree indifferently. "Go look in the bar."
Grange went out, and Robison stooped to the girl. And in the shadows beyond Moosta crooned a placid Cree lullaby to her baby.
"You're carin' for me now?" said Robison, and his rough voice shook with feeling. "Andree, you're carin' for' me now?"
Her eyes dilated. She leaned forward to him.
"I not know what it means," she whispered. "I cannot understand. I cannot know."
Again that look quivered over the coarse, earthy face.
"You ain't learnt what it means fer another man," he said. "I reckon I kin wait so long's you don't do that"
But all a woman's desire to touch beyond her reach was in Andree.
"Suppose I no can help doing that?" she asked, and the breed's face blackened to sudden anger.
"By , you'll sure have to help it," he said violently.
But Andree gave no answer. Her eyes were taking on the wide-wild-animal fear again. For she was thinking of Tempest who had looked at her as no man had looked at her before. She did not know the look for reverence; but Tempest did. Sitting in his office through the silent hours he knew that he thought of Andree as a man thinks of the woman whom he desires to make his wife. Under the knowledge of this his face was changing. It wore more the serenity of a man who sees home before him than the strenuousness that follows the gleam of a star up the heights.
From a practical point of view there was every reason why Tempest should marry. He was thirty-seven, and love had filtered very sparsely through his years. He believed that his Inspectorship was sure in the near future. He was lonely—and every man needs human love to round and ripen his life.
"Besides," he said, and looked on the inchoate well-smudge that was maps and memoranda only, "I think it is taken out of my hands, somehow."
He got up, treading the room with his light virile step. But the dreamer-light in his eyes was not the same. He had given his love to an intangible thing; to the great West that was and would be. An hour had made it concrete in the shape of a woman; but he did not think how much would be lost or won through it. And he had forgotten the word of a great one of the earth, "No man can serve two masters."
Dick's step passed in the passage, and Tempest opened the door with his mind closed like a steel trap on the present moment of duty.
"Come in here a minute," he said. Then, facing the other in the lamplight, he added, "Don't you think you can get through by fighting a man in the open?"
Dick looked at him curiously.
"Does she mean more to you than another woman?" he said.
Tempest stared. And, suddenly and very vividly, it burst on him how far, how marvellously far, he had travelled since he last saw Jennifer. He laughed, exultantly, as becomes a man who had just discovered for himself something that is very new and hidden, and very sweet.
"No," he said. "But don't you understand, you owl? I can't eat a man's bread and betray him."
"Oh!" The short laugh held contempt. "Well, I can; especially when the man is Ducane." He sat down, crossing his arms on the chair-back. "In an album of Mrs. Ducane's I found two photographs of our wonderful West which I had seen before—in one of those prospectuses that old man from Tennessee showed us last week," he said.
"You don't mean that!"
"I mean it very certainly. Ducane is the man at this end of the string."
Tempest walked through the room in agitation.
"Even so, I hate to have you do it this way," he said.
"My dear fellow, with a good object in view it is allowable to stretch a point occasionally. I don't pretend to be very moral or very nice in my methods, or very honest, you know. But I have never shirked settling day yet, and if this matter puts me in a corner I hope I won't shirk it then. But I intend that it shall put Ducane in the corner instead. He won't be very pretty when he gets here, either. 1 have a notion that he'll cry."
"Dick, I can't allow this. It is degrading our work to do it this way."
"It is only when we cease to recognise degradation that it becomes complete. You may recognise it all you like, Tempest, but you will leave me alone here. You gave me a free hand, and I am going to take it. This case is big enough to make me if I pull it off."
"And you'll sell your honour for that?"
"I could not sell my honour at all—for obvious reasons. You know that I have the blackest sheet in the Force and perhaps the best record for the kind of work that some men don't care about touching. What those widows and maiden ladies and doddering old men are doing about this company which has corralled them, I can't say. But I know what I am going to do. And you will leave me to do it. You are not my master in this."
His voice was still quiet and rather slow. But the amused indifference had gone out of it. Tempest recognised the truth. Dick's mind was on the trail and he would not be whipped off it.
"You have changed more than I ever thought you would," he said.
"Possibly." Dick stood up, stretching his long limbs. "It was one of that sex which you are being so extremely fastidious about who was responsible in the first place, as you may remember. Oh, I don't owe her any grudge. I have had my fun, as I said. And I am going to take this thing through—also as I said."
He lay awake long that night, assorting such facts as he knew. They were not many, but the very difficulty of the whole complicated matter delighted him. Jennifer knew nothing of it. That was sure. And Slicker knew nothing. Their innocence would help him infinitely. Already he understood Ducane. The man was false and dishonourable right through, but he was also a coward. Robison he knew very little of. The man kept clear of the barracks and the policeman, and any overtures had been met with dislike and suspicion. Now Dick decided to try another way. Rage would show the breed's elemental nature more completely than anything else. It would be easy to touch him there, and Dick was never afraid of consequences. He went to sleep on that with the twitching smile on his lips which Grey Wolf had already come to regard with suspicion.
A week later he put his decision into force on a night of wild storm and eddying snow. The timber-lined mess-room at the barracks was warm that night, and bright with the coal-oil lamps and the red glow from the stove where Kennedy swung the door open. Men going by saw the gleam over the picket- fence, and drifted in, one by one; leaving puddles of melting snow as calling-cards for Poley over the kitchen-floor, and disturbing Dick and Kennedy where they strove to make up a half-year's arrears with needle and thread on more or less wrecked garments.
The varied degrees of men among which Dick's life was thrown interested him always. But to-night he welcomed them with special graciousness. One of them would serve his need before the night was out. He glanced over them, wondering where his choice would fall. There was Ogilvie, pinched and shakily conscious that he was an old man in his youth. There was Lampard, the cheerful commonplace Canadian in the Hudson Bay Store. There was Slicker; Parrett, the new Dissenting minister; Heinmann, a German boy travelling through to Peace River; and Falconer from Lac La Biche. They drowsed and talked and smoked in their steaming clothes, with the smell of cast furs in the corner growing stronger as the heat increased.
Dick, pulling a thread as long as his arm, broke suddenly into song, with the elements riding their Valkyrie gallop outside.
"King Charles, and who'll do him right now?
King Charles, and who's ripe for fight now?
Give a rouse: here's in Hell's despite now.
King Charles!"
The outer door burst open, and a blast of icy wind licked past Robison as he stood on the sill with his shoulders peppered with snow.
"Sergeant home yet?" he asked, and slammed the door in obedience to a tenfold command.
"No," said Dick. "Do you want anything?"
Robison intimated that he did; and Dick went through with him to the little court-room, gave the special bit of information required, ripped some memo-forms off the block, and noted on his way back that Robison stumbled on Ogilvie's out-thrust feet and shot him a perfectly unexplainable look of fury in reply to Ogilvie's apology.
"There is something the matter here," said his unflagging-brain. But he continued his song untroubled as he shut Robison out in the night.
"Who helped me to gold I spent since?
Who found me in wine you drank once?"
"And that we never did," said Lampard. "Though you appear to be bearing up under it."
"Just as well as the H. B. C. is bearing up under the knowledge that it has lost its significance," agreed Dick.
"What's that?" demanded Lampard, instantly afire for the honour of his world-known firm.
"Why" Dick laid a piece of leather over a rubbed place in the leg of his riding-breeches with care. "The Hudson Bay Company spread everywhere before the missionary, and thereby earned the right to call themselves 'Here before Christ.' Now a missionary has got into some place near Herschel ahead of them, and consequently the Company is doomed."
Lampard was aroused to an exhortation on the staying powers of the Company, and Dick finished his work and turned to make a drawing on the backs of those memorandum forms which carry the full title of the Police on the front of them.
"I saw a wood-buffalo on the Twin Hill trail to-day just after you passed, Parrett," he said. "You saw the tracks of it, of course?"
Parrett was the youthful Dissenting minister fresh from Winnipeg, and he knew that his first duty towards these outcasts was to convince them of his ultimate knowledge. He was the only man there who was ignorant of the fact that wood-buffalo fed neither so far west or south by some hundreds of miles, and he fell into the trap instantly.
"Why, certainly," he said. "I saw the tracks. Plenty of them."
"Ah. I saw the buffalo itself. How big would you take it to be by the spore?" asked Dick, bringing out bold sweeps on the paper.
"Why sure; they were—I guess I didn't measure them."
"Do you think they would fit an animal of about this size?"
Dick flicked his sketch into the group round the stove, and sat unmoved under the comments. Ogilvie sucked his lips in.
"I fancy Mr. Robison will want to kill you if ever he sees this," he said.
"You can show him if you feel like it," said Dick placidly.
The buffalo in the black sharp lines of the sketch wore Robison's little red eyes and shaggy mane of thick hair. It had Robison's slight deformity, magnified into an ordinary buffalo hump, and it waded up to its hocks in mud. Ogilvie folded it with remembrance of that night with Andree in Grange's back-parlour stirring in him.
"We'll see how Robison likes it," he said.
Slicker snatched at it and missed it.
"Oh, you make me tired, Ogilvie," he said. "Tear it up. What did you give it to him for, Dick? You know what Robison is."
This was precisely what Dick did not know. But if that sketch went where he intended he expected to find out. Robison was useless at present, but he might make a valuable enemy.
"Slicker hardly does justice to an artist's natural conceit," he said. "I want to know if Robison recognises it. Be sure you show him, Ogilvie."
"Certainly. But so sure as God made little apples I think he'll try to kill you for it," said Ogilvie; and presently he got up and went his way into the storm.
Dick drew another sheet towards him and went on sketching idly. And this time his song had the old stately, deep-sea tread:
"Good-night to you, Spanish ladies.
Good-night to you, ladies of Spain,"
and the face which he drew in the shadow of his curved hand was the face of Ducane's wife.
Parret's high nasal voice cut sharply into the song.
Dick glanced up at the German boy who puffed his little cigarette at the ceiling, unmoved by Parrett's wrath.
"That last epithet is at once your excuse and your condemnation," he said. "What have you been doing, Heinmann?"
"I say all clever men are immoral," explained the German boy. He contemplated Dick. "Are you moral?" he asked. "I think you do not look it."
Dick accepted the compliment modestly.
"Some day you will speak of your kind with more respect," he suggested.
"But I hope not," said Heinmann. "For respect does not mean love in your language, and I hope to love all ladies—always."
An appreciative laugh sprang into Dick's eyes. Then he glanced at the girl-face in the shadow of his hand. And then he jerked the stove door open; crumpled the sheet, and thrust it in.
"Respect may not mean love in your language, Heinmann," he said dryly. "But love means respect, and I'll trouble you to remember that."
And yet, when they were gone, and when Kennedy had toiled with his armful of derelicts up to bed, Dick sat with his arms on the table, and laughed a low laugh with no mirth in it.
"How very easy it is to humbug others," he said. "What a pity it is not so easy to humbug oneself."
The ring of alert feet came down the passage, and Tempest thrust open the door.
"Ah! You've got it warmer in here," he said. "I'm frozen stiff as boards."
He jerked off his gloves and rubbed his hands before the stove, laughing cheerfully. He brought a changed atmosphere into the room which Dick's thoughts had made sordid; an atmosphere pure almost to austerity, yet gay and quick and eager, and a deep light shone in his eyes which was strange to Dick in its content. For Tempest had been over to the English Mission, and there he had seen Andree for five minutes that it tingled his blood to remember.
"How's Blake?" he asked. "Did you get him to do any work to-day?"
"Well, I did," Dick smiled blandly. "He intimated that he was too crippled with rheumatism. So I stretched him and rubbed him until I fancy he understands me a little better. He chopped half-a-cord of wood after that, and was willing to do more if I'd ordered it."
Tempest looked at him with puckered brows.
"There are ways of doing things" he suggested.
"I know. And I know Blake. When you have to do sentry-go over a skunk you must treat him like a skunk. It's an insult to his powers to do anything else. He'll sleep well to-night—and so will I."
He yawned, lying back in his chair. The day of both men had been hard; filled to the brim with the numberless common little things which knit up the great whole. For it is on the anvil of the common things that human nature is ordained to be hammered out and toughened for the tests of life.
Tempest went on to his office; but a little later he put his head out, and called Dick up the passage. Dick came, yawning still.
"Did you take any papers out of the court-room just now?" asked Tempest.
"No. Lost anything?"
"I could gamble I left it here," said Tempest, sifting a handful on the desk. "Didn't light your pipe with any of this, I suppose?"
"I tell you—why—I took a couple of memo-forms. But they were blank."
"The top side of the under one had my writing on it. What did you do with them?"
"Burnt one. Sketched Robison on the other, and Ogilvie took it out to show him about two hours ago."
The deep lines came round Tempest's jaw. He stood still.
"Well?" said Dick, and his eyes narrowed. "Hit out. Don't be shy."
"Paul was in this morning about some freighting. He happened to remark that a breed on the Peace who took land about six months ago had sold to Robison. He said that Robison had been buying in several places lately. Evidently people are commenting on it. I took down the heads of what he told me in pencil on the memo-book. It wasn't much, but it would explain to those two that they are being watched"
Dick lifted his shoulders.
"My luck," he said. Then he turned; went up the stairs two at a time, and came back in his outer clothes.
"I'm after Ogilvie," he shouted, and was gone with the slam of the door.
Wrath at the thought that he might be foiled in this special work of his hurried him out where the wind caught him with its full blast across the hills, stinging his face with hard snow. He drove against it with his head low; cut across a side-trail to the shack in the cotton-woods which Ogilvie shared with Hotchkiss; found it empty, and battled back to Grange's, where Jimmy was settling the bar for the night.
"Seen Ogilvie?" he gasped, and reeled in the sudden calm that loosed his sinews after the buffeting.
"Gee!" said Jimmy, and suspended his operations. "What's doing? Murder or suicide?"
"Be easy. You're not accused yet." The temper in Dick woke at the clink of the bottles. "Give me a whiskey straight," he ordered. "Seen Ogilvie?"
"Sure. He was around right after supper"
"He was at the barracks since then. Where now? Hit her up."
"My," said Jimmy admiringly. "You sure are a hustler." He leaned on the counter and reflected. "He's likely in the back parlour with Andree," he said. "He's crazy for her. Eh? Well-l-l; I guess! Or maybe he's met the doctor some place an' is standin' under shelter tryin' ter git enough English out of him to know if what he's got the matter wi' him is a stomach-ache or heart-disease. But I guess he's jes' sleepin' it off some place. Oh, I tell you; he's sure over to the English Mission. He's been along there three times since doc. told him he was a-dyin' man. But I imagine he ain't wuth findin'. He is the biggest toad in the puddle, anyway."
Having quartered Ogilvie to his satisfaction he fell to work again. Dick glanced into the back-parlour. Then he went on, with the wind screaming in the tortured branches that whipped the bare poles, and the whiskey and the hot blood rising in him to fight the bitter cold.
In the lonely forest-trail near the Mission he saw something dark swerve aside from the snow-line and crouch in the trees. He sprang at it as the tuft-eared lynx springs; jerked it up by the arm, and bit off the oath on his lips.
"What are you doing here, Andree?" he demanded.
He had first seen Grange's Andree when she was losing money to some men in Grange's back-parlour. Besides, respect for his kind was not natural growth with him, and what he had had was long since gone. He shook her.
"Stop laughing, you imp," he said. "What are you doing out here?"
She swayed in his grip; tall and vivid and vigorous, with the black curls flying out round her head and her long coat wrapped close by the wind.
"Vous venez trop tard," she cried exultantly. "Eh! Vous venez trop tard!"
"Too late for what?" He felt her flinch in his grip, and he tightened it. "I think you had better find that I've not come too late, my pretty one," he said softly.
She laughed again, flinging her arms up.
"Hear the wind," she cried. "Hear the wind! Dieu! C'est to ride the wind when it comes so. Ah! Vous terrible! Vous si cruelle! Ecoutez moi!" she cried to it, breaking into the deep belling whistle of the moose-call. Dick's eyes changed. For she struck his own wild fibres to a chord of restless passion.
"Speak you little devil," he said, and shook her again. "Who's been here? Ogilvie?"
"Ogilvie! Ogilvie l'ivrogne! Ah! Tant pis pour il if he had."
"I don't doubt it. I fancy it's the worse for anyone who has much to do with you. Who, then? Robison?"
She stood suddenly still.
"Nom de chien," she said pettishly. "How you tease! Oui. Ogilvie did come to the Mission for me, and I sent him home. And Robison did come and I sent him home. And you did come—too late."
"Oh. That's where I was too late, is it? Keep that modest opinion of yourself, Andree. One sees it too seldom these days. And now I'm sending you home. See? Allez. You've no right out at this hour."
She laughed, swaying against the blast; provocative; lawlessly daring.
"You no my keeper, Corp'ral Heriot," she cried.
The drink in Dick flushed in his brain. He followed her two steps. Then he turned.
"Get on home with you, Andree," he said, and faced the knives of the wind again. For it was necessary to discover at the Mission the exact time when the two men had been there.
It was two hours before he came back to Tempest.
"Ogilvie doesn't appear to be on earth," he said. "But I guess he hasn't had time to get under it. We'll make some inquiries of Mr. Robison in the morning, though I don't know if we'll get much out of him. There was an hour between their calls at the Mission."
"Robison might have waited for him," suggested Tempest, and Dick laughed.
"More likely to have waited for Grange's Andree," he said. "I met her coming home alone."
"Andree!"
Tempest reddened. He hated to think of Andree in connection with those men, and in his heart the time was already ripening when he should take her from all such things as could rub the bloom off her young girlhood.
"U-m-m," grunted Dick, rubbing the frozen snow out of his hair. "Wild little devil she is, too. May as well question her again, anyway."
And then Tempest turned on him in a swift blaze of anger.
"I suppose it is hardly likely that you should keep your respect for women when you have lost it for yourself," he said.
Dick stared. Then he laughed, low and softly. He put no personal application into this. He was not fastidious, but he would not have troubled about Grange's Andree, and the idea that Tempest might do so would have been absolutely impossible of conception. But he believed that he saw in this Tempest's old impossible ideals of human nature.
"Don't fret," he said. "You have probably annexed all the superfluous amount in the universe. Anyway, I think I'm going to ask some questions to-morrow."
But although Grey Wolf to its last man searched the woods in the blinding snow next day; although Robison underwent a severe cross-examination in the barrack-office; although Dick questioned Andree privately until she stooped and bit his hand and fled, leaving him cursing, no one found Ogilvie. He was gone: gone like the dead leaves of fall that lay under the snow to decay; and neither art or chance nor anything else gave him back to Grey Wolf to tell what he had done with a certain memorandum of the Royal North-West Mounted Police.