The Law-bringers/Chapter 5

by G. B. Lancaster

 

CHAPTER V

"WE GENERALLY DON'T"

"I guess that'll take him goin' some to figure it out," said Poley in a pious content.

Kennedy straightened from pulling up the last sled-strap; breathed heavily on his hands to make them bend sufficiently to go back into the fur gloves; beat them together, and said:

"Well, I guess Dick'll be handin' out trouble to you in a minit, all right, all right."

Poley peered sulkily over the collar of his mangy bearskin coat at the snarling knot of giddes in the traces.

"Teach him ter make picters o' me," he said. "Wait till he starts bossin' that hound a bit. That'll larn him."

The dog-teams at Grey Wolf were drawn from "any kind o' dog as'll work," and the barrack-teams were Poley's the full summer through, descending to Tempest and Dick when work began. Poley knew them intimately; mysteriously. He communicated his opinion on the universe and his fellows to them, and last night he had told them—so far as words would go—exactly what he thought of Dick for a certain sketch of himself which was just now circulating Grey Wolf. This morning he had improved the lesson by harnessing one team in wrong order when Dick left the work half-done to go in at Tempest's call; and now he stood with Kennedy, who was over-young for skilled labour, and waited results. Dick came out briskly, pulling on his gloves. He glanced from the tangle of yelping dogs to Poley, and his smile was soft.

"Who treated you at Grange's last night, Poley?" he asked. "For I'll swear you never got as bad as this out of your own pocket."

Because Poley was known to be over-careful of his private purse Kennedy choked with laughter as Dick sprang in among the dogs; cuffing and kicking in a good-humoured savagery such as they loved. The huge short-haired Mackenzie hound was buckled into his rightful place in the lead, where he proclaimed his content with head up. Sharkey, the one husky of the team, backed his vigorously-curled tail against the sled, and along the traces between Dick strung the mongrels, quick and certainly. They stood motionless as Tempest brought the second team round the corner at a run. And then Dick slipped his feet into the snow-shoe thongs.

"Get busy," he said to Kennedy. "Mush, boys. Mush along."

He cracked the long whip once, and at the yard gate he wheeled to send Poley a parting word of cheer.

"I gave Alice another sketch of you last night, Poley," he shouted.

On the lip of the forest Dick sprang ahead to break trail; swinging his weight on alternate feet and jerking up the heel of the long shoe with the kick born of much practice. The new-fallen snow packed in the shoe-lacings and before the runners, and all Dick's endurance and great muscle-power were sternly taxed before he halted, taking heavy breaths through his nostrils, and reached his coat from the sled.

"Get down to it," he said.

Kennedy hesitated. This was his first winter trail, and he was soft.

"Suppose I get cramp, or the snow-shoe heel?" he suggested.

"Suppose you don't," said Dick with meaning, and dropped into place beside the sleds.

This trip promised all the elements that were good for Dick. There was danger, there was unusualness, there was likely to be sufficient bodily discomfort to flog quiet in him the restless passions that grew during stagnation. Early in the fall a handful of men and women had come from the States and up the water-ways, calling themselves a lost tribe of Israel, and thrusting through the wilderness in the certain expectation of finding the land of Canaan at the North Pole. Remembering a recent march of the Doukhobors in "the altogether," when the Mounted Police chased them with underclothing and much tact, Tempest had picked apart this tribe more than once. But always they had drawn together again as an eddy draws straws, drifting north all the while. Yesterday word had come through by the Indian telegraph which flashes from mouth to mouth with curious speed that Abraham, the patriarch of the tribe, was sharpening knives and preparing to offer up some Isaacs to the God who walked the sky in the coloured Northern Lights which were to lead them into Canaan.

It was for Dick to discourage Abraham, and, what would probably be much more difficult, the tribe, and to bring back such members as he thought fit. Privately he sorrowed that the process could not be left to work itself to a legitimate conclusion by means of Abraham's knives; publicly he agreed with Tempest that there might be a big force to contend with; for the wild, hairy father of Israel had that quality which brought men to obey and follow him, and a khaki tunic and a few shiny buttons were not likely to prove of much weight there. But to Kennedy when he asked questions Dick said one thing only.

"When you've lived as long as I have you won't try to jump your fence till you come up right to it—and if you don't limber your ankles you'll get that stiff tendon before you know it."

Kennedy knew it that night when he hobbled in sharp agony through the hour of stern, breathless work, done in the eye and the teeth of the inclosing frost. Both men were red with hot young blood and sweating with labour; both wrenched from the dying day and the living cold every ounce they could get. But dark had shut down and the keen-toothed frost was on them before the tent had been pitched in the clearing shovelled out by the snow-shoes, and the big fire lit, and the rawhide lacings, now rigid as iron, beaten and bent from the sledge-covers, and the outfit brought in, and the frozen whitefish, threaded six on a stick, hung in the heat to thaw out for the dogs.

Dick took kettle and frying-pan and got supper, whistling softly, with his shadow treading about him like a giant with its head against the wall of black beyond the fire-circle. On the snowy rim of the circle sat the dogs, slavering, motionless, with savage eyes drawn to pin-points that never left their master. Dick reached for the white-fish, and in a flash the welter of dogs was about him, hunger-mad. Kennedy saw the gleam of white teeth and the red of many eyes against the tall man's shoulder, and he sat still, with a sudden thrill in him that he did not care to name. But Dick beat and kicked and swore unemotionally; doling out the fish to each, and hammering the brutes apart that they might slink aside, each with his own, to bolt it with growling throat and back-looking, suspicious eyes. Then he cast away the whip, and poured the tea.

"That boar-hound is a sure enough devil," he said. "What does Poley call him?"

"Okimow," said Kennedy, continuing to rub liniment into his tendon Achilles.

"Um-m," said Dick. "‘Chief,'" is he?" He looked at the hound where it snuffed round the edge of things with long ears flapping. "My lad," he told it, "there isn't going to be but one chief in this outfit, and I guess that is yours truly." And then he looked at Kennedy. "I've shown you how to wrap your feet before," he said. "But I'll swear you've got your instep chafed right now. Let up and have supper. I'll fix you after."

He did, with scrupulous exactness and plain words. For a man's feet on the long trail are of infinitely more value to him than his soul or anything else. Besides, in Kennedy's case, they did not belong to him at all, but to that great organisation of which he was such a very minor part, and all this Dick made clear to him without pity or evasion. Then the fire was rebuilt, huge and glowing, with the night rounding it like a black basin full of blood; and the dogs slunk from dark to light and from light to dark again, restless as a weaver's shuttle, and unsatisfied still.

The men hung their outer clothes around the fire. Then, in their dry rough furs they lay down and slept, forgetful of the frost that was at its stealthy work about them; splitting sappy trees where their trail would pass; making brittle the steel knives at their belts; stiffening the cover-lacings and the harness, and creeping near to snatch with icy grip at the fire itself.

Twice in the night Dick rose to fling on more wood and to see the Northern Lights chasing across the sky like merry children at play. The long months at Grey Wolf had been bad for Dick. They had cramped him back into the old desires which had been too strong for him all his life. Among men he fell on men's sins instantly, and desired nothing else. But here, with the great call of the unsubdued North-West, whose colours he wore vibrating through all his senses, he paused a moment on the threshold while the stars went by, and the black pines peaked their tops to point where their feet could not follow.

Dick had no desire to follow. He had no wish to be good. But he knew, with a wide-awake, grim amusement, that the delight of bringing a certain man to justice was shortly going to be weighed against the pain of hurting a certain woman.

The North Star that the sailors love swung high in the glittering night. Dick had never kept but one star true all his days, and that was the star of his own wild will. He dropped his eyes and crept back to his skins with their rough, coarse hair and their animal smell. But they were good to Dick, for they were Nature's own way of pulling him back to the verities past all the subtle creeds of yea and nay.

On the fourth night Dick bought more whitefish at a clump of tepees on the rim of a snow-spread lake that ran to the forest lip. He gave in exchange a memorandum-form where, above his scrawled name, he had set this request: "To the Hudson Bay Company. Please pay to Kewasis Eusta the sum of two dollars, and charge to general acct."

That paper would hold good all over the North-West and the old chief knew it, folding it with stiff fingers that yet had not lost cunning at trap and trigger.

"Perhaps I go to Peace River Landing," he said. "And perhaps to St. John. Ne totam goes west?"

Dick's knowledge of Cree would not string a sentence. But his hand-language presently brought him out an interpreter; a middle-aged half-breed with tangled hair lank on his shoulders and mangy skins close to his throat. The whole camp smelt badly; it was poor and desolate, and at Dick's feet a couple of children gnawed together on a last-year's moose-bone dug out of the snow. The breed looked down on them with pride.

"Mine," he said, in the French of the half-breed West. "I have a brother who is un homme blanc."

He explained further that his brother lived in a white-man house "outside" and drank and swore after the manner that white-men use. He clung to that piece of civilisation as Randel clung to his battery-key and Jennifer to her silk portières, and Dick nodded.

"You're belly-pinched, my friend," he said. "And you're old before your time. But you are a happier man than your brother. Your social problems don't keep you awake o' nights, I imagine. Now, tell me what you know of that lost tribe of Israel which has gone up into the Clear Hills to find a picturesque place to sacrifice Isaac in."

What the breed told, Dick afterwards translated to Kennedy in the tent.

"They're camped some place where they expect to make out for the winter. But they can't be hunters, for they have already traded most of their clothing here for food. I'm taking dried moosemeat along, and we can give 'em some skins if they'll wear them. But I'd like to know why nakedness and certain phases of religion go together, and I'd like to know what we're to do with that nursery when we find it."

Kennedy was rubbing his knotted calves where the last hour's cramp had caught him. But three days with Dick had taught him to endure his pains without comment, and the agonising snow-shoe ache was eased since he had learned to grease the instep and properly lace the thongs.

"Will we have to bring all the beggars in?" he demanded.

"The Lord forbid," said Dick, and laughed. "There should be four men and eleven women and six children. But we'll leave that puzzle till we come to it, I think."

On the second afternoon they came to the puzzle, where a crazy knot of branch-made shacks, helped out by slabs of snow, crouched under the flank of a cliff where the spruces brooded with their wide-winged branches, snow-spread, for a roof above all.

"If they last the winter out the first Chinook will drown them," said Dick. Then he called Kennedy forward as the first dog in the camp gave tongue.

"I'm out for Abraham," he said. "But you're to look after his wives, Kennedy—as many of them as you can manage. Leave me the men."

"B-but—what can I do with 'em?" said Kennedy in his nervous youth.

"Anything. Kiss 'em. But keep them off me. Abraham will likely show fight, and I can't be mussed up with other things."

The dogs drew into the camp and dropped panting, each where he stood. But Okimow the hound watched Dick with his red-rimmed, sagging eyes. One night those two had met for victory, even as Poley had predicted, and the dog now gave the man that proud obedience which one lord may yield another. Dick rubbed the wet nose as he passed Okimow.

"Good boy," he said, and strode up to a shapeless muddle of sticks and snow sealed by a wooden door that had once been the floor of a wagon. His knock on the door woke the silent camp as a bee-hive wakes at a kick. Unseen children screamed; a woman ran out of a near-by shack and dived back. More dogs barked, and sound went calling through all the crazy structures where no man appeared to stand against these two who carried their errand in their very tread.

"Saints send that Abraham has offered up himself," said Dick, and burst the door down with his shoulder and went in.

A damp air breathed at him; fetid, and chill and horrible. He struck a match and held it up, looking round. Then his blood suddenly ran slow. The smoke-blackened place was empty, swept naked of all that made it human habitation. And yet human habitation was there, stretched on a piece of sacking at his feet; a still body, small and young, and but partly covered. Dick dropped on his knee with his heart thumping. He struck another match, and sought with swift eyes and fingers. There was no blood; no mark of the knife anywhere at all. And yet the boy lay there very truly as a sacrifice; offered up to the madness of man's beliefs as surely as though he had died by the steel on the wind-swept hill.

Dick stepped out again with his lips close and eyes dangerous. Any little mercy that might have been in him was dead, and he kicked in the brush-and-snow shelters with slight ceremony, unearthing the remaining children and all the women. The women cried, clamouring to Kennedy in an unknown tongue. They were drawn by his fresh cheeks and his young eyes, and Dick laughed, watching.

"Keep your head and keep your temper," he said. "I suppose Abraham and the other bucks have gone hunting. We'll wait for them."

Kennedy never forgot that hour when Dick inspected everything in the camp that would bear inspection and much that would not. The children followed him; dark-eyed little shaggy creatures, hopping from one foot to the other to warm their half-clad misery. The women stood apart with sullen mutterings, and their eyes were suspicious under the close-drawn shawls. Dick pushed his investigations through to the bitter end, unembarrassed. Then he came to Kennedy.

"They live like beasts," he said. "But they likely can make out. They have food and warmth. I guess I'll have to pluck the patriarch, though. His doings savour mildly of insanity." He flung up his head, with the listening look in his eyes. "Here they come," he said. "And—Lord, they've got a battle-chant like the South Sea Islanders."

Down the narrow trail that gave to the naked woods four men swung into the clearing with the white spray breaking from their snow-shoes. Moose-meat hung from their shoulders in great lumps; grey coarse stuff, dark with its blood. Two were weedy weaklings who shambled, looking sideways. The third walked like a hunter, with a Winchester crooked in his arm, and his keen eyes glancing. Abraham led, chanting what was probably an Old Testament war-song. His grey beard, stiffened by frost, blew into points over each shoulder; the moose-pelt girded about him, trailed, congealing in bloody lumps of fat. His eyes were wild, the toss of his great arms was wild, and Dick slid the revolver round in his belt, speaking curtly to Kennedy.

"Keep your head and your temper. And don't shoot till you know there's no other way."

The Mounted Policeman who brings his prisoner in dead has to suffer for it. Kennedy remembered, with the apple swelling in his throat, as the men neared. His mind was under fire for the first time, and he began to realise that it is possible for a man to do less than make good. He sat down on the sled nervously; stood up again, and heard the hound growl where it lay with muzzle on stretched paws.

Dick walked three steps and saluted; made another step, and the barrel of a second Winchester shone among the folds of the moose-pelt. Kennedy began to feel sick, for he knew that that ten-shot automatic rifle, and he saw Dick walk straight up to it with unflinching feet. But then he could not see, as Dick saw, the wavering in those red eyes of insanity. Abraham quivered; swerved; made a break for the woods, and Dick swung like a flash and leapt after him.

"Hold the others," he shouted. And the raw, sappy youth jerked forward his revolver and covered the three with shaking hand and heart that quailed as sound died out in the forest.

It was the first searing in the boy's soul of the claims made on manhood, and he stood alone in the sudden dumb silence, striving to make his face look bold. The two weaklings dropped in the snow. The third stood, holding him eye to eye, and the rifle was flung forward along his wrist. The women whimpered, afraid to scream; but the children crawled up to the hunters, dragging at the raw meat. And out of the forest where the grey of dusk drifted there came no sound .

Kennedy's breath caught in great gulps. An insane man occasionally has the strength of ten, and if that maniac came back alone—something at the back of his head said eternally: "I won't run. By ——, I won't run."

Then he looked down at the hound, straining in the harness. With a gasp of understanding he loosed him, holding the steel menace still, and Okimow shot across the clearing like a brown log launched into space. The grip of numb dread lessened in Kennedy, and he realised that the cold was eating into his bones, and that, in the frosty metallic light, the held-up men looked grey.

By signs he got them moving, and the four took the treadmill trail over the narrow clearing, round after round; the white boy with the blue scared eyes driving the swarthy, shaggy men of alien tongue and breed.

Shivering and complaining the women made fires, and presently the smell of roast moose-flesh stirred Kennedy's vitals until he shut his nostrils against it. And the tension of fear and hunger and weariness grew. It had grown to the edge of hysteria when Dick came back, walking heavily. He was half-stripped in the bitter cold, and he staggered as he swung up his fur artiki from the sled and bisected Kennedy's march.

"Okimow's watching Abraham," he said. "I left him most of my dunnage. Get those men over to the fires and feed. Sharp! We've got to go after him."

Kennedy asked one question as his teeth met in the smoking meat.

"Did Okimow help any?" he said. And Dick answered, sitting with Abraham's rifle across his knees:

"Just about saved my life, I guess."

That was all that Kennedy ever knew in words of the struggle in the forest; but imagination told him a little more when they lifted the bound man on to the sled in the dark, and Dick's clipped tones of exhaustion bade him stand clear of the snapping jaws and the writhing, taloned hands. All that had been man in Abraham had given way, and he foamed like an animal in a trap; raving in an unknown tongue, and glaring with starting eyes.

Dick showed neither pity nor horror. He engineered the burdened sled into a shack; covered it warm for the night, and left it. Then he and Kennedy took sentry-go in turns until the dawn broke. And at dawn they buried the Isaac of a later history; baring the ground of snow and building the body in against wolf and coyote with rocks brought with great labour. For the earth rang like iron, denying entrance to the earth that lay placid above it. Then Dick straightened, wiping the sweat from his face.

"Time we pulled out," he said. They've got one man, and he's a hunter. They'll do till we can get 'em out in spring."

But Kennedy halted shamefaced by the grave.

"Perhaps you wouldn't want ter say something" he mumbled.

"What?" Dick stared. Then humorous contempt twitched his lips.

"Say anything you feel like, son," he said. "And take your time. I imagine it would come better from you than me."

He went back to the shack where the big hound watched Abraham and the remainder of the lost tribe of Israel watched the hound and listened to the whirling words of the pinioned man. And an hour later began that long nightmare that walked with them through the eight days into Grey Wolf; days that two men remembered long after the third had gone to find his senses again in another world.

There were hours when the man on the sled turned livid from cold, and Dick had to let him up to keep life in him, locking the handcuffs to his own belt for safety. There were hours when Abraham lay rigid, with clenched teeth through which they struggled to force food in vain. There were hours too when the blizzard caught them; so that men and dogs bowed to its might, and crouched under the half-pitched tent with the raving man at their ears until the storm was spent and they rose again, recounting their lessening food-kit.

But to Kennedy the edge of all horror was reached in the times when Dick set the maniac on his feet, and ran beside him, or struggled against him, or whirled with him in a drunken, hideous dance, according to Abraham's whim, in order that life might be kept in this huge creature whom earth did not want and dared not lose. Dick's own life was often in danger from the sheer brute strength of the man. He was worn from sleeplessness and exhaustion and cold, and, in later days, from hunger. A spot on his chin had been bitten black in an hour when he had no time to give thought to it. Abraham's teeth had met once in the fleshy part of his hand, and the incoming frost threatened a long, painful healing. His nerves were strong as a man's need be, but the tension was unslackening; food ran short, and bad weather made trail-breaking needful for three ghastly days on end. Kennedy worked well and uncomplainingly; but his mental and physical fibres were not yet set, and the burden of all fell on Dick.

And then came the last night out from Grey Wolf, in an empty freighter's shack by the river. For fifty hours Abraham had refused food. He lay weak as a child by the fire, moaning until Dick loosed the rawhide that had wound him about through his last fit of violence, and left him at ease with the handcuffs only. He fell asleep then, and Dick looked with sunken eyes on Kennedy.

"I must sleep right now, if we all die for it," he said. "You can have Okimow help you; but I believe he's fagged out. Give me two hours, and then call me."

Within two hours another than Kennedy very nearly called Dick, when a gasping smother of human hair pressed down on him, and somewhere in the dark he heard the mad jaws clashing. He was full awake and alert with all the instinct of self-preservation; and, like reality piercing through a nightmare, the click of Kennedy's revolver-hammer came to him.

"Don't shoot," he shouted, and fumbled for the throat-grip with his maimed hand as Kennedy flung himself on the two.

Dick said nothing when Abraham was laid at last like a moss-baby on the earth, and the fire was made up, and Okimow's bristles quieted. But when Kennedy floundered into self-accusation he swore impatiently.

"Sit up and make out the report of this capture," he said. "That'll keep you awake."

"I don't guess I know how——"

"You've seen a Blue Book, haven't you? Get busy and shut up."

The shack fell silent. Outside, the world was infinitely quiet and far in its sweeping wastes of snow. The wood wheewed and crackled, spitting suddenly when a lump of snow in a broken fork caught the heat. Abraham lay still, breathing thickly. Kenney, with his heavily-stockinged feet thrust out to the fire, wrote laboriously and lengthily, and Dick watched the flames and remembered this game which he was playing with Ducane as goal. He spoke at last abruptly.

"Give me that paper, Kennedy. I'll put it in my pocketbook."

"I'm not through yet——"

"Holy smoke! What are you writing? A book? How much have you got?"

"Only four pages and a bit."

"It'll go into four lines. Tear that stuff out and chuck it on the fire. Now, write as I tell you. 'Sir,—I have the honour to report that the maniac Abraham—surname unknown—who headed the company of fanatics calling themselves a lost tribe of Israel, was lately captured by Constable Kennedy and myself at their settlement in the Clear Hills. Constable Kennedy, who has recently joined, behaved with commendable coolness under rather trying circumstances. I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant——’"

"Lord!" said Kennedy sharply. "You don't want to rub it in like that."

"You'll make a man all right when you grow up," said Dick. "And then you will understand that a man only talks about the things he doesn't do. What were you going to make out of this little game home in Grey Wolf?"

Under the quizzical eyes Kennedy burned with the red of shame.

"All right," said Dick, and laughed. "But I guess I wouldn't. We generally don't, you know."

But this moral lesson did not prevent him from leaving Kennedy at the barracks when Abraham was disposed of, and straightway seeking at Grange's that brandy for which his soul craved. And so it was that Jennifer, coming later into the little back-room at Grange's, whither Dick had retired with his glass, found him asleep there. He lay back in the big chair, with one leg outstretched to the heat of the stove, and melted snow dripping from the black stockings rolled up to the knee, and the white ones rolled down over the moccasins. His fur coat and his cap were flung on the floor, and his unshaven chin was sunk in his tunic-collar. One hand, knotted in a rough bandage, hung over the chair-arm, and the whole of him told out that slackness of fibre which is born of bitter, unresting strain.

Jennifer knew just a little concerning that strain, for Kennedy's youth would not be denied some heroics. And yet the reserve of his new-come manhood had set his tongue rather to such things as the searing of Dick's wound by a red-hot bolt and the pulling of the teams in a blizzard than to his own glory. And of the things which were the real essentials he had neither the wit nor the understanding to speak. But Jennifer was learning to interpret knowledge by that which is not said. She moved a little from the slow-breathing man with his dark hair damp with sweat and the deep lines round his mouth, and she looked from the dulling window on the lives whereto such men came.

There had been a policeman of the West who bore his man south from Chipewyan against the full blast of the winter; a maniac prisoner and a hard-bitten officer who paid for those days of strain by the loss of his own senses. There was one at whom a "Cowboy Jack pointed a gun against section 105 of the Criminal Code," and who "unfortunately destroyed one chair" in the struggle of capture. There was the rider of the prairie-patrol who brought the wife and children of a settler from the stinging smoke and the flames that ringed them as surely as ever fires ringed in Brunhild. There was the other who walked in the serenity which is given of God or devils through the Indian camp squatted in vivid objection across the projected line of a railroad, and dispersed the thunder and gathering lightning by the simple methodical directness with which he kicked down the tepees, one by one, in an unbroken silence. And there were a thousand more whose life-work lay, bald and unvarnished, in the blue-backed Annual Reports which the world never reads.

There was something of the old Norse grim humour in these naked stories. To him who encountered Cowboy Jack the breaking of the chair was the vital point. Jennifer laughed softly. These men did not know what they were doing—for their land, for their nation. They did not know.

She looked again at Dick. Already slackness had gone out of him. One knee was bent, one hand gripped up as though his nature watched for the sudden call. Jennifer could understand that. It was the birth-mark of more than the roving men, for all the children of a new land carry it; carry the force and the charged tenseness and the untiring alertness which makes for conquest, for the wresting of something from nothing, for the building of nations in the land they hold by birth and purchase and hard-won exchange. And yet, in such as these was surely some throw-back to the men who came in with Prince Rupert; some blood of the lawless, of unauthorised passions and whim, of the temper that will not get into line, of the daring that swings a man to the front rank where the big guns roar.

Dick stirred a little, opening his eyes. They were heavy with a great sleep as they lifted to Jennifer where she stood against the grey window.

"You there still," he said. "But why did they call you Jennifer? That is Cornish for Guinevere—and she left Arthur."

His voice told that he groped yet on the hazy edge of dreams. Jennifer moved nervously; and then he sprang up, locked suddenly into his senses again.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I was sleeping. And I'm disgracefully dirty. I have just come in."

"I know. Oh, you have had a terrible, terrible time."

"Kennedy is very young," apologised Dick. "You must excuse him."

"But—didn't you?"

"Not at all, thank you. It was an extremely ordinary patrol. But I can't forgive myself for coming before you in these clothes."

"Oh, how could you think I'd mind that? I'm glad always——"

Dick skilfully effaced the sentence before she realised it. His eyes smiled as he paraphrased Tempest's accusation of a few weeks back.

"Men say hard things of me, Mrs. Ducane," he said. "But won't you concede me still the possession of a little respect for women and for myself?"

"Oh," said Jennifer, and reddened. "Don't. It—it hurts to to think a man would need to speak in that way—ever."

"I'm sorry," he said instantly. "A man who has been much in rough places forgets sometimes what a delicate instrument a woman is."

He stretched his hands out, dirty bandage and all.

"Look at those," he said. "Fit for a drum or a barrel-organ, perhaps. But for the lute or the harp! No!"

The easy courtesy of his manner belied his words, and he shook his head, smiling. To Jennifer it was the daring of life, the ring of the bold heart and merry that had ever called out her own heart to meet it. She had thought that she answered that call in Ducane, and the knowledge that it never was there was a live pain that would not cease. But this unshaven man, with the smell of wet wool in his stockings and clothes, and of drying mooseskin on his feet, brought her near it again until she felt the hot breath of the world in her face, and the reckless laugh of the world in her eyes.

Dick struck in her a spark that Tempest could not, nor Ducane. For he did not shield her womanhood as Tempest was wont to do, nor offend it as Ducane often did. And he took her out at last to Ducane with the passion of life welling up in her for the things that were done and to do. Ducane looked at her as they swept over the frozen lake where a sunset laid golden bars.

"What was that buck saying to you? " he demanded.

"Nothing in particular," said Jennifer, and reddened at words and tone.

"I won't have you see too much of those fellows," said Ducane, and pulled her close in his arm. "Do you hear me, Jenny?"

"What do you mean?" said Jennifer, and her voice was concentrated.

"Oh, you know well enough," Ducane laughed. "Play with them all you like," he said. "But don't you play with me. See? I won't have it."

The knowledge that these last months had given her controlled Jennifer. She reached her mittened hand to stroke his cheek.

"Harry, dear, don't you sometimes forget that I'm your wife?" she said.

Ducane's rough bear hug brought her close to his rough bear's heart.

"No, Jenny. No, my girl. I guess I never forget that. But I'm worried, Jenny. I'm worried. And I want you all the time. If you went back on me, by——"

She silenced his lips with her soft fingers.

"I will never go back on you, my husband," she said, and they drove on, unspeaking.

Ducane had her hand under the rug, clinging as a coward or a child might do. Jennifer looked straight out to where the white hill and the scattered forest grew plain to meet them. But she saw only a lean, tired, firm face, white under the wind-burn, and a brown hand that clenched strongly even in sleep.

When Dick returned to the bar he saw Grange's Andree feeding the young moose in the hotel yard. Her laugh called Dick's eyes to her. And then he stopped and stared. For it was Tempest who held the armful of branches from which Andree plucked her handfuls.

"What the devil——" he said. Then he laughed and went in. "For if Tempest sets out to make a saint out of that young sinner he'll have to take off his coat to it," he said.

Tempest was not trying to make a saint of Andree, because he did not guess at the need of it. Through the white light of his own nature he saw her; discovering in her beauties that were never there; gold that was only dross; strong-burning fires that other men knew for will-o'-the-wisp. But, because a man fashions his own heaven and hell, and his own beliefs from the texture of his own heart, Tempest was not like to find this out. For a man is never blinder than when he is quite sure that he sees.

After Ogilvie had gone, no man knew where, leaving his corner of Hotchkiss' shack empty, Hotchkiss had married one of the town-bred girls from Grange's and Andree had taken her place. This arrangement appeared satisfactory to all concerned until Tempest came in from a three days' trip to Lower Landing and found Andree bearing the little oval dishes with their ill-cooked food over the big bare room to a noisy tableful of freighters.

Andree had not forgotten how he halted inside the door, straight and tall in his uniform, and looked at her with eyes as straight—and more stern than she cared to see. For Tempest was just now the North Star in her universe, and her compass swung to him as naturally as it would by and by swing to another. She flinched from his glance as though it had been a whip. Then her tread grew stately and her eyes cold, and she moved among the burring talk and the rough laughter and the clatter of plates and knives like the handmaid of the gods which Tempest would have her be. He spoke low when she brought the food to his table where he sat alone.

"What do they mean by letting you do this?" he asked.

"Gertrude got married yesterday," she said. "And I do not mind."

"But I mind," he said. And because it was the first time he had taken that tone with her she went away, half-flattered, half-afraid.

He was saying the same thing now, as he shed the last spruce-branches on the snow and thrust past the long poking fiddle-head to come near her.

"And I won't have it," he ended sternly. "I had to turn a man out last night. If he had spoken to you——"

Andree looked away. She knew dimly that it would not please Tempest to hear how well she could take care of herself when she chose.

"But it is so often that they are good boys," she said.

"I know. They're usually all right. But I hate to have you wait on them. And I hate to have you wait on me." He came nearer yet. "I wonder if you guess how I feel when I have to sit still and let you wait on me," he said.

She heard the note in his voice. But she could not read it. She saw his eyes. But she did not know what they said.

"I—don't understand," she told him.

The red and purple sunset was gone, leaving greyness. A thick mist swept up the lake and into the yard, and beside them the moose was coughing. She herself seemed growing vague, indistinct. And then he caught her hands, bringing a sharp virile note into the haze.

"Andree," he said. "Will you marry me?"

She jumped, with a cry of anger and fear.

"Non, non," she gasped. "Nemoweya. I do not want to go maree. I do not want."

The breaking of her careful English warned him. He stood back on the instant.

"Why, don't be frightened, dear," he said. "You don't imagine I'd do a thing to frighten you? But I need you to think about this, Andree. I have thought of it ever since I first saw you in the trail."

"So?" she said, with a long indrawn breath.

She stared at him, with her brain working slowly behind the soft eyes. She had no desire for marriage. Always with Andree, "two boys were better than one, and three boys were better than two." But Robison had been troublesome of late, and it might be well to let Tempest step between to take the brunt. It did not run so in her mind. That held no more than the animal instinct of getting behind something that would shield it from danger. She stood very still in the mist that rimed her curls and her close-drawn hood and pushed long warning fingers between her and the man. The very silence that she used with Tempest waked his reverence. To him it showed a girl-heart finely tuned, and to be as finely touched. He did not guess that she had just enough wit to know it for her only weapon with him. The moose stamped impatiently in the snow. Then it flung restlessly round the yard, with neck laid back so that the budding horns made a line with the shoulders, and its big splay feet swinging noiselessly. It looked huge and threatening as it loomed in the mist, passed and came again. And Tempest had no knowledge of how the wild heart in that still girl called to it.

"I want you, dear," he said, gently. "And I think you likely want me. Everything needs its opposite—which is its complement. You won't understand that. But everything is made dual, Andree. Light needs darkness, sweet needs bitter, strength needs weakness, man needs woman. It is only the contrast—the nearness of the other—which can make the one grow to its highest. I love my work, God knows. But it has not been enough for me since I found you. I think it can never be enough for me again."

His hands were ungloved where they came over her gloved ones. Andree looked down on them. Those brown, sinewy, nervous pieces of flesh and blood could strike her out of life by the sudden contraction and swing of their steel muscles and tendons. He was the strong animal; stronger perhaps than Robison, and infinitely less alarming. She lifted his hands suddenly and kissed them. It was her tribute to the man-strength of him, and that was all that she cared for or understood. But to Tempest it was a glorious act that brought the blood to his forehead. He bowed it down on the joined hands.

"God bless you," he said unsteadily. "God bless you, Andree."

Dick, half-asleep over the mess-room fire, was startled by the light which still shone in Tempest's face when he came in to smoke a pipe much later. But no power short of actual proof could have made him connect it with Grange's Andree. He blinked up, half-derisive, half-envious.

"Have you been on the mountain-tops again, you old beggar?" he said. Then, underbreath, he mumbled part of a verse that drifted to him out of the nowhere—

 

"A veil 'twixt us and Thee, dread God.
A veil 'twixt us and Thee;
Lest we should hear too clear, too clear,
And unto madness see."