The Popular Magazine/Volume 58/Number 4/The Implacable Friend/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII.
THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT.
When Bruce? Waring tied his partner's hands, pride tied Ticely's tongue. But a man can do a great deal of hard thinking in two long days of riding with a silent captor—especially when he is being dragged back to a ferocious mob mad from baffled avarice—and Frederick Ticely, who loved life, really cogitated!
During the remainder of that first morning, he scowled at Waring's broad back, fifteen feet ahead of him, and sometimes shook at it his bound fists in voiceless imprecation. When they stopped for a cup of tea, the ignominy of his position, borne to him by the necessity of lifting both hands with his cup and with his hunk of bread, goaded him almost to frenzy—which was all the greater because pride locked within him the violent words that might have relieved it.
All the long afternoon, the cruel humiliation of it burned; and it was that that determined the main current of his thought of Bruce Waring and the fate awaiting them. Caught by his own partner, whom he had trusted with the secret of his way of escape, and dragged at the end of a rope woven of callow sentiment, sentiment inexperienced, maudlin—absurd! Never in the secret recesses of his being questioning the sincerity of that sentiment or the loyalty to him of the man, he raged at Waring only as we rage at those forces which, whether sentient, as in man, or insentient, as in the wave of the hurricane, surge across the pathway of our vital needs and purposes, menacing our liberty or our life. A lunatic noble enough, where those of Midas were ignoble, but a lunatic just the same, Ticely hated him as we sometimes hate transiently our loved ones. And he would, if he could, have done him injury enough to thwart his fell intent.
But after supper that night, when Waring untied his hands—watching him, however, ready pistol at thigh—Ticely found humility enough to engage Bruce in converse. What he said to him was said partly in curiosity, partly with the obstinate purpose of yet securing his liberty. And thence followed that which swerved the currents of his thought.
“Bruce,” he said, when he had lit his pipe, “suppose some one had told me when I first met you in that God-forsaken clearing of yours in the Cascade Mountains, and offered you a job in my office, and took you into my house—suppose somebody had told me that some day you'd make me a prisoner at the point of a gun and turn me over to a gang of bloodthirsty curs. What do you suppose I would have said?”
Waring, lying on his side, was making squares on the smooth sand surface—where Ticely, at his ease, would have drawn curves!
“Called him a fool, may be,” he replied in a low voice.
“And my wife—the woman who came to nurse you”
“Hol' on!” Bruce lifted his finger. “Wait: Don't say it. I thought you'd speak of that—some time. You've got to understand that—if you can. She was always my friend, as much or more than you've been. And in a different way. She kind of understood me better—knew I wasn't cut out for business—that kind of business, anyhow. And when the doctor sent you word about me—I didn't tell him nor want him to—she did what my mother would have done; and done it better than mother could have.”
He stood up, and his feeling carried him back to the language of his boyhood.
“I seen her in the light when I come to myself—in white, the sun on her hair; her face, anxious but smiling, bending over me. All that was left of my dream delirium she was, but the best part of it—and real. I had gone out of my head in a filthy hovel. Men were dying around me. And—thanks to her—I woke up far from there, on a clean hillside, in a clean-floored tent—everything clean, like at home and her bending over me!”
“And yet”
“Wait! God, can't you wait! She used to read to me—fine, clean things. And we talked, by and by, when I got the strength. At first I labored like a bellows for to get out ten words. And I asked her why she come—she had no call to come. She could of sent me money. She says: 'We thought of that, but we was afraid-money wasn't enough,'”
“She lied—in my favor,” cut in Ticely. “I said money was enough—all we could do. She said, 'No, we have to do more.'”
Waring turned his gray eyes upon him. “There! And you say it? Hell, man, you're comin' round! I told her the grubstake says nothing about fevers and nursing. And she says to me, 'Those words in that document was just the letter of our covenant, and the letter I despise. The spirit of it was to protect you in all ways possible in your hard task.' They was her words. 'The spirit, Bruce, the spirit, not the letter,' she repeats. 'Better be dead than keep the word and spurn the spirit.' That's what she said to me.”
Waring wiped his forehead with the back of his great caloused hand, and went on—gazing fixedly into the other's eyes:
“She loves you, Fred; she loves you hard. And I think she knows you're a—a terrible clever salesman. And don't you, honest now, catch a turning-away look of hers sometimes when you tell her—if you ever do tell her—of your neat little turns in real estate—at the other feller's expense! Don't you know she's proud, fearfully proud about everything—you—might—do!
“Man, I just got to do it, for her and for you. She'd rather have you dead than know you just told the truth in words—and the lies of hell in what you meant for them to think. And if you turn tail and run, she'll know it all—everything. And if she was here and knew it all—why she'd put her arm around your neck and draw you back. Me for her—I got to use a gun! Don't beg, don't plead. It ain't any use. I got a debt to pay to her and you, and by the livin' God, I'm a-goin' to pay it!”
As they approached Midas, the hour of fate upon him, the second current gathered force within the soul of Frederick Ticely—a force strengthened by a picture he could not banish: his wife in her white raiment reading the “clean books” to the emaciated youth she had snatched from the brink of eternity, telling him pridefully of the triumph of the spirit, of her preference of death to the cowardice of dishonor. Stronger and yet stronger within him flowed the current in that channel of Ker making. And the man being, in reality, a strong and a proud one, its waters had become a flood when they padded down the mossy hillside of Midas Creek and in the moonlit valley were halted by a grim confrontation.
A heavily gnarled alder, one of the few trees growing near the stream bed, shadowed the trail in front of them, and hanging from a jutting limb a rope, with a loop at the end, stood starkly out against the risen moon. Waring's horse stopped abruptly in front of it, and Ticely's came on and stood alongside of Waring's mount. Motionless, the two men sat their motionless horses, the noose of the stout lariat gently swinging between them in a whispering breeze. Finally Ticely said:
“They're all ready for me!”
“For us,” amended Waring, “if we can't stand 'em off!”
Ticely turned to him curiously.
“You've done nothing, Bruce. You mean to tell me”
“Partners are partners, Fred. No baby act for mine!”
“All right,” decided Ticely—the next current racing. “But you can't do it. I'm through. They can have me, if they like, but if they take you, it's going to be plain murder. I'll tell them the truth—what I'm going to tell you now. 'They were right. You were right. I'm guilty—guilty of a fraud and a swindle. Just what many men do all the time, but—a spade's a spade. I intended to get them! By playing on their credulity and avarice. I schemed it out cold-bloodedly—every detail of it. The telegrams were addressed to men who did not exist. The diary—which happened to have no year date on it—I purposely left out where they could get it. I helped them deceive themselves—salt themselves—every way I could. I'm guilty, and they know it. My wife is right. You are right. They are right. The thing is coming to me!”
They looked into each other's faces. Then, slowly and solemnly, Waring held out his hand to him.
“Shake, old man!”
Ticely meditatively regarded the outstretched hand. Even with confession still warm on his lips, the anger of those long, bitter hours died hard. At last he gripped his partner's hand.
“I'll tell them just what I've told you,” he assured him.
“Not by a jugful, you won't!” exclaimed Waring.
“I've got to. They've got it coming.”
“Not much,” said Bruce decisively, an ugly look about his jaw. “A lot of that bunch—the ones that are hollering the loudest—are cheap skates. Sneaks you called them, and sneaks they are—men that would have done us out of rich ground, jumped our claims, if they had to. We'll agree to give them back all we got from them, if they're dissatisfied—all the outfit and all you sent out to Seattle. You can do it, now that your business has been saved. But tell them nothing! It would only get to her ears! Fight, if we have to, you and me, back to back. And they'll be others, others besides Manners and Joan—yes, Joan. See if there won't, if it comes to a show-down! They might not speak to us, but they'll not see us lynched or shot when we're offering to make good!”
“Perhaps you're right. Come on, then, to the cabin.”
“No! Not to the cabin. Up the hill there, to the bench. We've got one chance—one way out. That chance is in some shafts I'm putting down in as pretty a line of bench claims as you ever saw in the north country. I was close to bed rock when I went out after you, and”
“But what—how can”
“The prospects were darn good when I came down to that meeting. Remember that 'Coarse, also very fine, and bright' the judge read from your Klondike diary? Well, that exactly described the gold in my bench prospect—what there was of it. And when they asked you what that book was it struck me all of a heap that if the bed rock turned out big, that old memorandum book could have been what they thought it was—a diary of pannings on Midas. So I hunched you to keep mum!”
“Oh, that was why you did it, hey?” murmured Ticely. “Well, I'm damned! There's plenty under your hat, boy, if you do keep so quiet.”
“There's a chance,” pursued Waring. “The last fire's been thawed four and a half days ago, and if Ak Tuk hasn't let it freeze back again, we can go up to the bench and take it out. No matter what we get, remember we've never left there. Running away nothing! Been working there five days. Sticking around and gritting things out is the one best thing you do—not even excepting selling prospects on wild-cat creeks at boom prices!”
Ticely blinked.
“Joan knows, but she'll never tell. So—it's win or lose on that bed rock. And remember—we've been up there all the time!”
He untied the long halter from the saddle pommel, and flung the end to Ticely. “We'll make up quartering, right about through there! I've got a camp and everything up on the bench. Come on!”
“We'll get away from this dangling rope for a while, anyhow,” remarked the man who was no longer a captive, as he turned his horse to follow Waring.