But as soon as Jack took his hands off him Garrod endeavoured to get up
and follow Jean Paul, who by this time had climbed the bank. Garrod's
wasted strength was no match for Jack's but Jack could hardly see
himself sitting there holding the other man down until Sir Bryson
returned. He looked around for inspiration. There was a length of
rope fastened to the bow of the dugout. Cutting off a piece of it, he
tied Garrod's wrists and ankles, and let him lie.
Jack sat down and filled his pipe, watching Garrod grimly meanwhile,
and trying to puzzle out a solution. The man spoke no articulate word
except to mutter once or twice that he must go. Occasionally he
struggled feebly in his bonds like a fish at the last gasp. Still it
did not occur to Jack to connect this new phase of his sickness with
the appearance of the half-breed. Jack's heart was sore. "Of what use
was the confession of a man in such a state?" he thought. In Jack's
simple system of treatment there was but one remedy for all swoons or
seizures, viz., cold water. Upon thinking of this he got up and,
filling his hat in the river, dashed the contents in Garrod's face.
It had the desired effect. Garrod gasped and shivered, and looked at
Jack as if he saw him for the first. He ceased to struggle, and Jack
untied the ropes. Garrod sat up, a ghastly figure, with the water
trickling from his dank hair over his livid face.
"I'm all wet," he said, putting up the back of his hand. Without
expressing any curiosity as to what had happened, he dried his face and
neck with his handkerchief.
"Do you remember what we were talking about?" asked Jack, concealing
his anxiety.
"You wanted me to write something," Garrod said dully.
"Are you willing?"
Garrod nodded, and held out his hand for the pen and the little book.
Jack breathed freely again. The blade of a paddle served Garrod for a
writing table. The man was entirely submissive.
"But do you know what you're doing?" demanded Jack frowning.
Garrod nodded again. "You want me to write out a confession," he said.
"What shall I write."
Jack dictated: "I, Francis Garrod, desire to state of my own free will
that on the morning of October ninth, nineteen hundred and six, I took
the sum of five thousand dollars from the vault of the Bank of Canada,
Montreal. I knew that Malcolm Piers had gone away, and I allowed the
theft to be fixed on him."
He signed the page, and dated it. Taking the book, Jack slipped it in
the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. Jack was genuinely moved. It
was borne in on him dimly that though he was technically the injured
party, it was the other man who showed the wound.
"You'll feel better now," he said gruffly.
Garrod lay back on the stones, and covered his face with his arm. "I
suppose you loathe me, Malcolm," he muttered.
"You've gone a long way to make it up," Jack said, in the keenest
discomfort. "Just give me a little time."
Garrod's thoughts strayed in another direction. "What will _she_ say?"
he whispered.
Considering everything, this was a poser for Jack. "You've got no
business to be thinking about girls in your state," he said frowning.
"Put her out of your mind, man, and go to work to win back what you've
lost."
Garrod reverted to the night five years before. "I didn't mean to take
the money," he murmured. "I couldn't sleep after you went, that night,
and all night I played with the idea as if it was a story. Supposing I
_did_ take the money, you know, how I would cover my tracks, and so on.
But I never meant to. And next morning when I went to the bank I was
alone in the vault for a moment, and I slipped the package in my pocket
just to carry out the idea, and Rokeby came in before I could put it
back. Then the money was counted, and the shortage discovered. I had
plenty of other chances to put it back, for the money was counted
twenty times, but I was always afraid of being seen, and I kept putting
it off, and at last the alarm was given and it was too late. They were
old bills and they couldn't be traced.
"I don't know how I lived through the time that followed. I was afraid
to put it back then, because the fellows talked about my changed looks,
and I knew if the money turned up they would suspect me. As it was,
they thought I was grieving on your account. I was, too, but not the
way they thought. I set a store by you, Malcolm. I didn't mean to
injure you. I just drifted into it, and I was caught before I knew.
The thought of meeting you brought the sweat pouring out of me. I
thought you would come back. I bought a revolver, and carried it
always. If I had come face to face with you it would have nerved me to
turn it on myself, which I couldn't do alone.
"You didn't come. The thing was quickly hushed up. I left the bank,
and my life went on like anybody's. I didn't think about the money any
more. But something had changed in me. I was nervous and cranky
without knowing why. I couldn't sleep nights. I was full of silly
terrors, always looking around corners, and over my shoulder. And it
kept getting worse."
Garrod's voice never varied from the toneless half-whisper that was
like a man talking in his sleep. "Then I came up here," he went on,
"and ran into you without any warning. It was like a blow on the
temple. It all came back to me. Then I knew what was the matter. I
didn't kill myself on the spot, because I found you didn't know. I
wish I had. I've died a thousand deaths since. It was like little
knives in my brain thrusting and hacking. I could have screamed with
it----"
Jack's increasing discomfort became more than he could bear. "For
heaven's sake, don't tell all this," he burst out. "At least not to
me. I'm the one you injured. Pull yourself together!"
"It is a relief to get it out," Garrod murmured with a sigh. "I can
sleep now."
Jack got up. "Sleep, that's what you need," he said. "Come back to
your tent, and lie low for the rest of the day."
"I--I don't want to be alone," stammered Garrod.
"Well, stretch out here in the grass," suggested Jack.
"You won't go away without waking me?" Garrod said anxiously.
"All right," said Jack.
Above the stones of the beach extended a narrow strip of grass, shaded
from the sun by thickly springing willows. Behind and above the
willows the trail skirted the escarpment of the bank. Garrod crawled
into the shade and stretched himself out. Once or twice he started up
to look rather wildly if Jack were still there; finally he slept.
Meanwhile Jack, returning to the dugout, took up his poplar braces
again, with the instant concentration on the job in hand of which he
was capable. Jack's highly practical temperament was at once the
source of his strength and his weakness. On the one hand, he conserved
his nervous energy by refusing to worry about things not immediately
present; on the other hand, his refusal to track these same things down
in his mind often left him unprepared for further eventualities. At
this moment, while his attentive blue eyes directed his sure hands, he
had not altogether ceased to think of the strange things that had
happened, but it was only a subconscious current. There was evidence
of it in the way his hand occasionally strayed to the pocket of his
shirt to make sure the little book was still there.
Jack had pushed the dugout partly into the water. The stern floated in
a backwater on the lower side of a little point of stones that jutted
out. On this point impinged the descending current, which was
deflected out, straight for the opening in the wall of rock, a thousand
feet or so downstream. Little could be seen of this opening from
above; the first fall hid the white welter below, and the bend in the
walls of rock closed up the prospect. It was as if the river came to
an end here in a round bay with a stony beach, and rich, green-clad
shores. Only the deep, throaty roar from under the wall of rock gave
warning that this was really "Hell's Opening."
Jack thought of no reason for watching Garrod now, and his back was
turned to him as he worked. He therefore did not notice that the
leaves of the willows above Garrod's head were occasionally twitched on
their stems in a different way from the fluttering produced by a
current of air. Only a sharp and attentive eye could have spotted it,
for the movement was very slight, and there were long pauses between.
After a while the leaves low down were parted, and for an instant a
dark face showed, bright and eager with evil. It was Jean Paul.
Marking Jack's position and Garrod's, he drew back. Garrod was
immediately below him.
More minutes passed. The patience of a redskin is infinite.
Finally Garrod began to twitch and mutter in his sleep, and presently
he rolled over on his back, wide awake. Jack threw him a careless
glance, and went on working. As Garrod lay staring at the leaves over
his head, a change passed subtly over his face; the lines of his flesh
relaxed a little, a slight glaze seemed to be drawn over his eyes. In
the end he slowly raised himself on one elbow, and looked at Jack with
an exact reproduction of the cunning, hateful expression Jean Paul had
shown. He quickly dropped back, and lay, waiting.
Presently, Jack having finished the shaping of his braces, picked up
hammer and nails, and with another off-hand glance at the apparently
sleeping Garrod, climbed into the dugout. He put in the stern thwart
first, sitting on his heels in the bottom of the dugout, with his back
toward the shore.
Garrod raised his head again, and seeing Jack's attitude, drew himself
slowly up, and came crawling with infinite caution down over the
stones. Back among the leaves a fiery pair of eyes was directing him.
This was where Jack's faculty of concentration proved his undoing.
Driving the nails as if his soul's fate rested on the accuracy of his
strokes, he never looked around. Garrod covered the last five yards at
a crouching run. Seizing the bow of the dugout, and exerting all his
strength, he heaved the craft out into the stream.
The force and the suddenness of the shove threw Jack flat on his back.
By the time he recovered himself, the dugout fairly caught in the
current and, gradually gaining way, was headed straight for Hell's
Opening.
If Jack allowed the moment to take him unawares, it must be said he
wasted no time when it came. His faculties leaped in the presence of
danger. His bright, wary, calculating eyes first sought for the
paddle, but it lay back on the stones where Garrod had used it. He
looked at Garrod. The man had picked up his gun, and was running
toward him. He kept pace with the moving dugout along the edge of the
stones. Not more than fifty feet separated the two men. Jack measured
the distance to the backwater. Ten swimming strokes would have carried
him to safety.
"If you jump overboard I'll shoot," Garrod murmured huskily. "I'll get
you easy in the water!"
Jack saw that it was madness he had to deal with, and he wasted no
words with him. Garrod, crouching, stumbling over the stones, with his
strained, inhuman eyes fixed on Jack, was an ugly sight. He muttered
as he went:
"I've got to kill you. I can't help it. I've got to!"
Jack stood up in the canoe. The blue eyes were steady, and the thin
line of his lips was firm, but the rich colour slowly faded out of his
sunburned face, leaving it like old ivory. All this had happened in a
moment; the dugout was not yet fully under way, though it seemed to
Jack as if it were flying down. The harbouring backwater still
stretched between him and the shore. He had a minute or longer to make
his choice. The roaring canyon that ground its great tree-trunks into
shreds was vividly present before his eyes; on the other hand, he could
jump overboard and make his bobbing head a mark like a bottle for a
madman to shoot at. A minute to decide in, and there he was tinglingly
alive, and life was very sweet.
A woman's frightened voice rang out: "Jack! what are you doing out
there? Come ashore!"
He looked and saw Linda standing in the trail by the bank's edge.
Garrod was hidden from her by the intervening bushes. She came flying
down, regardless. Garrod heard the voice, and, turning toward it,
stopped dead. His muscles relaxed, and the butt of the gun dropped on
the stones.
Jack laughed, and jumped overboard. Half a dozen strokes carried him
into the backwater; twenty landed him hands and knees on the stones.
Rising face to face with Garrod, he snatched the gun from his nerveless
hands and sent it spinning into the bushes. Without looking at the
girl he ran and caught up the paddle, ran back along the stones,
plunged in and, heading off the dugout, wriggled himself aboard. It
became a question then of his strength against the sucking current.
The dugout hung in the stream as if undecided. Finally it swung around
inch by inch, swept inshore, and grounded with perhaps five yards to
spare.
As he landed the second time Linda cast herself weeping and trembling
on his dripping bosom. "What did you frighten me like that for?" she
cried, beating him with her small fists.
Jack laughed, and held her off. "It's a good boat," he said; "besides,
the hammer was in it, the only one we have."
"How did you get adrift?" she demanded.
Jack looked at Garrod with a hardening eye. Garrod still stood where
he had stopped. His eyes were blank of sense or feeling. Linda flew
toward him, her slight frame instinct and quivering with menace.
"You coward!" she hissed.
Jack held her off. "Let him alone," he said. "His wits are clean
gone!"
He started to lead Garrod, unresisting, back to camp. Suddenly he
remembered the note-book, and his hand flew to his pocket. It was gone.