Produced by David Widger
THE WORLD FOR SALE
By Gilbert Parker
CONTENTS:
PRELUDE
BOOK I
I. “THE DRUSES ARE UP!”
II. THE WHISPER FROM BEYOND
III. CONCERNING INGOLBY AND THE TWO TOWNS
IV. THE COMING OF JETHRO FAWE
V. “BY THE RIVER STARZKE... IT WAS SO DONE”
VI. THE UNGUARDED FIRES
VII. IN WHICH THE PRISONER GOES FREE
BOOK II
VIII. THE SULTAN
IX. MATTER AND MIND AND TWO MEN
X. FOR LUCK
XI. THE SENTENCE OF THE PATRIN
XII. “LET THERE BE LIGHT”
XIII. THE CHAIN OF THE PAST
XIV. SUCH THINGS MAY NOT BE
XV. THE WOMAN FROM WIND RIVER
XVI. THE MAYOR FILLS AN OFFICE
XVII. THE MONSEIGNEUR AND THE NOMAD
XVIII. THE BEACONS
XIX. THE BEEPER OF THE BRIDGE
BOOK III
XX. TWO LIFE PIECES
XXI. THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER
XXII. THE SECRET MAN
XXIII. THE RETURN OF BELISARIUS
XXIV. AT LONG LAST
XXV. MAN PROPOSES
XXVI. THE SLEEPER
XXVII. THE WORLD FOR SALE
INTRODUCTION
‘The World for Sale’ is a tale of the primitive and lonely West and
North, but the primitiveness and loneliness is not like that to be found
in ‘Pierre and His People’. Pierre’s wanderings took place in a period
when civilization had made but scant marks upon the broad bosom of the
prairie land, and towns and villages were few and far scattered. The
Lebanon and Manitou of this story had no existence in the time of
Pierre, except that where Manitou stands there was a Hudson’s Bay
Company’s post at which Indians, half-breeds, and chance settlers
occasionally gathered for trade and exchange-furs, groceries, clothing,
blankets, tobacco, and other things; and in the long winters the post
was as isolated as an oasis in the Sahara.
That old life was lonely and primitive, but it had its compensating
balance of bright sun, wild animal life, and an air as vivid and virile
as ever stirred the veins of man. Sometimes the still, bright cold was
broken by a terrific storm, which ravaged, smothered, and entombed the
stray traveller in ravines of death. That was in winter; but in
summer, what had been called, fifty years ago, an alkali desert was an
everlasting stretch of untilled soil, with unsown crops, and here
and there herds of buffalo, which were stalked by alert Red Indians,
half-breeds, and white pioneer hunters.
The stories in ‘Pierre and His People’ were true to the life of that
time; the incidents in ‘The World for Sale’, and the whole narrative,
are true to the life of a very few years ago. Railways have pierced
and opened up lonely regions of the Sagalae, and there are two thriving
towns where, in the days of Pierre, only stood a Hudson’s Bay Company’s
post with its store. Now, as far as eye can see, vast fields of grain
greet the eye, and houses and barns speckle the greenish brown or Tuscan
yellow of the crop-covered lands, while towns like Lebanon and Manitou
provide for the modern settler all the modern conveniences which science
has given to civilized municipalities. Today the motor-car and the
telephone are as common in such places as they are in a thriving town
of the United Kingdom. After the first few days of settlement two things
always appear--a school-house and a church. Probably there is no country
in the world where elementary education commands the devotion and
the cash of the people as in English Canada; that is why the towns of
Lebanon and Manitou had from the first divergent views. Lebanon
was English, progressive, and brazenly modern; Manitou was slow,
reactionary, more or less indifferent to education, and strenuously
Catholic, and was thus opposed to the militant Protestantism of Lebanon.
It was my idea to picture a situation in the big new West where destiny
is being worked out in the making of a nation and the peopling of the
wastes. I selected a very modern and unusual type of man as the central
figure of my story. He was highly educated, well born, and carefully
brought up. He possessed all the best elements of a young man in a new
country--intelligent self-dependence, skill, daring, vision. He had an
original turn of mind, and, as men are obliged to do in new countries,
he looked far ahead. Yet he had to face what pioneers and reformers in
old countries have to face, namely the disturbance of rooted interests.
Certainly rooted interests in towns but a generation old cannot be
extensive or remarkable, but if they are associated with habits and
principles, they may be as deadly as those which test the qualities
and wreck the careers of men in towns as old as London. The difference,
however, between the old European town and the new Western town is that
differences in the Western town are more likely to take physical form,
as was the case in the life of Ingolby. In order to accentuate the
primitive and yet highly civilized nature of the life I chose my heroine
from a race and condition more unsettled and more primitive than that of
Lebanon or Manitou at any time. I chose a heroine from the gipsy race,
and to heighten the picture of the primitive life from which she had
come I made her a convert to the settled life of civilization. I had
known such a woman, older, but with the same characteristics, the same
struggles, temptations, and suffering the same restriction of her life
and movements by the prejudice in her veins--the prejudice of racial
predilection.
Looking at the story now after its publication, I am inclined to think
that the introduction of the gipsy element was too bold, yet I believe
it was carefully worked out in construction, and was a legitimate,
intellectual enterprise. The danger of it was that it might detract from
the reality and vividness of the narrative as a picture of Western life.
Most American critics of the book seem not to have been struck by this
doubt which has occurred to me. They realize perhaps more faithfully
than some of the English critics have done that these mad contrasts are
by no means uncommon in the primitive and virile life of the West and
North. Just as California in the old days, just as Ballaret in Australia
drew the oddest people from every corner of the world, so Western towns,
with new railways, brought strange conglomerations into the life. For
instance, a town like Winnipeg has sections which represent the life of
nearly every race of Europe, and towns like Lebanon and Manitou, with
English and French characteristics controlling them mainly, are still as
subject to outside racial influences as to inside racial antagonisms.
I believe The World for Sale shows as plainly as anything can show
the vexed and conglomerate life of a Western town. It shows how racial
characteristics may clash, disturb, and destroy, and yet how wisdom,
tact, and lucky incident may overcome almost impossible situations. The
antagonisms between Lebanon and Manitou were unwillingly and unjustly
deepened by the very man who had set out to bring them together, as one
of the ideals of his life, and as one of the factors of his success.
Ingolby, who had everything to gain by careful going, almost wrecked his
own life, and he injured the life of the two towns by impulsive acts.
The descriptions of life in the two towns are true, and the chief
characters in the book are lifted out of the life as one has seen it.
Men like Osterhaut and Jowett, Indians like Tekewani, doctors like
Rockwell, priests like Monseigneur Fabre, ministers like Mr. Tripple,
and ne’er-do-weels like Marchand may be found in many a town of the West
and North. Naturally the book must lack in something of that magnetic
picturesqueness and atmosphere which belongs to the people in the
Province of Quebec. Western and Northern life has little of the settled
charm which belongs to the old civilization of the French province. The
only way to recapture that charm is to place Frenchmen in the West,
and have them act and live--or try to act and live--as they do in old
Quebec.
That is what I did with Pierre in my first book of fiction, Pierre and
His People, but with the exception of Monseigneur Fabre there is no
Frenchman in this book who fulfils, or could fulfil, the temperamental
place which I have indicated. Men like Monseigneur Fabre have lived
in the West, and worked and slaved like him, blest and beloved by all
classes, creeds, and races. Father Lacombe was one of them. The part he
played in the life of Western Canada will be written some day by one who
understands how such men, celibate, and dedicated to religious life, may
play a stupendous part in the development of civilization. Something of
him is to be found in my description of Monseigneur Fabre.
NOTE
This book was begun in 1911 and finished in 1913, a year before war
broke out. It was published serially in the year 1915 and the beginning
of 1916. It must, therefore, go to the public on the basis of its merits
alone, and as a picture of the peace-life of the great North West.
PRELUDE
Harvest-time was almost come, and the great new land was resting under
coverlets of gold. From the rise above the town of Lebanon, there
stretched out ungarnered wheat in the ear as far as sight could reach,
and the place itself and the neighbouring town of Manitou on the other
side of the Sagalac River were like islands washed by a topaz sea.
Standing upon the Rise, lost in the prospect, was an old, white-haired
man in the cassock of a priest, with grey beard reaching nearly to the
waist.
For long he surveyed the scene, and his eyes had a rapt look.
At last he spoke aloud:
“There shall be an heap of corn in the earth, high upon the hills;
his fruit shall shake like Libanus, and shall be green in the city
like grass upon the earth.”
A smile came to his lips--a rare, benevolent smile. He had seen this
expanse of teeming life when it was thought to be an alkali desert, fit
only to be invaded by the Blackfeet and the Cree and the Blood Indians
on a foray for food and furs. Here he had come fifty years before, and
had gone West and North into the mountains in the Summer season, when
the land was tremulous with light and vibrating to the hoofs of herds of
buffalo as they stampeded from the hunters; and also in the Winter time,
when frost was master and blizzard and drift its malignant servants.
Even yet his work was not done. In the town of Manitou he still said
mass now and then, and heard the sorrows and sins of men and women, and
gave them “ghostly comfort,” while priests younger than himself took the
burden of parish-work from his shoulders.
For a lifetime he had laboured among the Indians and the few whites and
squaw-men and half-breeds, with neither settlement nor progress. Then,
all at once, the railway; and people coming from all the world,
and cities springing up! Now once more he was living the life of
civilization, exchanging raw flesh of fish and animals and a meal of
tallow or pemmican for the wheaten loaf; the Indian tepee for the warm
house with the mansard roof; the crude mass beneath the trees for the
refinements of a chancel and an altar covered with lace and white linen.
A flock of geese went honking over his head. His eyes smiled in memory
of the countless times he had watched such flights, had seen thousands
of wild ducks hurrying down a valley, had watched a family of herons
stretching away to some lonely water-home. And then another sound
greeted his ear. It was shrill, sharp and insistent. A great serpent was
stealing out of the East and moving down upon Lebanon. It gave out puffs
of smoke from its ungainly head. It shrieked in triumph as it came. It
was the daily train from the East, arriving at the Sagalac River.
“These things must be,” he said aloud as he looked. While he lost
himself again in reminiscence, a young man came driving across the
plains, passing beneath where he stood. The young man’s face and figure
suggested power. In his buggy was a fishing-rod.
His hat was pulled down over his eyes, but he was humming cheerfully
to himself. When he saw the priest, he raised his hat respectfully, yet
with an air of equality.
“Good day, Monseigneur” (this honour of the Church had come at last to
the aged missionary), he said warmly. “Good day--good day!”
The priest raised his hat and murmured the name, “Ingolby.” As the
distance grew between them, he said sadly: “These are the men who change
the West, who seize it, and divide it, and make it their own--
“‘I will rejoice, and divide Sichem: and mete out the valley of
Succoth.’
“Hush! Hush!” he said to himself in reproach. “These things must be. The
country must be opened up. That is why I came--to bring the Truth before
the trader.”
Now another traveller came riding out of Lebanon towards him, galloping
his horse up-hill and down. He also was young, but nothing about him
suggested power, only self-indulgence. He, too, raised his hat, or
rather swung it from his head in a devil-may-care way, and overdid his
salutation. He did not speak. The priest’s face was very grave, if not a
little resentful. His salutation was reserved.
“The tyranny of gold,” he murmured, “and without the mind or energy that
created it. Felix was no name for him. Ingolby is a builder, perhaps a
jerry-builder; but he builds.”
He looked across the prairie towards the young man in the buggy.
“Sure, he is a builder. He has the Cortez eye. He sees far off, and
plans big things. But Felix Marchand there--”
He stopped short.
“Such men must be, perhaps,” he added. Then, after a moment, as he gazed
round again upon the land of promise which he had loved so long, he
murmured as one murmurs a prayer:
“Thou suferedst men to ride over our heads: we went through fire and
water, and Thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place.”
CHAPTER I. “THE DRUSES ARE UP!”
“Great Scott, look at her! She’s goin’ to try and take ‘em!” exclaimed
Osterhaut, the Jack-of-all-trades at Lebanon.
“She ain’t such a fool as all that. Why, no one ever done it alone.
Low water, too, when every rock’s got its chance at the canoe. But, my
gracious, she is goin’ to ride ‘em!”
Jowett, the horse-dealer, had a sportsman’s joy in a daring thing.
“See, old Injun Tekewani’s after her! He’s calling at her from the bank.
He knows. He done it himself years ago when there was rips in the tribe
an’ he had to sew up the tears. He run them Rapids in his canoe--”
“Just as the Druse girl there is doin’--”
“An’ he’s done what he liked with the Blackfeet ever since.”
“But she ain’t a chief--what’s the use of her doin’ it? She’s goin’
straight for them. She can’t turn back now. She couldn’t make the bank
if she wanted to. She’s got to run ‘em. Holy smoke, see her wavin’ the
paddle at Tekewani! Osterhaut, she’s the limit, that petticoat--so quiet
and shy and don’t-look-at-me, too, with eyes like brown diamonds.”
“Oh, get out, Jowett; she’s all right! She’ll make this country sit up
some day-by gorry, she’ll make Manitou and Lebanon sit up to-day if she
runs the Carillon Rapids safe!”
“She’s runnin’ ‘em all right, son. She’s--by jee, well done, Miss Druse!
Well done, I say--well done!” exclaimed Jowett, dancing about and waving
his arms towards the adventurous girl.
The girl had reached the angry, thrashing waters where the rocks rent
and tore into white ribbons the onrushing current, and her first trial
had come on the instant the spitting, raging panthers of foam struck the
bow of her canoe. The waters were so low that this course, which she
had made once before with her friend Tekewani the Blackfeet chief,
had perils not met on that desperate journey. Her canoe struck a rock
slantwise, shuddered and swung round, but by a dexterous stroke she
freed the frail craft. It righted and plunged forward again into fresh
death-traps.
It was these new dangers which had made Tekewani try to warn her from
the shore--he and the dozen braves with him: but it was characteristic
of his race that, after the first warning, when she must play out the
game to the bitter end, he made no further attempt to stop her. The
Indians ran down the river-bank, however, with eyes intent on her
headlong progress, grunting approval as she plunged safely from danger
to danger.
Osterhaut and Jowett became silent, too, and, like the Indians, ran
as fast as they could, over fences, through the trees, stumbling and
occasionally cursing, but watching with fascinated eyes this adventuress
of the North, taking chances which not one coureur-de-bois or
river-driver in a thousand would take, with a five thousand-dollar prize
as the lure. Why should she do it?
“Women folks are sick darn fools when they git goin’,” gasped Osterhaut
as he ran. “They don’t care a split pea what happens when they’ve got
the pip. Look at her--my hair’s bleachin’.”
“She’s got the pip all right,” stuttered Jowett as he plunged along;
“but she’s foreign, and they’ve all got the pip, foreign men and women
both--but the women go crazy.”
“She keeps pretty cool for a crazy loon, that girl. If I owned her,
I’d--”
Jowett interrupted impatiently. “You’d do what old man Druse does--you’d
let her be, Osterhaut. What’s the good of havin’ your own way with one
that’s the apple of your eye, if it turns her agin you? You want her
to kiss you on the high cheek-bone, but if you go to play the
cat-o’-nine-tails round her, the high cheek-bone gets froze. Gol blast
it, look at her, son! What are the wild waves saying? They’re sayin’,
‘This is a surprise, Miss Druse. Not quite ready for ye, Miss Druse.’
My, ain’t she got the luck of the old devil!”
It seemed so. More than once the canoe half jammed between the rocks,
and the stern lifted up by the force of the wild current, but again the
paddle made swift play, and again the cockle-shell swung clear. But now
Fleda Druse was no longer on her feet. She knelt, her strong, slim
brown arms bared to the shoulder, her hair blown about her forehead,
her daring eyes flashing to left and right, memory of her course at work
under such a strain as few can endure without chaos of mind in the end.
A hundred times since the day she had run these Rapids with Tekewani,
she had gone over the course in her mind, asleep and awake, forcing her
brain to see again every yard of that watery way; because she knew that
the day must come when she would make the journey alone. Why she would
make it she did not know; she only knew that she would do it some day;
and the day had come. For long it had been an obsession with her--as
though some spirit whispered in her ear--“Do you hear the bells ringing
at Carillon? Do you hear the river singing towards Carillon? Do you
see the wild birds flying towards Carillon? Do you hear the Rapids
calling--the Rapids of Carillon?”
Night and day since she had braved death with Tekewani, giving him a
gun, a meerschaum pipe, and ten pounds of beautiful brown “plug” tobacco
as a token of her gratitude--night and day she had heard this spirit
murmuring in her ear, and always the refrain was, “Down the stream to
Carillon! Shoot the Rapids of Carillon!”
Why? How should she know? Wherefore should she know? This was of the
things beyond the why of the human mind. Sometimes all our lives, if we
keep our souls young, and see the world as we first saw it with eyes and
heart unsoiled, we hear the murmuring of the Other Self, that Self
from which we separated when we entered this mortal sphere, but which
followed us, invisible yet whispering inspiration to us. But sometimes
we only hear It, our own soul’s oracle, while yet our years are few,
and we have not passed that frontier between innocence and experience,
reality and pretence. Pretence it is which drives the Other Self away
with wailing on its lips. Then we hear It cry in the night when, because
of the trouble of life, we cannot sleep; or at the play when we are
caught away from ourselves into another air than ours; when music pours
around us like a soft wind from a garden of pomegranates; or when a
child asks a question which brings us back to the land where everything
is so true that it can be shouted from the tree-tops.
Why was Fleda Druse tempting death in the Carillon Rapids?
She had heard a whisper as she wandered among the pine-trees there at
Manitou, and it said simply the one word, “Now!” She knew that she must
do it; she had driven her canoe out into the resistless current to ride
the Rapids of Carillon. Her Other Self had whispered to her.
Yonder, thousands of miles away in Syria, there were the Hills of
Lebanon; and there was one phrase which made every Syrian heart beat
faster, if he were on the march. It was, “The Druses are up!” When
that wild tribe took to the saddle to war upon the Caravans and against
authority, from Lebanon to Palmyra, from Jerusalem to Damascus men
looked anxiously about them and rode hard to refuge.
And here also in the Far North where the River Sagalac ran a wild race
to Carillon, leaving behind the new towns of Lebanon and Manitou, “the
Druses were up.”
The daughter of Gabriel Druse, the giant, was riding the Rapids of the
Sagalac. The suspense to her and to those who watched her course--to
Tekewani and his braves, to Osterhaut and Jowett--could not be long. It
was a matter of minutes only, in which every second was a miracle and
might be a catastrophe.
From rock to rock, from wild white water to wild white water she sped,
now tossing to death as it seemed, now shooting on safely to the next
test of skill and courage--on, on, till at last there was only one
passage to make before the canoe would plunge into the smooth water
running with great swiftness till it almost reached Carillon.
Suddenly, as she neared the last dangerous point, round which she must
swing between jagged and unseen barriers of rock, her sight became for
an instant dimmed, as though a cloud passed over her eyes. She had never
fainted in her life, but it seemed to her now that she was hovering on
unconsciousness. Commending the will and energy left, she fought the
weakness down. It was as though she forced a way through tossing,
buffeting shadows; as though she was shaking off from her shoulders
shadowy hands which sought to detain her; as though smothering things
kept choking back her breath, and darkness like clouds of wool gathered
about her face. She was fighting for her life, and for years it seemed
to be; though indeed it was only seconds before her will reasserted
itself, and light broke again upon her way. Even on the verge of the
last ambushed passage her senses came back; but they came with a stark
realization of the peril ahead: it looked out of her eyes as a face
shows itself at the window of a burning building.
Memory shook itself free. It pierced the tumult of waters, found the
ambushed rocks, and guided the lithe brown arms and hands, so that the
swift paddle drove the canoe straight onward, as a fish drives itself
through a flume of dragon’s teeth beneath the flood. The canoe quivered
for an instant at the last cataract, then responding to Memory and Will,
sped through the hidden chasm, tossed by spray and water, and swept into
the swift current of smooth water below.
Fleda Druse had run the Rapids of Carillon. She could hear the bells
ringing for evening service in the Catholic Church of Carillon, and
bells-soft, booming bells-were ringing in her own brain. Like muffled
silver these brain-bells were, and she was as one who enters into a deep
forest, and hears far away in the boscage the mystic summons of
forest deities. Voices from the banks of the river behind called to
her--hilarious, approving, agitated voices of her Indian friends, and of
Osterhaut and Jowett, those wild spectators of her adventure: but they
were not wholly real. Only those soft, booming bells in her brain were
real.
Shooting the Rapids of Carillon was the bridge by which she passed from
the world she had left to this other. Her girlhood was ended--wondering,
hovering, unrealizing girlhood. This adventure was the outward sign, the
rite in the Lodge of Life which passed her from one degree of being to
another.
She was safe; but now as her canoe shot onward to the town of Carillon,
her senses again grew faint. Again she felt the buffeting mist, again
her face was muffled in smothering folds; again great hands reached out
towards her; again her eyes were drawn into a stupefying darkness; but
now there was no will to fight, no energy to resist. The paddle lay
inert in her fingers, her head drooped. She slowly raised her head once,
twice, as though the call of the exhausted will was heard, but suddenly
it fell heavily upon her breast. For a moment so, and then as the canoe
shot forward on a fresh current, the lithe body sank backwards in the
canoe, and lay face upward to the evening sky.
The canoe sped on, but presently it swung round and lay athwart the
current, dipping and rolling.
From the banks on either side, the Indians of the Manitou Reservation
and the two men from Lebanon called out and hastened on, for they saw
that the girl had collapsed, and they knew only too well that her danger
was not yet past. The canoe might strike against the piers of the bridge
at Carillon and overturn, or it might be carried to the second cataract
below the town. They were too far away to save her, but they kept
shouting as they ran.
None responded to their call, but that defiance of the last cataract of
the Rapids of Carillon had been seen by one who, below an eddy on the
Lebanon side of the river, was steadily stringing upon maple-twigs black
bass and long-nosed pike. As he sat in the shade of the trees, he had
seen the plunge of the canoe into the chasm, and had held his breath in
wonder and admiration. Even at that distance he knew who it was. He had
seen Fleda only a few times before, for she was little abroad; but when
he had seen her he had asked himself what such a face and form were
doing in the Far North. It belonged to Andalusia, to the Carpathians, to
Syrian villages.
“The pluck of the very devil!” he had exclaimed, as Fleda’s canoe swept
into the smooth current, free of the dragon’s teeth; and as he had
something of the devil in himself, she seemed much nearer to him than
the hundreds of yards of water intervening. Presently, however, he saw
her droop and sink away out of sight.
For an instant he did not realize what had happened, and then, with
angry self-reproach, he flung the oars into the rowlocks of his skiff
and drove down and athwart the stream with long, powerful strokes.
“That’s like a woman!” he said to himself as he bent to the oars, and
now and then turned his head to make sure that the canoe was still safe.
“Do the trick better than a man, and then collapse like a rabbit.”
He was Max Ingolby, the financier, contractor, manager of great
interests, disturber of the peace of slow minds, who had come to Lebanon
with the avowed object of amalgamating three railways, of making the
place the swivel of all the trade and interests of the Western North;
but also with the declared intention of uniting Lebanon and Manitou in
one municipality, one centre of commercial and industrial power.
Men said he had bitten off more than he could chew, but he had replied
that his teeth were good, and he would masticate the meal or know the
reason why. He was only thirty-three, but his will was like nothing the
West had seen as yet. It was sublime in its confidence, it was free from
conceit, and it knew not the word despair, though once or twice it had
known defeat.
Men cheered him from the shore as his skiff leaped through the water.
“It’s that blessed Ingolby,” said Jowett, who had tried to “do” the
financier in a horsedeal, and had been done instead, and was now a
devout admirer and adherent of the Master Man. “I saw him driving down
there this morning from Lebanon. He’s been fishing at Seely’s Eddy.”
“When Ingolby goes fishing, there’s trouble goin’ on somewhere and he’s
stalkin’ it,” rejoined Osterhaut. “But, by gol, he’s goin’ to do this
trump trick first; he’s goin’ to overhaul her before she gits to the
bridge. Look at him swing! Hell, ain’t it pretty! There you go, old
Ingolby. You’re right on it, even when you’re fishing.”
On the other-the Manitou-shore Tekewani and his braves were less
talkative, but they were more concerned in the incident than Osterhaut
and Jowett. They knew little or nothing of Ingolby the hustler, but they
knew more of Fleda Druse and her father than all the people of Lebanon
and Manitou put together. Fleda had won old Tekewani’s heart when she
had asked him to take her down the Rapids, for the days of adventure
for him and his tribe were over. The adventure shared with this girl
had brought back to the chief the old days when Indian women tanned
bearskins and deerskins day in, day out, and made pemmican of the
buffalo-meat; when the years were filled with hunting and war and
migrant journeyings to fresh game-grounds and pastures new.
Danger faced was the one thing which could restore Tekewani’s
self-respect, after he had been checked and rebuked before his tribe by
the Indian Commissioner for being drunk. Danger faced had restored it,
and Fleda Druse had brought the danger to him as a gift.
If the canoe should crash against the piers of the bridge, if it should
drift to the cataract below, if anything should happen to this white
girl whom he worshipped in his heathen way, nothing could preserve his
self-respect; he would pour ashes on his head and firewater down his
throat.
Suddenly he and his braves stood still. They watched as one would watch
an enemy a hundred times stronger than one’s self. The white man’s skiff
was near the derelict canoe; the bridge was near also. Carillon now
lined the bank of the river with its people. They ran upon the bridge,
but not so fast as to reach the place where, in the nick of time,
Ingolby got possession of the rolling canoe; where Fleda Druse lay
waiting like a princess to be waked by the kiss of destiny.
Only five hundred yards below the bridge was the second cataract, and
she would never have waked if she had been carried into it.
To Ingolby she was as beautiful as a human being could be as she lay
with white face upturned, the paddle still in her hand.
“Drowning isn’t good enough for her,” he said, as he fastened her canoe
to his skiff.
“It’s been a full day’s work,” he added; and even in this human crisis
he thought of the fish he had caught, of “the big trouble,” he had been
thinking out as Osterhaut had said, as well as of the girl that he was
saving.
“I always have luck when I go fishing,” he added presently. “I can take
her back to Lebanon,” he continued with a quickening look. “She’ll be
all right in a jiffy. I’ve got room for her in my buggy--and room for
her in any place that belongs to me,” he hastened to reflect with a
curious, bashful smile.
“It’s like a thing in a book,” he murmured, as he neared the waiting
people on the banks of Carillon, and the ringing of the vesper bells
came out to him on the evening air.
“Is she dead?” some one whispered, as eager hands reached out to secure
his skiff to the bank.
“As dead as I am,” he answered with a laugh, and drew Fleda’s canoe up
alongside his skiff.
He had a strange sensation of new life, as, with delicacy and
gentleness, he lifted her up in his strong arms and stepped ashore.