Beatrice Neilson was a mountain girl, with the strong thews of Jael, yet
she hid her face as the canoe shot into the crest of the rapids. It
seemed incredible to her that the light craft should buffet that wild
cataract and yet live. She was young and she loved life; and death
seemed very near.
The scene that her eyes beheld in that last little instant in which the
boat seemed to hang, shuddering, at the crest of the descent was branded
indelibly on her memory. She saw Ben's face, set like iron, the muscles
bunching beneath his flannel sleeves as he set his paddle. He was
leaning forward, aware of nothing in the world but the forthcoming
crisis. And in that swift flash of vision she saw not only the steel
determination and the brutal savagery of the avenger. A little glimpse
of the truth went home to her, and she beheld something of the
misdirected idealism of the man, the intensity and steadfastness that
were the dominant traits of his nature. She could not doubt his belief
in the reality of his cause. Whether fancied or real the injury, deep
wells of emotion in his heart had broken their seals and flowed forth.
The wolf crouched on the heap of supplies, fearful to the depths of his
wild heart of this mighty stream, yet still putting his faith in his
master in the stern. Beatrice saw his wild, frightened eyes as he gazed
down into the frightful whirlpools. The banks seemed to whip past.
Then the rushing waters caught the craft and seemed to fling it into
the air. There was the swift sense of lightning and incredible movement,
of such incalculable speed as that with which a meteor blazes through
the sky, and then a mighty surging, struggle; an interminable instant of
ineffable and stupendous conflict. The bow dipped, split the foam; then
the raging waters seized the craft again, and with one great impulse
hurled it through the clouds of spray, down between the narrow portals
of rocks.
Beatrice came to herself with the realization that she had uttered a
shrill cry. Part of the impulse behind it was simply terror; but it was
also the expression of an intensity of sensation never before
experienced. She could have understood, now, the lure of the rapids to
experienced canoeists. She forced herself to look into the wild
cataract.
The boat sped at an unbelievable pace. Ben held his paddle like iron,
yet with a touch as delicate as that of a great musician upon piano
keys, and he steered his craft to the last inch. His face was still like
metal, but the eyes, steely, vivid, and magnetic, had a look of triumph.
The first of the great tests had been passed.
Sudden confidence in Ben's ability to guide her through to safety began
to warm the girl's frozen heart. There were no places more dangerous
than that just past; and he had handled his craft like a master. He was
a voyageur: as long as his iron control was sustained, as long as his
nerve was strong and his eye true she had every chance of coming out
alive. But they had irremediably cast their fortunes upon the river,
now. They could not turn back. She was in his whole charge, an agent of
vengeance against her own father and his confederates.
Hot, blinding tears suddenly filled her eyes. Her frantic fear of the
river had held them back for a time; but they flowed freely enough now
the first crisis was past. In utter misery and despair her head bowed in
her hands; and her brown hair, disheveled, dropped down.
Ben gazed at her with a curious mingling of emotions. It had not been
part of his plan to bring sorrow to this girl. After all, she was not in
the least responsible for her father's crimes. He had sworn to have no
regrets, no matter what innocent flesh was despoiled in order that he
might strike the guilty; yet the sight of that bowed, lovely head went
home to him very deeply indeed. She was the instrument of his vengeance,
necessary to his cause, but there was nothing to be gained by afflicting
her needlessly. At least, he could give her his pity. It would not
weaken him, dampen his fiery resolution, to give her that.
As he guided his craft he felt growing compassion for her; yet it was a
personal pity only and brought no regrets that he had acted as he did.
"I wish you wouldn't cry," he said, rather quietly.
Amazed beyond expression at the words, Beatrice looked up. For the
instant her woe was forgotten in the astounding fact that she had won
compassion from this cast-iron man in the stern.
"I'll try not to," she told him, her dark eyes ineffably beautiful with
their luster of tears. "I don't see why I should try--why I should try
to do anything you ask me to--but yet I will--"
Further words came to him, and he could not restrain them. "You're sort
of--the goat, Beatrice," he told her soberly. "It was said, long ago,
that the sins of the father must be visited upon the children; and maybe
that's the way it is with you. I can't help but feel sorry--that you had
to undergo this--so that I could reach your father and his men. If you
had seen old Ezram lying there--the life gone from, his kind, gray old
face--the man who brought me home and gave me my one chance--maybe you'd
understand."
They were speechless a long time, Beatrice watching the swift leap of
the shore line, Ben guiding, with steady hand, the canoe. Neither of
them could guess at what speed they traveled this first wild half-hour;
but he knew that the long miles--so heart-breaking with their ridges and
brush thickets to men and horses--were whipping past them each in a few,
little breaths. Ever they plunged deeper into the secret, hushed heart
of the wild--a land unknown to the tread of white men, a region so still
and changeless that it seemed excluded from the reign and law of, time.
The spruce grew here, straight and dark and tall, a stalwart army whose
measureless march no human eyes beheld. Already they had come farther
than a pack train could travel, through the same region, in weary days.
Already they were at the border of Back There. They had cut the last
ties with the world of men. There were no trails here, leading slowly
but immutably to the busy centers of civilization; not a blaze on a tree
for the eyes of a woodsman riding on some forest venture, not the ashes
of a dead camp fire or a charred cooking rack, where an Indian had
broiled his caribou flesh. Except by the slow process of exploration
with pack horses, traveling a few miles each day, fording unknown rivers
and encircling impassable ranges, or by waiting patiently until the fall
rains swelled the river, they might never leave this land they had so
boldly entered. They could not go out the way they had come--over those
seething waters--and the river, falling swiftly, would soon be too low
to permit them to push down to its lower waters where they might find
Indian encampments.
Nothing was left but the wilderness, ancient and unchanged. The spruce
forest had a depth and a darkness that even Ben had never seen; the wild
creatures that they sometimes glimpsed on the bank stared at them wholly
without knowledge as to what they were, and likely amazed at the
strength whereby they had braved this seething torrent that swept
through their sylvan home. Here was a land where the grizzly had not yet
learned of a might greater than his, where he had not yet surrendered
his sovereignty to man. Here the moose--mightiest of the antlered
herd--reached full maturity and old age without ever mistaking the call
of a birch-bark horn for that of his rutting cow. Young bulls with only
a fifty-inch spread of horns and ten points on each did not lead the
herds, as in the more accessible provinces of the North. All things were
in their proper balance, since the forest had gone unchanged for time
immemorial; and as the head-hunters had not yet come the bull moose did
not rank as a full-grown warrior until he wore thirty points and had
five feet of spread, and he wasn't a patriarch until he could no longer
walk free between two tree trunks seventy inches apart. Certain of the
lesser forest people were not in unwonted numbers because that fierce
little hunter, the marten, had been exterminated by trappers; the otter,
yet to know the feel of cold iron, fished to his heart's content in
rivers where an artificial fly had never fallen and the trout swarmed in
uncounted numbers in the pools.
Darting down the rapids Ben felt the beginnings of an exquisite
exhilaration. Part of it arose from the very thrill and excitement of
their headlong pace; but partly it had a deeper, more portentous origin.
Here was his own country--this Back There. While all the spruce forest
in which he had lived had been his natural range and district--his own
kind of land with which he felt close and intimate relations--this was
even more his home than his own birthplace. By light of a secret
quality, hard to recognize, he was of it, and it was of him. He felt the
joy of one who sees the gleam of his own hearth through a distant
window.
He _knew_ this land; it was as if he had simply been away, through the
centuries, and had come home. The shadows and the stillness had the
exact depth and tone that was true and right; the forest fragance was
undefiled; the dark sky line was like something he had dreamed come
true. He felt a strange and growing excitement, as if magnificent
adventure were opening out before him. His gaze fell, with a queer sense
of understanding, to Fenris.
The wolf had recovered from his fear of the river, by now, and he was
crouched, alert and still, in his place. His gaze was fast upon the
shore line; and the green and yellow fires that mark the beast were
ablaze again in his eyes. Fenris too made instinctive response to those
breathless forests; and Ben knew that the bond between them was never so
close as now.
Fenris also knew that here was his own realm, the land in which the
great Fear had not yet laid its curse. The forest still thronged with
game, the wood trails would be his own. Here was the motherland, not
only to him but to his master, too. They were its fierce children: one
by breed, the other because he answered, to the full, the call of the
wild from which no man is wholly immune.
Ben could have understood the wolf's growing exultation. The war he was
about to wage with Neilson. would be on his own ground, in a land that
enhanced and developed his innate, natural powers, and where he had
every advantage. The wolf does not run into the heart of busy cities in
pursuit of his prey. He tries to decoy it into his own fastnesses.
A sudden movement on the part of Beatrice, in the bow of the canoe,
caught his eye. She had leaned forward and was reaching among the
supplies. His mind at once leaped to the box of shells for her pistol
that he had thrown among the duffle, but evidently this was not the
object of her search. She lifted into her hands a paper parcel, the same
she had brought from her cabin early that morning.
He tried to analyze the curious mingling of emotions in her face. It was
neither white with disdain nor dark with wrath; and the tears were gone
from her eyes. Rather her expression was speculative, pensive. Presently
her eyes met his.
His heart leaped; why he did not know. "What is, it?" he asked.
"Ben--I called you that yesterday and there's no use going back to last
names now--I've made an important decision."
"I hope it's a happy one," he ventured.
"It's as happy as it can be, under the circumstances. Ben, I came of a
line of frontiersmen--the forest people--and if the woods teach one
thing it is to make the best of any bad situation."
Ben nodded. For all his long training he had not entirely mastered this
lesson himself, but he knew she spoke true.
"We've found out how hard Fate can hit--if I can make it plain," she
went on. "We've found out there are certain powers--or devils--or
something else, and what I don't know--that are always lying in wait for
people, ready to strike them down. Maybe you would call it Destiny. But
the Destiny city men know isn't the Destiny we know out here--I don't
have to tell you that. We see Nature just as she is, without any gay
clothes, and we know the cruelty behind her smile, and the evil plans
behind her gentle words."
The man was amazed. Evidently the stress and excitement of the morning
had brought out the fanciful and poetic side of the girl's nature.
"We don't look for good luck," she told him. "We don't expect to live
forever. We know what death is, and that it is sure to come, and that
misfortune comes always--in the snow and the cold and the falling
tree--and when we have good luck we're glad--we don't take it for
granted. Living up here, where life is real, we've learned that we have
to make the best of things in order to be happy at all."
"And you mean--you're going to try to make the best of _this_?" His
voice throbbed ever so slightly, because he could not hold it even.
"There's nothing else I can do," she replied. "You've taken me here and
as yet I don't see how I can get away. This doesn't mean I've gone over
to your side."
He nodded. He understood _that_ very well.
"I'm just admitting that at present I'm in your hands--helpless--and
many long weeks in before us," she went on. "I'm on my father's side,
last and always, and I'll strike back at you if the chance comes. Expect
no mercy from me, in case I ever see my way to strike."
The man's eyes suddenly gleamed. "Don't you know--that you'd have a
better chance of fighting me--if you didn't put me on guard?"
"I don't think so. I don't believe you'd be fooled that easy.
Besides--I can't pretend to be a friend--when I'm really an enemy."
For one significant instant the man looked down. This was what he had
done--pretended friendship when he was a foe. But his was a high cause!
"I'm warning you that I'm against you to the last--and will beat you if
I see my way," the girl went on. "But at the same time I'm going to make
the best of a bad situation, and try to get all the comfort I can. I'm
in your hands at present, and we're foes, but just the same we can talk,
and try to make each other comfortable so that we can be comfortable
ourselves, and try not to be any more miserable than we can help. I'm
not going to cry any more."
As she talked she was slowly unwrapping the little parcel she had
brought. Presently she held it out to him.
It was just a box of homemade candy--fudge made with sugar and canned
milk--that she had brought for their day's picnic. But it was a peace
offering not to be despised. A heavy load lifted from Ben's heart.
He waited his chance, guiding the boat with care, and then reached a
brown hand. He crushed a piece of the soft, delicious confection between
his lips. "Thanks, Beatrice," he said. "I'll remember all you've told
me."