Between Archangel’s Rise and Pardon’s Drive there was but one house. It
was a tavern, and it was known as Galbraith’s Place. There was no man
in the Western Territories to whom it was not familiar. There was no
traveller who crossed the lonely waste but was glad of it, and would go
twenty miles out of his way to rest a night on a corn-husk bed which Jen
Galbraith’s hands had filled, to eat a meal that she had prepared,
and to hear Peter Galbraith’s tales of early days on the plains, when
buffalo were like clouds on the horizon, when Indians were many and
hostile, and when men called the great western prairie a wedge of the
American desert.
It was night on the prairie. Jen Galbraith stood in the doorway of the
tavern sitting-room and watched a mighty beacon of flame rising before
her, a hundred yards away. Every night this beacon made a circle of
light on the prairie, and Galbraith’s Place was in the centre of the
circle. Summer and winter it burned from dusk to daylight. No hand fed
it but that of Nature. It never failed; it was a cruse that was never
empty. Upon Jen Galbraith it had a weird influence. It grew to be to her
a kind of spiritual companion, though, perhaps, she would not so have
named it. This flaming gas, bubbling up from the depths of the earth on
the lonely plains, was to her a mysterious presence grateful to her; the
receiver of her thoughts, the daily necessity in her life. It filled
her too with a kind of awe; for, when it burned, she seemed not herself
alone, but another self of her whom she could not quite understand. Yet
she was no mere dreamer. Upon her practical strength of body and mind
had come that rugged poetical sense, which touches all who live the life
of mountain and prairie. She showed it in her speech; it had a measured
cadence. She expressed it in her body; it had a free and rhythmic
movement. And not Jen alone, but many another dweller on the prairie,
looked upon it with a superstitious reverence akin to worship. A
blizzard could not quench it. A gale of wind only fed its strength. A
rain-storm made a mist about it, in which it was enshrined like a god.
Peter Galbraith could not fully understand his daughter’s fascination
for this Prairie Star, as the North-West people called it. It was not
without its natural influence upon him; but he regarded it most as
a comfortable advertisement, and he lamented every day that this
never-failing gas well was not near a large population, and he still its
owner. He was one of that large family in the earth who would turn the
best things in their lives into merchandise. As it was, it brought
much grist to his mill; for he was not averse to the exercise of
the insinuating pleasures of euchre and poker in his tavern; and the
hospitality which ranchmen, cowboys, and travellers sought at his hand
was often prolonged, and also remunerative to him.
Pretty Pierre, who had his patrol as gamester defined, made semi-annual
visits to Galbraith’s Place. It occurred generally after the rounding-up
and branding seasons, when the cowboys and ranchmen were “flush” with
money. It was generally conceded that Monsieur Pierre would have made
an early excursion to a place where none is ever “ordered up,” if he had
not been free with the money which he so plentifully won.
Card-playing was to him a science and a passion. He loved to win for
winning’s sake. After that, money, as he himself put it, was only fit
to be spent for the good of the country, and that men should earn more.
Since he put his philosophy into instant and generous practice, active
and deadly prejudice against him did not have lengthened life.
The Mounted Police, or as they are more poetically called, the Riders
of the Plains, watched Galbraith’s Place, not from any apprehension of
violent events, but because Galbraith was suspected of infringing the
prevailing law of Prohibition, and because for some years it had been a
tradition and a custom to keep an eye on Pierre.
As Jen Galbraith stood in the doorway looking abstractedly at the
beacon, her fingers smoothing her snowy apron the while, she was
thinking thus to herself: “Perhaps father is right. If that Prairie Star
were only at Vancouver or Winnipeg instead of here, our Val could be
something, more than a prairie-rider. He’d have been different, if
father hadn’t started this tavern business. Not that our Val is bad. He
isn’t; but if he had money he could buy a ranch,--or something.”
Our Val, as Jen and her father called him, was a lad of twenty-two,
one year younger than Jen. He was prairie-rider, cattle-dealer, scout,
cowboy, happy-go-lucky vagrant,--a splendid Bohemian of the plains. As
Jen said, he was not bad; but he had a fiery, wandering spirit, touched
withal by the sunniest humour. He had never known any curb but Jen’s
love and care. That had kept him within bounds so far. All men of the
prairie spoke well of him. The great new lands have codes and standards
of morals quite their own. One enthusiastic admirer of this youth
said, in Jen’s hearing, “He’s a Christian--Val Galbraith!” That was
the western way of announcing a man as having great civic and social
virtues. Perhaps the respect for Val Galbraith was deepened by the
fact that there was no broncho or cayuse that he could not tame to the
saddle.
Jen turned her face from the flame and looked away from the oasis of
warmth it made, to where the light shaded away into darkness, a darkness
that was unbroken for many a score of miles to the north and west. She
sighed deeply and drew herself up with an aggressive motion as though
she was freeing herself of something. So she was. She was trying to
shake off a feeling of oppression. Ten minutes ago the gaslighted house
behind her had seemed like a prison. She felt that she must have air,
space, and freedom.
She would have liked a long ride on the buffalo-track. That, she felt,
would clear her mind. She was no romantic creature out of her sphere, no
exotic. She was country-born and bred, and her blood had been charged
by a prairie instinct passing through three generations. She was part
of this life. Her mind was free and strong, and her body was free and
healthy. While that freedom and health was genial, it revolted against
what was gross or irregular. She loved horses and dogs, she liked to
take a gun and ride away to the Poplar Hills in search of game, she
found pleasure in visiting the Indian Reservation, and talking to
Sun-in-the-North, the only good Indian chief she knew, or that anyone
else on the prairies knew. She loved all that was strong and untamed,
all that was panting with wild and glowing life. Splendidly developed,
softly sinewy, warmly bountiful, yet without the least physical
over-luxuriance or suggestiveness, Jen, with her tawny hair and
dark-brown eyes, was a growth of unrestrained, unconventional, and
eloquent life. Like Nature around her, glowing and fresh, yet glowing
and hardy. There was, however, just a strain of pensiveness in her,
partly owing to the fact that there were no women near her, that she
had, virtually, lived her life as a woman alone.
As she thus looked into the undefined horizon two things were happening:
a traveller was approaching Galbraith’s Place from a point in that
horizon; and in the house behind her someone was singing. The traveller
sat erect upon his horse. He had not the free and lazy seat of the
ordinary prairie-rider. It was a cavalry seat, and a military manner. He
belonged to that handful of men who patrol a frontier of near a thousand
miles, and are the security of peace in three hundred thousand miles of
territory--the Riders of the Plains, the North-West Mounted Police.
This Rider of the Plains was Sergeant Thomas Gellatly, familiarly
known as Sergeant Tom. Far away as he was he could see that a woman
was standing in the tavern door. He guessed who it was, and his blood
quickened at the guessing. But reining his horse on the furthest edge of
the lighted circle, he said, debatingly: “I’ve little time enough to get
to the Rise, and the order was to go through, hand the information to
Inspector Jules, and be back within forty-eight hours. Is it flesh and
blood they think I am? Me that’s just come back from a journey of a
hundred miles, and sent off again like this with but a taste of sleep
and little food, and Corporal Byng sittin’ there at Fort Desire with a
pipe in his mouth and the fat on his back like a porpoise. It’s famished
I am with hunger, and thirty miles yet to do; and she, standin’ there
with a six months’ welcome in her eye.... It’s in the interest of
Justice if I halt at Galbraith’s Place for half-an-hour, bedad! The
blackguard hid away there at Soldier’s Knee will be arrested all the
sooner; for horse and man will be able the better to travel. I’m glad
it’s not me that has to take him whoever he is. It’s little I like
leadin’ a fellow-creature towards the gallows, or puttin’ a bullet into
him if he won’t come.... Now what will we do, Larry, me boy?” this to
the broncho--“Go on without bite or sup, me achin’ behind and empty
before, and you laggin’ in the legs, or stay here for the slice of an
hour and get some heart into us? Stay here is it, me boy? then lave
go me fut with your teeth and push on to the Prairie Star there.” So
saying, Sergeant Tom, whose language in soliloquy, or when excited,
was more marked by a brogue than at other times, rode away towards
Galbraith’s Place.
In the tavern at that moment, Pretty Pierrre was sitting on the
bar-counter, where temperance drinks were professedly sold, singing to
himself. His dress was singularly neat, if coarse, and his slouch hat
was worn with an air of jauntiness according well with his slight make
and almost girlish delicacy of complexion. He was puffing a cigarette,
in the breaks of the song. Peter Galbraith, tall, gaunt, and
sombre-looking, sat with his chair tilted back against the wall, rather
nervously pulling at the strips of bark of which the yielding chair-seat
was made. He may or may not have been listening to the song which had
run through several verses. Where it had come from, no one knew; no one
cared to know. The number of its verses were legion. Pierre had a
sweet voice, of a peculiarly penetrating quality; still it was low and
well-modulated, like the colour in his cheeks, which gave him his name.
These were the words he was singing as Sergeant Tom rode towards the
tavern:
“The hot blood leaps in his quivering breast
Voila! ‘Tis his enemies near!
There’s a chasm deep on the mountain crest
Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear!
They follow him close and they follow him fast,
And he flies like a mountain deer;
Then a mad, wild leap and he’s safe at last!
Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear!
A cry and a leap and the danger’s past
Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear!”
At the close of the verse, Galbraith said: “I don’t like that song. I--I
don’t like it. You’re not a father, Pierre.”
“No, I am not a father. I have some virtue of that. I have spared the
world something, Pete Galbraith.”
“You have the Devil’s luck; your sins never get YOU into trouble.”
A curious fire flashed in the half-breed’s eyes, and he said, quietly:
“Yes, I have great luck; but I have my little troubles at times--at
times.”
“They’re different, though, from this trouble of Val’s.” There was
something like a fog in the old man’s throat.
“Yes, Val was quite foolish, you see. If he had killed a white
man--Pretty Pierre, for instance--well, there would have been a show of
arrest, but he could escape. It was an Injin. The Government cherish
the Injin much in these days. The redskin must be protected. It must be
shown that at Ottawa there is justice. That is droll--quite. Eh, bien!
Val will not try to escape. He waits too long-near twenty-four hours.
Then, it is as you see.... You have not told her?” He nodded towards the
door of the sittingroom.
“Nothing. It’ll come on Jen soon enough if he doesn’t get away, and bad
enough if he does, and can’t come back to us. She’s fond of him--as fond
of him as a mother. Always was wiser than our Val or me, Jen was. More
sense than a judge, and proud but not too proud, Pierre--not too proud.
She knows the right thing to do, like the Scriptures; and she does it
too.... Where did you say he was hid?”
“In the Hollow at Soldier’s Knee. He stayed too long at Moose Horn.
Injins carried the news on to Fort Desire. When Val started south for
the Border other Injins followed, and when a halt was made at Soldier’s
Knee they pushed across country over to Fort Desire. You see, Val’s
horse give out. I rode with him so far. My horse too was broke up. What
was to be done? Well, I knew a ranchman not far from Soldier’s Knee. I
told Val to sleep, and I would go on and get the ranchman to send him
a horse, while I come on to you. Then he could push on to the Border. I
saw the ranchman, and he swore to send a horse to Val to-night. He will
keep his word. He knows Val. That was at noon to-day, and I am here, you
see, and you know all. The danger? Ah, my friend,--the Police Barracks
at Archangel’s Rise! If word is sent down there from Fort Desire before
Val passes, they will have out a big patrol, and his chances,--well, you
know them, the Riders of the Plains. But Val, I think will have luck,
and get into Montana before they can stop him. I hope; yes.”
“If I could do anything, Pierre! Can’t we--”
The half-breed interrupted: “No, we can’t do anything, Galbraith. I have
done all. The ranchman knows me. He will keep his word, by the Great
Heaven!” It would seem as if Pierre had reasons for relying on the
ranchman other than ordinary prairie courtesy to law-breakers.
“Pierre, tell me the whole story over, slow and plain. It don’t seem
nateral to think of it; but if you go over it again, perhaps I can
get the thing more reas’nable in my mind. No, it ain’t nateral to me,
Pierre--our Val running away.” The old man leaned forward and put his
elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.
“Eh, well, it was an Injin. So much. It was in self-defence--a little,
but of course to prove that. There is the difficulty. You see, they were
all drinking, and the Injin--he was a chief---proposed--he proposed that
Val should sell him his sister, Jen Galbraith, to be the chief’s squaw.
He would give him a cayuse. Val’s blood came up quick--quite quick. You
know Val. He said between his teeth: ‘Look out, Snow Devil, you Injin
dog, or I’ll have your heart. Do you think a white girl is like a
redskin woman, to be sold as you sell your wives and daughters to the
squaw-men and white loafers, you reptile?’ Then the Injin said an ugly
word about Val’s sister, and Val shot him dead like lightning.... Yes,
that is good to swear, Galbraith. You are not the only one that curses
the law in this world. It is not Justice that fills the gaols, but Law.”
The old man rose and walked up and down the room in a shuffling kind of
way. His best days were done, the spring of his life was gone, and the
step was that of a man who had little more of activity and force with
which to turn the halting wheels of life. His face was not altogether
good, yet it was not evil. There was a sinister droop to the eyelids, a
suggestion of cruelty about the mouth; but there was more of good-nature
and passive strength than either in the general expression. One could
see that some genial influence had dominated what was inherently cruel
and sinister in him. Still the sinister predisposition was there.
“He can’t never come here, Pierre, can he”? he asked, despairingly.
“No, he can’t come here, Galbraith. And look: if the Riders of the
Plains should stop here to-night, or to-morrow, you will be cool--cool,
eh?”
“Yes, I will be quite cool, Pierre.” Then he seemed to think of
something else and looked up half-curiously, half-inquiringly at the
half-breed.
Pierre saw this. He whistled quietly to himself for a little, and then
called the old man over to where he sat. Leaning slightly forward he
made his reply to the look that had been bent upon him. He touched
Galbraith’s breast lightly with his delicate fingers, and said: “I have
not much love for the world, Pete Galbraith, and not much love for
men and women altogether; they are fools--nearly all. Some men--you
know--treat me well. They drink with me--much. They would make life a
hell for me if I was poor--shoot me, perhaps, quick!--if--if I didn’t
shoot first. They would wipe me with their feet. They would spoil Pretty
Pierre.” This he said with a grim kind of humour and scorn, refined in
its suppressed force. Fastidious as he was in appearance, Pierre was not
vain. He had been created with a sense of refinement that reduced the
grossness of his life; but he did not trade on it; he simply accepted it
and lived it naturally after his kind. He was not good at heart, and he
never pretended to be so. He continued: “No, I have not much love; but
Val, well, I think of him some. His tongue is straight; he makes no
lies. His heart is fire; his arms are strong; he has no fear. He does
not love Pierre; but he does not pretend to love him. He does not think
of me like the rest. So much the more when his trouble comes I help him.
I help him to the death if he needs me. To make him my friend--that is
good. Eh? Perhaps. You see, Galbraith?”
The old man nodded thoughtfully, and after a little pause said: “I
have killed Injins myself;” and he made a motion of his head backward,
suggestive of the past.
With a shrug of his shoulders the other replied “Yes, so have
I--sometimes. But the government was different then, and there were
no Riders of the Plains.” His white teeth showed menacingly under his
slight moustache. Then there was another pause. Pierre was watching the
other.
“What’s that you’re doing, Galbraith?”
“Rubbin’ laudanum on my gums for this toothache. Have to use it for
nuralgy, too.”
Galbraith put the little vial back in his waistcoat pocket, and
presently said: “What will you have to drink, Pretty Pierre?” That was
his way of showing gratitude.
“I am reform. I will take coffee, if Jen Galbraith will make some. Too
much broke glass inside is not good. Yes.”
Galbraith went into the sitting-room to ask Jen to make the coffee.
Pierre, still sitting on the bar-counter, sang to himself a verse of a
rough-and-ready, satirical prairie ballad:
“The Riders of the Plains, my boys, are twenty thousand strong
Oh, Lordy, don’t they make the prairies howl!
‘Tis their lot to smile on virtue and to collar what is wrong,
And to intercept the happy flowin’ bowl.
They’ve a notion, that in glory, when we wicked ones have chains
They will all be major-generals--and that!
They’re a lovely band of pilgrims are the Riders of the Plains
Will some sinner please to pass around the hat?”
As he reached the last two lines of the verse the door opened and
Sergeant Tom entered. Pretty Pierre did not stop singing. His eyes
simply grew a little brighter, his cheek flushed ever so slightly, and
there was an increase of vigour in the closing notes.
Sergeant Tom smiled a little grimly, then he nodded and said: “Been at
it ever since, Pretty Pierre? You were singing the same song on the same
spot when I passed here six months ago.”
“Eh, Sergeant Tom, it is you? What brings you so far from your straw-bed
at Fort Desire?” From underneath his hat-brim Pierre scanned the face of
the trooper closely.
“Business. Not to smile on virtue, but to collar what is wrong. I guess
you ought to be ready by this time to go into quarters, Pierre. You’ve
had a long innings.”
“Not yet, Sergeant Tom, though I love the Irish, and your company would
make me happy. But I am so innocent, and the world--it cannot spare me
yet. But I think you come to smile on virtue, all the same, Sergeant
Tom. She is beautiful is Jen Galbraith. Ah, that makes your eye
bright--so! You Riders of the Plains, you do two things at one time. You
make this hour someone happy, and that hour someone unhappy. In one
hand the soft glove of kindness, in the other, voila! the cold glove of
steel. We cannot all be great like that, Sergeant Tom.”
“Not great, but clever. Voila, the Pretty Pierre! In one hand he holds
the soft paper, the pictures that deceive--kings, queens, and knaves;
in the other, pictures in gold and silver--money won from the pockets of
fools. And so, as you say, ‘bien,’ and we each have our way, bedad!”
Sergeant Tom noticed that the half-breed’s eyes nearly closed, as if to
hide the malevolence that was in them. He would not have been surprised
to see a pistol drawn. But he was quite fearless, and if it was not his
duty to provoke a difficulty, his fighting nature would not shrink from
giving as good as he got. Besides, so far as that nature permitted, he
hated Pretty Pierre. He knew the ruin that this gambler had caused here
and there in the West, and he was glad that Fort Desire, at any rate,
knew him less than it did formerly.
Just then Peter Galbraith entered with the coffee, followed by Jen.
When the old man saw his visitor he stood still with sudden fear; but
catching a warning look from the eye of the half-breed, he made an
effort to be steady, and said: “Well, Jen, if it isn’t Sergeant Tom!
And what brings you down here, Sergeant Tom? After some scalawag that’s
broke the law?”
Sergeant Tom had not noticed the blanched anxiety in the father’s
face; for his eyes were seeking those of the daughter. He answered the
question as he advanced towards Jen: “Yes and no, Galbraith; I’m only
takin’ orders to those who will be after some scalawag by daylight in
the mornin’, or before. The hand of a traveller to you, Miss Jen.”
Her eyes replied to his in one language; her lips spoke another. “And
who is the law-breaker, Sergeant Tom”? she said, as she took his hand.
Galbraith’s eyes strained towards the soldier till the reply came: “And
I don’t know that; not wan o’ me. I’d ridden in to Fort Desire from
another duty, a matter of a hundred miles, whin the major says to me,
‘There’s murder been done at Moose Horn. Take these orders down to
Archangel’s Rise, and deliver them and be back here within forty-eight
hours.’ And here I am on the way, and, if I wasn’t ready to drop for
want of a bite and sup, I’d be movin’ away from here to the south at
this moment.”
Galbraith was trembling with excitement. Pierre warned him by a look,
and almost immediately afterward gave him a reassuring nod, as if an
important and favourable idea had occurred to him.
Jen, looking at the Sergeant’s handsome face, said: “It’s six months to
a day since you were here, Sergeant Tom.”
“What an almanac you are, Miss!”
Pretty Pierre sipping his coffee here interrupted musingly: “But her
almanac is not always so reliable. So I think. When was I here last,
Ma’m’selle?”
With something like menace in her eyes Jen replied: “You were here six
months ago to-day, when you won thirty dollars from our Val; and then
again, just thirty days after that.”
“Ah, so! You remember with a difference.”
A moment after, Sergeant Tom being occupied in talking to Jen, Pierre
whispered to Peter Galbraith: “His horse--then the laudanum!”
Galbraith was puzzled for a moment, but soon nodded significantly, and
the sinister droop to his eyes became more marked. He turned to the
Sergeant and said, “Your horse must be fed as well as yourself, Sergeant
Tom. I’ll look after the beast, and Jen will take care of you. There’s
some fresh coffee, isn’t there, Jen?”
Jen nodded an affirmative. Galbraith knew that the Sergeant would trust
no one to feed his horse but himself, and the offer therefore was made
with design.
Sergeant Tom replied instantly: “No, I’ll do it if someone will show me
the grass pile.”
Pierre slipped quietly from the counter, and said, “I know the way,
Galbraith. I will show.”
Jen turned to the sitting-room, and Sergeant Tom moved to the tavern
door, followed by Pierre, who, as he passed Galbraith, touched the old
man’s waistcoat pocket, and said: “Thirty drops in the coffee.”
Then he passed out, singing softly:
“And he sleepeth so well, and he sleepeth so long
The fight it was hard, my dear;
And his foes were many and swift and strong
Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear!”
There was danger ahead for Sergeant Thomas Gellatly. Galbraith followed
his daughter to the sitting-room. She went to the kitchen and brought
bread, and cold venison, and prairie fowl, and stewed dried apples--the
stay and luxury of all rural Canadian homes. The coffee-pot was then
placed on the table. Then the old man said: “Better give him some of
that old cheese, Jen, hadn’t you? It’s in the cellar.” He wanted to be
rid of her for a few moments. “S’pose I had,” and Jen vanished.
Now was Galbraith’s chance. He took the vial of laudanum from his
pocket, and opened the coffee-pot. It was half full. This would not
suit. Someone else--Jen--might drink the coffee also! Yet it had to be
done. Sergeant Tom should not go on. Inspector Jules and his Riders of
the Plains must not be put upon the track of Val. Twelve hours would
make all the difference. Pour out a cup of coffee?--Yes, of course, that
would do. It was poured out quickly, and then thirty drops of laudanum
were carefully counted into it. Hark, they are coming back!--Just in
time. Sergeant Tom and Pierre enter from outside, and then Jen from the
kitchen. Galbraith is pouring another cup of coffee as they enter, and
he says: “Just to be sociable I’m goin’ to have a cup of coffee with
you, Sergeant Tom. How you Riders of the Plains get waited on hand and
foot!” Did some warning flash through Sergeant Tom’s mind or body, some
mental shock or some physical chill? For he distinctly shivered, though
he was not cold. He seemed suddenly oppressed with a sense of danger.
But his eyes fell on Jen, and the hesitation, for which he did not then
try to account, passed. Jen, clear-faced and true, invited him to sit
and eat, and he, starting half-abstractedly, responded to her “Draw
nigh, Sergeant Tom,” and sat down. Commonplace as the words were, they
thrilled him, for he thought of a table of his own in a home of his own,
and the same words spoken everyday, but without the “Sergeant,”--simply
“Tom.”
He ate heartily and sipped his coffee slowly, talking meanwhile to Jen
and Galbraith. Pretty Pierre watched them all. Presently the gambler
said: “Let us go and have our game of euchre, Galbraith. Ma’m’selle can
well take care of Sergeant Tom.”
Galbraith drank the rest of his coffee, rose, and passed with
Pierre into the bar-room. Then the halfbreed said to him, “You were
careful--thirty drops?”
“Yes, thirty drops.” The latent cruelty of the old man’s nature was
awake.
“That is right. It is sleep; not death. He will sleep so sound for half
a day, perhaps eighteen hours, and then!--Val will have a long start.”
In the sitting-room Sergeant Tom was saying: “Where is your brother,
Miss Galbraith?” He had no idea that the order in his pocket was for the
arrest of that brother. He merely asked the question to start the talk.
He and Jen had met but five or six times; but the impression left on
the minds of both was pleasant--ineradicable. Yet, as Sergeant Tom often
asked himself during the past six months, why should he think of
her? The life he led was one of severe endurance, and harshness, and
austerity. Into it there could not possibly enter anything of home. He
was but a noncommissioned officer of the Mounted Police, and beyond
that he had nothing. Ireland had not been kind to him. He had left her
inhospitable shores, and after years of absence he had but a couple of
hundred dollars laid up--enough to purchase his discharge and something
over, but nothing with which to start a home. Ranching required capital.
No, it couldn’t be thought of; and yet he had thought of it, try as he
would not to do so. And she? There was that about this man who had
lived life on two continents, in whose blood ran the warm and chivalrous
Celtic fire, which appealed to her. His physical manhood was noble, if
rugged; his disposition genial and free, if schooled, but not entirely,
to that reserve which his occupation made necessary--a reserve he would
have been more careful to maintain, in speaking of his mission a short
time back in the bar-room, if Jen had not been there. She called out the
frankest part of him; she opened the doors of his nature; she attracted
confidence as the sun does the sunflower.
To his question she replied: “I do not know where our Val is. He went on
a hunting expedition up north. We never can tell about him, when he will
turn up or where he will be to-morrow. He may walk in any minute. We
never feel uneasy. He always has such luck, and comes out safe and sound
wherever he is. Father says Val’s a hustler, and that nothing can keep
in the road with him. But he’s a little wild--a little. Still, we don’t
hector him, Sergeant Tom; hectoring never does any good, does it?”
“No, hectoring never does any good. And as for the wildness, if the
heart of him’s right, why that’s easy out of him whin he’s older. It’s a
fine lad I thought him, the time I saw him here. It’s his freedom I wish
I had--me that has to travel all day and part of the night, and thin
part of the day and all night back again, and thin a day of sleep and
the same thing over again. And that’s the life of me, sayin’ nothin’ of
the frost and the blizzards, and no home to go to, and no one to have a
meal for me like this whin I turn up.” And the sergeant wound up with,
“Whooroo! there’s a speech for you, Miss!” and laughed good-humouredly.
For all that, there was in his eyes an appeal that went straight to
Jen’s heart.
But, woman-like, she would not open the way for him to say anything more
definite just yet. She turned the subject. And yet again, woman-like,
she knew it would lead to the same conclusion:
“You must go to-night?”
“Yes, I must.”
“Nothing--nothing would keep you?”
“Nothing. Duty is duty, much as I’d like to stay, and you givin’ me the
bid. But my orders were strict. You don’t know what discipline means,
perhaps. It means obeyin’ commands if you die for it; and my commands
were to take a letter to Inspector Jules at Archangel’s Rise to-night.
It’s a matter of murder or the like, and duty must be done, and me that
sleepy, not forgettin’ your presence, as ever a man was and looked the
world in the face.”
He drank the rest of the coffee and mechanically set the cup down,
his eyes closing heavily as he did so. He made an effort, however, and
pulled himself together. His eyes opened, and he looked at Jen steadily
for a moment. Then he leaned over and touched her hand gently with his
fingers,--Pierre’s glove of kindness,--and said: “It’s in my heart to
want to stay; but a sight of you I’ll have on my way back. But I must
go on now, though I’m that drowsy I could lie down here and never stir
again.”
Jen said to herself: “Poor fellow, poor fellow, how tired he is! I
wish”--but she withdrew her hand. He put his hand to his head, and said,
absently: “It’s my duty and it’s orders, and... what was I sayin’? The
disgrace of me if, if... bedad! the sleep’s on me; I’m awake, but I
can’t open my eyes.... If the orders of me--and a good meal... and the
disgrace... to do me duty-looked the world in the face--”
During this speech he staggered to his feet, Jen watching him anxiously
the while. No suspicion of the cause of his trouble crossed her mind.
She set it down to extreme natural exhaustion. Presently feeling the
sofa behind him, he dropped upon it, and, falling back, began to breathe
heavily. But even in this physical stupefaction he made an effort to
reassert himself, to draw himself back from the coming unconsciousness.
His eyes opened, but they were blind with sleep; and as if in a dream,
he said: “My duty... disgrace... a long sleep... Jen, dearest”--how she
started then!--“it must be done... my Jen!” and he said no more.
But these few words had opened up a world for her--a new-created world
on the instant. Her life was illuminated. She felt the fulness of a
great thought suffusing her face. A beautiful dream was upon her. It had
come to her out of his sleep. But with its splendid advent there
came the other thing that always is born with woman’s love--an almost
pathetic care of the being loved. In the deep love of women the maternal
and protective sense works in the parallels of mutual regard. In her
life now it sprang full-statured in action; love of him, care of him;
his honour her honour; his life her life. He must not sleep like this if
it was his duty to go on. Yet how utterly worn he must be! She had seen
men brought in from fighting prairie fires for three days without sleep;
had watched them drop on their beds, and lie like logs for thirty-six
hours. This sleep of her lover was, therefore, not so strange to her but
it was perilous to the performance of his duty.
“Poor Sergeant Tom,” she said. “Poor Tom,” she added; and then, with a
great flutter at the heart at last, “My Tom!” Yes, she said that;
but she said it to the beacon, to the Prairie Star, burning outside
brighter, it seemed to her, than it had ever done be fore. Then she sat
down and watched him for many minutes, thinking at the end of each that
she would wake him. But the minutes passed, his breathing grew heavier,
and he did not stir. The Prairie Star made quivering and luminous
curtains of red for the windows, and Jen’s mind was quivering in vivid
waves of feeling just the same. It seemed to her as if she was looking
at life now through an atmosphere charged with some rare, refining
essence, and that in it she stood exultingly. Perhaps she did not define
it so; but that which we define she felt. And happy are they who feel
it, and, feeling it, do not lose it in this world, and have the hope of
carrying it into the next.
After a time she rose, went over to him and touched his shoulder. It
seemed strange to her to do this thing. She drew back timidly from the
pleasant shock of a new experience. Then she remembered that he ought
to be on his way, and she shook him gently, then, with all her strength,
and called to him quietly all the time, as if her low tones ought
to wake him, if nothing else could. But he lay in a deep and stolid
slumber. It was no use. She went to her seat and sat down to think. As
she did so, her father entered the room.
“Did you call, Jen”? he said; and turned to the sofa. “I was calling to
Sergeant Tom. He’s asleep there; dead-gone, father. I can’t wake him.”
“Why should you wake him? He is tired.”
The sinister lines in Galbraith’s face had deepened greatly in the
last hour. He went over and looked closely at the Sergeant, followed
languidly by Pierre, who casually touched the pulse of the sleeping man,
and said as casually:
“Eh, he sleep well; his pulse is like a baby; he was tired, much. He has
had no sleep for one, two, three nights, perhaps; and a good meal, it
makes him comfortable, and so you see!”
Then he touched lightly the triple chevron on Sergeant Tom’s arm, and
said:
“Eh, a man does much work for that. And then, to be moral and the friend
of the law all the time!” Pierre here shrugged his shoulders. “It is
easier to be wicked and free, and spend when one is rich, and starve
when one is poor, than to be a sergeant and wear the triple chevron. But
the sleep will do him good just the same, Jen Galbraith.”
“He said that he must go to Archangel’s Rise tonight, and be back at
Fort Desire to-morrow night.”
“Well, that’s nothing to us, Jen,” replied Galbraith, roughly. “He’s got
his own business to look after. He and his tribe are none too good to
us and our tribe. He’d have your old father up to-morrow for selling
a tired traveller a glass of brandy; and worse than that, ay, a great
sight worse than that, mind you, Jen.”
Jen did not notice, or, at least, did not heed, the excited emphasis on
the last words. She thought that perhaps her father had been set against
the Sergeant by Pierre.
“There, that’ll do, father,” she said. “It’s easy to bark at a dead
lion. Sergeant Tom’s asleep, and you say things that you wouldn’t say
if he was awake. He never did us any harm, and you know that’s true,
father.”
Galbraith was about to reply with anger; but he changed his mind and
walked into the bar-room, followed by Pierre.
In Jen’s mind a scheme had been hurriedly and clearly formed; and with
her, to form it was to put it into execution. She went to Sergeant Tom,
opened his coat, felt in the inside pocket, and drew forth an official
envelope. It was addressed to Inspector Jules at Archangel’s Rise. She
put it back and buttoned up the coat again. Then she said, with her
hands firmly clenching at her side,--“I’ll do it.”
She went into the adjoining room and got a quilt, which she threw over
him, and a pillow, which she put under his head. Then she took his cap
and the cloak which he had thrown over a chair, as if to carry them
away. But another thought occurred to her, for she looked towards the
bar-room and put them down again. She glanced out of the window and saw
that her father and Pierre had gone to lessen the volume of gas which
was feeding the flame. This, she knew, meant that her father would go
to bed when he came back to the house; and this suited her purpose. She
waited till they had entered the bar-room again, and then she went to
them, and said: “I guess he’s asleep for all night. Best leave him where
he is. I’m going. Good-night.”
When she got back to the sitting-room she said to herself: “How old
father’s looking! He seems broken up to-day. He isn’t what he used to
be.” She turned once more to look at Sergeant Tom, then she went to her
room.
A little later Peter Galbraith and Pretty Pierre went to the
sitting-room, and the old man drew from the Sergeant’s pocket the
envelope which Jen had seen. Pierre took it from him. “No, Pete
Galbraith. Do not be a fool. Suppose you steal that paper. Sergeant Tom
will miss it. He will understand. He will guess about the drug, then you
will be in trouble. Val will be safe now. This Rider of the Plains will
sleep long enough for that. There, I put the paper back. He sleeps like
a log. No one can suspect the drug, and it is all as we like. No, we
will not steal; that is wrong--quite wrong”--here Pretty Pierre showed
his teeth. “We will go to bed. Come!”
Jen heard them ascend the stairs. She waited a half-hour, then she
stole into Val’s bedroom, and when she emerged again she had a bundle
of clothes across her arm. A few minutes more and she walked into the
sitting-room dressed in Val’s clothes, and with her hair closely wound
on the top of her head.
The house was still. The Prairie Star made the room light enough for her
purpose. She took Sergeant Tom’s cap and cloak and put them on. She drew
the envelope from his pocket and put it in her bosom--she showed the
woman there, though for the rest of this night she was to be a Rider of
the Plains, She of the Triple Chevron.
She went towards the door, hesitated, drew back, then paused, stooped
down quickly, tenderly touched the soldier’s brow with her lips, and
said: “I’ll do it for you. You shall not be disgraced--Tom.”