Kitty was ironing clothes in the kitchen of the living shack. She and
her father had been alone in camp for four days. It had rained in the
interim and the greens of Milburn gulch were freshly polished and
gilded. Inside the shack the cherry-coloured embers glowed on the
grate, and a blue gingham dress was falling into crisp and immaculate
folds as it was turned on the ironing board. The door stood open, and
a single big fly buzzed in and out over the sill, as if he couldn't
make up his mind whether he preferred sunshine or shadow.
While Kitty propelled the iron she thought a girl's thoughts, which
alight on a subject as delicately as butterflies, and as lightly sheer
away. Since she had beheld the eager light in Bill's eyes at the sight
of the dark girl, a fluttering disquiet winged in Kitty's mind. She
was thinking of men and women now.
"Annie knows much more"----thus it ran in her head. "I wish she would
tell me. I ought to know. But why do I want to know what is ugly?
But it's neither ugly nor beautiful; it's mixed. Men are not angels.
That's only silly dreaming that leaves you flat. I wouldn't want a man
to be too good, really. Just a spice of danger and uncertainty."
Kitty blushed, and looked around her guiltily as if this dreadful
thought might have been overheard. She applied herself to her ironing
with prim lips.
"I am a fool!" she thought. "Annie is wise. I wish she would come."
Kitty's thoughts were broken in upon by the sound of a footstep outside
the shack. Something heavy and unfamiliar in the fall of it caused her
to call out sharply: "Is that you, dad?"
There was no answer. She started around the ironing-board to
investigate. At the same moment the doorway was darkened by the figure
of a stranger, a piteous, ghastly, unkempt travesty of manhood. For a
moment he wavered there, then pitched headlong to Kitty's feet. One
arm reached toward her as in supplication; the other was grotesquely
doubled under him.
Kitty screamed, and stood rooted to the spot. The man lay without
moving. He had uttered no sound. Jim Sholto came running from the
works with a blanched face. He all but fell over the body, and stood
like his daughter, turned into stone with astonishment, His admirable
composure quickly asserted itself. He dropped to his knees.
"Help me to turn him over, lass," he said quietly.
The face that was revealed with its sunken, bearded cheeks and
painfully drawn lips seemed aged to Kitty. The eyes were closed. Jim
lowered his head to listen at the man's breast.
"He lives," he said succinctly. "Dislocated shoulder--starvation.
Give me your sharpest knife to cut away this sleeve. Get a pillow for
his head. Put water on the stove."
Kitty flew to obey the various orders.
"I'll put his shoulder in before he comes to," Jim went on grimly. "It
is more merciful. It's a nasty job--after a week or more untended.
Can you stand it?"
Kitty nodded.
"Then hold him as I bid you."
Jim Sholto at fifty was still more powerful than either of his sons.
He needed all his strength for the cruel job in hand. The swollen,
feverish flesh was dreadful to see. Kitty closed her eyes and gritted
her teeth and held on. Deep, soft groans broke from the unconscious
man as Jim worked over him. Finally, with a dull click as of colliding
billiard balls, it was done. Jim stood up and wiped his face. Now
that the most urgent service had been rendered, curiosity began to have
way.
"Did you see him come?" he asked.
Kitty shook her head.
"H'm!" said Jim. "With all this vast empty land to choose from, he
stumbles on us. Look, his moccasins are worn clean through."
"What happened to him?" said Kitty.
"Who knows?" said Jim. "Maybe just the folly of an ignorant man
travelling alone. Maybe there's something on him to give us a clue."
Jim knelt again. His searching fingers came in contact with a little
cloth packet sewed to the inside of the man's shirt. Cutting the
stitches with the point of his knife, he unwrapped it, and revealed
inside a final wrapping of soft cotton, a delicate platinum chain with
a great gleaming emerald hanging from it. Father and daughter looked
at each other in strong amazement.
"There's some strange tale behind this," said Jim. "Put it in a safe
place."
The stranger's eyelids flickered, and a slight sound issued from his
lips.
"We must lay him on your bed," said Jim. "This is your job from now.
Is there any condensed milk left?"
"I have saved a can," said Kitty.
"Dilute it and warm it, and feed him bread soaked in it when he is able
to swallow. Keep hot cloths around his shoulder. Like he will have
fever. Give him gelseminum and aconite. You know the doses."
"I know," said Kitty.
A new era began for her from that moment. In the presence of this
urgent reality her vague discontents were dissipated like morning
mists. Kitty had a passion for mothering, which had never been
satisfied, for they all treated her like a child, and none of them had
ever been sick. At first the stricken man--that strange visitant from
nowhere--was no more than an object for her to wreak her passionate
pity upon. Only by degrees did he come to have an individuality for
her. It commenced at the moment when she made the surprising discovery
that he was young. She learned that from the fresh, vibrant quality of
his voice. He was delirious.
All that night, and the next day, and the night that followed he tossed
and murmured in his fever. But it could be seen that he was growing
better. Kitty was sleepless and happy. At first his speech was
formless and incoherent. Later he fixed Kitty with his big bright
eyes, and spoke with an unnatural distinctness and appearance of
sanity. She listened as one listens to a romance, interested and
thrilled, but unsuspicious of any real foundation to the tale. It was
too much like a phantasy of the imagination, all his talk of a
beautiful valley hidden within the mountains, that you entered through
a cave; and of a brave and lovely woman who ruled the place, that he
called Nahnya. The name suggested nothing to Kitty.
"He is a poet," she thought with a touch of awe. In her simplicity she
wrote it all down during the hours of the night, that she might be able
to tell him later.
On the second morning, Kitty dozing on a chair beside the bed was
startled into complete wakefulness by hearing him say in a weak,
natural voice:
"You are real! I thought I had dreamed you!"
"You're better!" cried Kitty overjoyed.
"Is it still up North?" he said wonderingly. "I never expected to see
a white girl!"
"There's none but me," said Kitty.
"How did I come here?" he asked.
"I don't know," said Kitty. "You just tumbled in the door."
He told her of his accident.
"The Stanley rapids!" said Kitty. "That is only ten miles up the
river. You must have been many days making it!"
"Walking in circles I suppose," he said. "I started all right, keeping
to the shore. But the pain was so bad, I suppose I got lightheaded. I
remember stumbling through the woods with all kinds of things going
through my head----!"
"You mustn't talk any more," said Kitty commandingly.
"All right," he said smiling. "Don't go away!"
Nourishment and good care worked wonders with the patient. He insisted
on getting up next day. Catching sight of his face in a mirror, he
cried out in horror, and demanded a razor. Kitty left him alone to
make himself presentable, while she helped her father in the works.
Returning at length, she found him sitting in the kitchen
metamorphosed. His thick dark hair was brushed and gleaming; he smiled
at her with a face as smooth and bland as a boy's. Wonderful are the
changes wrought in men's faces by a razor! Kitty, remembering how he
had looked when her father turned him over, could scarcely believe her
eyes.
There was likewise a changed quality in his smile. Kitty read in it
that he found her good to look at. She was much taken aback by the
discovery. In a twinkling, it seemed to her, their positions had been
reversed. He was no longer her sick child, but a man--a possible
master. Her heart began to beat fast. To hide her confusion, she
turned and rummaged on the kitchen shelves. Even with her back turned
she felt as if his careless, smiling eyes were laying bare her very
soul. She could not tell whether it was painful or sweet to have it
exposed to him.
Of course she was not as open as she fancied herself to be. Ralph
guessed nothing. Presently she turned with a composed face, and
without comment brought him the little packet they had discovered on
his body.
He saw the emerald lying on her outstretched hand without offering to
take it. An expression of pain crossed his face, and he averted his
head.
"Please keep it for me," he said. "I don't want to be obliged to think
of things yet."
A little jealous stab of the unknown pricked Kitty's breast. She put
the bauble away in her room.
Coming back she said, with a brisk attempt to reassert a nurse's
authority: "You may go out and sit in the sun for an hour."
It only made him smile now--covering her with confusion again. "Yes,
ma'am," he said with mock humility. "If you'll come, too."
"I have my work to do," said Kitty rebukingly.
He was incorrigible. "Please, I can't walk all that way without help,"
he said plaintively.
She laughed, and helped him outside; lingered beside the bench--and
finally sat down on the other end of it. Poor, inexperienced Kitty had
no armour for her soft breast. They chattered and laughed, and the
hours flew on wings. Ralph told her no more of his story than his name
and profession. She, seeing that it distressed him to rake up the
past, was happy to avoid it. For the same reason she forbore saying
anything as yet about the wonderful story he had told in his delirium.
She, likewise in private, made her father agree not to ask their
visitor any questions until he was stronger.
Ralph's frame of mind was natural to one recovering from a sudden,
serious illness. He instinctively felt the necessity of maintaining a
quiet mind while the strength stole deliciously back through his veins.
Away back he apprehended a burden waiting to be shouldered when he was
strong enough, but at present he would have none of it. He was no more
than a bit of reanimated clay gratefully absorbing the sunshine. At no
time was vanity a great factor in his make-up, and in his present
purgated state it was non-existent. It honestly never occurred to him
that their jolly talk and laughter, and the exchange of happy glances
might be working irremediable damage in the breast of the dreamy girl
beside him.
Ralph, now sufficiently recovered, was banished to the men's bunks,
outside, and Kitty repossessed herself of her own room. That night in
the secure and comfortable darkness her defences fell away from her.
She pressed her lips to the pillow that had supported his dear head
throughout his illness, and moistened it with her tears. "Little did I
guess when he came tumbling through the doorway," she thought--and left
the thought unfinished on a swelling breast. "It is like an answer to
a prayer I didn't dare make," she whispered to herself. When doubts
and jealousies of the mystery that enshrouded him obtruded on her, she
thrust them away. "It must be all right!" she insisted. "His feet
were led to our door!"
The next day passed in the same fashion. Ralph insisted on helping
Kitty with the housework, much to her amused scorn. Ralph took an
inexhaustible delight in her naïve simplicity. She loved to have him
chaff her. He seemed to her the cleverest, kindest, most lovable of
superior creatures. Further than that the mystery of his manliness
thrilled her. In his eyes there lurked a strange, sly promise of
rapture. She called it "wickedness" in her innocence and was sweetly
troubled. "What shall I do if he tries to kiss me?" she thought in a
delicious panic. As the day passed and he made no move to do so a
faint chagrin made itself felt, which she refused to recognize.
As if moved by a common impulse they kept their conversational shallop
floating in the safe shallows. Reminiscences of childhood afforded
them much humorous matter. Ralph did most of the talking.
"Once when I was a kid," he said, "they dug up the street in front of
our house for a drain, and ran into an Indian burial ground. My chum
and I played ninepins on the sidewalk with the skulls, and the
constable arrested us. What a fuss there was!"
"I should say so!" said Kitty, simulating a virtuous indignation.
"Little savages!"
"Why?" said Ralph teasingly. "Old bones are all right. Don't you like
their nice earthy smell?"
"Horrible!" said Kitty.
"Did you ever see Hamlet?" asked Ralph. He apostrophized, a teacup in
his extended hand. "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well, Horatio. He
was a fellow of infinite jest!"
Ralph acted out the speech for her with improvisations. Kitty was
obliged to sit down suddenly, and to hold her sides. Kitty was one of
those shy, admiring, easily shocked, and easily moved-to-laughter
girls, that inspire a man to the highest flights of audacious wit.
"Speaking of bones," Ralph went on; "when I was a student at McGill, my
room-mate and I saved up enough to buy a whole skeleton all properly
articulated. It was a peach! We kept it in the closet hanging from a
clothes-hook."
"Mercy!" said Kitty.
"The landlady had a daughter who had a beau, and the two of them used
to make us fellows tired with their goings-on. They'd stand for half
an hour at the foot of the stairs saying good-night. Yes, it sounded
like a cow drawing her foot out of a boggy place!"
"Aren't you awful!" said Kitty, blushing.
"We decided that something must be done," Ralph went on. "I got some
phosphorus paint, and we painted the skeleton all over and fastened a
long line to the hook in his skull that was used to hang him up by.
And that night when the pair of them came out in the hall downstairs,
and turned down the light, we crept out on the upper landing, and
leaned over the rail, and let Mr. Bones go walking slowly step by step
down the stairs. He was a lovely blue colour; every bone stood out!"
"You might have killed them with fright," said Kitty.
"No such luck!" said Ralph. "They didn't hear him coming until he was
halfway down. Then I rattled him a little. Jehosaphat! You never
heard such a screech in your life! Both of them! They made for the
front door, and rattled it like mad, and couldn't get it open! I
laughed so hard the string slipped out of my hand. And Mr. Bones went
down the rest of the stairs sitting up just like a person--rattle,
clatter, smash! Oh, my! Oh, my!"
"I don't think it was funny at all!" said Kitty. But she laughed, and
her eyes confessed her admiration of his dreadful boldness.
"Next day we moved," said Ralph.