I
When old Throng the trader, trembling with sickness and misery, got on
his knees to Captain Halby and groaned, “She didn’t want to go; they
dragged her off; you’ll fetch her back, won’t ye?--she always had a
fancy for you, cap’n,” Pierre shrugged a shoulder and said:
“But you stole her when she was in her rock-a-by, my Throng--you and
your Manette.”
“Like a match she was--no bigger,” continued the old man. “Lord, how
that stepmother bully-ragged her, and her father didn’t care a darn.
He’d half a dozen others--Manette and me hadn’t none. We took her and
used her like as if she was an angel, and we brought her off up here.
Haven’t we set store by her? Wasn’t it ‘cause we was lonely an’ loved
her we took her? Hasn’t everybody stood up and said there wasn’t anyone
like her in the North? Ain’t I done fair by her always--ain’t I? An’
now, when this cough ‘s eatin’ my life out, and Manette ‘s gone, and
there ain’t a soul but Duc the trapper to put a blister on to me, them
brutes ride up from over the border, call theirselves her brothers, an’
drag her off!”
He was still on his knees. Pierre reached over and lightly kicked a
moccasined foot.
“Get up, Jim Throng,” he said. “Holy! do you think the law moves because
an old man cries? Is it in the statutes?--that’s what the law says. Does
it come within the act? Is it a trespass--an assault and battery?--a
breach of the peace?--a misdemeanour? Victoria--So and So: that’s how
the law talks. Get on your knees to Father Corraine, not to Captain
Halby, Jimmy Throng.”
Pierre spoke in a half-sinister, ironical way, for between him and
Captain Halby’s Riders of the Plains there was no good feeling. More
than once he had come into conflict with them, more than once had they
laid their hands on him--and taken them off again in due time. He had
foiled them as to men they wanted; he had defied them--but he had helped
them too, when it seemed right to him; he had sided with them once or
twice when to do so was perilous to himself. He had sneered at them,
he did not like them, nor they him. The sum of it was, he thought them
brave--and stupid; and he knew that the law erred as often as it set
things right.
The Trader got up and stood between the two men, coughing much, his face
straining, his eyes bloodshot, as he looked anxiously from Pierre to
Halby. He was the sad wreck of a strong man. Nothing looked strong about
him now save his head, which, with its long grey hair, seemed badly
balanced by the thin neck, through which the terrible cough was hacking.
“Only half a lung left,” he stammered, as soon as he could speak, “an’
Duc can’t fix the boneset, camomile, and whisky, as she could. An’ he
waters the whisky--curse-his-soul!” The last three words were spoken
through another spasm of coughing. “An’ the blister--how he mucks the
blister!”
Pierre sat back on the table, laughing noiselessly, his white teeth
shining. Halby, with one foot on a bench, was picking at the fur on
his sleeve thoughtfully. His face was a little drawn, his lips were
tight-pressed, and his eyes had a light of excitement. Presently he
straightened himself, and, after a half-malicious look at Pierre, he
said to Throng:
“Where are they, do you say?”
“They’re at”--the old man coughed hard--“at Fort O’Battle.”
“What are they doing there?”
“Waitin’ till spring, when they’ll fetch their cattle up an’ settle
there.”
“They want--Lydia--to keep house for them?” The old man writhed.
“Yes, God’s sake, that’s it! An’ they want Liddy to marry a devil
called Borotte, with a thousand cattle or so--Pito the courier told me
yesterday. Pito saw her, an’ he said she was white like a sheet, an’
called out to him as he went by. Only half a lung I got, an’ her boneset
and camomile ‘d save it for a bit, mebbe--mebbe!”
“It’s clear,” said Halby, “that they trespassed, and they haven’t proved
their right to her.”
“Tonnerre, what a thinker!” said Pierre, mocking. Halby did not notice.
His was a solid sense of responsibility.
“She is of age?” he half asked, half mused.
“She’s twenty-one,” answered the old man, with difficulty.
“Old enough to set the world right,” suggested Pierre, still mocking.
“She was forced away, she regarded you as her natural protector, she
believed you her father: they broke the law,” said the soldier.
“There was Moses, and Solomon, and Caesar, and Socrates, and now...!”
murmured Pierre in assumed abstraction.
A red spot burned on Halby’s high cheekbone for a minute, but he
persistently kept his temper.
“I’m expected elsewhere,” he said at last. “I’m only one man, yet I wish
I could go to-day--even alone. But--”
“But you have a heart,” said Pierre. “How wonderful--a heart! And
there’s the half a lung, and the boneset and camomile tea, and the
blister, and the girl with an eye like a spot of rainbow, and the
sacred law in a Remington rifle! Well, well! And to do it in the early
morning--to wait in the shelter of the trees till some go to look after
the horses, then enter the house, arrest those inside, and lay low for
the rest.”
Halby looked over at Pierre astonished. Here was raillery and good
advice all in a piece.
“It isn’t wise to go alone, for if there’s trouble and I should go down,
who’s to tell the truth? Two could do it; but one--no, it isn’t wise,
though it would look smart enough.”
“Who said to go alone?” asked Pierre, scrawling on the table with a
burnt match.
“I have no men.”
Pierre looked up at the wall.
“Throng has a good Snider there,” he said. “Bosh! Throng can’t go.”
The old man coughed and strained.
“If it wasn’t--only-half a lung, and I could carry the boneset ‘long
with us.”
Pierre slid off the table, came to the old man, and, taking him by
the arms, pushed him gently into a chair. “Sit down; don’t be a fool,
Throng,” he said. Then he turned to Halby: “You’re a magistrate--make me
a special constable; I’ll go, monsieur le capitaine--of no company.”
Halby stared. He knew Pierre’s bravery, his ingenuity and daring. But
this was the last thing he expected: that the malicious, railing little
half-breed would work with him and the law. Pierre seemed to understand
his thoughts, for he said: “It is not for you. I am sick for adventure,
and then there is mademoiselle--such a finger she has for a ven’son
pudding.”
Without a word Halby wrote on a leaf in his notebook, and presently
handed the slip to Pierre. “That’s your commission as a special
constable,” he said, “and here’s the seal on it.” He handed over a
pistol.
Pierre raised his eyebrows at it, but Halby continued: “It has the
Government mark. But you’d better bring Throng’s rifle too.”
Throng sat staring at the two men, his hands nervously shifting on
his knees. “Tell Liddy,” he said, “that the last batch of bread was
sour--Duc ain’t no good-an’ that I ain’t had no relish sence she left.
Tell her the cough gits lower down all the time. ‘Member when she tended
that felon o’ yourn, Pierre?”
Pierre looked at a sear on his finger and nodded. “She cut it too young;
but she had the nerve! When do you start, captain? It’s an eighty-mile
ride.”
“At once,” was the reply. “We can sleep to-night in the Jim-a-long-Jo”
(a hut which the Company had built between two distant posts), “and get
there at dawn day after to-morrow. The snow is light and we can travel
quick. I have a good horse, and you--”
“I have my black Tophet. He’ll travel with your roan as on one
snaffle-bar. That roan--you know where he come from?”
“From the Dolright stud, over the Border.”
“That’s wrong. He come from Greystop’s paddock, where my Tophet was
foaled; they are brothers. Yours was stole and sold to the Gover’ment;
mine was bought by good hard money. The law the keeper of stolen
goods, eh? But these two will go cinch to cinch all the way, like two
brothers--like you and me.”
He could not help the touch of irony in his last words: he saw the
amusing side of things, and all humour in him had a strain of the
sardonic.
“Brothers-in-law for a day or two,” answered Halby drily.
Within two hours they were ready to start. Pierre had charged Duc the
incompetent upon matters for the old man’s comfort, and had himself,
with a curious sort of kindness, steeped the boneset and camomile in
whisky, and set a cup of it near his chair. Then he had gone up to
Throng’s bedroom and straightened out and shook and “made” the corn-husk
bed, which had gathered into lumps and rolls. Before he came down he
opened a door near by and entered another room, shutting the door, and
sitting down on a chair. A stovepipe ran through the room, and it was
warm, though the window was frosted and the world seemed shut out. He
looked round slowly, keenly interested. There was a dressing-table made
of an old box; it was covered with pink calico, with muslin over this.
A cheap looking-glass on it was draped with muslin and tied at the top
with a bit of pink ribbon. A common bone comb lay near the glass, and
beside it a beautiful brush with an ivory back and handle. This was the
only expensive thing in the room. He wondered, but did not go near it
yet. There was a little eight-day clock on a bracket which had been made
by hand--pasteboard darkened with umber and varnished; a tiny little
set of shelves made of the wood of cigar-boxes; and--alas, the shifts
of poverty to be gay!--an easy-chair made of the staves of a barrel and
covered with poor chintz. Then there was a photograph or two, in little
frames made from the red cedar of cigar-boxes, with decorations of
putty, varnished, and a long panel screen of birch-bark of Indian
workmanship. Some dresses hung behind the door. The bedstead was small,
the frame was of hickory, with no footboard, ropes making the support
for the husk tick. Across the foot lay a bedgown and a pair of
stockings.
Pierre looked long, at first curiously; but after a little his forehead
gathered and his lips drew in a little, as if he had a twinge of pain.
He got up, went over near the bed, and picked up a hairpin. Then he came
back to the chair and sat down, turning it about in his fingers, still
looking abstractedly at the floor.
“Poor Lucy!” he said presently; “the poor child! Ah, what a devil I was
then--so long ago!”
This solitary room--Lydia’s--had brought back the time he went to the
room of his own wife, dead by her own hand after an attempt to readjust
the broken pieces of life, and sat and looked at the place which had
been hers, remembering how he had left her with her wet face turned to
the wall, and never saw her again till she was set free for ever. Since
that time he had never sat in a room sacred to a woman alone.
“What a fool, what a fool, to think!” he said at last, standing up; “but
this girl must be saved. She must have her home here again.”
Unconsciously he put the hairpin in his pocket, walked over to the
dressing-table and picked up the hair-brush. On its back was the legend,
“L. T. from C. H.” He gave a whistle.
“So-so?” he said, “‘C. H.’ M’sieu’ le capitaine, is it like that?”
A year before, Lydia had given Captain Halby a dollar to buy her a
hair-brush at Winnipeg, and he had brought her one worth ten dollars.
She had beautiful hair, and what pride she had in using this brush!
Every Sunday morning she spent a long time in washing, curling, and
brushing her hair, and every night she tended it lovingly, so that it
was a splendid rich brown like her eye, coiling nobly above her plain,
strong face with its good colour.
Pierre, glancing in the glass, saw Captain Halby’s face looking over
his shoulder. It startled him, and he turned round. There was the face
looking out from a photograph that hung on the wall in the recess where
the bed was. He noted now that the likeness hung where the girl could
see it the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning.
“So far as that, eh!” he said. “And m’sieu’ is a gentleman, too. We
shall see what he will do: he has his chance now, once for all.”
He turned, came to the door, softly opened it, passed out, and shut
it, then descended the stairs, and in half an hour was at the door with
Captain Halby, ready to start. It was an exquisite winter day, even
in its bitter coldness. The sun was shining clear and strong, all the
plains glistened and shook like quicksilver, and the vast blue cup of
sky seemed deeper than it had ever been. But the frost ate the skin
like an acid, and when Throng came to the door Pierre drove him back
instantly from the air.
“I only-wanted--to say--to Liddy,” hacked the old man, “that I’m
thinkin’--a little m’lasses ‘d kinder help--the boneset an’ camomile.
Tell her that the cattle ‘ll all be hers--an’--the house, an’ I ain’t
got no one but--”
But Pierre pushed him back and shut the door, saying: “I’ll tell
her what a fool you are, Jimmy Throng.” The old man, as he sat down
awkwardly in his chair, with Duc stolidly lighting his pipe and watching
him, said to himself: “Yes, I be a durn fool; I be, I be!” over and over
again. And when the dog got up from near the stove and came near to him,
he added: “I be, Touser; I be a durn fool, for I ought to ha’ stole two
or three, an’ then I’d not be alone, an’ nothin’ but sour bread an’ pork
to eat. I ought to ha’ stole three.”
“Ah, Manette ought to have given you some of your own, it’s true, that!”
said Duc stolidly. “You never was a real father, Jim.”
“Liddy got to look like me; she got to look like Manette and me, I tell
ye!” said the old man hoarsely. Duc laughed in his stupid way. “Look
like you? Look like you, Jim, with a face to turn milk sour? Ho, ho!”
Throng rose, his face purple with anger, and made as if to catch Duc by
the throat, but a fit of coughing seized him, and presently blood showed
on his lips. Duc, with a rough gentleness, wiped off the blood and put
the whisky-and-herbs to the sick man’s lips, saying, in a fatherly way:
“For why you do like that? You’re a fool, Jimmy!”
“I be, I be,” said the old man in a whisper, and let his hand rest on
Duc’s shoulder.
“I’ll fix the bread sweet next time, Jimmy.”
“No, no,” said the husky voice peevishly. “She’ll do it--Liddy’ll do it.
Liddy’s comin’.”
“All right, Jimmy. All right.”
After a moment Throng shook his head feebly and said, scarcely above a
whisper:
“But I be a durn fool--when she’s not here.”
Duc nodded and gave him more whisky and herbs. “My feet’s cold,” said
the old man, and Duc wrapped a bearskin round his legs.