Half a dozen times that night David had walked from end to end of the
five snowbound coaches that made up the Transcontinental. He believed
that for him it was an act of Providence that had delayed the train.
Otherwise a sleeping car would have been picked up at the next
divisional point, and he would not have unburdened himself to Father
Roland. They would not have sat up until that late hour in the smoking
compartment, and this strange little man of the forest would not have
told him the story of a lonely cabin up on the edge of the Barrens--a
story of strange pathos and human tragedy that had, in some mysterious
way, unsealed his own lips. David had kept to himself the shame and
heartbreak of his own affliction since the day he had been compelled to
tell it, coldly and without visible emotion, to gain his own freedom. He
had meant to keep it to himself always. And of a sudden it had all come
out. He was not sorry. He was glad. He was amazed at the change in
himself. That day had been a terrible day for him. He could not get
_her_ out of his mind. Now a depressing hand seemed to have lifted
itself from his heart. He was quick to understand. His story had not
fallen upon ears eager with sensual curiosity. He had met a _man_, and
from the soul of that man there had reached out to him the spirit of a
deep and comforting strength. He would have revolted at compassion, and
words of pity would have shamed him. Father Roland had given voice to
neither of these. But the grip of his hand had been like the grip of an
iron man.
In the third coach David sat down in an empty seat. For the first time
in many months there was a thrill of something in his blood which he
could not analyze. What had the Little Missioner meant when, with that
wonderful grip of his knotted hand, he had said, "I've learned how a man
can find himself when he's down and out"? And what had he meant when he
added, "Will you come with me"? Go with him? Where?
There came a sudden crash of the storm against the window, a shrieking
blast of wind and snow, and David stared into the night. He could see
nothing. It was a black chaos outside. But he could hear. He could hear
the wailing and the moaning of the wind in the trees, and he almost
fancied that it was not darkness alone that shut out his vision, but the
thick walls of the forest.
Was that what Father Roland had meant? Had he asked him to go with him
into _that_?
His face touched the cold glass. He stared harder. That morning Father
Roland had boarded the train at a wilderness station and had taken a
seat beside him. They had become acquainted. And later the Little
Missioner had told him how those vast forests reached without a break
for hundreds of miles into the mysterious North. He loved them, even as
they lay cold and white outside the windows. There was gladness in his
voice when he had said that he was going back into them. They were a
part of _his_ world--a world of "mystery and savage glory" he had
called it, stretching for a thousand miles to the edge of the Arctic,
and fifteen hundred miles from Hudson's Bay to the western mountains.
And to-night he had said, "Will you come with me?"
David's pulse quickened. A thousand little snow demons beat in his face
to challenge his courage. The wind swept down, as if enraged at the
thought in his mind, and scooped up volley after volley of drifting snow
and hurled them at him. There was only the thin glass between. It was
like the defiance of a living thing. It threatened him. It dared him. It
invited him out like a great bully, with a brawling show of fists. He
had always been more or less pusillanimous in the face of winter. He
disliked cold. He hated snow. But this that beat and shrieked at him
outside the window had set something stirring strangely within him. It
was a desire, whimsical and undecided at first, to thrust his face out
into that darkness and feel the sting of the wind and snow. It was
Father Roland's world. And Father Roland had invited him to enter it.
That was the curious part of the situation, as it was impressed upon him
as he sat with his face flattened against the window. The Little
Missioner had invited him, and the night was daring him. For a single
moment the incongruity of it all made him forget himself, and he
laughed--a chuckling, half-broken, and out-of-tune sort of laugh. It was
the first time in a year that he had forgotten himself anywhere near to
a point resembling laughter, and in the sudden and inexplicable
spontaneity of it he was startled. He turned quickly, as though some one
at his side had laughed and he was about to demand an explanation. He
looked across the aisle and his eyes met squarely the eyes of a woman.
He saw nothing but the eyes at first. They were big, dark, questing
eyes--eyes that had in them a hunting look, as though they hoped to find
in his face the answer to a great question. Never in his life had he
seen eyes that were so haunted by a great unrest, or that held in their
lustrous depths the smouldering glow of a deeper grief. Then the face
added itself to the eyes. It was not a young face. The woman was past
forty. But this age did not impress itself over a strange and appealing
beauty in her countenance which was like the beauty of a flower whose
petals are falling. Before David had seen more than this she turned her
eyes from him slowly and doubtfully, as if not quite convinced that she
had found what she sought, and faced the darkness beyond her own side of
the car.
David was puzzled, and he looked at her with still deeper interest. Her
seat was turned so that it was facing him across the aisle, three seats
ahead, and he could look at her without conspicuous effort or rudeness.
Her hood had slipped down and hung by its long scarf about her
shoulders. She leaned toward the window, and as she stared out, her chin
rested in the cup of her hand. He noticed that her hand was thin, and
that there was a shadowy hollow in the white pallor of her cheek. Her
hair was heavy and done in thick coils that glowed dully in the
lamplight. It was a deep brown, almost black, shot through with little
silvery threads of gray.
For a few moments David withdrew his gaze, subconsciously ashamed of the
directness of his scrutiny. But after a little his eyes drifted back to
her. Her head was sunk forward a little, he caught now a pathetic droop
of her shoulders, and he fancied that he saw a little shiver run through
her. Just as before he had felt the desire to thrust his face out into
the night, he felt now an equally unaccountable impulse to speak to her
and ask her if he could in any way be of service to her. But he could
see no excuse for this presumptuousness in himself. If she was in
distress it was not of a physical sort for which he might have suggested
his services as a remedy. She was neither hungry nor cold, for there was
a basket at her side in which he had a glimpse of broken bits of food;
and at her back, draped over the seat, was a heavy beaver-skin coat.
He rose to his feet with the intention of returning to the smoking
compartment in which he had left Father Roland. His movement seemed to
rouse the woman. Again her dark eyes met his own. They looked straight
up at him as he stood in the aisle, and he stopped. Her lips trembled.
"Are you ... acquainted ... between here and Lac Seul?" she asked.
Her voice had in it the same haunting mystery that he had seen in her
eyes, the same apprehension, the same hope, as though some curious and
indefinable instinct was telling her that in this stranger she was very
near to the thing which she was seeking.
"I am a stranger," he said. "This is the first time I have ever been in
this country."
She sank back, the look of hope in her face dying out like a passing
flash.
"I thank you," she murmured. "I thought perhaps you might know of a man
whom I am seeking--a man by the name of Michael O'Doone."
She did not expect him to speak again. She drew her heavy coat about her
and turned her face toward the window. There was nothing that he could
say, nothing that he could do, and he went back to Father Roland.
He was in the last coach when a sound came to him faintly. It was too
sharp for the wailing of the storm. Others heard it and grew suddenly
erect, with tense and listening faces. The young woman with the round
mouth gave a little gasp. A man pacing back and forth in the aisle
stopped as if at the point of a bayonet.
It came again.
The heavy-jowled man who had taken the adventure as a jest at first, and
who had rolled himself in his great coat like a hibernating woodchuck,
unloosed his voice in a rumble of joy.
"It's the whistle!" he announced. "The damned thing's coming at last!"