winds came out of the North, and nights these winds wailed desolately
through the tops of the spruce under which they slept. And day after
day and night after night the temptation came upon him more strongly to
open the letter he was carrying to Peter God.
He was convinced now that the letter--and the letter alone--held his
fate, and that he was acting blindly. Was this justice to himself? He
wanted Josephine. He wanted her above all else in the world. Then why
should he not fight for her--in his own way? And to do that he must
read the letter. To know its contents would mean--Josephine. If there
was nothing in it that would stand between them, he would have done no
wrong, for he would still take it on to Peter God. So he argued. But if
the letter jeopardized his chances of possessing her, his knowledge of
what it contained would give him an opportunity to win in another way.
He could even answer it himself and take back to her false word from
Peter God, for seven frost-biting years along the edge of the Barren
had surely changed Peter God's handwriting. His treachery, if it could
be called that, would never be discovered. And it would give him
Josephine.
This was the temptation. The power that resisted it was the spirit of
that big, clean, fighting North which makes men out of a beginning of
flesh and bone. Ten years of that North had seeped into Philip's being.
He hung on. It was November when he reached Port MacPherson, and he had
not opened the letter.
Deep snows fell, and fierce blizzards shot like gunblasts from out of
the Arctic. Snow and wind were not what brought the deeper gloom and
fear to Fort MacPherson. La mort rouge, smallpox,--the "red
death,"--was galloping through the wilderness. Rumors were first
verified by facts from the Dog Rib Indians. A quarter of them were down
with the scourge of the Northland. From Hudson's Bay on the east to the
Great Bear on the west, the fur posts were sending out their runners,
and a hundred Paul Reveres of the forests were riding swiftly behind
their dogs to spread the warning. On the afternoon of the day Philip
left for the cabin of Peter God, a patrol of the Royal Mounted came in
on snowshoes from the South, and voluntarily went into quarantine.
Philip traveled slowly. For three days and nights the air was filled
with the "Arctic dust" snow that was hard as flint and stung like shot;
and it was so cold that he paused frequently and built small fires,
over which he filled his lungs with hot air and smoke. He knew what it
meant to have the lungs "touched"--sloughing away in the spring,
blood-spitting, and certain death.
On the fourth day the temperature began to rise; the fifth it was
clear, and thirty degrees warmer. His thermometer had gone to sixty
below zero. It was now thirty below.
It was the morning of the sixth day when he reached the thick fringe of
stunted spruce that sheltered Peter God's cabin. He was half blinded.
The snow-filled blizzards cut his face until it was swollen and purple.
Twenty paces from Peter God's cabin he stopped, and stared, and rubbed
his eyes--and rubbed them again--as though not quite sure his vision
was not playing him a trick.
A cry broke from his lips then. Over Peter God's door there was nailed
a slender sapling, and at the end of that sapling there floated a
tattered, windbeaten red rag. It was the signal. It was the one voice
common to all the wilderness--a warning to man, woman and child, white
or red, that had come down through the centuries. Peter God was down
with the smallpox!
For a few moments the discovery stunned him. Then he was filled with a
chill, creeping horror. Peter God was sick with the scourge. Perhaps he
was dying. It might be--that he was dead. In spite of the terror of the
thing ahead of him, he thought of Josephine. If Peter God was dead--
Above the low moaning of the wind in the spruce tops he cursed himself.
He had thought a crime, and he clenched his mittened hands as he stared
at the one window of the cabin. His eyes shifted upward. In the air was
a filmy, floating gray. It was smoke coming from the chimney. Peter God
was not dead.
Something kept him from shouting Peter God's name, that the trapper
might come to the door. He went to the window, and looked in. For a few
moments he could see nothing. And then, dimly, he made out the cot
against the wall. And Peter God sat on the cot, hunched forward, his
head in his hands. With a quick breath Philip turned to the door,
opened it, and entered the cabin. Peter God staggered to his feet as
the door opened. His eyes were wild and filled with fever.
"You--Curtis!" he cried huskily. "My God, didn't you see the flag?"
"Yes."
Philip's half-frozen features were smiling, and now he was holding out
a hand from which he had drawn his mitten.
"Lucky I happened along just now, old man. You've got it, eh?"
Peter God shrank back from the other's outstretched hand.
"There's time," he cried, pointing to the door.
"Don't breathe this air. Get out. I'm not bad yet--but it's smallpox,
Curtis!"
"I know it," said Philip, beginning to throw off his hood and coat.
"I'm not afraid of it. I had a touch of it three years ago over on the
Gray Buzzard, so I guess I'm immune. Besides, I've come two thousand
miles to see you, Peter God--two thousand miles to bring you a letter
from Josephine McCloud."
For ten seconds Peter God stood tense and motionless. Then he swayed
forward.
"A letter--for Peter God--from Josephine McCloud?" he gasped, and held
out his hands.
An hour later they sat facing each other--Peter God and Curtis. The
beginning of the scourge betrayed itself in the red flush of Peter
God's face, and the fever in his eyes. But he was calm. For many
minutes he had spoken in a quiet, even voice, and Philip Curtis sat
with scarcely a breath and a heart that at times had risen in his
throat to choke him. In his hand Peter God held the pages of the letter
he had read.
Now he went on:
"So I'm going to tell it all to you, Curtis--because I know that you
are a man. Josephine has left nothing out. She has told me of your
love, and of the reward she has promised you--if Peter God sends back a
certain word. She says frankly that she does not love you, but that she
honors you above all men--except her father, and one other. That other,
Curtis, is myself. Years ago the woman you love--was my wife."
Peter God put a hand to his head, as if to cool the fire that was
beginning to burn him up.
"Her name wasn't Mrs. Peter God," he went on, and a smile fought grimly
on his lips. "That's the one thing I won't tell you, Curtis--my name.
The story itself will be enough.
"Perhaps there were two other people in the world happier than we. I
doubt it. I got into politics. I made an enemy, a deadly enemy. He was
a blackmailer, a thief, the head of a political ring that lived on
graft. Through my efforts he was exposed, And then he laid for me--and
he got me.
"I must give him credit for doing it cleverly and completely. He set a
trap for me, and a woman helped him. I won't go into details. The trap
sprung, and it caught me. Even Josephine could not be made to believe
in my innocence; so cleverly was the trap set that my best friends
among the newspapers could find no excuse for me.
"I have never blamed Josephine for what she did after that. To all the
world, and most of all to her, I was caught red-handed. I knew that she
loved me even as she was divorcing me. On the day the divorce was given
to her, my brain went bad. The world turned red, and then black, and
then red again. And I--"
Peter God paused again, with a hand to his head.
"You came up here," said Philip, in a low voice.
"Not--until I had seen the man who ruined me," replied Peter God
quietly. "We were alone in his office. I gave him a fair chance to
redeem himself--to confess what he had done. He laughed at me, exulted
over my fall, taunted me. And so--I killed him."
He rose from his chair and stood swaying. He was not excited.
"In his office, with his dead body at my feet, I wrote a note to
Josephine," he finished. "I told her what I had done, and again I swore
my innocence. I wrote her that some day she might hear from me, but not
under my right name, as the law would always be watching for me. It was
ironic that on that human cobra's desk there lay an open Bible, open at
the Book of Peter, and involuntarily I wrote the words to
Josephine--PETER GOD. She has kept my secret, while the law has hunted
for me. And this--"
He held the pages of the letter out to Philip.
"Take the letter--go outside--and read what she has written," he said.
"Come back in half an hour. I want to think."
Back of the cabin, where Peter God had piled his winter's fuel, Philip
read the letter; and at times the soul within him seemed smothered, and
at times it quivered with a strange and joyous emotion.
At last vindication had come for Peter God, and before he had read a
page of the letter Philip understood why it was that Josephine had sent
him with it into the North. For nearly seven years she had known of
Peter God's innocence of the thing for which she had divorced him. The
woman--the dead man's accomplice--had told her the whole story, as
Peter God a few minutes before had told it to Curtis; and during those
seven years she had traveled the world seeking for him--the man who
bore the name of Peter God.
Each night she had prayed God that the next day she might find him, and
now that her prayer had been answered, she begged that she might come
to him, and share with him for all time a life away from the world they
knew.
The woman breathed like life in the pages Philip read; yet with that
wonderful message to Peter God she pilloried herself for those red and
insane hours in which she had lost faith in him. She had no excuse for
herself, except her great love; she crucified herself, even as she held
out her arms to him across that thousand miles of desolation. Frankly
she had written of the great price she was offering for this one chance
of life and happiness. She told of Philip's love, and of the reward she
had offered him should Peter God find that in his heart love had died
for her. Which should it be?
Twice Philip read that wonderful message he had brought into the North,
and he envied Peter God the outlaw.
The thirty minutes were gone when he entered the cabin. Peter God was
waiting for him. He motioned him to a seat close to him.
"You have read it?" he asked.
Philip nodded. In these moments he did not trust himself to speak.
Peter God understood. The flush was deeper in his face; his eyes burned
brighter with the fever; but of the two he was the calmer, and his
voice was steady.
"I haven't much time, Curtis," he said, and he smiled faintly as he
folded the pages of the letter, "My head is cracking. But I've thought
it all out, and you've got to go back to her--and tell her that Peter
God is dead."
A gasp broke from Philip's lips. It was his only answer.
"It's--best," continued Peter God, and he spoke more slowly, but
firmly. "I love her, Curtis. God knows that it's been only my dreams of
her that have kept me alive all these years. She wants to come to me,
but it's impossible. I'm an outlaw. The law won't excuse my killing of
the cobra. We'd have to hide. All our lives we'd have to hide.
And--some day--they might get me. There's just one thing to do. Go back
to her. Tell her Peter God is dead. And--make her happy--if you can."
For the first time something rose and overwhelmed the love in Philip's
breast.
"She wants to come to you," he cried, and he leaned toward Peter God,
white-faced, clenching his hands. "She wants to come!" he repeated.
"And the law won't find you. It's been seven years--and God knows no
word will ever go from me. It won't find you. And if it should, you can
fight it together, you and Josephine."
Peter God held out his hands.
"Now I know I need have no fear in sending you back," he said huskily.
"You're a man. And you've got to go. She can't come to me, Curtis. It
would kill her--this life. Think of a winter here--madness--the yapping
of the foxes--"
He put a hand to his head, and swayed.
"You've got to go. Tell her Peter God is dead--"
Philip sprang forward as Peter God crumpled down on his bunk.
After that came the long dark hours of fever and delirium. They crawled
along into days, and day and night Philip fought to keep life in the
body of the man who had given the world to him, for as the fight
continued he began more and more to accept Josephine as his own. He had
come fairly. He had kept his pledge. And Peter God had spoken.
"You must go. You must tell her Peter God is dead."
And Philip began to accept this, not altogether as his joy, but as his
duty. He could not argue with Peter God when he rose from his sick bed.
He would go back to Josephine.
For many days he and Peter God fought with the "red death" in the
little cabin. It was a fight which he could never forget. One
afternoon--to strengthen himself for the terrible night that was
coming--he walked several miles back into the stunted spruce on his
snowshoes. It was mid-afternoon when he returned with a haunch of
caribou meat on his shoulder. Three hundred yards from the cabin
something stopped him like a shot. He listened. From ahead of him came
the whining and snarling of dogs, the crack of a whip, a shout which he
could not understand. He dropped his burden of meat and sped on. At the
southward edge of a level open he stopped again. Straight ahead of him
was the cabin. A hundred yards to the right of him was a dog team and a
driver. Between the team and the cabin a hooded and coated figure was
running in the direction of the danger signal on the sapling pole.
With a cry of warning Philip darted in pursuit. He overtook the figure
at the cabin door. His hand caught it by the arm. It turned--and he
stared into the white, terror-stricken face of Josephine McCloud!
"Good God!" he cried, and that was all.
She gripped him with both hands. He had never heard her voice as it was
now. She answered the amazement and horror in his face.
"I sent you a letter," she cried pantingly, "and it didn't overtake
you. As soon as you were gone, I knew that I must come--that I must
follow--that I must speak with my own lips what I had written. I tried
to catch you. But you traveled faster. Will you forgive me--you will
forgive me--"
She turned to the door. He held her.
"It is the smallpox," he said, and his voice was dead.
"I know," she panted. "The man over there--told me what the little flag
means. And I'm glad--glad I came in time to go in to him--as he is. And
you--you--must forgive!"
She snatched herself free from his grasp. The door opened. It closed
behind her. A moment later he heard through the sapling door a strange
cry--a woman's cry--a man's cry--and he turned and walked heavily back
into the spruce forest.
THE MOUSE
"Why, you ornery little cuss," said Falkner, pausing with a forkful of
beans half way to his mouth. "Where in God A'mighty's name did YOU come
from?"
It was against all of Jim's crude but honest ethics of the big
wilderness to take the Lord's name in vain, and the words he uttered
were filled more with the softness of a prayer than the harshness of
profanity. He was big, and his hands were hard and knotted, and his
face was covered with a coarse red scrub of beard. But his hair was
blond, and his eyes were blue, and just now they were filled with
unbounded amazement. Slowly the fork loaded with beans descended to his
plate, and he said again, barely above a whisper:
"Where in God A'mighty's name DID you come from?"
There was nothing human in the one room of his wilderness cabin to
speak of. At the first glance there was nothing alive in the room, with
the exception of Jim Falkner himself. There was not even a dog, for Jim
had lost his one dog weeks before. And yet he spoke, and his eyes
glistened, and for a full minute after that he sat as motionless as a
rock. Then something moved--at the farther end of the rough board
table. It was a mouse--a soft, brown, bright-eyed little mouse, not as
large as his thumb. It was not like the mice Jim had been accustomed to
see in the North woods, the larger, sharp-nosed, rat-like creatures
which sprung his traps now and then, and he gave a sort of gasp through
his beard.
"I'm as crazy as a loon if it isn't a sure-enough down-home mouse, just
like we used to catch in the kitchen down in Ohio," he told himself.
And for the third time he asked. "Now where in God A'mighty's name DID
YOU come from?"
The mouse made no answer. It had humped itself up into a little ball,
and was eyeing Jim with the keenest of suspicion.
"You're a thousand miles from home, old man," Falkner addressed it,
still without a movement. "You're a clean thousand miles straight north
of the kind o' civilization you was born in, and I want to know how you
got here. By George--is it possible--you got mixed up in that box of
stuff SHE sent up? Did you come from HER?"
He made a sudden movement, as if he expected an answer, and in a flash
the mouse had scurried off the table and had disappeared under his bunk.
"The little cuss!" said Falkner. "He's sure got his nerve!"
He went on eating his beans, and when he had done he lighted a lamp,
for the half Arctic darkness was falling early, and began to clear away
the dishes. When he had done he put a scrap of bannock and a few beans
on the corner of the table.
"I'll bet he's hungry, the little cuss," he said. "A thousand miles--in
that box!"
He sat down close to the sheet-iron box stove, which was glowing
red-hot, and filled his pipe. Kerosene was a precious commodity, and he
had turned down the lamp wick until he was mostly in gloom. Outside a
storm was wailing down across the Barrens from the North. He could hear
the swish of the spruce-boughs overhead, and those moaning,
half-shrieking sounds that always came with storm from out of the
North, and sometimes fooled even him into thinking they were human
cries. They had seemed more and more human to him during the past three
days, and he was growing afraid. Once or twice strange thoughts had
come into his head, and he had tried to fight them down. He had known
of men whom loneliness had driven mad--and he was terribly lonely. He
shivered as a piercing blast of wind filled with a mourning wail swept
over the cabin.
And that day, too, he had been taken with a touch of fever. It burned
more hotly in his blood to-night, and he knew that it was the
loneliness--the emptiness of the world about him, the despair and black
foreboding that came to him with the first early twilights of the Long
Night. For he was in the edge of that Long Night. For weeks he would
only now and then catch a glimpse of the sun. He shuddered.
A hundred and fifty miles to the south and east there was a Hudson's
Bay post. Eighty miles south was the nearest trapper's cabin he knew
of. Two months before he had gone down to the post, with a thick beard
to cover his face, and had brought back supplies--and the box. His wife
had sent up the box to him, only it had come to him as "John Blake"
instead of Jim Falkner, his right name. There were things in it for him
to wear, and pictures of the sweet-faced wife who was still filled with
prayer and hope for him, and of the kid, their boy. "He is walking
now," she had written to him, "and a dozen times a day he goes to your
picture and says 'Pa-pa--Pa-pa'--and every night we talk about you
before we go to bed, and pray God to send you back to us soon."
"God bless 'em!" breathed Jim.
He had not lighted his pipe, and there was something in his eyes that
shimmered and glistened in the dull light. And then, as he sat silent,
his eyes clearing, he saw that the little mouse had climbed back to the
edge of the table. It did not eat the food he had placed there for it,
but humped itself up in a tiny ball again, and its tiny shining eyes
looked in his direction.
"You're not hungry," said Jim, and he spoke aloud. "YOU'RE lonely,
too--that's it!"
A strange thrill shot through him at the thought, and he wondered again
if he was mad at the longing that filled him--the desire to reach out
and snuggle the little creature in his hand, and hold it close up to
his bearded face, and TALK TO IT! He laughed, and drew his stool a
little more into the light. The mouse did not run. He edged nearer and
nearer, until his elbows rested on the table, and a curious feeling of
pleasure took the place of his loneliness when he saw that the mouse
was looking at him, and yet seemed unafraid.
"Don't be scairt," he said softly, speaking directly to it. "I won't
hurt you. No, siree, I'd--I'd cut off a hand before I'd do that. I
ain't had any company but you for two months. I ain't seen a human
face, or heard a human voice--nothing--nothing but them shrieks 'n'
wails 'n' baby-cryings out there in the wind. I won't hurt you--" His
voice was almost pleading in its gentleness. And for the tenth time
that day he felt, with his fever, a sickening dizziness in his head.
For a moment or two his vision was blurred, but he could still see the
mouse--farther away, it seemed to him.
"I don't s'pose you've killed anyone--or anything," he said, and his
voice seemed thick and distant to him. "Mice don't kill, do they? They
live on--cheese. But I have--I've killed. I killed a man. That's why
I'm here."
His dizziness almost overcame him, and he leaned heavily against the
table. Still the little mouse did not move. Still he could see it
through the strange gauze veil before his eyes.
"I killed--a man," he repeated, and now he was wondering why the mouse
did not say something at that remarkable confession. "I killed him, old
man, an' you'd have done the same if you'd been in my place. I didn't
mean to. I struck too hard. But I found 'im in my cabin, an' SHE was
fighting--fighting him until her face was scratched an' her clothes
torn,--God bless her dear heart!--fighting him to the last breath, an'
I come just in time! He didn't think I'd be back for a day--a
black-hearted devil we'd fed when he came to our door hungry. I killed
him. And they've hunted me ever since. They'll put a rope round my
neck, an' choke me to death if they catch me--because I came in time to
save her! That's law!
"But they won't find me. I've been up here a year now, and in the
spring I'm going down there--where you come from--back to the Girl and
the Kid. The policemen won't be looking for me then. An' we're going to
some other part of the world, an' live happy. She's waitin' for me, she
an' the kid, an' they know I'm coming in the spring. Yessir, I killed a
man. An' they want to kill me for it. That's the law--Canadian law--the
law that wants an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, an' where
there ain't no extenuatin' circumstance. They call it murder. But it
wasn't--was it?"
He waited for an answer. The mouse seemed going farther and farther
away from him. He leaned more heavily on the table.
"It wasn't--was it?" he persisted.
His arms reached out; his head dropped forward, and the little mouse
scurried to the floor. But Falkner did not know that it had gone.
"I killed him, an' I guess I'd do it again," he said, and his words
were only a whisper. "An' to-night they're prayin' for me down
there--she 'n the kid--an' he's sayin', 'Pa-pa--Pa-pa'; an' they sent
you up--to keep me comp'ny--"
His head dropped wearily upon his arms. The red stove crackled, and
turned slowly black. In the cabin it grew darker, except where the dim
light burned on the table. Outside the storm wailed and screeched down
across the Barren. And after a time the mouse came back. It looked at
Jim Falkner. It came nearer, until it touched the unconscious man's
sleeve. More daringly it ran over his arm. It smelled of his fingers.
Then the mouse returned to the corner of the table, and began eating
the food that Falkner had placed there for it.
The wick of the lamp had burned low when Falkner raised his head. The
stove was black and cold. Outside, the storm still raged, and it was
the shivering shriek of it over the cabin that Falkner first heard. He
felt terribly dizzy, and there was a sharp, knife-like pain just back
of his eyes. By the gray light that came through the one window he knew
that what was left of Arctic day had come. He rose to his feet, and
staggered about like a drunken man as he rebuilt the fire, and he tried
to laugh as the truth dawned upon him that he had been sick, and that
he had rested for hours with his head on the table. His back seemed
broken. His legs were numb, and hurt when he stepped on them. He swung
his arms a little to bring back circulation, and rubbed his hands over
the fire that began to crackle in the stove.