If, like her husband, the brown squaw was a devotee of cruelty, she must
have received great satisfaction from the sight of that slender, girlish
figure standing in the gloom of the cabin. The fact that there were no
shells in the rifle—otherwise a desperate agent of escape—seemed
nothing less than the death of hope. The strength born of the crisis
departed swiftly from her, and her only impulse was to yield to bitter
tears. Her erect body seemed to wilt, her sensitive lips, so straight
and firm before, drooped like those of a child in some utter,
unconsolable tragedy of childhood. It was a curious thing how the light
died in her eyes. All at once they seemed to be at some strange,
below-zero point of darkness,—like black wounds in the utter whiteness
of her face. Yet the squaw gave no sign that she had seen. Her face was
impassive, that of an imperturbable Buddha that sits forever in a far
temple.
Great terror is nothing more or less than temporary loss of hope. In
that moment Bess was finding out what real hopelessness meant, so far as
it is ever possible for human beings to know. For that moment she
couldn’t see a rift in the darkness that enfolded her. In the first
place she felt infinitely alone: Knutsen was dead; Lenore still sat
yielding to self-pity; Ned still extended to her his solicitous care.
The thing went beyond mere fear of death. She could conceive of
possibilities now wherein death would be a thing desired and prayed for;
a deliverance from a living hell that was infinitely worse. The terror
that was upon her was incomparable with any previous experience of her
life.
Yet her eyes remained dry. Some way, she was beyond the beneficence of
tears; partly because of her terror, partly, perhaps, because the
instinct was with her yet to hide the truth from Ned and Lenore so long
as possible. Thus she was not, in the last analysis, absolutely bereft
of hope. It might be, since Ned was a man and she a woman, he would
never become the prey of Doomsdorf to such a degree as she herself. And
now there was no time to try to formulate other plans; to seek some
other gateway of escape; no time more to listen to Ned’s complaints of
her inattention to Lenore. She heard Doomsdorf’s heavy step at the door.
The man came in, for an instant standing framed by the doorway, the
light of morning behind him. Ned looked up, expecting some inquiry as to
his own and Lenore’s condition, some word of greeting on his lips. It
came about, however, that his thought fell quickly into other channels.
Doomsdorf closed the door behind him.
The man turned contemptuously to Ned. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
Startled and indignant at the tone, Ned instinctively straightened. “I
didn’t say anything was the matter. Where’s Knutsen?”
“Knutsen—has gone on. Hell didn’t suit him. He went against its
mandates the first thing. I hope it doesn’t happen again—I would hate
to lose any more of you. I’ve other plans in mind.”
Ned hardly understood, yet his face went white. Partly it was anger
because of the unmistakable insult and contempt in Doomsdorf’s tone.
Partly it was a vague fear that his good sense would not permit him to
credit. “I don’t—I don’t understand, I’m afraid,” he remarked coldly.
“We’ll talk it over later. At present I want to know where we can put
this girl to bed. She’s in a serious condition from her last night’s
experience.”
The lips curled under the great blond beard. “I may put her to bed, all
right—if I like her looks,” he answered evenly. “It won’t be your bed,
either.”
Appalled, unbelieving, yet obeying a racial instinct that goes back to
the roots of time, Ned dropped the girl from his arms and leaped to his
feet. His eyes blazed with a magnificent burst of fury, and a mighty
oath was at his lips. “You——” he began.
Yet no second word came. Doomsdorf’s great body lunged across the room
with the ferocity and might of a charging bear. His arm went out like a
javelin, great fingers extended, and clutched with the effect of a
mighty mechanical trap the younger man’s throat. He caught him as he
might catch a vicious dog he intended to kill, snatching him off his
feet. Ned’s arm lashed out impotently, and forcing through with his own
body, Doomsdorf thrust him into the corner. For a moment he battered him
back and forth, hammering his head against the wall, then let him fall
to a huddled heap on the floor.
Lenore’s voice raised in a piercing scream of terror; but a fiercer
instinct took hold of Bess. The impulse that moved her was simply that
to fight to the death, now as well as later. A heavy hammer, evidently a
tool recently in use by Doomsdorf, lay on the window sill, and she
sprang for it with the strength of desperation. But her hand had hardly
touched it before she herself was hurled back against the log wall
behind her.
The squaw had not sat supine in this stress. With the swiftness and
dexterity of an animal, she had sprung to intercept the deadly blow,
hurling the girl back by her hand upon the latter’s shoulder. If she
made any sound at all, it was a single, chattering sentence that was
mostly obliterated in the sound of battle. And already, before seemingly
a second was past, Doomsdorf was standing back in his place in the
center of the room.
Except for the huddled heap in the blood-spattered corner of the cabin,
it was as if it had never happened. The squaw was again stolid, moving
slowly back to her chair; Doomsdorf breathed quietly and evenly. The two
girls stood staring in speechless horror.
“I hope there won’t be any more of that,” Doomsdorf said quietly. “The
sooner we get these little matters straightened out, the better for all
concerned. It isn’t pleasant to be hammered to pieces, is it?”
He took one step toward Ned, and Lenore started to scream again. But he
inflicted no further punishment. He reached a strong hand, seized Ned’s
shoulder, and snatched him to his feet.
“Don’t try it again,” he advised. “Here in this cabin—on this island—I
do and say what I like. I don’t stand for any resentment. The next time
it won’t be so easy, and that will be too bad for everybody. You
wouldn’t be able to do your work.”
Racked by pain but fully conscious, Ned looked into the glittering eyes.
It was no longer possible to disbelieve in this hairy giant before him.
The agony in his throat muscles was only too real. And the only recourse
that occurred to him was one of pitiful inadequacy.
It was a moment of test for Ned, and he knew of no way to meet it except
as he met such little crises as sometimes occurred to him in his native
city. The only code of life he knew was that he practiced in his old
life: now was its time of trial. His own blood on his hands; the grim,
wicked face before him should have been enough to convince a man less
inured in his own creed of self-sufficiency and conceit; yet Ned would
not let himself believe that he had found his master.
As a child has recourse to senseless threats, he tried to take refuge in
his old attitude of superiority. “I don’t know what you mean, and I
don’t care to,” he said at last. In pity for him Bess’s eyes filled with
tears. “I only know we won’t accept the hospitality of such men as you.
We’ll go—right now.”
Doomsdorf’s answer was a roaring laugh of scorn. Presently he walked to
the door and threw it wide.
But he wasn’t smiling when he turned back to face them, the morning
light on his bearded face. The sight of the North through the open door
had sobered and awed him, as it awes all men who know its power. Beyond
lay only the edge of the forest and the snow-swept barrens, stretching
down to a gray and desolate sea.
“It’s snowing a little, isn’t it?” he said. “Just the North—keeping its
tail up and letting us know it’s here. Where, my young friend, do you
think of going?”
“It doesn’t matter——”
“There’s snow and cold out there.” His voice was deeply sober. “Death
too—sure as you’re standing here. A weakling like you can’t live in
that, out there. None of your kind can stand it—they’d die like so many
sheep. And as a result you have to bow down and serve the man that can!”
Ned had no answer. The greatest fear of his life was clamping down upon
him.
“That’s the law up here—that the weak have to serve the strong. I’ve
beat the North at its own game, and it serves me, just as you’re going
to serve me now. You’re not accepting any hospitality from me. You’re
going to pay for the warmth of this fire I’ve grubbed out of these
woods—you’ll pay for the food you eat. You can go out there if you
like—if you prefer to die. There’s no boat to carry you off. There
never will be a boat to carry you off.”
Ned’s breath caught in a gasp. “My God, you don’t mean you’ll hold us
here by force!”
“I mean you’re my prisoners here for the rest of your natural lives. And
you can abandon hope just as surely as if this island was the real hell
it was named for.”
Quietly, coldly he told them their fate, these three who had been cast
up by the sea. He didn’t mince words. And for all the strangeness of the
scene—the gray light of the dawn and the snow against the window and
the noise of the wind without—they knew it was all true, not merely
some shadowed vista of an eerie dream.
“You might as well know how you stand, first as last,” he began. “When
you once get everything through your heads, maybe we won’t have any more
trouble such as we had just now. You ought to be glad that the
seaman—Knutsen, you called him?—is sliding around on the sea bottom
instead of being here with you; he’d be a source of trouble from
beginning to end. He’d have been hard to teach, hard to master—I saw
that in the beginning—and he’d never give in short of a fight every
morning and every night. None of you, fortunately, are that way. You’ll
see how things stack up, and we’ll all get along nicely together.”
He paused, smiling grimly; then with an explosive motion, pulled back
the lid of the stove and threw in another log. “Sit down, why don’t
you?” he invited. “I don’t insist on my servants standing up always in
my presence. You’ll have to sit down sometime, you know.”
Lenore, wholly despondent, sank back in her seat. To show that he was
still her protector, Ned stood behind her, his hands resting on the back
of her chair. Bess stole to a little rough seat between them and the
squaw.
A single great chair was left vacant, almost in the middle of the
circle. Doomsdorf glanced once about the room as if guarding against any
possibility of surprise attack by his prisoners, then sat down easily
himself. “Excuse me for not making you known to my woman,” he began. “In
fact, I haven’t even learned your own names. She is, translating from
the vernacular, ‘Owl-That-Never-Sleeps.’ You won’t be expected to call
her that, however—although I regret as a general thing that the
picturesque native names so often undergo such laceration on the tongues
of the whites. When I took her from her village, they gave her to me as
‘Sindy.’ You may call her that. It will do as good as any—every other
squaw from Tin City to Ketchikan is called Sindy. It means nothing, as
far as I know.
“‘Owl-That-Never-Sleeps,’ however, fits her very well. You might make a
point of it. And if you are interested in the occult sciences, perhaps
you might explain to me how, when she was a pappoose, her parents could
understand her character and nature well enough to give her a name that
fits her so perfectly. I notice the same thing happens again and again
through these northern tribes. But I’m wandering off the point. Sindy,
you must know, speaks English and is second in command. What she says
goes. Get up and do it on the jump.
“You’ll be interested to know that you are on one of the supposedly
uninhabited islands of the Skopin group. Other islands are grouped all
around you, making one big snow field when the ice closes down in
winter. I could give you almost your exact longitudinal position, but it
wouldn’t be the least good to you. The population consists of we five
people—and various bear, caribou, and such like. The principal
industry, as you will find out later, is furs.
“There is no need to tell in detail how and why I came here—unlike
Caliban, I am not a native of the place. I hope you are not so deficient
as to have failed to read ‘Tempest.’ I find quite an analogy to our
present condition. Shakespeare is a great delight on wintry nights; he
remains real, when most of my other slim stock of authors fades into
air. I like ‘Merry Wives’ the best of the comedies, though—because we
have such fine fun with Falstaff. Of the tragedies I like Macbeth the
best and Lear, by far the worst; and it’s a curious paradox that I
didn’t like the ending of the first and did like the second. Macbeth and
his lady shouldn’t have fallen. They were people with a purpose, and
purpose should be allowed to triumph in art as well as in life. In life,
Macbeth would have snipped off Macduff’s head and left a distinguished
line. Lear, old and foolish, got just what was coming to him—only it
shouldn’t have been dragged over five acts.
“But I really must get down to essentials. It’s so long since I’ve
talked to the outside world that I can’t help being garrulous. To begin
with—I came here some years ago, not entirely by my own choice. Of
course, not even the devil comes to such a hell as this from his own
choice. There’s always pressure from above.”
He paused again, hardly aware of the horrified gaze with which his
hearers regarded him. A startling change had come over him when he spoke
again. His eyes looked red as a weasel’s in the shadowed room; the tones
of his voice were more subdued, yet throbbing with passion.
“I remember gray walls, long ago, in Siberia,” he went on slowly and
gravely. “I was not much more than a boy, a student at a great
university—and then there were gray walls in a gray, snow-swept land,
and gray cells with barred doors, and men standing ever on watch with
loaded rifles, and thousands of human cattle in prison garb. It was
almost straight west of here, far beyond Bering Sea; and sometimes
inspectors would come, stylish people like yourselves, except that they
were bearded men of Petrograd, and look at us through the bars as at
animals in a zoo, but they never interfered with the way things were
run! How I came there doesn’t matter; what I did, and what I didn’t do.
There I found out how much toil the human back can stand without
breaking, one day like another, years without end. I knew what it was to
have a taskmaster stand over me with a whip—a whip with many tails,
with a shot and wire twisted into each. I can show you my back now if
you don’t believe me. I found out all these things, and right then there
came a desire to teach them to some one else. I was an enemy of society,
they said—so I became an enemy of society in reality. Right then I
learned a hate for such society and a desire to burn out the heart of
such weak things as you!”
He turned to them, snarling like a beast. His voice had begun to rumble
like lavas in the bowels of the earth. There could be no question as to
the reality of this hatred. It was a storm cloud over his face; it
filled his gray eyes with searing fire, it drew his muscles till it
seemed that the arms of his chair, clutched by his hands, would be torn
from the rounds. To his listeners it was the most terribly vivid moment
of their lives.
“I swore an oath then, by the devil himself, that if the time ever came
that I’d have opportunity, I’d show society just what kind of an enemy I
was. Sometime, I thought, that time would come. What made me think so I
can’t tell. Sometime I’d pay ’em back for all they had done to me.
“One day the chance came to escape. While more cowardly men would have
hesitated, I pushed through and out. On the way I learned a little
lesson—that none of the larger creatures of the wild die as easily as
men. I found out that there is nothing more to killing a man that is in
your way than killing a caribou I want to eat. I didn’t feel any worse
about it afterward. After that I decided I would never compromise with a
man who was in my way. The other method was too easy. Remember it in all
our relations to come.
“I had to come across here. I couldn’t forever escape the hue and cry
that was raised. Ultimately I landed on this little island—with Sindy
and a few steel traps.
“In this climate we can trap almost the whole year round. We can start
putting them out in a few days more—keep them out clear till June.
Every year a ship—the _Intrepid_ that you’ve likely heard of—touches
here to buy my furs—just one trip a year—and it leaves here supplies
of all kinds in exchange. But don’t take hope from that. Hope is one
thing you want to get out of your systems. The captain of the _Intrepid_
and his Japanese crew are the only human beings that know I live here,
except yourself—that know there’s a human occupant on this island. On
their yearly visit I’ll see to it that none of them get a sight of you.
“Once I was used to working all day from dawn to dark, with an armed
master on guard over me. It isn’t going to be that way from now on. I’m
going to be the armed master. The next few days you’re going to spend
building yourselves a shack and cutting winter fuel. Then each of you
will have a trap line—a good stiff one, too. Every day you’ll go out
and follow your line of traps—baiting, skinning and fleshing, drying
the skins when you get to the cabins. You’ll know what it really is to
be cold, then; you’ll know what work means, too. With you three I expect
to triple my usual season’s catch, building up three times as fast the
fortune I need.
“All my life I’ve looked forward to a chance to give society the same
kind of treatment it gave to me—and when that fortune is large enough
to work with, there will be a new dynasty arise in Russia. In the
meantime, you’re going to get the same treatment I did—hard labor for
life! You’re going to have an armed guard over you to shoot you down if
you show the least sign of mutiny. You’ll obey every command and lick my
boots if I tell you to. I said then, when the chance came, I’d grind
society down—or any representatives of society that came into my
power—just as it ground me down. This is the beginning of my triumph.
You, you three—represent all I hated. Wealth—constituted
authority—softness and ease and luxury. I’ll teach you what softness
is! You’ll know what a heaven a hard bed can be, after a day in the wind
off Bering Straits. You’ll find out what luxury is, too.” His wild laugh
blew like a wind through the room. “And incidentally, my fur output will
be increased by three, my final dream brought three times nearer.
“What I want from you I’ll take. You’re in hell if there is such a
place—and you’ll know it plenty soon.” He turned to Ned, his lip curled
in scorn. “Your feeble arms over the chair back won’t protect that girl
if I make up my mind I want her. At present you may be safe from
that—simply because some conquests aren’t any pleasure if they’re made
with force. If I want either of you,” his gaze flashed toward Bess, “I’m
not afraid that I’ll have to descend to force to get you.
“When I said to abandon hope I meant it. You have no boat, and I’ll give
you no chance to make one. The distance is too great across the ice ever
to make it through; besides, you won’t be given a chance to try. No
ships will come here to look for you. No matter what wealth and power
you represented down there, you’ll be forgotten soon enough. Others will
take your place, other girls will reign at the balls, and other men will
spend your money. You will be up here, as lost and forgotten as if you
were in the real hell you’ll go to in the end.
“Even if your doting fathers should send out a search party, they will
overlook this little island. It was just a freak of the currents that
you landed here—I don’t see yet why you weren’t blown to Tzar Island,
immediately east of here. When they find you aren’t there, and pick up
any other lifeboats from your ship that in all probability landed there,
they’ll be glad enough to turn around and go back. Especially if they
see your lifeboat floating bottom upward in the water!
“You should never have come to the North, you three! Society should
never move from the civilization that has been built to protect
it—otherwise it will find forces too big and too cruel to master.
You’re all weaklings, soft as putty—without the nerve of a ptarmigan.
Already I’ve crushed the resistance out of you. All my life I’ve dreamed
of some such chance as this, and yet you can’t fight enough to make it
interesting for me. You’ll be docile, hopeless slaves until you die.”
He paused, scanning their pale, drawn faces. He turned to Ned first, but
the latter was too immersed in his own despair ever to return his stare.
Lenore didn’t raise her golden head to meet his eyes. But before his
gaze ever got to her, Bess was on her feet.
“Don’t be too sure of yourself,” she cautioned quickly. He looked with
sudden amazement into her kindling eyes. “Men like you have gone in the
face of society before. You’re not so far up here that the arm of the
law can’t reach you.”
The blond man smiled into her earnest face. “Go on, my dear,” he urged.
“It’s got you once, and it’ll get you again. And I warn you that if you
put one indignity on us, do one thing you’ve said—you’ll pay for it in
the end—just as you’ll pay for that fiendish crime you committed
to-day.”
As her eyes met his, straight and unfaltering, the expression of
contemptuous amazement died in his face. Presently his interest seemed
to quicken. It was as if he had seen her for the first time, searching
eyes resting first on hers, then on her lips, dropping down over her
athletic form, and again into her eyes. He seemed lost in sinister
speculations.
Something seemed strained, ready to break. The four in the little circle
made no motion, all of them inert and frozen like characters in a dream.
And then, before that speculative, searching gaze—a gaze unlike any
that he had bent on Lenore—her eyes faltered from his. Ned felt a wild,
impotent fury like live steam in his brain.
Bess’s little mutiny was already quelled. Her blue eyes were black with
terror.