Dawn--the dusk of another night--and Keith raised his haggard face from
Conniston's bedside with a woman's sob on his lips. The Englishman had
died as he knew that he would die, game to the last threadbare breath
that came out of his body. For with this last breath he whispered the
words which he had repeated a dozen times before, "Remember, old chap,
you win or lose the moment McDowell first sets his eyes on you!" And
then, with a strange kind of sob in his chest, he was gone, and Keith's
eyes were blinded by the miracle of a hot flood of tears, and there
rose in him a mighty pride in the name of Derwent Conniston.
It was his name now. John Keith was dead. It was Derwent Conniston who
was living. And as he looked down into the cold, still face of the
heroic Englishman, the thing did not seem so strange to him after all.
It would not be difficult to bear Conniston's name; the difficulty
would be in living up to the Conniston code.
That night the rumble of the ice fields was clearer because there was
no wind to deaden their tumult. The sky was cloudless, and the stars
were like glaring, yellow eyes peering through holes in a vast,
overhanging curtain of jet black. Keith, out to fill his lungs with
air, looked up at the phenomenon of the polar night and shuddered. The
stars were like living things, and they were looking at him. Under
their sinister glow the foxes were holding high carnival. It seemed to
Keith that they had drawn a closer circle about the cabin and that
there was a different note in their yapping now, a note that was more
persistent, more horrible. Conniston had foreseen that closing-in of
the little white beasts of the night, and Keith, reentering the cabin,
set about the fulfillment of his promise. Ghostly dawn found his task
completed.
Half an hour later he stood in the edge of the scrub timber that rimmed
in the arctic plain, and looked for the last time upon the little cabin
under the floor of which the Englishman was buried. It stood there
splendidly unafraid in its terrible loneliness, a proud monument to a
dead man's courage and a dead man's soul. Within its four walls it
treasured a thing which gave to it at last a reason for being, a reason
for fighting against dissolution as long as one log could hold upon
another. Conniston's spirit had become a living part of it, and the
foxes might yap everlastingly, and the winds howl, and winter follow
winter, and long night follow long night--and it would stand there in
its pride fighting to the last, a memorial to Derwent Conniston, the
Englishman.
Looking back at it, Keith bared his head in the raw dawn. "God bless
you, Conniston," he whispered, and turned slowly away and into the
south.
Ahead of him was eight hundred miles of wilderness--eight hundred miles
between him and the little town on the Saskatchewan where McDowell
commanded Division of the Royal Mounted. The thought of distance did
not appall him. Four years at the top of the earth had accustomed him
to the illimitable and had inured him to the lack of things. That
winter Conniston had followed him with the tenacity of a ferret for a
thousand miles along the rim of the Arctic, and it had been a miracle
that he had not killed the Englishman. A score of times he might have
ended the exciting chase without staining his own hands. His Eskimo
friends would have performed the deed at a word. But he had let the
Englishman live, and Conniston, dead, was sending him back home. Eight
hundred miles was but the step between.
He had no dogs or sledge. His own team had given up the ghost long ago,
and a treacherous Kogmollock from the Roes Welcome had stolen the
Englishman's outfit in the last lap of their race down from Fullerton's
Point. What he carried was Conniston's, with the exception of his rifle
and his own parka and hood. He even wore Conniston's watch. His pack
was light. The chief articles it contained were a little flour, a
three-pound tent, a sleeping-bag, and certain articles of
identification to prove the death of John Keith, the outlaw. Hour after
hour of that first day the zip, zip, zip of his snowshoes beat with
deadly monotony upon his brain. He could not think. Time and again it
seemed to him that something was pulling him back, and always he was
hearing Conniston's voice and seeing Conniston's face in the gray gloom
of the day about him. He passed through the slim finger of scrub timber
that a strange freak of nature had flung across the plain, and once
more was a moving speck in a wide and wind-swept barren. In the
afternoon he made out a dark rim on the southern horizon and knew it
was timber, real timber, the first he had seen since that day, a year
and a half ago, when the last of the Mackenzie River forest had faded
away behind him! It gave him, at last, something tangible to grip. It
was a thing beckoning to him, a sentient, living wall beyond which was
his other world. The eight hundred miles meant less to him than the
space between himself and that growing, black rim on the horizon.
He reached it as the twilight of the day was dissolving into the deeper
dusk of the night, and put up his tent in the shelter of a clump of
gnarled and storm-beaten spruce. Then he gathered wood and built
himself a fire. He did not count the sticks as he had counted them for
eighteen months. He was wasteful, prodigal. He had traveled forty miles
since morning but he felt no exhaustion. He gathered wood until he had
a great pile of it, and the flames of his fire leaped higher and higher
until the spruce needles crackled and hissed over his head. He boiled a
pot of weak tea and made a supper of caribou meat and a bit of bannock.
Then he sat with his back to a tree and stared into the flames.
The fire leaping and crackling before his eyes was like a powerful
medicine. It stirred things that had lain dormant within him. It
consumed the heavy dross of four years of stupefying torture and
brought back to him vividly the happenings of a yesterday that had
dragged itself on like a century. All at once he seemed unburdened of
shackles that had weighted him down to the point of madness. Every
fiber in his body responded to that glorious roar of the fire; a thing
seemed to snap in his head, freeing it of an oppressive bondage, and in
the heart of the flames he saw home, and hope, and life--the things
familiar and precious long ago, which the scourge of the north had
almost beaten dead in his memory. He saw the broad Saskatchewan
shimmering its way through the yellow plains, banked in by the
foothills and the golden mists of morning dawn; he saw his home town
clinging to its shore on one side and with its back against the purple
wilderness on the other; he heard the rhythmic chug, chug, chug of the
old gold dredge and the rattle of its chains as it devoured its tons of
sand for a few grains of treasure; over him there were lacy clouds in a
blue heaven again, he heard the sound of voices, the tread of feet,
laughter--life. His soul reborn, he rose to his feet and stretched his
arms until the muscles snapped. No, they would not know him back
there--now! He laughed softly as he thought of the old John
Keith--"Johnny" they used to call him up and down the few
balsam-scented streets--his father's right-hand man mentally but a
little off feed, as his chum, Reddy McTabb, used to say, when it came
to the matter of muscle and brawn. He could look back on things without
excitement now. Even hatred had burned itself out, and he found himself
wondering if old Judge Kirkstone's house looked the same on the top of
the hill, and if Miriam Kirkstone had come back to live there after
that terrible night when he had returned to avenge his father.
Four years! It was not so very long, though the years had seemed like a
lifetime to him. There would not be many changes. Everything would be
the same--everything--except--the old home. That home he and his father
had planned, and they had overseen the building of it, a chateau of
logs a little distance from the town, with the Saskatchewan sweeping
below it and the forest at its doors. Masterless, it must have seen
changes in those four years. Fumbling in his pocket, his fingers
touched Conniston's watch. He drew it out and let the firelight play on
the open dial. It was ten o'clock. In the back of the premier half of
the case Conniston had at some time or another pasted a picture. It
must have been a long time ago, for the face was faded and indistinct.
The eyes alone were undimmed, and in the flash of the fire they took on
a living glow as they looked at Keith. It was the face of a young
girl--a schoolgirl, Keith thought, of ten or twelve. Yet the eyes
seemed older; they seemed pleading with someone, speaking a message
that had come spontaneously out of the soul of the child. Keith closed
the watch. Its tick, tick, tick rose louder to his ears. He dropped it
in his pocket. He could still hear it.
A pitch-filled spruce knot exploded with the startling vividness of a
star bomb, and with it came a dull sort of mental shock to Keith. He
was sure that for an instant he had seen Conniston's face and that the
Englishman's eyes were looking at him as the eyes had looked at him out
of the face in the watch. The deception was so real that it sent him
back a step, staring, and then, his eyes striving to catch the illusion
again, there fell upon him a realization of the tremendous strain he
had been under for many hours. It had been days since he had slept
soundly. Yet he was not sleepy now; he scarcely felt fatigue. The
instinct of self-preservation made him arrange his sleeping-bag on a
carpet of spruce boughs in the tent and go to bed.
Even then, for a long time, he lay in the grip of a harrowing
wakefulness. He closed his eyes, but it was impossible for him to hold
them closed. The sounds of the night came to him with painful
distinctness--the crackling of the fire, the serpent-like hiss of the
flaming pitch, the whispering of the tree tops, and the steady tick,
tick, tick of Conniston's watch. And out on the barren, through the rim
of sheltering trees, the wind was beginning to moan its everlasting
whimper and sob of loneliness. In spite of his clenched hands and his
fighting determination to hold it off, Keith fancied that he heard
again--riding strangely in that wind--the sound of Conniston's voice.
And suddenly he asked himself: What did it mean? What was it that
Conniston had forgotten? What was it that Conniston had been trying to
tell him all that day, when he had felt the presence of him in the
gloom of the Barrens? Was it that Conniston wanted him to come back?
He tried to rid himself of the depressing insistence of that thought.
And yet he was certain that in the last half-hour before death entered
the cabin the Englishman had wanted to tell him something and had
crucified the desire. There was the triumph of an iron courage in those
last words, "Remember, old chap, you win or lose the moment McDowell
first sets his eyes on you!"--but in the next instant, as death sent
home its thrust, Keith had caught a glimpse of Conniston's naked soul,
and in that final moment when speech was gone forever, he knew that
Conniston was fighting to make his lips utter words which he had left
unspoken until too late. And Keith, listening to the moaning of the
wind and the crackling of the fire, found himself repeating over and
over again, "What was it he wanted to say?"
In a lull in the wind Conniston's watch seemed to beat like a heart in
its case, and swiftly its tick, tick, ticked to his ears an answer,
"Come back, come back, come back!"
With a cry at his own pitiable weakness, Keith thrust the thing far
under his sleeping-bag, and there its sound was smothered. At last
sleep overcame him like a restless anesthesia.
With the break of another day he came out of his tent and stirred the
fire. There were still bits of burning ember, and these he fanned into
life and added to their flame fresh fuel. He could not easily forget
last night's torture, but its significance was gone. He laughed at his
own folly and wondered what Conniston himself would have thought of his
nervousness. For the first time in years he thought of the old days
down at college where, among other things, he had made a mark for
himself in psychology. He had considered himself an expert in the
discussion and understanding of phenomena of the mind. Afterward he had
lived up to the mark and had profited by his beliefs, and the fact that
a simple relaxation of his mental machinery had so disturbed him last
night amused him now. The solution was easy. It was his mind struggling
to equilibrium after four years of brain-fag. And he felt better. His
brain was clearer. He listened to the watch and found its ticking
natural. He braced himself to another effort and whistled as he
prepared his breakfast.
After that he packed his dunnage and continued south. He wondered if
Conniston ever knew his Manual as he learned it now. At the end of the
sixth day he could repeat it from cover to cover. Every hour he made it
a practice to stop short and salute the trees about him. McDowell would
not catch him there.
"I am Derwent Conniston," he kept telling himself. "John Keith is
dead--dead. I buried him back there under the cabin, the cabin built by
Sergeant Trossy and his patrol in nineteen hundred and eight. My name
is Conniston--Derwent Conniston."
In his years of aloneness he had grown into the habit of talking to
himself--or with himself--to keep up his courage and sanity. "Keith,
old boy, we've got to fight it out," he would say. Now it was,
"Conniston, old chap, we'll win or die." After the third day, he never
spoke of John Keith except as a man who was dead. And over the dead
John Keith he spread Conniston's mantle. "John Keith died game, sir,"
he said to McDowell, who was a tree. "He was the finest chap I ever
knew."
On this sixth day came the miracle. For the first time in many months
John Keith saw the sun. He had seen the murky glow of it before this,
fighting to break through the pall of fog and haze that hung over the
Barrens, but this sixth day it was the sun, the real sun, bursting in
all its glory for a short space over the northern world. Each day after
this the sun was nearer and warmer, as the arctic vapor clouds and
frost smoke were left farther behind, and not until he had passed
beyond the ice fogs entirely did Keith swing westward. He did not
hurry, for now that he was out of his prison, he wanted time in which
to feel the first exhilarating thrill of his freedom. And more than all
else he knew that he must measure and test himself for the tremendous
fight ahead of him.
Now that the sun and the blue sky had cleared his brain, he saw the
hundred pit-falls in his way, the hundred little slips that might be
made, the hundred traps waiting for any chance blunder on his part.
Deliberately he was on his way to the hangman. Down there--every day of
his life--he would rub elbows with him as he passed his fellow men in
the street. He would never completely feel himself out of the presence
of death. Day and night he must watch himself and guard himself, his
tongue, his feet, his thoughts, never knowing in what hour the eyes of
the law would pierce the veneer of his disguise and deliver his life as
the forfeit. There were times when the contemplation of these things
appalled him, and his mind turned to other channels of escape. And
then--always--he heard Conniston's cool, fighting voice, and the red
blood fired up in his veins, and he faced home.
He was Derwent Conniston. And never for an hour could he put out of his
mind the one great mystifying question in this adventure of life and
death, who was Derwent Conniston? Shred by shred he pieced together
what little he knew, and always he arrived at the same futile end. An
Englishman, dead to his family if he had one, an outcast or an
expatriate--and the finest, bravest gentleman he had ever known. It was
the WHYFORE of these things that stirred within him an emotion which he
had never experienced before. The Englishman had grimly and
determinedly taken his secret to the grave with him. To him, John
Keith--who was now Derwent Conniston--he had left an heritage of deep
mystery and the mission, if he so chose, of discovering who he was,
whence he had come--and why. Often he looked at the young girl's
picture in the watch, and always he saw in her eyes something which
made him think of Conniston as he lay in the last hour of his life.
Undoubtedly the girl had grown into a woman now.
Days grew into weeks, and under Keith's feet the wet, sweet-smelling
earth rose up through the last of the slush snow. Three hundred miles
below the Barrens, he was in the Reindeer Lake country early in May.
For a week he rested at a trapper's cabin on the Burntwood, and after
that set out for Cumberland House. Ten days later he arrived at the
post, and in the sunlit glow of the second evening afterward he built
his camp-fire on the shore of the yellow Saskatchewan.
The mighty river, beloved from the days of his boyhood, sang to him
again, that night, the wonderful things that time and grief had dimmed
in his heart. The moon rose over it, a warm wind drifted out of the
south, and Keith, smoking his pipe, sat for a long time listening to
the soft murmur of it as it rolled past at his feet. For him it had
always been more than the river. He had grown up with it, and it had
become a part of him; it had mothered his earliest dreams and
ambitions; on it he had sought his first adventures; it had been his
chum, his friend, and his comrade, and the fancy struck him that in the
murmuring voice of it tonight there was a gladness, a welcome, an
exultation in his return. He looked out on its silvery bars shimmering
in the moonlight, and a flood of memories swept upon him. Thirty years
was not so long ago that he could not remember the beautiful mother who
had told him stories as the sun went down and bedtime drew near. And
vividly there stood out the wonderful tales of Kistachiwun, the river;
how it was born away over in the mystery of the western mountains, away
from the eyes and feet of men; how it came down from the mountains into
the hills, and through the hills into the plains, broadening and
deepening and growing mightier with every mile, until at last it swept
past their door, bearing with it the golden grains of sand that made
men rich. His father had pointed out the deep-beaten trails of buffalo
to him and had told him stories of the Indians and of the land before
white men came, so that between father and mother the river became his
book of fables, his wonderland, the never-ending source of his
treasured tales of childhood. And tonight the river was the one thing
left to him. It was the one friend he could claim again, the one
comrade he could open his arms to without fear of betrayal. And with
the grief for things that once had lived and were now dead, there came
over him a strange sort of happiness, the spirit of the great river
itself giving him consolation.
Stretching out his arms, he cried: "My old river--it's me--Johnny
Keith! I've come back!"
And the river, whispering, seemed to answer him: "It's Johnny Keith!
And he's come back! He's come back!"