For a week John Keith followed up the shores of the Saskatchewan. It
was a hundred and forty miles from the Hudson's Bay Company's post of
Cumberland House to Prince Albert as the crow would fly, but Keith did
not travel a homing line. Only now and then did he take advantage of a
portage trail. Clinging to the river, his journey was lengthened by
some sixty miles. Now that the hour for which Conniston had prepared
him was so close at hand, he felt the need of this mighty, tongueless
friend that had played such an intimate part in his life. It gave to
him both courage and confidence, and in its company he could think more
clearly. Nights he camped on its golden-yellow bars with the open stars
over his head when he slept; his ears drank in the familiar sounds of
long ago, for which he had yearned to the point of madness in his
exile--the soft cries of the birds that hunted and mated in the glow of
the moon, the friendly twit, twit, twit of the low-flying sand-pipers,
the hoot of the owls, and the splash and sleepy voice of wildfowl
already on their way up from the south. Out of that south, where in
places the plains swept the forest back almost to the river's edge, he
heard now and then the doglike barking of his little yellow friends of
many an exciting horseback chase, the coyotes, and on the wilderness
side, deep in the forest, the sinister howling of wolves. He was
traveling, literally, the narrow pathway between two worlds. The river
was that pathway. On the one hand, not so very far away, were the
rolling prairies, green fields of grain, settlements and towns and the
homes of men; on the other the wilderness lay to the water's edge with
its doors still open to him. The seventh day a new sound came to his
ears at dawn. It was the whistle of a train at Prince Albert.
There was no change in that whistle, and every nerve-string in his body
responded to it with crying thrill. It was the first voice to greet his
home-coming, and the sound of it rolled the yesterdays back upon him in
a deluge. He knew where he was now; he recalled exactly what he would
find at the next turn in the river. A few minutes later he heard the
wheezy chug, chug, chug of the old gold dredge at McCoffin's Bend. It
would be the Betty M., of course, with old Andy Duggan at the windlass,
his black pipe in mouth, still scooping up the shifting sands as he had
scooped them up for more than twenty years. He could see Andy sitting
at his post, clouded in a halo of tobacco smoke, a red-bearded,
shaggy-headed giant of a man whom the town affectionately called the
River Pirate. All his life Andy had spent in digging gold out of the
mountains or the river, and like grim death he had hung to the bars
above and below McCoffin's Bend. Keith smiled as he remembered old
Andy's passion for bacon. One could always find the perfume of bacon
about the Betty M., and when Duggan went to town, there were those who
swore they could smell it in his whiskers.
Keith left the river trail now for the old logging road. In spite of
his long fight to steel himself for what Conniston had called the
"psychological moment," he felt himself in the grip of an uncomfortable
mental excitement. At last he was face to face with the great gamble.
In a few hours he would play his one card. If he won, there was life
ahead of him again, if he lost--death. The old question which he had
struggled to down surged upon him. Was it worth the chance? Was it in
an hour of madness that he and Conniston had pledged themselves to this
amazing adventure? The forest was still with him. He could turn back.
The game had not yet gone so far that he could not withdraw his
hand--and for a space a powerful impulse moved him. And then, coming
suddenly to the edge of the clearing at McCoffin's Bend, he saw the
dredge close inshore, and striding up from the beach Andy Duggan
himself! In another moment Keith had stepped forth and was holding up a
hand in greeting.
He felt his heart thumping in an unfamiliar way as Duggan came on. Was
it conceivable that the riverman would not recognize him? He forgot his
beard, forgot the great change that four years had wrought in him. He
remembered only that Duggan had been his friend, that a hundred times
they had sat together in the quiet glow of long evenings, telling tales
of the great river they both loved. And always Duggan's stories had
been of that mystic paradise hidden away in the western mountains--the
river's end, the paradise of golden lure, where the Saskatchewan was
born amid towering peaks, and where Duggan--a long time ago--had
quested for the treasure which he knew was hidden somewhere there. Four
years had not changed Duggan. If anything his beard was redder and
thicker and his hair shaggier than when Keith had last seen him. And
then, following him from the Betsy M., Keith caught the everlasting
scent of bacon. He devoured it in deep breaths. His soul cried out for
it. Once he had grown tired of Duggan's bacon, but now he felt that he
could go on eating it forever. As Duggan advanced, he was moved by a
tremendous desire to stretch out his hand and say: "I'm John Keith.
Don't you know me, Duggan?" Instead, he choked back his desire and
said, "Fine morning!"
Duggan nodded uncertainly. He was evidently puzzled at not being able
to place his man. "It's always fine on the river, rain 'r shine.
Anybody who says it ain't is a God A'mighty liar!"
He was still the old Duggan, ready to fight for his river at the drop
of a hat! Keith wanted to hug him. He shifted his pack and said:
"I've slept with it for a week--just to have it for company--on the way
down from Cumberland House. Seems good to get back!" He took off his
hat and met the riverman's eyes squarely. "Do you happen to know if
McDowell is at barracks?" he asked.
"He is," said Duggan.
That was all. He was looking at Keith with a curious directness. Keith
held his breath. He would have given a good deal to have seen behind
Duggan's beard. There was a hard note in the riverman's voice, too. It
puzzled him. And there was a flash of sullen fire in his eyes at the
mention of McDowell's name. "The Inspector's there--sittin' tight," he
added, and to Keith's amazement brushed past him without another word
and disappeared into the bush.
This, at least, was not like the good-humored Duggan of four years ago.
Keith replaced his hat and went on. At the farther side of the clearing
he turned and looked back. Duggan stood in the open roadway, his hands
thrust deep in his pockets, staring after him. Keith waved his hand,
but Duggan did not respond. He stood like a sphinx, his big red beard
glowing in the early sun, and watched Keith until he was gone.
To Keith this first experiment in the matter of testing an identity was
a disappointment. It was not only disappointing but filled him with
apprehension. It was true that Duggan had not recognized him as John
Keith, BUT NEITHER HAD HE RECOGNIZED HIM AS DERWENT CONNISTON! And
Duggan was not a man to forget in three or four years--or half a
lifetime, for that matter. He saw himself facing a new and unexpected
situation. What if McDowell, like Duggan, saw in him nothing more than
a stranger? The Englishman's last words pounded in his head again like
little fists beating home a truth, "You win or lose the moment McDowell
first sets his eyes on you." They pressed upon him now with a deadly
significance. For the first time he understood all that Conniston had
meant. His danger was not alone in the possibility of being recognized
as John Keith; it lay also in the hazard of NOT being recognized as
Derwent Conniston.
If the thought had come to him to turn back, if the voice of fear and a
premonition of impending evil had urged him to seek freedom in another
direction, their whispered cautions were futile in the thrill of the
greater excitement that possessed him now. That there was a third hand
playing in this game of chance in which Conniston had already lost his
life, and in which he was now staking his own, was something which gave
to Keith a new and entirely unlooked-for desire to see the end of the
adventure. The mental vision of his own certain fate, should he lose,
dissolved into a nebulous presence that no longer oppressed nor
appalled him. Physical instinct to fight against odds, the inspiration
that presages the uncertainty of battle, fired his blood with an
exhilarating eagerness. He was anxious to stand face to face with
McDowell. Not until then would the real fight begin. For the first time
the fact seized upon him that the Englishman was wrong--he would NOT
win or lose in the first moment of the Inspector's scrutiny. In that
moment he could lose--McDowell's cleverly trained eyes might detect the
fraud; but to win, if the game was not lost at the first shot, meant an
exciting struggle. Today might be his Armageddon, but it could not
possess the hour of his final triumph.
He felt himself now like a warrior held in leash within sound of the
enemy's guns and the smell of his powder. He held his old world to be
his enemy, for civilization meant people, and the people were the
law--and the law wanted his life. Never had he possessed a deeper
hatred for the old code of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth
than in this hour when he saw up the valley a gray mist of smoke rising
over the roofs of his home town. He had never conceded within himself
that he was a criminal. He believed that in killing Kirkstone he had
killed a serpent who had deserved to die, and a hundred times he had
told himself that the job would have been much more satisfactory from
the view-point of human sanitation if he had sent the son in the
father's footsteps. He had rid the people of a man not fit to live--and
the people wanted to kill him for it. Therefore the men and women in
that town he had once loved, and still loved, were his enemies, and to
find friends among them again he was compelled to perpetrate a clever
fraud.
He remembered an unboarded path from this side of the town, which
entered an inconspicuous little street at the end of which was a barber
shop. It was the barber shop which he must reach first He was glad that
it was early in the day when he came to the street an hour later, for
he would meet few people. The street had changed considerably. Long,
open spaces had filled in with houses, and he wondered if the
anticipated boom of four years ago had come. He smiled grimly as the
humor of the situation struck him. His father and he had staked their
future in accumulating a lot of "outside" property. If the boom had
materialized, that property was "inside" now--and worth a great deal.
Before he reached the barber shop he realized that the dream of the
Prince Albertites had come true. Prosperity had advanced upon them in
mighty leaps. The population of the place had trebled. He was a rich
man! And also, it occurred to him, he was a dead one--or would be when
he reported officially to McDowell. What a merry scrap there would be
among the heirs of John Keith, deceased!
The old shop still clung to its corner, which was valuable as "business
footage" now. But it possessed a new barber. He was alone. Keith gave
his instructions in definite detail and showed him Conniston's
photograph in his identification book. The beard and mustache must be
just so, very smart, decidedly English, and of military neatness, his
hair cut not too short and brushed smoothly back. When the operation
was over, he congratulated the barber and himself. Bronzed to the color
of an Indian by wind and smoke, straight as an arrow, his muscles
swelling with the brute strength of the wilderness, he smiled at
himself in the mirror when he compared the old John Keith with this new
Derwent Conniston! Before he went out he tightened his belt a notch.
Then he headed straight for the barracks of His Majesty's Royal
Northwest Mounted Police.
His way took him up the main street, past the rows of shops that had
been there four years ago, past the Saskatchewan Hotel and the little
Board of Trade building which, like the old barber shop, still hung to
its original perch at the edge of the high bank which ran precipitously
down to the river. And there, as sure as fate, was Percival Clary, the
little English Secretary! But what a different Percy!
He had broadened out and straightened up. He had grown a mustache,
which was immaculately waxed. His trousers were immaculately creased,
his shoes were shining, and he stood before the door of his now
important office resting lightly on a cane. Keith grinned as he
witnessed how prosperity had bolstered up Percival along with the town.
His eyes quested for familiar faces as he went along. Here and there he
saw one, but for the most part he encountered strangers, lively looking
men who were hustling as if they had a mission in hand. Glaring real
estate signs greeted him from every place of prominence, and
automobiles began to hum up and down the main street that stretched
along the river--twenty where there had been one not so long ago.
Keith found himself fighting to keep his eyes straight ahead when he
met a girl or a woman. Never had he believed fully and utterly in the
angelhood of the feminine until now. He passed perhaps a dozen on the
way to barracks, and he was overwhelmed with the desire to stop and
feast his eyes upon each one of them. He had never been a lover of
women; he admired them, he believed them to be the better part of man,
he had worshiped his mother, but his heart had been neither glorified
nor broken by a passion for the opposite sex. Now, to the bottom of his
soul, he worshiped that dozen! Some of them were homely, some of them
were plain, two or three of them were pretty, but to Keith their
present physical qualifications made no difference. They were white
women, and they were glorious, every one of them! The plainest of them
was lovely. He wanted to throw up his hat and shout in sheer joy. Four
years--and now he was back in angel land! For a space he forgot
McDowell.
His head was in a whirl when he came to barracks. Life was good, after
all. It was worth fighting for, and he was bound fight. He went
straight to McDowell's office. A moment after his knock on the door the
Inspector's secretary appeared.
"The Inspector is busy, sir," he said in response to Keith's inquiry.
"I'll tell him--"
"That I am here on a very important matter," advised Keith. "He will
admit me when you tell him that I bring information regarding a certain
John Keith."
The secretary disappeared through an inner door. It seemed not more
than ten seconds before he was back. "The Inspector will see you, sir."
Keith drew a deep breath to quiet the violent beating of his heart. In
spite of all his courage he felt upon him the clutch of a cold and
foreboding hand, a hand that seemed struggling to drag him back. And
again he heard Conniston's dying voice whispering to him, "REMEMBER,
OLD CHAP, YOU WIN OR LOSE THE MOMENT MCDOWELL FIRST SETS HIS EYES ON
YOU!"
Was Conniston right?
Win or lose, he would play the game as the Englishman would have played
it. Squaring his shoulders he entered to face McDowell, the cleverest
man-hunter in the Northwest.
V
Keith's first vision, as he entered the office of the Inspector of
Police, was not of McDowell, but of a girl. She sat directly facing him
as he advanced through the door, the light from a window throwing into
strong relief her face and hair. The effect was unusual. She was
strikingly handsome. The sun, giving to the room a soft radiance, lit
up her hair with shimmering gold; her eyes, Keith saw, were a clear and
wonderful gray--and they stared at him as he entered, while the poise
of her body and the tenseness of her face gave evidence of sudden and
unusual emotion. These things Keith observed in a flash; then he turned
toward McDowell.
The Inspector sat behind a table covered with maps and papers, and
instantly Keith was conscious of the penetrating inquisition of his
gaze. He felt, for an instant, the disquieting tremor of the criminal.
Then he met McDowell's eyes squarely. They were, as Conniston had
warned him, eyes that could see through boiler-plate. Of an indefinable
color and deep set behind shaggy, gray eyebrows, they pierced him
through at the first glance. Keith took in the carefully waxed gray
mustaches, the close-cropped gray hair, the rigidly set muscles of the
man's face, and saluted.
He felt creeping over him a slow chill. There was no greeting in that
iron-like countenance, for full a quarter-minute no sign of
recognition. And then, as the sun had played in the girl's hair, a new
emotion passed over McDowell's face, and Keith saw for the first time
the man whom Derwent Conniston had known as a friend as well as a
superior. He rose from his chair, and leaning over the table said in a
voice in which were mingled both amazement and pleasure:
"We were just talking about the devil--and here you are, sir!
Conniston, how are you?"
For a few moments Keith did not see. HE HAD WON! The blood pounded
through his heart so violently that it confused his vision and his
senses. He felt the grip of McDowell's hand; he heard his voice; a
vision swam before his eyes--and it was the vision of Derwent
Conniston's triumphant face. He was standing erect, his head was up, he
was meeting McDowell shoulder to shoulder, even smiling, but in that
swift surge of exultation he did not know. McDowell, still gripping his
hand and with his other hand on his arm, was wheeling him about, and he
found the girl on her feet, staring at him as if he had newly risen
from the dead.
McDowell's military voice was snapping vibrantly, "Conniston, meet Miss
Miriam Kirkstone, daughter of Judge Kirkstone!"
He bowed and held for a moment in his own the hand of the girl whose
father he had killed. It was lifeless and cold. Her lips moved, merely
speaking his name. His own were mute. McDowell was saying something
about the glory of the service and the sovereignty of the law. And
then, breaking in like the beat of a drum on the introduction, his
voice demanded, "Conniston--DID YOU GET YOUR MAN?"
The question brought Keith to his senses. He inclined his head slightly
and said, "I beg to report that John Keith is dead, sir."
He saw Miriam Kirkstone give a visible start, as if his words had
carried a stab. She was apparently making a strong effort to hide her
agitation as she turned swiftly away from him, speaking to McDowell.
"You have been very kind, Inspector McDowell. I hope very soon to have
the pleasure of talking with Mr. Conniston--about--John Keith."
She left them, nodding slightly to Keith.
When she was gone, a puzzled look filled the Inspector's eyes. "She has
been like that for the last six months," he explained. "Tremendously
interested in this man Keith and his fate. I don't believe that I have
watched for your return more anxiously than she has, Conniston. And the
curious part of it is she seemed to have no interest in the matter at
all until six months ago. Sometimes I am afraid that brooding over her
father's death has unsettled her a little. A mighty pretty girl,
Conniston. A mighty pretty girl, indeed! And her brother is a skunk.
Pst! You haven't forgotten him?"
He drew a chair up close to his own and motioned Keith to be seated.
"You're changed, Conniston!"
The words came out of him like a shot. So unexpected were they that
Keith felt the effect of them in every nerve of his body. He sensed
instantly what McDowell meant. He was NOT like the Englishman; he
lacked his mannerisms, his cool and superior suavity, the inimitable
quality of his nerve and sportsmanship. Even as he met the disquieting
directness of the Inspector's eyes, he could see Conniston sitting in
his place, rolling his mustache between his forefinger and thumb, and
smiling as though he had gone into the north but yesterday and had
returned today. That was what McDowell was missing in him, the soul of
Conniston himself--Conniston, the ne plus ultra of presence and amiable
condescension, the man who could look the Inspector or the High
Commissioner himself between the eyes, and, serenely indifferent to
Service regulations, say, "Fine morning, old top!" Keith was not
without his own sense of humor. How the Englishman's ghost must be
raging if it was in the room at the present moment! He grinned and
shrugged his shoulders.
"Were you ever up there--through the Long Night--alone?" he asked.
"Ever been through six months of living torture with the stars leering
at you and the foxes barking at you all the time, fighting to keep
yourself from going mad? I went through that twice to get John Keith,
and I guess you're right. I'm changed. I don't think I'll ever be the
same again. Something--has gone. I can't tell what it is, but I feel
it. I guess only half of me pulled through. It killed John Keith.
Rotten, isn't it?"
He felt that he had made a lucky stroke. McDowell pulled out a drawer
from under the table and thrust a box of fat cigars under his nose.
"Light up, Derry--light up and tell us what happened. Bless my soul,
you're not half dead! A week in the old town will straighten you out."
He struck a match and held it to the tip of Keith's cigar.
For an hour thereafter Keith told the story of the man-hunt. It was his
Iliad. He could feel the presence of Conniston as words fell from his
lips; he forgot the presence of the stern-faced man who was watching
him and listening to him; he could see once more only the long months
and years of that epic drama of one against one, of pursuit and flight,
of hunger and cold, of the Long Nights filled with the desolation of
madness and despair. He triumphed over himself, and it was Conniston
who spoke from within him. It was the Englishman who told how terribly
John Keith had been punished, and when he came to the final days in the
lonely little cabin in the edge of the Barrens, Keith finished with a
choking in his throat, and the words, "And that was how John Keith
died--a gentleman and a MAN!"
He was thinking of the Englishman, of the calm and fearless smile in
his eyes as he died, of his last words, the last friendly grip of his
hand, and McDowell saw the thing as though he had faced it himself. He
brushed a hand over his face as if to wipe away a film. For some
moments after Keith had finished, he stood with his back to the man who
he thought was Conniston, and his mind was swiftly adding twos and twos
and fours and fours as he looked away into the green valley of the
Saskatchewan. He was the iron man when he turned to Keith again, the
law itself, merciless and potent, by some miracle turned into the form
of human flesh.
"After two and a half years of THAT even a murderer must have seemed
like a saint to you, Conniston. You have done your work splendidly. The
whole story shall go to the Department, and if it doesn't bring you a
commission, I'll resign. But we must continue to regret that John Keith
did not live to be hanged."
"He has paid the price," said Keith dully.
"No, he has not paid the price, not in full. He merely died. It could
have been paid only at the end of a rope. His crime was atrociously
brutal, the culmination of a fiend's desire for revenge. We will wipe
off his name. But I can not wipe away the regret. I would sacrifice a
year of my life if he were in this room with you now. It would be worth
it. God, what a thing for the Service--to have brought John Keith back
to justice after four years!"
He was rubbing his hands and smiling at Keith even as he spoke. His
eyes had taken on a filmy glitter. The law! It stood there, without
heart or soul, coveting the life that had escaped it. A feeling of
revulsion swept over Keith.
A knock came at the door.
McDowell's voice gave permission, and the door slowly opened. Cruze,
the young secretary, thrust in his head.
"Shan Tung is waiting, sir," he said.
An invisible hand reached up suddenly and gripped at Keith's throat. He
turned aside to conceal what his face might have betrayed. Shan Tung!
He knew what it was now that had pulled him back, he knew why
Conniston's troubled face had traveled with him over the Barrens, and
there surged over him with a sickening foreboding, a realization of
what it was that Conniston had remembered and wanted to tell him--when
it was too late. THEY HAD FORGOTTEN SHAN TUNG, THE CHINAMAN!