Produced by Norm Wolcott
Isobel
A Romance of the Northern Trail
by James Oliver Curwood, 1913
TO
CARLOTTA
WHO IS WITH ME AND TO
VIOLA
WHO FILLS FOR ME A DREAM OF THE FUTURE
I AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATE THIS BOOK
I
THE MOST TERRIBLE THING IN THE WORLD
At Point Fullerton, one thousand miles straight north of civilization,
Sergeant William MacVeigh wrote with the stub end of a pencil between
his fingers the last words of his semi-annual report to the
Commissioner of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police at Regina.
He concluded:
"I beg to say that I have made every effort to run down Scottie
Deane, the murderer. I have not given up hope of finding him, but I
believe that he has gone from my territory and is probably now
somewhere within the limits of the Fort Churchill patrol. We have
hunted the country for three hundred miles south along the shore of
Hudson's Bay to Eskimo Point, and as far north as Wagner Inlet.
Within three months we have made three patrols west of the Bay,
unraveling sixteen hundred miles without finding our man or word of
him. I respectfully advise a close watch of the patrols south of
the Barren Lands."
"There!" said MacVeigh aloud, straightening his rounded shoulders with
a groan of relief. "It's done."
From his bunk in a corner of the little wind and storm beaten cabin
which represented Law at the top end of the earth Private Pelliter
lifted a head wearily from his sick bed and said: "I'm bloomin' glad
of it, Mac. Now mebbe you'll give me a drink of water and shoot that
devilish huskie that keeps howling every now and then out there as
though death was after me."
"Nervous?" said MacVeigh, stretching his strong young frame with
another sigh of satisfaction. "What if you had to write this twice a
year?" And he pointed at the report.
"It isn't any longer than the letters you wrote to that girl of
yours--"
Pelliter stopped short. There was a moment of embarrassing silence.
Then he added, bluntly, and with a hand reaching out: "I beg your
pardon, Mac. It's this fever. I forgot for a moment that-- that you
two-- had broken."
"That's all right," said MacVeigh, with a quiver in his voice, as he
turned for the water.
"You see," he added, returning with a tin cup, "this report is
different. When you're writing to the Big Mogul himself something gets
on your nerves. And it has been a bad year with us, Pelly. We fell
down on Scottie, and let the raiders from that whaler get away from
us. And-- By Jo, I forgot to mention the wolves!"
"Put in a P. S.," suggested Pelliter.
"A P. S. to his Royal Nibs!" cried MacVeigh, staring incredulously at
his mate. "There's no use of feeling your pulse any more, Pelly. The
fever's got you. You're sure out of your head."
He spoke cheerfully, trying to bring a smile to the other's pale face.
Pelliter dropped back with a sigh.
"No-- there isn't any use feeling my pulse," he repeated. "It isn't
sickness, Bill-- not sickness of the ordinary sort. It's in my brain--
that's where it is. Think of it-- nine months up here, and never a
glimpse of a white man's face except yours. Nine months without the
sound of a woman's voice. Nine months of just that dead, gray world
out there, with the northern lights hissing at us every night like
snakes and the black rocks staring at us as they've stared for a
million centuries. There may be glory in it, but that's all. We're
'eroes all right, but there's no one knows it but ourselves and the
six hundred and forty-nine other men of the Royal Mounted. My God,
what I'd give for the sight of a girl's face, for just a moment's
touch of her hand! It would drive out this fever, for it's the fever
of loneliness, Mac-- a sort of madness, and it's splitting my 'ead."
"Tush, tush!" said MacVeigh, taking his mate's hand. "Wake up, Pelly!
Think of what's coming. Only a few months more of it, and we'll be
changed. And then-- think of what a heaven you'll be entering. You'll
be able to enjoy it more than the other fellows, for they've never had
this. And I'm going to bring you back a letter-- from the little
girl--"
Pelliter's face brightened.
"God bless her!" he exclaimed. "There'll be letters from her-- a dozen
of them. She's waited a long time for me, and she's true to the bottom
of her dear heart. You've got my letter safe?"
"Yes."
MacVeigh went back to the rough little table and added still further
to his report to the Commissioner of the Royal Mounted in the
following words:
"Pelliter is sick with a strange trouble in his head. At times I
have been afraid he was going mad, and if he lives I advise his
transfer south at an early date. I am leaving for Churchill two
weeks ahead of the usual time in order to get medicines. I also
wish to add a word to what I said about wolves in my last report.
We have seen them repeatedly in packs of from fifty to one
thousand. Late this autumn a pack attacked a large herd of
traveling caribou fifteen miles in from the Bay, and we counted the
remains of one hundred and sixty animals killed over a distance of
less than three miles. It is my opinion that the wolves kill at
least five thousand caribou in this patrol each year.
"I have the honor to be, sir,
"Your obedient servant,
" WILLIAM MACVEIGH, Sergeant,
"In charge of detachment."
He folded the report, placed it with other treasures in the waterproof
rubber bag which always went into his pack, and returned to Pelliter's
side.
"I hate to leave you alone, Pelly," he said. "But I'll make a fast
trip of it-- four hundred and fifty miles over the ice, and I'll do it
in ten days or bust. Then ten days back, mebbe two weeks, and you'll
have the medicines and the letters. Hurrah!"
"Hurrah!" cried Pelliter.
He turned his face a little to the wall. Something rose up in
MacVeigh's throat and choked him as he gripped Pelliter's hand.
"My God, Bill, is that the sun?" suddenly cried Pelliter.
MacVeigh wheeled toward the one window of the cabin. The sick man
tumbled from his bunk. Together they stood for a moment at the window,
staring far to the south and east, where a faint red rim of gold shot
up through the leaden sky.
"It's the sun," said MacVeigh, like one speaking a prayer.
"The first in four months," breathed Pelliter.
Like starving men the two gazed through the window. The golden light
lingered for a few moments, then died away. Pelliter went back to his
bunk.
Half an hour later four dogs, a sledge, and a man were moving swiftly
through the dead and silent gloom of Arctic day. Sergeant MacVeigh was
on his way to Fort Churchill, more than four hundred miles away.
This is the loneliest journey in the world, the trip down from the
solitary little wind-beaten cabin at Point Fullerton to Fort
Churchill. That cabin has but one rival in the whole of the
Northland-- the other cabin at Herschel Island, at the mouth of the
Firth, where twenty-one wooden crosses mark twenty-one white men's
graves. But whalers come to Herschel. Unless by accident, or to break
the laws, they never come in the neighborhood of Fullerton. It is at
Fullerton that men die of the most terrible thing in the world--
loneliness. In the little cabin men have gone mad.
The gloomy truth oppressed MacVeigh as he guided his dog team over the
ice into the south. He was afraid for Pelliter. He prayed that
Pelliter might see the sun now and then. On the second day he stopped
at a cache of fish which they had put up in the early autumn for dog
feed. He stopped at a second cache on the fifth day, and spent the
sixth night at an Eskimo igloo at Blind Eskimo Point. Late on the
ninth day he came into Fort Churchill, with an average of fifty miles
a day to his credit.
From Fullerton men came in nearer dead than alive when they made the
hazard in winter. MacVeigh's face was raw from the beat of the wind.
His eyes were red. He had a touch of runner's cramp. He slept for
twenty-four hours in a warm bed without stirring. When he awoke he
raged at the commanding officer of the barrack for letting him sleep
so long, ate three meals in one, and did up his business in a hurry.
His heart warmed with pleasure when he sorted out of his mail nine
letters for Pelliter, all addressed in the same small, girlish hand.
There was none for himself-- none of the sort which Pelliter was
receiving, and the sickening loneliness within him grew almost
suffocating.
He laughed softly as he broke a law. He opened one of Pelliter's
letters-- the last one written-- and calmly read it. It was filled
with the sweet tenderness of a girl's love, and tears came into his
red eyes. Then he sat down and answered it. He told the girl about
Pelliter, and confessed to her that he had opened her last letter. And
the chief of what he said was that it would be a glorious surprise to
a man who was going mad (only he used loneliness in place of madness)
if she would come up to Churchill the following spring and marry him
there. He told her that he had opened her letter because he loved
Pelliter more than most men loved their brothers. Then he resealed the
letter, gave his mail to the superintendent, packed his medicines and
supplies, and made ready to return.
On this same day there came into Churchill a halfbreed who had been
hunting white foxes near Blind Eskimo, and who now and then did scout
work for the department. He brought the information that he had seen a
white man and a white woman ten miles south of the Maguse River. The
news thrilled MacVeigh.
"I'll stop at the Eskimo camp," he said to the superintendent. "It's
worth investigating, for I never knew of a white woman north of sixty
in this country. It might be Scottie Deane."
"Not very likely," replied the superintendent. "Scottie is a tall man,
straight and powerful. Coujag says this man was no taller than
himself, and walked like a hunchback. But if there are white people
out there their history is worth knowing."
The following morning MacVeigh started north. He reached the
half-dozen igloos which made up the Eskimo village late the third day.
Bye-Bye, the chief man, offered him no encouragement, MacVeigh gave
him a pound of bacon, and in return for the magnificent present
Bye-Bye told him that he had seen no white people. MacVeigh gave him
another pound, and Bye-Bye added that he had not heard of any white
people. He listened with the lifeless stare of a walrus while MacVeigh
impressed upon him that he was going inland the next morning to search
for white people whom he had heard were there. That night, in a
blinding snow-storm, Bye-Bye disappeared from camp.
MacVeigh left his dogs to rest up at the igloo village and swung
northwest on snow-shoes with the break of arctic dawn, which was but
little better than the night itself. He planned to continue in this
direction until he struck the Barren, then patrol in a wide circle
that would bring him back to the Eskimo camp the next night. From the
first he was handicapped by the storm. He lost Bye-Bye's snow-shoe
tracks a hundred yards from the igloos. All that day he searched in
sheltered places for signs of a camp or trail. In the afternoon the
wind died away, the sky cleared, and in the wake of the calm the cold
became so intense that trees cracked with reports like pistol shots.
He stopped to build a fire of scrub bush and eat his supper on the
edge of the Barren just as the cold stars began blazing over his head.
It was a white, still night. The southern timberline lay far behind
him, and to the north there was no timber for three hundred miles.
Between those lines there was no life, and so there was no sound. On
the west the Barren thrust itself down in a long finger ten miles in
width, and across that MacVeigh would have to strike to reach the
wooded country beyond. It was over there that he had the greatest hope
of discovering a trail. After he had finished his supper he loaded his
pipe, and sat hunched close up to his fire, staring out over the
Barren. For some reason he was filled with a strange and uncomfortable
emotion, and he wished that he had brought along one of his tired dogs
to keep him company.
He was accustomed to loneliness; he had laughed in the face of things
that had driven other men mad. But to-night there seemed to be
something about him that he had never known before, something that
wormed its way deep down into his soul and made his pulse beat faster.
He thought of Pelliter on his fever bed, of Scottie Deane, and then of
himself. After all, was there much to choose between the three of
them?
A picture rose slowly before him in the bush-fire, and in that picture
he saw Scottie, the man-hunted man, fighting a great fight to keep
himself from being hung by the neck until he was dead; and then he saw
Pelliter, dying of the sickness which comes of loneliness, and beyond
those two, like a pale cameo appearing for a moment out of gloom, he
saw the picture of a face. It was a girl's face, and it was gone in an
instant. He had hoped against hope that she would write to him again.
But she had failed him.
He rose to his feet with a little laugh, partly of joy and partly of
pain, as he thought of the true heart that was waiting for Pelliter.
He tied on his snow-shoes and struck out over the Barren. He moved
swiftly, looking sharply ahead of him. The night grew brighter, the
stars more brilliant. The zipp, zipp, zipp of the tails of his
snow-shoes was the only sound he heard except the first faint, hissing
monotone of the aurora in the northern skies, which came to him like
the shivering run of steel sledge runners on hard snow.
In place of sound the night about him began to fill with ghostly life.
His shadow beckoned and grimaced ahead of him, and the stunted bush
seemed to move. His eyes were alert and questing. Within himself he
reasoned that he would see nothing, and yet some unusual instinct
moved him to caution. At regular intervals he stopped to listen and to
sniff the air for an odor of smoke. More and more he became like a
beast of prey. He left the last bush behind him. Ahead of him the
starlit space was now unbroken by a single shadow. Weird whispers came
with a low wind that was gathering in the north.
Suddenly MacVeigh stopped and swung his rifle into the crook of his
arm. Something that was not the wind had come up out of the night. He
lifted his fur cap from his ears and listened. He heard it again,
faintly, the frosty singing of sledge runners. The sledge was
approaching from the open Barren, and he cleared for action. He took
off his heavy fur mittens and snapped them to his belt, replaced them
with his light service gloves, and examined his revolver to see that
the cylinder was not frozen. Then he stood silent and waited.
II
BILLY MEETS THE WOMAN
Out of the gloom a sledge approached slowly. It took form at last in a
dim shadow, and MacVeigh saw that it would pass very near to him. He
made out, one after another, a human figure, three dogs, and the
toboggan. There was something appalling in the quiet of this specter
of life looming up out of the night. He could no longer hear the
sledge, though it was within fifty paces of him. The figure in advance
walked slowly and with bowed head, and the dogs and the sledge
followed in a ghostly line. Human leader and animals were oblivious to
MacVeigh, silent and staring in the white night. They were opposite
him before he moved.
Then he strode out quickly, with a loud holloa. At the sound of his
voice there followed a low cry, the dogs stopped in their traces, and
the figure ran back to the sledge. MacVeigh drew his revolver. Half a
dozen long strides and he had reached the sledge. From the opposite
side a white face stared at him, and with one hand resting on the
heavily laden sledge, and his revolver at level with his waist,
MacVeigh stared back in speechless astonishment.
For the great, dark, frightened eyes that looked across at him, and
the white, staring face he recognized as the eyes and the face of a
woman. For a moment he was unable to move or speak, and the woman
raised her hands and pushed back her fur hood so that he saw her hair
shimmering in the starlight. She was a white woman. Suddenly he saw
something in her face that struck him with a chill, and he looked down
at the thing under his hand. It was a long, rough box. He drew back a
step.
"Good God!" he said. "Are you alone?"
She bowed her head, and he heard her voice in a half sob.
"Yes-- alone."
He passed quickly around to her side. "I am Sergeant MacVeigh, of the
Royal Mounted," he said, gently. "Tell me, where are you going, and
how does it happen that you are out here in the Barren-- alone."
Her hood had fallen upon her shoulder, and she lifted her face full to
MacVeigh. The stars shone in her eyes. They were wonderful eyes, and
now they were filled with pain. And it was a wonderful face to
MacVeigh, who had not seen a white woman's face for nearly a year. She
was young, so young that in the pale glow of the night she looked
almost like a girl, and in her eyes and mouth and the upturn of her
chin there was something so like that other face of which he had
dreamed that he reached out and took her two hesitating hands in his
own, and asked again:
"Where are you going, and why are you out here-- alone?"
"I am going-- down there," she said, turning her head toward the
timber-line. "I am going with him-- my husband--"
Her voice choked her, and, drawing her hands suddenly from him, she
went to the sledge and stood facing him. For a moment there was a glow
of defiance in her eyes, as though she feared him and was ready to
fight for herself and her dead. The dogs slunk in at her feet, and
MacVeigh saw the gleam of their naked fangs in the starlight.
"He died three days ago," she finished, quietly, "and I am taking him
back to my people, down on the Little Seul."
"It is two hundred miles," said MacVeigh, looking at her as if she
were mad. "You will die."
"I have traveled two days," replied the woman. "I am going on."
"Two days-- across the Barren!"
MacVeigh looked at the box, grim and terrible in the ghostly radiance
that fell upon it. Then he looked at the woman. She had bowed her head
upon her breast, and her shining hair fell loose and disheveled. He
saw the pathetic droop of her tired shoulders, and knew that she was
crying. In that moment a thrilling warmth flooded every fiber of his
body, and the glory of this that had come to him from out of the
Barren held him mute. To him woman was all that was glorious and good.
The pitiless loneliness of his life had placed them next to angels in
his code of things, and before him now he saw all that he had ever
dreamed of in the love and loyalty of womanhood and of wifehood.
The bowed little figure before him was facing death for the man she
had loved, and who was dead. In a way he knew that she was mad. And
yet her madness was the madness of a devotion that was beyond fear, of
a faithfulness that made no measure of storm and cold and starvation;
and he was filled with a desire to go up to her as she stood crumpled
and exhausted against the box, to take her close in his arms and tell
her that of such a love he had built for himself the visions which had
kept him alive in his loneliness. She looked pathetically like a
child.
"Come, little girl," he said. "We'll go on. I'll see you safely on
your way to the Little Seul. You mustn't go alone. You'd never reach
your people alive. My God, if I were he--"
He stopped at the frightened look in the white face she lifted to him.
"What?" she asked.
"Nothing-- only it's hard for a man to die and lose a woman like you,"
said MacVeigh. "There-- let me lift you up on the box."
"The dogs cannot pull the load," she objected. "I have helped them--"
"If they can't, I can," he laughed, softly; and with a quick movement
he picked her up and seated her on the sledge. He stripped off his
pack and placed it behind her, and then he gave her his rifle. The
woman looked straight at him with a tense, white face as she placed
the weapon across her lap.
"You can shoot me if I don't do my duty," said MacVeigh. He tried to
hide the happiness that came to him in this companionship of woman,
but it trembled in his voice. He stopped suddenly, listening.
"What was that?"
"I heard nothing," said the woman. Her face was deadly white. Her eyes
had grown black.
MacVeigh turned, with a word to the dogs. He picked up the end of the
babiche rope with which the woman had assisted them to drag their
load, and set off across the Barren. The presence of the dead had
always been oppressive to him, but to-night it was otherwise. His
fatigue of the day was gone, and in spite of the thing he was helping
to drag behind him he was filled with a strange elation. He was in the
presence of a woman. Now and then he turned his head to look at her.
He could feel her behind him, and the sound of her low voice when she
spoke to the dogs was like music to him. He wanted to burst forth in
the wild song with which he and Pelliter had kept up their courage in
the little cabin, but he throttled his desire and whistled instead. He
wondered how the woman and the dogs had dragged the sledge. It sank
deep in the soft drift-snow, and taxed his strength. Now and then he
paused to rest, and at last the woman jumped from the sledge and came
to his side.
"I am going to walk," she said. "The load is too heavy."
"The snow is soft," replied MacVeigh. "Come."
He held out his hand to her; and, with the same strange, white look in
her face, the woman gave him her own. She glanced back uneasily toward
the box, and MacVeigh understood. He pressed her fingers a little
tighter and drew her nearer to him. Hand in hand, they resumed their
way across the Barren. MacVeigh said nothing, but his blood was
running like fire through his body. The little hand he held trembled
and started uneasily. Once or twice it tried to draw itself away, and
he held it closer. After that it remained submissively in his own,
warm and thrilling. Looking down, he could see the profile of the
woman's face.
A long, shining tress of her hair had freed itself from under her
hood, and the light wind lifted it so that it fell across his arm.
Like a thief he raised it to his lips, while the woman looked straight
ahead to where the timber-line began to show in a thin, black streak.
His cheeks burned, half with shame, half with tumultuous joy. Then he
straightened his shoulders and shook the floating tress from his arm.
Three-quarters of an hour later they came to the first of the timber.
He still held her hand. He was still holding it, with the brilliant
starlight falling upon them, when his chin shot suddenly into the air
again, alert and fighting, and he cried, softly:
"What was that?"
"Nothing," said the woman. "I heard nothing-- unless it was the wind
in the trees."
She drew away from him. The dogs whined and slunk close to the box.
Across the Barren came a low, wailing wind.
"The storm is coming back," said MacVeigh. "It must have been the wind
that I heard."
III
IN HONOR OF THE LIVING
For a few moments after uttering those words Billy stood silent
listening for a sound that was not the low moaning of the wind far out
on the Barren. He was sure that he had heard it-- something very near,
almost at his feet, and yet it was a sound which he could not place or
understand. He looked at the woman. She was gazing steadily at him.
"I hear it now," she said. "It is the wind. It has frightened me. It
makes such terrible sounds at times-- out on the Barren. A little
while ago-- I thought-- I heard-- a child crying--"
Billy saw her clutch a hand at her throat, and there were both terror
and grief in the eyes that never for an instant left his face. He
understood. She was almost ready to give way under the terrible strain
of the Barren. He smiled at her, and spoke in a voice that he might
have used to a little child.
"You are tired, little girl?"
"Yes-- yes-- I am tired--"
"And hungry and cold?"
"Yes."
"Then we will camp in the timber."
They went on until they came to a growth of spruce so dense that it
formed a shelter from both snow and wind, with a thick carpet of brown
needles under foot. They were shut out from the stars, and in the
darkness MacVeigh began to whistle cheerfully. He unstrapped his pack
and spread out one of his blankets close to the box and wrapped the
other about the woman's shoulders.
"You sit here while I make a fire," he said.
He piled up dry needles over a precious bit of his birchbark and
struck a flame. In the glowing light he found other fuel, and added to
the fire until the crackling blaze leaped as high as his head. The
woman's face was hidden, and she looked as though she had fallen
asleep in the warmth of the fire. For half an hour Mac-Veigh dragged
in fuel until he had a great pile of it in readiness.
Then he forked out a deep bed of burning coals and soon the odor of
coffee and frying bacon aroused his companion. She raised her head and
threw back the blanket with which he had covered her shoulders. It was
warm where she sat, and she took off her hood while he smiled at her
companionably from over the fire. Her reddish-brown hair tumbled about
her shoulders, rippling and glistening in the fire glow, and for a few
moments she sat with it falling loosely about her, with her eyes upon
MacVeigh. Then she gathered it between her fingers, and MacVeigh
watched her while she divided it into shining strands and pleated it
into a big braid.
"Supper is ready," he said. "Will you eat it there?"
She nodded, and for the first time she smiled at him. He brought bacon
and bread and coffee and other things from his pack and placed them on
a folded blanket between them. He sat opposite her, cross-legged. For
the first time he noticed that her eyes were blue and that there was a
flush in her cheeks. The flush deepened as he looked at her, and she
smiled at him again.
The smile, the momentary drooping of her eyes, set his heart leaping,
and for a little while he was unconscious of taste in the food he
swallowed. He told her of his post away up at Point Fullerton, and of
Pelliter, who was dying of loneliness.
"It's been a long time since I've seen a woman like you," he confided.
"And it seems like heaven. You don't know how lonely I am!" His voice
trembled. "I wish that Pelliter could see you-- just for a moment," he
added. "It would make him live again."
Something in the soft glow of her eyes urged other words to his lips.
"Mebbe you don't know what it means not to see a white woman in-- in--
all this time," he went on. "You won't think that I've gone mad, will
you, or that I'm saying or doing anything that's wrong? I'm trying to
hold myself back, but I feel like shouting, I'm that glad. If Pelliter
could see you--" He reached suddenly in his pocket and drew out the
precious packet of letters. "He's got a girl down south-- just like
you," he said. "These are from her. If I get 'em up in time they'll
bring him round. It's not medicine he wants. It's woman-- just a sight
of her, and sound of her, and a touch of her hand."
She reached across and took the letters. In the firelight he saw that
her hand was trembling.
"Are they-- married?" she asked, softly.
"No, but they're going to be," he cried, triumphantly. "She's the most
beautiful thing in the world, next to--"
He paused, and she finished for him.
"Next to one other girl-- who is yours."
"No, I wasn't going to say that. You won't think I mean wrong, will
you, if I tell you? I was going to say next to-- you. For you've come
out of the blizzard-- like an angel to give me new hope. I was sort of
broke when you came. If you disappeared now and I never saw you again
I'd go back and fight the rest of my time out, an' dream of pleasant
things. Gawd! Do you know a man has to be put up here before he knows
that life isn't the sun an' the moon an' the stars an' the air we
breathe. It's woman-- just woman."
He was returning the letters to his pocket. The woman's voice was
clear and gentle. To Billy it rose like sweetest music above the
crackling of the fire and the murmuring of the wind in the spruce
tops.
"Men like you-- ought to have a woman to care for," she said. "He was
like that."
"You mean--" His eyes sought the long, dark box.
"Yes-- he was like that."
"I know how you feel," he said; and for a moment he did not look at
her. "I've gone through-- a lot of it. Father an' mother and a sister.
Mother was the last, and I wasn't much more than a kid-- eighteen, I
guess-- but it don't seem much more than yesterday. When you come up
here and you don't see the sun for months nor a white face for a year
or more it brings up all those things pretty much as though they
happened only a little while ago.'"
"All of them are-- dead?" she asked.
"All but one. She wrote to me for a long time, and I thought she'd
keep her word. Pelly-- that's Pelliter-- thinks we've just had a
misunderstanding, and that she'll write again. I haven't told him that
she turned me down to marry another fellow. I didn't want to make him
think any unpleasant things about his own girl. You're apt to do that
when you're almost dying of loneliness."
The woman's eyes were shining. She leaned a little toward him.
"You should be glad," she said. "If she turned you down she wouldn't
have been worthy of you-- afterward. She wasn't a true woman. If she
had been, her love wouldn't have grown cold because you were away. It
mustn't spoil your faith-- because that is-- beautiful."
He had put a hand into his pocket again, and drew out now a thin
package wrapped in buckskin. His face was like a boy's.
"I might have-- if I hadn't met you," he said. "I'd like to let you
know-- some way-- what you've done for me. You and this."
He had unfolded the buckskin, and gave it to her. In it were the big
blue petals and dried stem of a blue flower.
"A blue flower!" she said.
"Yes. You know what it means. The Indians call it i-o-waka, or
something like that, because they believe that it is the flower spirit
of the purest and most beautiful thing in the world. I have called it
woman."
He laughed, and there was a joyous sort of note in the laugh.
"You may think me a little mad," he said, "but do you care if I tell
you about that blue flower?"
The woman nodded. There was a little quiver at her throat which Billy
did not see.
"I was away up on the Great Bear," he said, "and for ten days and ten
nights I was in camp-- alone-- laid up with a sprained ankle. It was a
wild and gloomy place, shut in by barren ridge mountains, with stunted
black spruce all about, and those spruce were haunted by owls that
made my blood run cold nights. The second day I found company. It was
a blue flower. It grew close to my tent, as high as my knee, and
during the day I used to spread out my blanket close to it and lie
there and smoke. And the blue flower would wave on its slender stem,
an' bob at me, an' talk in sign language that I imagined I understood.
Sometimes it was so funny and vivacious that I laughed, and then it
seemed to be inviting me to a dance. And at other times it was just
beautiful and still, and seemed listening to what the forest was
saying-- and once or twice, I thought, it might be praying. Loneliness
makes a fellow foolish, you know. With the going of the sun my blue
flower would always fold its petals and go to sleep, like a little
child tired out by the day's play, and after that I would feel
terribly lonely. But it was always awake again when I rolled out in
the morning. At last the time came when I was well enough to leave. On
the ninth night I watched my blue flower go to sleep for the last
time. Then I packed. The sun was up when I went away the next morning,
and from a little distance I turned and looked back. I suppose I was
foolish, and weak for a man, but I felt like crying. Blue flower had
taught me many things I had not known before. It had made me think.
And when I looked back it was in a pool of sunlight, and it was waving
at me! It seemed to me that it was calling-- calling me back-- and I
ran to it and picked it from the stem, and it has been with me ever
since that hour. It has been my Bible an' my comrade, an' I've known
it was the spirit of the purest and the most beautiful thing in the
world-- woman. I--" His voice broke a little. "I-- I may be foolish,
but I'd like to have you take it, an' keep it-- always-- for me."
He could see now the quiver of her lips as she looked across at him.
"Yes, I will take it," she said. "I will take it and keep it--
always."
"I've been keeping it for a woman-- somewhere," he said. "Foolish
idea, wasn't it? And I've been telling you all this, when I want to
hear what happened back there, and what you are going to do when you
reach your people. Do you mind-- telling me?"
"He died-- that's all," she replied, fighting to speak calmly. "I
promised to take him back-- to my people, And when I get there-- I
don't know-- what I shall-- do--"
She caught her breath. A low sob broke from her lips.
"You don't know-- what you will do--"
Billy's voice sounded strange even to himself. He rose to his feet and
looked down into her upturned face, his hands clenched, his body
trembling with the fight he was making. Words came to his lips and
were forced back again-- words which almost won in their struggle to
tell her again that she had come to him from out of the Barren like an
angel, that within the short space since their meeting he had lived a
lifetime, and that he loved her as no man had ever loved a woman
before. Her blue eyes looked at him questioningly as he stood above
her.
And then he saw the thing which for a moment he had forgotten-- the
long, rough box at the woman's back. His fingers dug deeper into his
palms, and with a gasping breath he turned away. A hundred paces back
in the spruce he had found a bare rock with a red bakneesh vine
growing over it. With his knife he cut off an armful, and when he
returned with it into the light of the fire the bakneesh glowed like a
mass of crimson flowers. The woman had risen to her feet, and looked
at him speechlessly as he scattered the vine over the box. He turned
to her and said, softly:
"In honor of the dead!"
The color had faded from her face, but her eyes shone like stars.
Billy advanced toward her with his hands reaching out. But suddenly he
stopped and stood listening. After a moment he turned and asked again:
"What was that?"
"I heard the dogs-- and the wind," she replied.
"It's something cracking in my head, I guess," said MacVeigh. "It
sounded like--" He passed a hand over his forehead and looked at the
dogs huddled in deep sleep beside the sledge. The woman did not see
the shiver that passed through him. He laughed cheerfully, and seized
his ax.
"Now for the camp," he announced. "We're going to get the storm within
an hour."
On the box the woman carried a small tent, and he pitched it close to
the fire, filling the interior two feet deep with cedar and balsam
boughs. His own silk service tent he put back in the deeper shadows of
the spruce. When he had finished he looked questioningly at the woman
and then at the box.
"If there is room-- I would like it in there-- with me," she said, and
while she stood with her face to the fire he dragged the box into the
tent. Then he piled fresh fuel upon the fire and came to bid her good
night. Her face was pale and haggard now, but she smiled at him, and
to MacVeigh she was the most beautiful thing in the world. Within
himself he felt that he had known her for years and years, and he took
her hands and looked down into her blue eyes and said, almost in a
whisper:
"Will you forgive me if I'm doing wrong? You don't know how lonesome
I've been, and how lonesome I am, and what it means to me to look once
more into a woman's face. I don't want to hurt you, and I'd-- I'd"--
his voice broke a little--"I'd give him back life if I could, just
because I've seen you and know you and-- and love you."
She started and drew a quick, sharp breath that came almost in a low
cry.
"Forgive me, little girl," he went on. "I may be a little mad. I guess
I am. But I'd die for you, and I'm going to see you safely down to
your people-- and-- and-- I wonder-- I wonder-- if you'd kiss me good
night--"
Her eyes never left his face. They were dazzlingly blue in the
firelight. Slowly she drew her hands away from him, still looking
straight into his eyes, and then she placed them against each of his
arms and slowly lifted her face to him. Reverently he bent and kissed
her.
"God bless you!" he whispered.
For hours after that he sat beside the fire. The wind came up stronger
across the Barren; the storm broke fresh from the north, the spruce
and the balsam wailed over his head, and he could hear the moaning
sweep of the blizzard out in the open spaces. But the sounds came to
him now like a new kind of music, and his heart throbbed and his soul
was warm with joy as he looked at the little tent wherein there lay
sleeping the woman whom he loved.
He still felt the warmth of her lips, he saw again and again the blue
softness that had come for an instant into her eyes, and he thanked
God for the wonderful happiness that had come to him. For the
sweetness of the woman's lips and the greater sweetness of her blue
eyes told him what life held for him now. A day's journey to the south
was an Indian camp. He would take her there, and would hire runners to
carry up Pelliter's medicines and his letters. Then he would go on--
with the woman-- and he laughed softly and joyously at the glorious
news which he would take back to Pelliter a little later. For the kiss
burned on his lips, the blue eyes smiled at him still from out of the
firelit gloom, and he knew nothing but hope.
It was late, almost midnight, when he went to bed. With the storm
wailing and twisting more fiercely about him, he fell asleep. And it
was late when he awoke. The forest was filled with a moaning sound.
The fire was low. Beyond it the flap of the woman's tent was still
down, and he put on fresh fuel quietly, so that he would not awaken
her. He looked at his watch and found that he had been sleeping for
nearly seven hours. Then he returned to his tent to get the things for
breakfast. Half a dozen paces from the door flap he stopped in sudden
astonishment.
Hanging to his tent in the form of a great wreath was the red bakneesh
which he had cut the night before, and over it, scrawled in charcoal
on the silk, there stared at him the crudely written words:
"In honor of the living."
With a low cry he sprang back toward the other tent, and then, as
sudden as his movement, there flashed upon him the significance of the
bakneesh wreath. The woman was saying to him what she had not spoken
in words. She had come out in the night while he was asleep and had
hung the wreath where he would see it in the morning. The blood rushed
warm and joyous through his body, and with something which was not a
laugh, but which was an exultant breath from the soul itself, he
straightened himself, and his hand fell in its old trick to his
revolver holster. It was empty.
He dragged out his blankets, but the weapon was not between them. He
looked into the corner where he had placed his rifle. That, too, was
gone. His face grew tense and white as he walked slowly beyond the
fire to the woman's tent. With his ear at the flap he listened. There
was no sound within-- no sound of movement, of life, of a sleeper's
breath; and like one who feared to reveal a terrible picture he drew
back the flap. The balsam bed which he had made for the woman was
empty, and across it had been drawn the big rough box. He stepped
inside. The box was open-- and empty, except for a mass of worn and
hard-packed balsam boughs in the bottom. In another instant the truth
burst in all its force upon MacVeigh. The box had held life, and the
woman--
Something on the side of the box caught his eyes. It was a folded bit
of paper, pinned where he must see it. He tore it off and staggered
with it back into the light of day. A low, hard cry came from his lips
as he read what the woman had written to him:
"May God bless you for being good to me. In the storm we have
gone-- my husband and I. Word came to us that you were on our
trail, and we saw your fire out on the Barren. My husband made the
box for me to keep me from cold and storm. When we saw you we
changed places, and so you met me with my dead. He could have
killed you-- a dozen times, but you were good to me, and so you
live. Some day may God give you a good woman who will love you as I
love him. He killed a man, but killing is not always murder. We
have taken your weapons, and the storm will cover our trail. But
you would not follow. I know that. For you know what it means to
love a woman, and so you know what life means to a woman when she
loves a man. MRS. ISOBEL DEANE."
IV
THE MAN-HUNTERS
Like one dazed by a blow Billy read once more the words which Isobel
Deane had left for him. He made no sound after that first cry that had
broken from his lips, but stood looking into the crackling flames of
the fire until a sudden lash of the wind whipped the note from between
his fingers and sent it scurrying away in a white volley of fine snow.
The loss of the note awoke him to action. He started to pursue the bit
of paper, then stopped and laughed. It was a short, mirthless laugh,
the kind of a laugh with which a strong man covers pain. He returned
to the tent again and looked in. He flung back the tent flaps so that
the light could enter and he could see into the box. A few hours
before that box had hidden Scottie Deane, the murderer. And she was
his wife! He turned back to the fire, and he saw again the red
bakneesh hanging over his tent flap, and the words she had scrawled
with the end of a charred stick, "In honor of the living." That meant
him. Something thick and uncomfortable rose in his throat, and a blur
that was not caused by snow or wind filled his eyes. She had made a
magnificent fight. And she had won. And it suddenly occurred to him
that what she had said in the note was true, and that Scottie Deane
could easily have killed him. The next moment he wondered why he had
not done that. Deane had taken a big chance in allowing him to live.
They had only a few hours' start of him, and their trail could not be
entirely obliterated by the storm. Deane would be hampered in his
flight by the presence of his wife. He could still follow and overtake
them. They had taken his weapons, but this would not be the first time
that he had gone after his man without weapons.
Swiftly the reaction worked in him. He ran beyond the fire, and
circled quickly until he came upon the trail of the outgoing sledge.
It was still quite distinct. Deeper in the forest it could be easily
followed. Something fluttered at his feet. It was Isobel Deane's note.
He picked it up, and again his eyes fell upon those last words that
she had written: But you would not follow. I know that. For you know
what it means to love a woman, and so you know what life means to a
woman when she loves a man. That was why Scottie Deane had not killed
him. It was because of the woman. And she had faith in him! This time
he folded the note and placed it in his pocket, where the blue flower
had been. Then he went slowly back to the fire.
"I told you I'd give him back his life-- if I could," he said. "And I
guess I'm going to keep my word." He fell into his old habit of
talking to himself-- a habit that comes easily to one in the big open
spaces-- and he laughed as he stood beside the fire and loaded his
pipe. "If it wasn't for her!" he added, thinking of Scottie Deane.
"Gawd-- if it wasn't for her!"
He finished loading his pipe, and lighted it, staring off into the
thicker spruce forest into which Scottie and his wife had fled. The
entire force was on the lookout for Scottie Deane. For more than a
year he had been as elusive as the little white ermine of the woods.
He had outwitted the best men in the service, and his name was known
to every man of the Royal Mounted from Calgary to Herschel Island.
There was a price on his head, and fame for the man who captured him.
Those who dreamed of promotions also dreamed of Scottie Deane; and as
Billy thought of these things something that was not the man-hunting
instinct rose in him and his blood warmed with a strange feeling of
brotherhood. Scottie Deane was more than an outlaw to him now, more
than a mere man. Hunted like a rat, chased from place to place, he
must be more than those things for a woman like Isobel Deane still to
cling to. He recalled the gentleness of her voice, the sweetness of
her face, the tenderness of her blue eyes, and for the first time the
thought came to him that such a woman could not love a man who was
wholly bad. And she did love him. A twinge of pain came with that
truth, and yet with it a thrill of pleasure. Her loyalty was a
triumph-- even for him. She had come to him like an angel out of the
storm, and she had gone from him like an angel. He was glad. A living,
breathing reality had taken the place of the dream vision in his
heart, a woman who was flesh and blood, and who was as true and as
beautiful as the blue flower he had carried against his breast. In
that moment he would have liked to grip Scottie Deane by the hand,
because he was her husband and because he was man enough to make her
love him. Perhaps it was Deane who had hung the wreath of bakneesh on
his tent and who had scribbled the words in charcoal. And Deane surely
knew of the note his wife had written. The feeling of brotherhood grew
stronger in Billy, and thought of their faith in him filled him with a
strange elation.
The fire was growing low, and he turned to add fresh fuel. His eyes
caught sight of the box in the tent, and he dragged it out. He was
about to throw it on the fire when he hesitated and examined it more
closely. How far had they come, he wondered? It must have been from
the other side of the Barren, for Deane had built the box to protect
Isobel from the fierce winds of the open. It was built of light, dry
wood, hewn with a belt ax, and the corners were fastened with babiche
cord made of caribou skin in place of nails. The balsam that had been
placed in it for Isobel was still in the box, and Billy's heart beat a
little more quickly as he drew it out. It had been Isobel's bed. He
could see where the balsam was thicker, where her head had rested.
With a sudden breathless cry he thrust the box on the fire.
He was not hungry, but he made himself a pot of coffee and drank it.
Until now he had not observed that the storm was growing steadily
worse. The thick, low-hanging spruce broke the force of it. Beyond the
shelter of the forest he could hear the roar of it as it swept through
the thin scrub and open spaces of the edge of the Barren. It recalled
him once more to Pelliter. In the excitement of Isobel's presence and
the shock and despair that had followed her flight he had been guilty
of partly forgetting Pelliter. By the time he reached the Eskimo
igloos there would be two days lost. Those two days might mean
everything to his sick comrade. He jumped to his feet, felt in his
pocket to see that the letters were safe, and began to arrange his
pack. Through the trees there came now fine white volleys of
blistering snow. It was like the hardest granulated sugar. A sudden
blast of it stung his eyes; and, leaving his pack and tent, he made
his way anxiously toward the more open timber and scrub. A few hundred
yards from the camp he was forced to bow his head against the snow
volleys and pull the broad flaps of his cap down over his cheeks and
ears. A hundred yards more and he stopped, sheltering himself behind a
gnarled and stunted banskian. He looked out into the beginning of the
open. It was a white and seething chaos into which he could not see
the distance of a pistol shot. The Eskimo igloos were twenty miles
across the Barren, and Billy's heart sank. He could not make it. No
man could live in the storm that was sweeping straight down from the
Arctic, and he turned back to the camp. He had scarcely made the move
when he was startled by a strange sound coming with the wind. He faced
the white blur again, a hand dropping to his empty pistol holster. It
came again, and this time he recognized it. It was a shout, a man's
voice. Instantly his mind leaped to Deane and Isobel. What miracle
could be bringing them back?
A shadow grew out of the twisting blur of the storm. It quickly
separated itself into definite parts-- a team of dogs, a sledge, three
men. A minute more and the dogs stopped in a snarling tangle as they
saw Billy. Billy stepped forth. Almost instantly he found a revolver
leveled at his breast.
"Put that up, Bucky Smith," he called. "If you're looking for a man
you've found the wrong one!"
The man advanced. His eyes were red and staring. His pistol arm
dropped as he came within a yard of Billy.