CONFESSIONS
Brent returned to the cabin with his brain in a whirl. "I'll make a
strike before spring! I've got to! Then we'll hit for Dawson, and we'll
stop at Fort Norman and be married. No--we'll go on through and be
married at the Reeves'! Married! A Brent married to an Indian!" He
halted in the trail and cursed himself for the thought.
"She's a damn sight too good for you! You're a hell of a Brent--nothing
left but the name! Gambler--notorious gambler, Reeves said--and a
barkeep in Malone's dive. You're a hooch hound, and you've got to keep
away from hooch to stay sober! You don't dare go back to Dawson--nor
anywhere else where there's a saloon! You're broke, and worse than
broke. You're right now living on Reeves' money--and you think of
marrying _her_!"
Furiously, next morning, he attacked the gravel at the bottom of the
shaft. When the loose muck was thrown out he swore at the slow progress,
and futilely attacked the floor of the shaft with his pick as though to
win down to bed-rock through the iron-hard frost. Then he climbed out
and, scooping up a pan from the dump, retired to the cabin, and washed
it out.
"Same thing," he muttered disgustedly, as he stared at the yellow
grains, "Just wages. I've got to make a strike! There's Reeves to
pay--and Camillo Bill--and I've got to have dust--and plenty of it--for
_her_. Damn this hole! I'm going to hit for the lower river. We'll cover
this shaft to keep the snow out and hit north. Hearne, and Franklin, and
Richardson all report native copper on the lower river--amygdaloid beds
that crop out in sheer cliffs. Gold isn't the only metal--there's
millions in copper! And, the river winding in and out among the trap and
basalt dykes, there's bound to be gold, too." He collected the few
grains of gold, threw out the gravel and water, and picking up his
rifle, stepped out the door. At the shaft he paused and called to Joe
Pete that he was going hunting and as the big Indian watched him
disappear up the river, his lips stretched in a slow grin, and he tossed
wood into the shaft.
A mile from the cabin Brent rounded a sharp bend and came face to face
with Snowdrift. There was an awkward silence during which both strove to
appear unconcerned. The girl was the first to speak, and Brent noticed
that she was blushing furiously: "I--I am hunting," she announced,
swinging her rifle prominently into view.
Brent laughed: "So am I hunting--for you."
"But really, I am hunting caribou. There are lots of mouths to feed, and
the men are not much good. They will spend hours slipping up onto a
caribou and then miss him."
"Come on, then, let's go," answered the man gaily. "Which way shall it
be?"
"I saw lots of tracks the other day on a lake to the eastward. It is six
or seven miles. I think we will find caribou there." Brent tried to take
her hand, but she eluded him with a laugh, and struck out through the
scraggling timber at a pace that he soon found hard to follow.
"Slow down! I'll be good!" he called, when they had covered a quarter of
a mile, and Snowdrift laughingly slackened her pace.
"You're a wonder!" he panted, as he closed up the distance that
separated them, "Don't you ever get tired?"
"Oh, yes, very often. But, not so early in the day. See, three caribou
passed this way only a few hours ago--a bull and two cows." They struck
into the trail, and two hours later Snowdrift succeeded in bring down
one of the cows with a long shot as the three animals trotted across a
frozen muskeg.
"And now we must kill one for you," announced the girl as Brent finished
drawing the animal.
"We needn't be in any hurry about it," he grinned. "We still have most
of the one we got the other day."
"Then, why are you hunting?"
"I told you. I found what I was hunting--back there on the river. How
about lunch? I'm hungry as a wolf."
The girl pointed to a sheltered spot in the lee of a spruce thicket, and
while Brent scraped back the snow, she produced food from her pack.
"You must have figured on getting pretty hungry," teased Brent, eying
the generous luncheon to which he had added his own.
Snowdrift blushed: "You brought more than I did!" she smiled,
"See--there is much more."
"Oh, I'll come right out with it--I put that up for two!"
"And mine is for two," she admitted, "But you are mean for making me say
it."
During the meal the girl was unusually silent and several times Brent
surprised a look of pain in the dark eyes, and then the look would fade
and the eyes would gaze pensively into the distance. Once he was sure
that her lip quivered.
"What's the matter, Snowdrift," he asked abruptly, "What is troubling
you? Tell me all about it. You might as well begin now, you
know--because----"
She hastened to interrupt him: "Nothing is the matter!" she cried, with
an obviously forced gaiety. "But, tell me, where did you come
from--before you came to the Yukon? All my life I have wanted to know
more of the land that lies to the southward--the land of the white man.
Father Ambrose and Sister Mercedes told me much--but it was mostly of
the church. And Henri of the White Water told me of the great stores in
Edmonton where one may buy fine clothes, of other stores where one may
sell hooch without fear of the police, and also where one may win money
with cards. But, surely, there are other things. The white men, and the
women, they do not always go to church and buy clothes, and drink hooch,
and gamble with cards. And are all the women beautiful like the pictures
in the books, and in the magazines?"
Brent laughed: "No, all the women are not beautiful. It is only once in
a great while that one sees a really beautiful woman, and you are the
most beautiful woman I have ever seen----"
"But I am not beautiful!" cried the girl, "Not like the pictures."
"The pictures are not pictures of real women, they are creations of an
artist's brain. The pictures are the artist's conception of what the
real women should be."
Snowdrift regarded him with a puzzled frown: "Is it all make-believe, in
the land of the white man? The books--the novels that tell of knights in
armor, and of the beautiful ladies with their clothes, and their rings
of the diamonds that sparkle like ice--and other novels that tell of
suffering, and of the plotting of men and women who are very bad--and of
the doings of men and women who are good--Sister Mercedes said they are
all lies--that they are the work of the brain of the man who wrote it
down. Is it all lies and make-believe? Do the white men use their brains
only to tell of the doings of people who have never lived, and to make
pictures of people and things that never were? Do you, too, live in the
make-believe? You have told me you love me. And just now you told me
that I was the most beautiful woman you have seen. Those are the words
of the books--of the novels. Always the man must tell the woman she is
the most beautiful woman in the world. And it is all make-believe, and
in the words is no truth!"
"No, no, dear! You do not understand. I don't know whether I can explain
it, but it is not all make-believe--by a long shot! Life down there is
as real as it is here. There are millions of people there and for them
all life is a struggle. Millions live in great cities, and other
millions live in the country and raise grain with which to feed
themselves, and the millions who live in the cities. And the people in
the cities work in great factories, and make the clothing, and the
tools, and guns, and everything that is used by themselves and by the
people who live outside the cities, and they build the ships and the
railroads which carry these goods to all parts of the world. But you
have read of all that in the books--and the books are not all lies and
make-believe, for they tell of life as it is--not as any one or a dozen
characters live it--but as thousands and millions live it. The comings
and goings of the characters are the composite comings and goings of a
thousand or a million living breathing people. And because each person
is too busy--too much occupied with his own particular life, he does not
know of the lives of the other millions. But he wants to know--so he
reads the books and the magazines, and the newspapers." The girl hung
absorbed upon his words, and for an hour Brent talked, describing,
explaining, detailing the little things and the great things, the
common-places, and the wonders of the far-off land to the southward. But
of all the things he described, the girl was most interested in the
libraries with their thousands and thousands of books that one might
read for the asking--the libraries, and the clothing of the women.
"All my life," she concluded, "I have wanted to go to the land of the
white man, and see these things myself. But, I never shall see them, and
I am glad you have told me more."
Brent laughed, happily, and before she could elude him his arms were
about her and he had drawn her close. "Indeed you shall see them!" he
cried. "You and I shall see them together. We'll be married at Dawson,
and we'll make a strike----"
With a low cry the girl freed herself from his arms, and drew away to
the other side of the fire: "No, no, no!" she cried, with a catch in her
voice, "I can never marry you! Oh, why must we love! Why must we
suffer, when the fault is not ours? They would hate me, and despise me,
and point at me with the finger of scorn!"
Brent laughed: "Hold on girl!" he cried, "Some of the best families in
the world have Indian blood in their veins--and they're proud of it! I
know 'em! They'll come a long way from hating you. Why, they'll pile all
over themselves to meet you--and a hundred years from now our
great-grand-children will be bragging about you!" Suddenly, he grew
serious, "But maybe you won't marry me, after all--when you've heard
what I've got to say. Maybe you'll despise me--and it'll be all right if
you do. It will be what I have earned. It isn't a pretty story, and it's
going to hurt to tell it--to you. But, you've got to know--so here goes.
"In the first place, you think I'm good. But, I'm not good--by most of
the ten commandments, and a lot of by-laws. I'm not going to do any
white-washing--I'm going to begin at the beginning and tell you the
truth, so you can see how far I've dropped. In the first place my family
tree is decorated with presidents, and senators, and congress-men, and
generals, and diplomats, and its branches are so crowded with colonels,
and majors and captains and judges, and doctors, that they have to prop
them up to keep them from breaking. Some were rich, but honest; and some
were poor, but not so honest, and a lot of them were half way between in
both wealth and honesty. But, anyway, you can't turn twenty pages of
United States history without running onto the trail of at least one man
that I can claim kin to. As for myself, I'm a college man, and a mining
engineer--that means I was fitted by family and education to be a big
man, and maybe get a chance to slip into history myself--I've made some,
over on the Yukon, but--it ain't fit to print.
"Hooch was at the bottom of the whole business. I couldn't handle hooch
like some men can. One drink always called for another, and two drinks
called for a dozen. I liked to get drunk, and I did get drunk, every
chance I got--and that was right often. I lost job after job because I
wouldn't stay sober--and later some others because I couldn't stay
sober. I heard of the gold on the Yukon and I went there, and I found
gold--lots of it. I was counted one of the richest men in the country.
Then I started out to get rid of the gold. I couldn't spend it all so I
gambled it away. Almost from the time I made my strike I never drew a
sober breath, until I'd shoved my last marker across the table. Then I
dealt faro--turned professional gambler for wages in the best place in
Dawson, but the hooch had got me and I lost out. I got another job in a
saloon that wasn't so good, but it was the same story, and in a little
while I was tending bar--selling hooch--in the lowest dive in town--and
that means the lowest one in the world, I reckon. That last place, The
Klondike Palace; with its painted women, who sell themselves nightly to
men, with the scum of the earth carousing in its dance-hall, and
playing at its tables, was the hell-hole of the Yukon. And I was part of
it. I stood behind its bar and sold hooch--I was the devil that kept the
hell-fires stoked and roaring. And I kept full of hooch myself, or I
couldn't have stood it. Then I lost out even there, on--what you might
call a technicality--and after that I was just a plain bum. Everybody
despised me--worst of all, I despised myself. I did odd jobs to get
money to buy hooch, and when I had bought it I crawled into my shack and
stayed there till it was gone. I was weak and flabby, and dirty. My
hands shook so I couldn't raise a glass of hooch to my lips, until I'd
had a stiff shot. I used to lap the first drink out of a saucer like a
dog. I dodged the men who had once been my friends. Only Joe Pete, who
had helped me over the Chilkoot, and who remembered that I was a good
man on the trail, and a girl named Kitty, would even turn their heads to
glance at the miserable drunkard that slunk along the street with his
bottle concealed in his ragged pocket.
"There is one more I thought was my friend. His name is Camillo Bill,
and he is square as a die, and he did me a good turn when he cleaned me
out, by holding my claims for only what he had coming when he could have
taken them all. But he came to see me one day toward the last. He came
to tell me that the claims had petered out. I wanted him to grub-stake
me, for a prospecting trip and he refused. That hurt me worse than all
the rest--for I thought he was my friend. He cursed me, and refused to
grub-stake me. Then I met a real friend--one I had never seen before,
and he furnished the gold for my trip to the Coppermine, and--here I
am."
Snowdrift had listened with breathless attention and when Brent
concluded she was silent for a long time. "This girl named Kitty?" she
asked at length, "Who is she, and why was she your friend? Did you love
this woman? Is she beautiful?"
"No," answered Brent, gravely, "I did not love her. She was not the kind
of a woman a man would love. She was beautiful after a fashion. She
might have been very beautiful had her life fallen in a different
groove. She was an adventuress, big hearted, keen of brain--but an
adventuress. Hers was a life distorted and twisted far from its original
intent. For it was plain to all that she had been cast in a finer mould,
and even the roughest and most brutal of the men treated her with a
certain respect that was not accorded to the others. She never spoke of
her past. She accepted the present philosophically, never by word or
look admitting that she had chosen the wrong road. Her ethics were the
ethics of the muck and ruck of the women of the dance halls. She
differed only in that she had imagination--and a certain pride that
prevented her from holding herself cheaply. Where others were careless
and slovenly, she was well groomed. And while they caroused and
shamelessly debauched themselves, she held aloof from the rabble.
"You asked why she was my friend. I suppose it was because she was quick
to see that I too, was different from the riff-raff of the dives. Not
that I was one whit better than they--for I was not. It was no credit to
me that I was inherently different. It was, I reckon, a certain innate
pride that kept me out of the filth of the mire, as it kept her out. To
me the painted slovens were physically loathsome, so I shunned them. She
was keener of brain than I--or maybe it was because she had a
perspective. But while I was still at the height of my success with the
claims and with the cards, she foresaw the end, and she warned me. But,
I disregarded the warning, and later, when I was rushing straight to the
final crash, she warned me again and again, and she despised me for the
fool I was.
"When, at the very bottom, I was taken suddenly sick, it was Kitty who
nursed me through. And then, when I was on my feet again she left me to
myself. I have not seen her since."
"And, if you make a strike again," asked the girl in a low voice, "Will
you go back to Dawson--to the cards and the hooch?"
"I will go back to Dawson," he answered, "And pay my debts. I will not
go back to the cards. I am through with gambling for good and all, for I
have promised. And when a Brent gives his word, he would die rather than
break it."
"But the hooch?" persisted Snowdrift. "Are you done with the hooch too?"
Brent was conscious that the eyes of the girl were fixed upon his in a
gaze of curious intentness, as though their deliberate calm suppressed
some mighty emotion. He groped for words: "I don't--that is, how can I
tell? I drink no hooch now--but there is none to drink. I hate it for I
know that what it did to me once it will do to me again. I hate it--and
I love it!" exclaimed the man. "Tell me, is hate stronger than love?"
The girl was silent for a moment, and by the clenching of her fists,
Brent knew that a struggle was raging within her. She ignored his
question, and when she spoke her voice was low, and the words fell with
a peculiar dullness of tone: "I, too, have a thing to tell. It is a
horrible thing. And when you have heard you will not want to marry me."
The girl paused, and Brent felt suddenly sick and weak. There was a dull
ache in his breast that was an actual physical pain, and when the cold
breeze fanned his forehead, it struck with a deadly chill. With a mighty
effort he recovered, leaned swiftly toward her and was vaguely conscious
that she winced at the grip of his fingers upon her arm.
"Tell me!" he cried hoarsely. For a single instant his eyes blazed into
hers, and then, as though anticipating her words, his fingers relaxed
their hold and he settled back with a half-articulate moan--"_Oh,
God!_"
"What you have told me," she continued, in the same dull tone, "Is
nothing. It is past and gone. It is dead, and its evil died with it. You
are a white man. The white man's thoughts are your thoughts, and his
standards are your standards. You work the harm, then unjustly you sit
in judgment. And the harm does not die with the deed. The shame of it is
a thing of the present, and of the future, and it is borne always by the
innocent.
"The thing I must tell you is this. I am a half-breed. But my father was
not the husband of Wananebish, who is my mother----"
Brent interrupted her with quick, glad cry: "Is that all?" The blood
surged hot through his veins. The ache in his breast became a wild
singing. And suddenly he realized the grip and the depth of the thing
that is called love, with its power to tear and to rend the very
foundations of his being. He felt an insane desire to leap and to
shout--and the next instant the girl was in his arms and he was crushing
her against his breast as he covered her face with hot kisses. And when
a few moments later, he released her, he laughed aloud--a laugh that was
clear and boyish, and altogether good to hear, while the girl gazed
half-fearfully--half-wonderingly into his eyes:
"I--I do not understand," she faltered, "I have known this only for a
short time. Henri of the White Water told me of it, and of the shame of
it--and then Sister Mercedes--and it is true, because years ago when I
was very small, Wananebish told it to Father Ambrose----"
"Damn Henri of the White Water! And damn Sister Mercedes and Father
Ambrose!" cried Brent, his eyes narrowing, "What did they tell you for?
What difference does it make?"
"Henri of the White Water told me because he was angry. I would not
marry him. I was going to a great convent school, and he said that in
the land of the white man I would be an object of scorn--that people
would shun me, and point me out with the finger of shame. I did not
believe him, so I went to Sister Mercedes, and she told me, also. And so
I would not go to the school, and that night I came away from the
mission--came back to the Indians." She paused, and as she raised her
eyes to his, Brent saw that in their depths a wondrous newborn hope
struggled against fear. Her lips moved: "You do not scorn me? You love
me--knowing that?"
Again she was in his arms, and his lips were upon hers: "Yes, I love
you--love you--love you! You are mine, darling--mine for all time!" She
did not resist his arms, and he felt her yielding body press close
against his own, as her shoulders heaved in short, quick sobs.
Softly, almost timidly, her arms stole about his neck, and her
tear-jeweled eyes raised to his: "And you would marry me, not knowing
who I am?"
"Yes, darling," reassured Brent, "Neither knowing nor caring who you
are. It is enough that you are the dearest, and most beautiful, and the
most lovable woman in the whole world of women. Why, girl, the wonder is
not that I love you--but that you could love me, after what I told you."
"It is the answer to your question," she smiled, "It means that love is
the strongest thing in all the world--stronger than hate, stronger than
race, or laws, or codes of ethics. Love is supreme!"
"And that means, then, that my love for hooch will conquer my hate for
it?"
"No!" breathed the girl, and Brent could feel her arms tighten about his
neck. "For your love for hooch has not only to overcome your hate for
it, but it must also overcome your love for me, and my love for you. I
am not afraid to fight it out with hooch for your love! If I cannot make
myself more to you than hooch ever can, I would not be worthy of your
love!"
"My darling," whispered Brent, his lips close to her ear, "You have won
already. I will promise----"
He was interrupted by her fingers upon his lips, shutting off the words.
"No--dear," she hesitated a second at the unfamiliar word, "You must not
promise--yet. It is easy to promise, out here in the barrens, where you
have me in your arms, and the hooch is far away. I ask no odds of hooch.
Wait till you have stood the test. I am not afraid. I have not much
learning, but some things I know. I know that, holding a promise in as
high regard as you hold one, if anything should happen--if you should
drink hooch just once, the promise would be broken--and never again
would a promise be just the same. We have a war with hooch--you and I.
And we are going to win. But, in the histories I have read of few wars
where every battle was won by the same army. Some of the battles we must
expect to lose--but the _war_ we will win."
"Not much learning," smiled Brent, looking into the depths of the dark
eyes, "But the concentrated wisdom of the ages--the wisdom that is the
heritage of woman, and which not one woman in a thousand learns to
apply."
For a long time the two sat beside their little fire, add in the gloom
of the early darkness, they made their way toward the river.