THE CREVASSE
For an hour before the Hannah reached Katma Miss O'Neill was busy
getting her little brood ready. In that last half-day she was a creature
of moods to them. They, too, like Sheba herself, were adventuring into
a new world. Somehow they represented to her the last tie that bound her
to the life she was leaving. Her heart was tender as a Madonna to these
lambs so ill-fitted to face a frigid waste. Their mother had been a good
woman. She could tell that. But she had no way of knowing what kind of
man their father might be.
Sheba gave Janet advice about where to keep her money and when to wear
rubbers and what to do for Billie's cold. She put up a lunch for them to
take on the stage. When they said their sniffling good-byes at Katma she
was suspiciously bright and merry. Soon the children were laughing again
with her.
One glance at their father, who introduced himself to Miss O'Neill
as John Husted, relieved her mind greatly. His spontaneous delight at
seeing them again and his choking gratitude to her for having looked
after them were evidence enough that this kind-eyed man meant to be both
father and mother to his recovered little folks. His emotion was too
poignant for him to talk about his wife, but Sheba understood and liked
him better for it.
Her temporary family stood on the end of the wharf and called good-byes
to the girl.
"Tum soon and see us, Aunt Sheba," Billie shouted from his seat on the
shoulder of his father.
The children waved handkerchiefs as long as she could be distinguished
by them. When they turned away she went directly to her room.
Elliot was passing forward when Miss O'Neill opened her stateroom door
to go in. The eyes of the young woman were blind with tears and she was
biting her lip to keep back the emotion that welled up. He knew she was
very fond of the motherless children, but he guessed at an additional
reason for her sobs. She too was as untaught as a child in the life of
this frontier land. Whatever she found here--how much of hardship or
happiness, of grief or woe--she knew that she had left behind forever
the safe harborage of quiet waters in which her life craft had always
floated.
It came on to rain in the afternoon. Heavy clouds swept across from the
mountains, and the sodden sky opened like a sluice-box. The Kusiak
contingent, driven indoors, resorted to bridge. Miss O'Neill read.
Gordon Elliot wrote letters, dawdled over magazines, and lounged
alternately in the ladies' parlor and the smoking-room, where Macdonald,
Strong, a hardware merchant from Fairbanks, and a pair of sour-dough
miners had settled themselves to a poker game that was to last all night
and well into the next day.
Of the two bridge tables all the players were old-timers except Mrs.
Mallory. Most of them were young enough in years, but they had been of
the North long enough to know the gossip of the country and its small
politics intimately. They shared common hopes of the day when Alaska
would be thrown open to industry and a large population.
But Mrs. Mallory had come in over the ice for the first time last
winter. The other women felt that she was a bird of passage, that the
frozen Arctic could be no more than a whim to her. They deferred a
little to her because she knew the great world--New York, Vienna,
London, Paris. Great names fell from her lips casually and carelessly.
She referred familiarly to princes and famous statesmen, as if she had
gossiped with them tête-à-tête over the teacups. She was full of spicy
little anecdotes about German royalty and the British aristocracy. It
was no wonder, Gordon Elliot thought, that she had rather stunned the
little social set of Kusiak.
Through Northrup and Trelawney a new slant on Macdonald was given to
Gordon. He had fallen into casual talk with them after dinner on the
fore deck. It was still raining, but all three were equipped with
slickers or mackintoshes. To his surprise the young man discovered that
they bore him no grudge at all for his interference the night before.
"But we ain't through with Colby Macdonald yet," Trelawney explained.
"Mind, I don't say we're going to get him. Nothing like that. He
knocked me cold with that loaded suitcase of his. By the looks of him
I'm even for that. Good enough. But here's the point. We stand for
Labor. He stands for Capital. See? Things ain't what they used to be
in Alaska, and it's because of Colby Macdonald and his friends. They're
grabbers--that's what they are. They want the whole works. A hell of a
roar goes up from them when the Government stops their combines, but
all the time they're bearing down a little harder on us workingmen.
Understand? It's up to us to fight, ain't it?"
Later Elliot put this viewpoint before Strong.
"There's something in it," the miner agreed. "Wages have gone down, and
it's partly because the big fellows are consolidating interests. Alaska
ain't a poor man's country the way it was. But Mac ain't to blame for
that. He has to play the game the way the cards are dealt out."
The sky was clear again when the Hannah drew in to the wharf at Moose
Head to unload freight, but the mud in the unpaved street leading to the
business section of the little frontier town was instep deep. Many of
the passengers hurried ashore to make the most of the five-hour stop.
Macdonald, with Mrs. Mallory and their Kusiak friends, disappeared in
a bus. Elliot put on a pair of heavy boots and started uptown.
At the end of the wharf he passed Miss O'Neill. She wore no rubbers and
she had come to a halt at the beginning of the mud. After a momentary
indecision she returned slowly to the boat.
The young man walked up into the town, but ten minutes later he crossed
the gangplank of the Hannah again with a package under his arm. Miss
O'Neill was sitting on the forward deck making a pretense to herself of
reading. This was where Elliot had expected to find her, but now that
the moment of attack had come he had to take his fear by the throat.
When he had thought of it first there seemed nothing difficult about
offering to do her a kindness, yet he found himself shrinking from the
chance of a rebuff.
He moved over to where she sat and lifted his hat. "I hope you won't
think it a liberty, Miss O'Neill, but I've brought you some rubbers from
a store uptown. I noticed you couldn't get ashore without them."
Gordon tore the paper wrapping from his package and disclosed half a
dozen pairs of rubbers.
The girl was visibly embarrassed. She was not at all certain of the
right thing to do. Where she had been brought up young men did not offer
courtesies of this sort so informally.
"I--I think I won't need them, thank you. I've decided not to leave the
boat," she answered shyly.
Elliot had never been accused of being a quitter. Having begun this, he
proposed to see it out. He caught sight of the purser superintending the
discharge of cargo and called to him by name. The officer joined them,
a pad of paper and a pencil in his hand.
"I'm trying to persuade Miss O'Neill that she ought to go ashore while
we're lying here. What was it you told me about the waterfall back of
the town?"
"Finest thing of its kind in Alaska. They're so proud of it in this burg
that they would like to make it against the law for any one to leave
without seeing it. Every one takes it in. We won't get away till night.
You've plenty of time if you want to see it."
"Now, will you please introduce me to Miss O'Neill formally?"
The purser went through the usual formula of presentation, adding that
Elliot was a government official on his way to Kusiak. Having done his
duty by the young man, the busy supercargo retired.
"I'm sure it would do you good to walk up to the waterfall with me, Miss
O'Neill," urged Elliot.
She met a little dubiously the smile that would not stay quite
extinguished on his good-looking, boyish face. Why shouldn't she go with
him, since it was the American way for unchaperoned youth to enjoy
itself naturally?
"If they'll fit," the girl answered, eyeing the rubbers.
Gordon dropped to his knee and demonstrated that they would.
As they walked along the muddy street she gave him a friendly little nod
of thanks. "Good of you to take the trouble to look out for me."
He laughed. "It was myself I was looking out for. I'm a stranger in the
country and was awfully lonesome."
"Is it that this is your first time in too?" she asked shyly.
"You're going to Kusiak, aren't you? Do you know anybody there?" replied
Elliot.
"My cousin lives there, but I haven't seen her since I was ten. She's an
American. Eleven years ago she visited us in Ireland."
"I'm glad you know some one," he said. "You'll not be so lonesome with
some of your people living there. I have two friends at Kusiak--a girl I
used to go to school with and her husband."
"Are you going to live at Kusiak?"
"No; but I'll be stationed in the Territory for several months. I'll be
in and out of the town a good deal. I hope you'll let me see something
of you."
The fine Irish coloring deepened in her cheeks. He had a way of taking
in his stride the barriers between them, but it was impossible for her
to feel offended at this cheery, vigorous young fellow with the winning
smile and the firm-set jaw. She liked the warmth in his honest brown
eyes. She liked the play of muscular grace beneath his well-fitting
clothes. The sinuous ease of his lean, wide-shouldered body stirred
faintly some primitive instinct in her maiden heart. Sheba did not know,
as her resilient muscles carried her forward joyfully, that she was
answering the call of youth to youth.
Gordon respected her shyness and moved warily to establish his contact.
He let the talk drift to impersonal topics as they picked their way out
from the town along the mossy trail. The ground was spongy with water.
On either side of them ferns and brakes grew lush. Sheba took the porous
path with a step elastic. To the young man following she seemed a
miracle of supple lightness.
The trail tilted up from the lowlands, led across dips, and into a draw.
A little stream meandered down and gurgled over rocks worn smooth by
ages of attrition. Alders brushed the stream and their foliage checkered
the trail with sunlight and shadow.
They were ascending steadily now along a pathway almost too indistinct
to follow. The air was aromatic with pine from a grove that came
straggling down the side of a gulch to the brook.
"Do you know, I have a queer feeling that I've seen all this before,"
the Irish girl said. "Of course I haven't--unless it was in my dreams.
Naturally I've thought about Alaska a great deal because my father lived
here."
"I didn't know that."
"Yes. He came in with the Klondike stampeders." She added quietly: "He
died on Bonanza Creek two years later."
"Was he a miner?"
"Not until he came North. He had an interest in a claim. It later turned
out worthless."
A bit of stiff climbing brought them to a boulder field back of which
rose a mountain ridge.
"We've got off the trail somehow," Elliot said. "But I don't suppose it
matters. If we keep going we're bound to come to the waterfall."
Beyond the boulder field the ridge rose sharply. Gordon looked a little
dubiously at Sheba.
"Are you a good climber?"
As she stood in the sunpour, her cheeks flushed with exercise, he could
see that her spirit courted adventure.
"I'm sure I must be," she answered with a smile adorable. "I believe I
could do the Matterhorn to-day."
Well up on the shoulder of the ridge they stopped to breathe. The
distant noise of falling water came faintly to them.
"We're too far to the left--must have followed the wrong spur," Elliot
explained. "Probably we can cut across the face of the mountain."
Presently they came to an impasse. The gulch between the two spurs
terminated in a rock wall that fell almost sheer for two hundred feet.
The color in the cheeks beneath the eager eyes of the girl was warm.
"Let's try it," she begged.
The young man had noticed that she was as sure-footed as a mountain goat
and that she could stand on the edge of a precipice without dizziness.
The surface of the wall was broken. What it might be beyond he could not
tell, but the first fifty feet was a bit of attractive and not too
difficult rock traverse.
Now and again he made a suggestion to the young woman following him,
but for the most part he trusted her to choose her own foot and hand
holds. Her delicacy was silken strong. If she was slender, she was yet
deep-bosomed. The movements of the girl were as certain as those of an
experienced mountaineer.
The way grew more difficult. They had been following a ledge that
narrowed till it ran out. Jutting knobs of feldspar and stunted shrubs
growing from crevices offered toe-grips instead of the even foothold of
the rock shelf. As Gordon looked down at the dizzy fall beneath them his
judgment told him they had better go back. He said as much to his
companion.
The smile she flashed at him was delightfully provocative. It served to
point the figure she borrowed from Gwen. "So you think I'm a 'fraid-cat,
Mr. Elliot?"
His inclination marched with hers. It was their first adventure together
and he did not want to spoil it by undue caution. There really was not
much danger yet so long as they were careful.
Gordon abandoned the traverse and followed an ascending crack in the
wall. The going was hard. It called for endurance and muscle, as well
as for a steady head and a sure foot. He looked down at the girl wedged
between the slopes of the granite trough.
She read his thought. "The old guard never surrenders, sir," was her
quick answer as she brushed in salute with the tips of her fingers a
stray lock of hair.
The trough was worse than Elliot had expected. It had in it a good deal
of loose rubble that started in small slides at the least pressure.
"Be very careful of your footing," he called back anxiously.
A small grassy platform lay above the upper end of the trough, but the
last dozen feet of the approach was a very difficult bit. Gordon took
advantage of every least projection. He fought his way up with his back
against one wall and his knees pressed to the other. Three feet short of
the platform the rock walls became absolutely smooth. The climber could
reach within a foot of the top.
"Are you stopped?" asked Sheba.
"Looks that way."
A small pine projected from the edge of the shelf out over the
precipice. It might be strong enough to bear his weight. It might not.
Gordon unbuckled his belt and threw one end over the trunk of the dwarf
tree. Gingerly he tested it with his weight, then went up hand over hand
and worked himself over the edge of the little plateau.
"All right?" the girl called up.
"All right. But you can't make it. I'm coming down again."
"I'm going to try."
"I wouldn't, Miss O'Neill. It's really dangerous."
"I'd like to try it. I'll stop if it's too hard," she promised.
The strength of her slender wrists surprised him. She struggled up the
vertical crevasse inch by inch. His heart was full of fear, for a
misstep now would be fatal. He lay down with his face over the ledge and
lowered to her the buckled loop of his belt. Twice she stopped
exhausted, her back and her hands pressed against the walls of the
trough angle for support.
"Better give it up," he advised.
"I'll not then." She smiled stubbornly as she shook her head.
Presently her fingers touched the belt.
[Illustration: "SO YOU THINK I'M A 'FRAID-CAT, MR. ELLIOT?"]
Gordon edged forward an inch or two farther. "Put your hand through the
loop and catch hold of the leather above," he told her.
She did so, and at the same instant her foot slipped. The girl swung out
into space suspended by one wrist. The muscles of Elliot hardened into
steel as they responded to the strain. His body began to slide very
slowly down the incline.
In a moment the acute danger was past. Sheba had found a hold with her
feet and relieved somewhat the dead pull upon Elliot.
She had not voiced a cry, but the face that looked up into his was very
white.
"Take your time," he said in a quiet, matter-of-fact way.
With his help she came close enough for him to reach her hand. After
that it was only a moment before she knelt on the plateau beside him.
"Touch and go, wasn't it?" Sheba tried to smile, but the colorless lips
told the young man she was still faint from the shock.
He knew he was going to reproach himself bitterly for having led her
into such a risk, but he could not just now afford to waste his energies
on regrets. Nor could he let her mind dwell on past dangers so long as
there were future ones to be faced.
"You might have sprained your wrist," he said lightly as he rose to
examine the cliff still to be negotiated.
Her dark eyes looked at him with quick surprise. "So I might," she
answered dryly.
But his indifferent tone had the effect upon her of a plunge into cold
water. It braced and stiffened her will. If he wanted to ignore the
terrible danger through which she had passed, certainly she was not
going to remind him of it.
Between where they stood and the summit of the cliff was another rock
traverse. A kind of rough, natural stairway led down to a point opposite
them. But before this could be reached thirty feet of granite must be
crossed. The wall looked hazardous enough in all faith. It lay in the
shade, and there were spots where a thin coating of ice covered the
smooth slabs. But there was no other way up, and if the traverse could
be made the rest was easy.
Gordon was mountaineer enough to know that the climb up is safer than
the one back. The only possible way for them to go down the trough was
for him to lower her by the belt until she found footing enough to go
alone. He did not quite admit it to himself, but in his heart he doubted
whether she could make it safely.
The alternative was the cliff face.