SHEBA SINGS--AND TWO MEN LISTEN
Elliot did not see Miss O'Neill next morning until she appeared in the
dining-room for breakfast. He timed himself to get through so as to join
her when she left. They strolled out to the deck together.
"Did you sleep well?" he asked.
"After I fell asleep. It took me a long time. I kept seeing you on the
traverse."
He came abruptly to what was on his mind. "I have an apology to make,
Miss O'Neill. If I made light of your danger yesterday, it was because I
was afraid you might break down. I had to seem unsympathetic rather than
risk that."
She smiled forgiveness. "All you said was that I might have sprained my
wrist. It was true too. I might have--and I did." Sheba showed a white
linen bandage tied tightly around her wrist.
"Does it pain much?"
"Not so much now. It throbbed a good deal last night."
"Your whole weight came on it with a wrench. No wonder it hurt."
Sheba noticed that the Hannah was drawing up to a wharf and the
passengers were lining up with their belongings. "Is this where we
change?"
"Those of us going to Kusiak transfer here. But there's no hurry.
We wait at this landing two hours."
Gordon helped Sheba move her baggage to the other boat and joined
her on deck. They were both strangers in the land. Their only common
acquaintance was Macdonald and he was letting Mrs. Mallory absorb his
attention just now. Left to their own resources the two young people
naturally drifted together a good deal.
This suited Elliot. He found his companion wholly delightful, not the
less because she was so different from the girls he knew at home. She
could be frank, and even shyly audacious on occasion, but she held a
little note of reserve he felt bound to respect. Her experience of the
world had clearly been limited. She was not at all sure of herself, of
the proper degree of intimacy to permit herself with a strange and
likable young man who had done her so signal a service.
Macdonald left the boat twenty miles below Kusiak with Mrs. Mallory and
the Selfridges. A chauffeur with a motor-car was waiting on the wharf to
run them to town, but he gave the wheel to Macdonald and took the seat
beside the driver.
The little miner Strong grinned across to Elliot, who was standing
beside Miss O'Neill at the boat rail.
"That's Mac all over. He hires a fellow to run his car--brings him up
here from Seattle--and then takes the wheel himself every time he rides.
I don't somehow see Mac sitting back and letting another man run the
machine."
It was close to noon before the river boat turned a bend and steamed up
to the wharf at Kusiak. The place was an undistinguished little log town
that rambled back from the river up the hill in a hit-or-miss fashion.
Its main street ran a tortuous course parallel to the stream.
Half of the town, it seemed, was down to meet the boat.
"Are you going to the hotel or direct to your cousin's?" Gordon asked
Miss O'Neill.
"To my cousin's. I fancy she's down here to meet me. It was arranged
that I come on this boat."
There was much waving of handkerchiefs and shouting back and forth as
the steamer slowly drew close to the landing.
Elliot caught a glimpse of the only people in Kusiak he had known before
coming in, but though he waved to them he saw they did not recognize
him. After the usual delay about getting ashore he walked down the
gangway carrying the suitcases of the Irish girl. Sheba followed at his
heels. On the wharf he came face to face with a slender, well-dressed
young woman.
"Diane!" he cried.
She stared at him. "You! What in Heaven's name are you doing here,
Gordon Elliot?" she demanded, and before he could answer had seized both
hands and turned excitedly to call a stocky man near. "Peter--Peter!
Guess who's here?"
"Hello, Paget!" grinned Gordon, and he shook hands with the husband of
Diane.
Elliot turned to introduce his friend, but she anticipated him.
"Cousin Diane," she said shyly. "Don't you know me?"
Mrs. Paget swooped down upon the girl and smothered her in her embrace.
"This is Sheba--little Sheba that I have told you so often about,
Peter," she cried. "Glory be, I'm glad to see you, child." And Diane
kissed her again warmly. "You two met on the boat, of course, coming
in, I hope you didn't let her get lonesome, Gordon. Look after Sheba's
suitcases, Peter. You'll come to dinner to-night, Gordon--at seven."
"I'm in the kind hands of my countrywoman," laughed Gordon. "I'll
certainly be on hand."
"But what in the world are you doing here? You're the last man I'd have
expected to see."
"I'm in the service of the Government, and I've been sent in on
business."
"Well, I'm going to say something original, dear people," Mrs. Paget
replied. "It's a small world, isn't it?"
While he was dressing for dinner later in the day, Elliot recalled
early memories of the Pagets. He had known Diane ever since they had
been youngsters together at school. He remembered her as a restless,
wiry little thing, keen as a knife-blade. She had developed into a very
pretty girl, alive, ambitious, energetic, with a shrewd eye to the main
chance. Always popular socially, she had surprised everybody by refusing
the catch of the town to marry a young mining engineer without a penny.
Gordon was in college at the time, but during the next long vacation
he had fraternized a good deal with the Peter Pagets. The young
married people had been very much in love with each other, but not too
preoccupied to take the college boy into their happiness as a comrade.
Diane always had been a manager, and she liked playing older sister
to so nice a lad. He had been on a footing friendly enough to drop in
unannounced whenever he took the fancy. If they were out, or about to go
out, the freedom of the den, a magazine, and good tobacco had been his.
Then the Arctic gold-fields had claimed Paget and his bride. That had
been more than ten years ago, and until to-day Gordon had not seen them
since.
While Elliot was brushing his dinner coat before the open window of the
room assigned him at the hotel, somebody came out to the porch below.
The voice of a woman floated faintly to him.
"Seen Diane's Irish beauty yet, Ned?"
"Yes," a man answered.
The woman laughed softly. "Mrs. Mallory came up on the same boat with
her." The inflection suggested that the words were meant not to tell a
fact, but some less obvious inference.
"Oh, you women!" the man commented good-naturedly.
"She's wonderfully pretty, and of course Diane will make the most of
her. But Mrs. Mallory is a woman among ten thousand."
"I'd choose the girl if it were me," said the man.
"But it isn't you. We'll see what we'll see."
They were moving up the street and Gordon heard no more. What he had
heard was not clear to him. Why should any importance attach to the fact
that Mrs. Mallory and Sheba O'Neill had come up the river on the same
boat? Yet he was vaguely disturbed by the insinuation that in some way
Diane was entering her cousin as a rival of the older woman. He resented
the idea that the fine, young personality of the Irish girl was being
cheapened by management on the part of Diane Paget.
Elliot was not the only dinner guest at the Paget home that evening. He
found Colby Macdonald sitting in the living-room with Sheba. She came
quickly forward to meet the newly arrived guest.
"Mr. Macdonald has been telling me about my father. He knew him on
Frenchman Creek where they both worked claims," explained the girl.
The big mining man made no comment and added nothing to what she said.
There were times when his face was about as expressive as a stone wall.
Except for a hard wariness in the eyes it told nothing now.
The dinner went off very well. Diane and Peter had a great many
questions to ask Gordon about old friends. By the time these had been
answered Macdonald was chatting easily with Sheba. The man had been in
many out-of-the-way corners of the world, had taken part in much that
was dramatic and interesting. If the experience of the Irish girl had
been small, her imagination had none the less gone questing beyond the
narrow bars of her life upon amazing adventure. She listened with
glowing eyes to the strange tales this man of magnificent horizons had
to tell. Never before had she come into contact with any one like him.
The others too succumbed to his charm. He dominated that little
dining-room because he was a sixty-horse-power dynamo. For all his bulk
he was as lean as a panther and as sinewy. There was virility in the
very economy of his motions, in the reticence of his speech. Not even
a fool could have read weakness there. When he followed Sheba into the
living-room, power trod in his long, easy stride.
Paget was superintendent of the Lucky Strike, a mine owned principally
by Macdonald. The two talked business for a few minutes over their
cigars, but Diane interrupted gayly to bring them back into the circle.
Adroitly she started Macdonald on the account of a rescue of two men
lost in a blizzard the year before. He had the gift of dramatizing his
story, of selecting only effective details. There was no suggestion of
boasting. If he happened to be the hero of any of his stories the fact
was of no importance to him. It was merely a detail of the picture he
was sketching.
Gordon interrupted with a question a story he was telling of a fight he
had seen between two bull moose.
"Did you say that was while you were on the way over to inspect the
Kamatlah coal-fields for the first time?"
The eyes of the young man were quick with interest.
"Yes."
"Four years ago last spring?"
Macdonald looked at him with a wary steadiness. Some doubt had found
lodgment in his mind. Before he could voice it, if, indeed, he had any
such intention, Elliot broke in swiftly,--
"Don't answer that question. I asked it without proper thought. I am a
special agent of the General Land Office sent up to investigate the
Macdonald coal claims and kindred interests."
Slowly the rigor of the big Scotchman's steely eyes relaxed to a smile
that was genial and disarming. If this news hit him hard he gave no sign
of it. And that it was an unexpected blow there could be no doubt.
"Glad you've come, Mr. Elliot. We ask nothing but fair play. Tell the
truth, and we'll thank you. The men who own the Macdonald group of
claims have nothing to conceal. I'll answer that question. I meant to
say two years ago last spring."
His voice was easy and his gaze unwavering as he made the correction,
yet everybody in the room except Sheba knew he was deliberately lying
to cover the slip. For the admission that he had inspected the Kamatlah
field just before his dummies had filed upon it would at least tend to
aggravate suspicion that the entries were not _bona-fide_.
It was rather an awkward moment. Diane blamed herself because she had
brought the men together socially. Why had she not asked Gordon more
explicitly what his business was? Peter grinned a little uncomfortably.
It was Sheba who quite unconsciously relieved the situation.
"But what about the big moose, Mr. Macdonald? What did it do then?"
The Alaskan went back to his story. He was talking for Sheba alone,
for the young girl with eager, fascinated eyes which flashed with
sympathy as they devoured selected glimpses of his wild, turbulent
career. Her clean, brave spirit was throwing a glamour over the man.
She saw him with other eyes than Elliot's. The Government official
admired him tremendously. Macdonald was an empire-builder. He blazed
trails for others to follow in safety. But Gordon could guess how
callously his path was strewn with brutality, with the effects of an
ethical color-blindness largely selfish, though even he did not know
that the man's primitive jungle code of wolf eat wolf had played havoc
with Sheba's young life many years before.
Diane, satisfied that Macdonald had scored, called upon Sheba.
"I want you to sing for us, dear, if you will."
Sheba accompanied herself. The voice of the girl had no unusual range,
but it was singularly sweet and full of the poignant feeling that
expresses the haunting pathos of her race.
"It's well I know ye, Shevè Cross, ye weary, stony hill,
An' I'm tired, och, I'm tired to be looking on ye still.
For here I live the near side an' he is on the far,
An' all your heights and hollows are between us, so they are.
Och anee!"
Gordon, as he listened, felt the strange hunger of that homesick cry
steal through his blood. He saw his own emotions reflected in the face
of the Scotch-Canadian, who was watching with a tense interest the slim,
young figure at the piano, the girl whose eyes were soft and dewy with
the mysticism of her people, were still luminous with the poetry of the
child in spite of the years that heralded her a woman.
Elliot intercepted the triumphant sweep of Diane's glance from Macdonald
to her husband. In a flash it lit up for him the words he had heard on
the hotel porch. Diane, an inveterate matchmaker, intended her cousin to
marry Colby Macdonald. No doubt she thought she was doing a fine thing
for the girl. He was a millionaire, the biggest figure in the Northwest.
His iron will ran the town and district as though the people were
chattels of his. Back of him were some of the biggest financial
interests in the United States.
But the gorge of Elliot rose. The man, after all, was a law-breaker,
a menace to civilization. He was a survivor by reason of his strength
from the primitive wolf-pack. Already the special agent had heard many
strange stories of how this man of steel had risen to supremacy by
trampling down lesser men with whom he had had dealings, of terrible
battles from which his lean, powerful body had emerged bloody and
battered, but victorious. The very look of his hard, gray eyes was
dominant and masterful. He would win, no matter how. It came to Gordon's
rebel heart that if Macdonald wanted this lovely Irish girl,--and the
young man never doubted that the Scotchman would want her,--he would
reach out and gather in Sheba just as if she were a coal mine or a
placer prospect.
All this surged through the mind of the young man while the singer was
on the first line of the second stanza.
"But if 't was only Shevè Cross to climb from foot to crown,
I'd soon be up an' over that, I'd soon be runnin' down.
Then sure the great ould sea itself is there beyont the bar,
An' all the windy wathers are between us, so they are.
Och anee!"
The rich, soft, young voice with its Irish brogue died away. The little
audience paid the singer the tribute of silence. She herself was the
first to speak.
"'Divided' is the name of it. A namesake of mine, Moira O'Neill, wrote
it," she explained.
"It's a beautiful song, and I thank ye for singing it," Macdonald said
simply. "It minds me of my own barefoot days by the Tay."
Later in the evening the two dinner guests walked back to the hotel
together. The two subjects uppermost in the minds of both were not
mentioned by either. They discussed casually the cost of living in the
North, the raising of strawberries at Kusiak, and the best way to treat
the mosquito nuisance, but neither of them referred to the Macdonald
coal claims or to Sheba O'Neill.