Out on the bosom of that infinite prairie, which rolls its unmeasured
miles north and west of the Spirit River, a last place of mystery and
dreams, still unharnessed by the geographers, and reluctantly written
down "unexplored" on their maps, two human figures were riding slowly,
with their horses' heads turned away from the last habitations of men.
The prairie undulated about them like a sea congealed in motion--but
seemingly vaster than the sea; for at sea the horizon is ever near at
hand; while here the very unevenness of the ground marked, and fixed,
and opened up the awful distances. The grass was short, rich and browned
by the summer sun; and it mantled the distant rounds and hollows with
the changing lights of beaver fur. The only breaks in its expanse were
here and there, springing in the sheltered hollows, coppices or bluffs
of slender poplar saplings, with crowding stems, as close and even as
hair. The leaves were yellowed by the first frosts.
The man rode ahead, slouching on the back of his wretched cayuse, with
eyes blank alike of inward thought or outward observation. He was not
yet forty years old, but bore the cast of premature decay, more aged
than age. What showed of his hair beneath his hat was sparse and faded;
and of his visible teeth he had no more than a perishing stump or two
left in his jaws. His discontented, satiated, exhausted mien, had a
strange look there in the fresh and potent wilderness.
The girl who followed with a travoise dragging at her pony's heels, was,
on the other hand, in harmony with the land. Of the extremes to which the
breeds run in looks, she was of the rare beauties of that strange race.
Her features were moulded in a delicate, definite harmony that would have
marked her out in any assemblage of beauty; and the spirit of beauty
was there too. There were actually pride and dignity under the arched
brows--so capricious is Nature in shaping her wilder daughters--and in the
deep soft eyes brooded, even when she was happiest, a heart-disquieting
quality of wistfulness. She was happy now; and ever and anon she raised
her eyes to the slouching back of the man riding ahead with a look of
passionate abandon in which there was nothing civilized at all. She was
slenderer than the run of brown maidens, and her clumsy print dress could
not hide the girlish, perfect contour of her shoulders. In her dusky
cheeks there glowed a tinge of deep rose; testimony to the lingering
influence of the white blood in her veins.
Topping a rise, the man paused for her to overtake him.
"Here we are, Rina," he said indifferently. His voice was oddly cracked.
His manner toward her expressed a good-humoured tolerance. His eyes
approved her casually; inner tenderness there was none.
The girl apparently was sensible of no lack--but the breeds do not bring
up their daughters to expect tenderness. Her eyes sparkled. "How pretty
it is, 'Erbe't!" she breathed. "Ver' moch good land!" She spoke the
pretty, clipped English of the convent school.
At their feet lay a shallow valley, hidden close until the very moment
of stumbling upon it. In it was a sparkling slough but large enough to
be dignified with the name of lake. It was something the shape of a
gourd, with a long end that curved out of sight below, a very girdle of
blue velvet binding the waists of the brown hills. At their left the
shores of the wider part of the lake, the bulb of the gourd, were, in
unexpected contrast to the bareness of the uplands, heavily wooded with
great cottonwood trees and spruce. A grassy islet ringed with willows
seemed to be moored here like the barge of some woodland princess. Away
beyond, elevated on a grassy terrace at the head of the lake, and
overlooking its whole expanse, stood a tiny weather-beaten shack,
startlingly conspicuous in that great expanse of untouched nature.
Sheltered by the hills from the howling blasts of the prairie above; and
with wood, water and unlimited game at its door, it was a wholly
desirable situation for a Northern dwelling--but it was seventy-five
miles off the trail.
The girl brought her pony alongside Mabyn's; and slipped her hand into
his. "It is jus' right!" she whispered. "We will be ver' happy,
'Erbe't!"
He let her hand fall carelessly. "It's damn lonesome!" he grumbled.
All the shy boldness of an enamoured girl peeped out of Rina's eyes, as
she whispered: "I'm glad it's lonesome! I don' want nobody to come--but
you!"
Mabyn was unimpressed. He struck the ribs of his tired pony with his
heels. "Come on," he said; and led the way down the incline.
Later, reaching the shack, on the threshold Rina spread out her arms
with an unconscious gesture. "This is my home!" she cried. "I will jus'
love it!"
Mabyn looking around at the gaping walls, the empty panes and the foul
litter, laughed jeeringly at her simplicity.
The girl was too happy to feel the sting. "I will fix it!" she said
stoutly. "I will mak' it like an outside house. It will be as nice than
the priest's parlour in the Settlement!" She clasped her hands against
her breast in the intensity of her eagerness. "Jus' you wait, 'Erbe't!
Some day I will have white curtains in the window! and a piece of carpet
on the floor! and a holy picture on the wall! Oh! I will work so hard!"
"Get about the supper, Rina," said Mabyn shortly.
She prepared the meal at the rough mud fireplace built across the corner
of the shack, for they had no stove; and they ate squatting on the floor
in the breed fashion, for neither was there a table. Afterward Mabyn
dragged the bench--a relic of the former tenant, and sole article of
furniture they possessed--outside the door; and sat upon it, smoking,
yawning, looking across the lake with lack-lustre eyes.
Rina having redd up the shack, came to the doorway, where she stood
looking at him wistfully. Finally she hovered toward him and retreated;
and her hands stole to her breast. She was longing mightily to sit
beside him; but she did not dare. In a breed's wife it would have been
highly presumptuous, and would very likely have been rewarded with a
blow; but Rina had a dim notion that a white man's wife had the right to
sit beside him--still she was afraid. In the end her desire overcame her
fears; drifting hither and thither toward the bench like a frond of
thistledown, she finally alighted on the edge, and her cheek dropped on
his shoulder. The act must have been subtly suggested by the tincture of
white blood in her veins, for it is not a redskin attitude. The man
neither repulsed nor welcomed her.
"'Erbe't," she whispered, "my head is so full of things I am near crazy
wit' thoughts! And my tongue is in a snare; I cannot speak at all!"
Mabyn's only comment was a sort of grunt, which meant anything--or
nothing.
Rina was encouraged to creep a little closer. "Oh, 'Erbe't, I love you!"
she whispered. "I am loving you every minute! I so glad you marry me,
'Erbe't!"
The man took his pipe out of his mouth, and uttered his brief, jeering
cackle of laughter. "That wasn't altogether a matter of choice, my
girl," he said. "It was a little preliminary insisted on by your father
and mother."
Rina hardly took the sense of this. "But you do love me, 'Erbe't? jus' a
little?" she pleaded.
"You're all right, Rina," he said patronizingly. "I never was one to
make much of a fuss about a woman."
Little by little gathering courage, she began to pour out her soul for
the man she loved. "I never love any man but you, 'Erbe't," so ran the
naive confession; "the breed boys, they always come aroun' and show off.
I not lak them. They foolish and dirty; they eat same lak cocouche; and
they know not'ing; but they think themself so fine. They mak' me sick!
My mot'er say to me; 'You eighteen year old, Rina; w'en you go to
marry?' I say to my mot'er, 'I never marry a pig-man; I want to stay to
you.'"
Her voice changed, borrowing the soft, passionate music of the
nightingale she had never heard. "Then bam-bye w'en the spring come, an'
we pitch by Ostachegan creek, an' the crocus flowers are coming up on
Sah-ko-da-tah prairie so many as stars in the sky--then you come by our
camp, 'Erbe't; and you so poor an' sick I feel ver' bad for you! An' you
talk so pretty, and know so much, my heart him fly straight out of my
breast like a bird, 'Erbe't; an' perch on your shoulder; an' him go
everywhere you go; an' I got no heart any more. I empty lak a nest in
the snow-time!
"So you stay to us," she went on, "and I mad to see all the men mock at
you, an' treat you bad, an' mak' you eat after all have finished, and
mak' you lie outside the fire. They t'ink themself better than a white
man, hey! All the time you ask me to come away from the camp with you;
an' you t'ink I don' want to come, but you don' know. Many, many nights
I not sleep, 'Erbe't. I want so bad to come to the ot'er side of the
tepee where you are, but I hold to my mot'er's blanket!"