For a Space they stood apart, and in the radiant loveliness of Mary
Standish’s face and in Alan’s quiet and unimpassioned attitude were
neither shame nor regret. In a moment they had swept aside the barrier
which convention had raised against them, and now they felt the
inevitable thrill of joy and triumph, and not the humiliating
embarrassment of dishonor. They made no effort to draw a curtain upon
their happiness, or to hide the swift heart-beat of it from each other.
It had happened, and they were glad. Yet they stood apart, and
something pressed upon Alan the inviolableness of the little freedom of
space between them, of its sacredness to Mary Standish, and darker and
deeper grew the glory of pride and faith that lay with the love in her
eyes when he did not cross it. He reached out his hand, and freely she
gave him her own. Lips blushing with his kisses trembled in a smile,
and she bowed her head a little, so that he was looking at her smooth
hair, soft and sweet where he had caressed it a few moments before.
“I thank God!” he said.
He did not finish the surge of gratitude that was in his heart. Speech
seemed trivial, even futile. But she understood. He was not thanking
God for that moment, but for a lifetime of something that at last had
come to him. This, it seemed to him, was the end, the end of a world as
he had known it, the beginning of a new. He stepped back, and his hands
trembled. For something to do he set up the overturned table, and Mary
Standish watched him with a quiet, satisfied wonder. She loved him, and
she had come into his arms. She had given him her lips to kiss. And he
laughed softly as he came to her side again, and looked over the tundra
where Rossland had gone.
“How long before you can prepare for the journey?” he asked.
“You mean—”
“That we must start tonight or in the morning. I think we shall go
through the cottonwoods over the old trail to Nome. Unless Rossland
lied, Graham is somewhere out there on the Tanana trail.”
Her hand pressed his arm. “We are going—_back?_ Is that it, Alan?”
“Yes, to Seattle. It is the one thing to do. You are not afraid?”
“With you there—no.”
“And you will return with me—when it is over?”
He was looking steadily ahead over the tundra. But he felt her cheek
touch his shoulder, lightly as a feather.
“Yes, I will come back with you.”
“And you will be ready?”
“I am ready now.”
The sun-fire of the plains danced in his eyes; a cob-web of golden mist
rising out of the earth, beckoning wraiths and undulating visions—the
breath of life, of warmth, of growing things—all between him and the
hidden cottonwoods; a joyous sea into which he wanted to plunge without
another minute of waiting, as he felt the gentle touch of her cheek
against his shoulder, and the weight of her hand on his arm. That she
had come to him utterly was in the low surrender of her voice. She had
ceased to fight—she had given to him the precious right to fight for
her.
It was this sense of her need and of her glorious faith in him, and of
the obligation pressing with it that drove slowly back into him the
grimmer realities of the day. Its horror surged upon him again, and the
significance of what Rossland had said seemed fresher, clearer, even
more terrible now that he was gone. Unconsciously the old lines of
hatred crept into his face again as he looked steadily in the direction
which the other man had taken, and he wondered how much of that same
horror—of the unbelievable menace stealing upon her—Rossland had
divulged to the girl who stood so quietly now at his side. Had he done
right to let him go? Should he not have killed him, as he would have
exterminated a serpent? For Rossland had exulted; he was of Graham’s
flesh and desires, a part of his foul soul, a defiler of womanhood and
the one who had bargained to make possible the opportunity for an
indescribable crime. It was not too late. He could still overtake him,
out there in the hollows of the tundra—
The pressure on his arm tightened. He looked down. Mary Standish had
seen what was in his face, and there was something in her calmness that
brought him to himself. He knew, in that moment, that Rossland had told
her a great deal. Yet she was not afraid, unless it was fear of what
had been in his mind.
“I am ready,” she reminded him.
“We must wait for Stampede,” he said, reason returning to him. “He
should be here sometime tonight, or in the morning. Now that Rossland
is off my nerves, I can see how necessary it is to have someone like
Stampede between us and—”
He did not finish, but what he had intended to say was quite clear to
her. She stood in the doorway, and he felt an almost uncontrollable
desire to take her in his arms again.
“He is between here and Tanana,” she said with a little gesture of her
head.
“Rossland told you that?”
“Yes. And there are others with him, so many that he was amused when I
told him you would not let them take me away.”
“Then you were not afraid that I—I might let them have you?”
“I have always been sure of what you would do since I opened that
second letter at Ellen McCormick’s, Alan!”
He caught the flash of her eyes, the gladness in them, and she was gone
before he could find another word to say. Keok and Nawadlook were
approaching hesitatingly, but now they hurried to meet her, Keok still
grimly clutching the long knife; and beyond them, at the little window
under the roof, he saw the ghostly face of old Sokwenna, like a
death’s-head on guard. His blood ran a little faster. The emptiness of
the tundras, the illimitable spaces without sign of human life, the
vast stage waiting for its impending drama, with its sunshine, its song
of birds, its whisper and breath of growing flowers, struck a new note
in him, and he looked again at the little window where Sokwenna sat
like a spirit from another world, warning him in his silent and
lifeless stare of something menacing and deadly creeping upon them out
of that space which seemed so free of all evil. He beckoned to him and
then entered his cabin, waiting while Sokwenna crawled down from his
post and came hobbling over the open, a crooked figure, bent like a
baboon, witch-like in his great age, yet with sunken eyes that gleamed
like little points of flame, and a quickness of movement that made Alan
shiver as he watched him through the window.
In a moment the old man entered. He was mumbling. He was saying, in
that jumble of sound which it was difficult for even Alan to
understand—and which Sokwenna had never given up for the missionaries’
teachings—that he could hear feet and smell blood; and that the feet
were many, and the blood was near, and that both smell and footfall
were coming from the old kloof where yellow skulls still lay, dripping
with the water that had once run red. Alan was one of the few who, by
reason of much effort, had learned the story of the kloof from old
Sokwenna; how, so long ago that Sokwenna was a young man, a hostile
tribe had descended upon his people, killing the men and stealing the
women; and how at last Sokwenna and a handful of his tribesmen fled
south with what women were left and made a final stand in the kloof,
and there, on a day that was golden and filled with the beauty of
bird-song and flowers, had ambushed their enemies and killed them to a
man. All were dead now, all but Sokwenna.
For a space Alan was sorry he had called Sokwenna to his cabin. He was
no longer the cheerful and gentle “old man” of his people; the old man
who chortled with joy at the prettiness and play of Keok and Nawadlook,
who loved birds and flowers and little children, and who had retained
an impish boyhood along with his great age. He was changed. He stood
before Alan an embodiment of fatalism, mumbling incoherent things in
his breath, a spirit of evil omen lurking in his sunken eyes, and his
thin hands gripping like bird-claws to his rifle. Alan threw off the
uncomfortable feeling that had gripped him for a moment, and set him to
an appointed task—the watching of the southward plain from the crest of
a tall ridge two miles back on the Tanana trail. He was to return when
the sun reached its horizon.
Alan was inspired now by a great caution, a growing premonition which
stirred him with uneasiness, and he began his own preparations as soon
as Sokwenna had started on his mission. The desire to leave at once,
without the delay of an hour, pulled strong in him, but he forced
himself to see the folly of such haste. He would be away many months,
possibly a year this time. There was much to do, a mass of detail to
attend to, a volume of instructions and advice to leave behind him. He
must at least see Stampede, and it was necessary to write down certain
laws for Tautuk and Amuk Toolik. As this work of preparation
progressed, and the premonition persisted in remaining with him, he
fell into a habit of repeating to himself the absurdity of fears and
the impossibility of danger. He tried to make himself feel
uncomfortably foolish at the thought of having ordered the herdsmen in.
In all probability Graham would not appear at all, he told himself, or
at least not for many days—or weeks; and if he did come, it would be to
war in a legal way, and not with murder.
Yet his uneasiness did not leave him. As the hours passed and the
afternoon lengthened, the invisible something urged him more strongly
to take the trail beyond the cottonwoods, with Mary Standish at his
side. Twice he saw her between noon and five o’clock, and by that time
his writing was done. He looked at his guns carefully. He saw that his
favorite rifle and automatic were working smoothly, and he called
himself a fool for filling his ammunition vest with an extravagant
number of cartridges. He even carried an amount of this ammunition and
two of his extra guns to Sokwenna’s cabin, with the thought that it was
this cabin on the edge of the ravine which was best fitted for defense
in the event of necessity. Possibly Stampede might have use for it, and
for the guns, if Graham should come after he and Mary were well on
their way to Nome.
After supper, when the sun was throwing long shadows from the edge of
the horizon, Alan came from a final survey of his cabin and the food
which Wegaruk had prepared for his pack, and found Mary at the edge of
the ravine, watching the twilight gathering where the coulée ran
narrower and deeper between the distant breasts of the tundra.
“I am going to leave you for a little while,” he said. “But Sokwenna
has returned, and you will not be alone.”
“Where are you going?”
“As far as the cottonwoods, I think.”
“Then I am going with you.”
“I expect to walk very fast.”
“Not faster than I, Alan.”
“But I want to make sure the country is clear in that direction before
twilight shuts out the distances.”
“I will help you.” Her hand crept into his. “I am going with you,
Alan,” she repeated.
“Yes, I—think you are,” he laughed joyously, and suddenly he bent his
head and pressed her hand to his lips, and in that way, with her hand
in his, they set out over the trail which they had not traveled
together since the day he had come from Nome.
There was a warm glow in her face, and something beautifully soft and
sweet in her eyes which she did not try to keep away from him. It made
him forget the cottonwoods and the plains beyond, and his caution, and
Sokwenna’s advice to guard carefully against the hiding-places of Ghost
Kloof and the country beyond.
“I have been thinking a great deal today,” she was saying, “because you
have left me so much alone. I have been thinking of _you_. And—my
thoughts have given me a wonderful happiness.”
“And I have been—in paradise,” he replied.
“You do not think that I am wicked?”
“I could sooner believe the sun would never come up again.”
“Nor that I have been unwomanly?”
“You are my dream of all that is glorious in womanhood.”
“Yet I have followed you—have thrust myself at you, fairly at your
head, Alan.”
“For which I thank God,” He breathed devoutly.
“And I have told you that I love you, and you have taken me in your
arms, and have kissed me—”
“Yes.”
“And I am walking now with my hand in yours—”
“And will continue to do so, if I can hold it.”
“And I am another man’s wife,” she shuddered.
“You are mine,” he declared doggedly. “You know it, and the Almighty
God knows it. It is blasphemy to speak of yourself as Graham’s wife.
You are legally entangled with him, and that is all. Heart and soul and
body you are free.”
“No, I am not free.”
“But you are!”
And then, after a moment, she whispered at his shoulder: “Alan, because
you are the finest gentleman in all the world, I will tell you why I am
not. It is because—heart and soul—I belong to you.”
He dared not look at her, and feeling the struggle within him Mary
Standish looked straight ahead with a wonderful smile on her lips and
repeated softly, “Yes, the very finest gentleman in all the world!”
Over the breasts of the tundra and the hollows between they went, still
hand in hand, and found themselves talking of the colorings in the sky,
and the birds, and flowers, and the twilight creeping in about them,
while Alan scanned the shortening horizons for a sign of human life.
One mile, and then another, and after that a third, and they were
looking into gray gloom far ahead, where lay the kloof.
It was strange that he should think of the letter now—the letter he had
written to Ellen McCormick—but think of it he did, and said what was in
his mind to Mary Standish, who was also looking with him into the wall
of gloom that lay between them and the distant cottonwoods.
“It seemed to me that I was not writing it to her, but to _you_” he
said. “And I think that if you hadn’t come back to me I would have gone
mad.”
“I have the letter. It is here”—and she placed a hand upon her breast.
“Do you remember what you wrote, Alan?”
“That you meant more to me than life.”
“And that—particularly—you wanted Ellen McCormick to keep a tress of my
hair for you if they found me.”
He nodded. “When I sat across the table from you aboard the _Nome_, I
worshiped it and didn’t know it. And since then—since I’ve had you
here—every time. I’ve looked at you—” He stopped, choking the words
back in his throat.
“Say it, Alan.”
“I’ve wanted to see it down,” he finished desperately. “Silly notion,
isn’t it?”
“Why is it?” she asked, her eyes widening a little. “If you love it,
why is it a silly notion to want to see it down?”
“Why, I though possibly you might think it so,” he added lamely.
Never had he heard anything sweeter than her laughter as she turned
suddenly from him, so that the glow of the fallen sun was at her back,
and with deft, swift fingers began loosening the coils of her hair
until its radiant masses tumbled about her, streaming down her back in
a silken glory that awed him with its beauty and drew from his lips a
cry of gladness.
She faced him, and in her eyes was the shining softness that glowed in
her hair. “Do you think it is nice, Alan?”
He went to her and filled his hands with the heavy tresses and pressed
them to his lips and face.
Thus he stood when he felt the sudden shiver that ran through her. It
was like a little shock. He heard the catch of her breath, and the hand
which she had placed gently on his bowed head fell suddenly away. When
he raised his head to look at her, she was staring past him into the
deepening twilight of the tundra, and it seemed as if something had
stricken her so that for a space she was powerless to speak or move.
“What is it?” he cried, and whirled about, straining his eyes to see
what had alarmed her; and as he looked, a deep, swift shadow sped over
the earth, darkening the mellow twilight until it was somber gloom of
night—and the midnight sun went out like a great, luminous lamp as a
dense wall of purple cloud rolled up in an impenetrable curtain between
it and the arctic world. Often he had seen this happen in the approach
of summer storm on the tundras, but never had the change seemed so
swift as now. Where there had been golden light, he saw his companion’s
face now pale in a sea of dusk. It was this miracle of arctic night,
its suddenness and unexpectedness, that had startled her, he thought,
and he laughed softly.
But her hand clutched his arm. “I saw them,” she cried, her voice
breaking. “I saw them—out there against the sun—before the cloud
came—and some of them were running, like animals—”
“Shadows!” he exclaimed. “The long shadows of foxes running against the
sun, or of the big gray rabbits, or of a wolf and her half-grown
sneaking away—”
“No, no, they were not that,” she breathed tensely, and her fingers
clung more fiercely to his arm. “They were not shadows. _They were
men_!”