It was in the old Alta-Inyo Club--a warm night for San Francisco--and
through the open windows, hushed and far, came the brawl of the streets.
The talk had led on from the Graft Prosecution and the latest signs
that the town was to be run wide open, down through all the grotesque
sordidness and rottenness of man-hate and man-meanness, until the name
of O'Brien was mentioned--O'Brien, the promising young pugilist who
had been killed in the prize-ring the night before. At once the air
had seemed to freshen. O'Brien had been a clean-living young man with
ideals. He neither drank, smoked, nor swore, and his had been the body
of a beautiful young god. He had even carried his prayer-book to the
ringside. They found it in his coat pocket in the dressing-room...
afterward.
Here was Youth, clean and wholesome, unsullied--the thing of glory and
wonder for men to conjure with..... after it has been lost to them and
they have turned middle-aged. And so well did we conjure, that Romance
came and for an hour led us far from the man-city and its snarling roar.
Bardwell, in a way, started it by quoting from Thoreau; but it was old
Trefethan, bald-headed and dewlapped, who took up the quotation and for
the hour to come was romance incarnate. At first we wondered how many
Scotches he had consumed since dinner, but very soon all that was
forgotten.
“It was in 1898--I was thirty-five then,” he said. “Yes, I know you are
adding it up. You're right. I'm forty-seven now; look ten years more;
and the doctors say--damn the doctors anyway!”
He lifted the long glass to his lips and sipped it slowly to soothe away
his irritation.
“But I was young... once. I was young twelve years ago, and I had
hair on top of my head, and my stomach was lean as a runner's, and the
longest day was none too long for me. I was a husky back there in '98.
You remember me, Milner. You knew me then. Wasn't I a pretty good bit of
all right?”
Milner nodded and agreed. Like Trefethan, he was another mining engineer
who had cleaned up a fortune in the Klondike.
“You certainly were, old man,” Milner said. “I'll never forget when
you cleaned out those lumberjacks in the M. & M. that night that
little newspaper man started the row. Slavin was in the country at
the time,”--this to us--“and his manager wanted to get up a match with
Trefethan.”
“Well, look at me now,” Trefethan commanded angrily. “That's what the
Goldstead did to me--God knows how many millions, but nothing left in my
soul..... nor in my veins. The good red blood is gone. I am a jellyfish,
a huge, gross mass of oscillating protoplasm, a--a...”
But language failed him, and he drew solace from the long glass.
“Women looked at me then; and turned their heads to look a second time.
Strange that I never married. But the girl. That's what I started to
tell you about. I met her a thousand miles from anywhere, and then some.
And she quoted to me those very words of Thoreau that Bardwell quoted a
moment ago--the ones about the day-born gods and the night-born.”
“It was after I had made my locations on Goldstead--and didn't know what
a treasure-pot that that trip creek was going to prove--that I made that
trip east over the Rockies, angling across to the Great Up North there
the Rockies are something more than a back-bone. They are a boundary,
a dividing line, a wall impregnable and unscalable. There is no
intercourse across them, though, on occasion, from the early days,
wandering trappers have crossed them, though more were lost by the way
than ever came through. And that was precisely why I tackled the job. It
was a traverse any man would be proud to make. I am prouder of it right
now than anything else I have ever done.
“It is an unknown land. Great stretches of it have never been explored.
There are big valleys there where the white man has never set foot, and
Indian tribes as primitive as ten thousand years... almost, for they
have had some contact with the whites. Parties of them come out once in
a while to trade, and that is all. Even the Hudson Bay Company failed to
find them and farm them.
“And now the girl. I was coming up a stream--you'd call it a river in
California--uncharted--and unnamed. It was a noble valley, now shut in
by high canyon walls, and again opening out into beautiful stretches,
wide and long, with pasture shoulder-high in the bottoms, meadows dotted
with flowers, and with clumps of timberspruce--virgin and magnificent.
The dogs were packing on their backs, and were sore-footed and played
out; while I was looking for any bunch of Indians to get sleds and
drivers from and go on with the first snow. It was late fall, but
the way those flowers persisted surprised me. I was supposed to be in
sub-arctic America, and high up among the buttresses of the Rockies,
and yet there was that everlasting spread of flowers. Some day the white
settlers will be in there and growing wheat down all that valley.
“And then I lifted a smoke, and heard the barking of the dogs--Indian
dogs--and came into camp. There must have been five hundred of them,
proper Indians at that, and I could see by the jerking-frames that the
fall hunting had been good. And then I met her--Lucy. That was her name.
Sign language--that was all we could talk with, till they led me to a
big fly--you know, half a tent, open on the one side where a campfire
burned. It was all of moose-skins, this fly--moose-skins, smoke-cured,
hand-rubbed, and golden-brown. Under it everything was neat and orderly
as no Indian camp ever was. The bed was laid on fresh spruce boughs.
There were furs galore, and on top of all was a robe of swanskins--white
swan-skins--I have never seen anything like that robe. And on top of it,
sitting cross-legged, was Lucy. She was nut-brown. I have called her a
girl. But she was not. She was a woman, a nut-brown woman, an Amazon, a
full-blooded, full-bodied woman, and royal ripe. And her eyes were blue.
“That's what took me off my feet--her eyes--blue, not China blue, but
deep blue, like the sea and sky all melted into one, and very wise. More
than that, they had laughter in them--warm laughter, sun-warm and human,
very human, and... shall I say feminine? They were. They were a woman's
eyes, a proper woman's eyes. You know what that means. Can I say more?
Also, in those blue eyes were, at the same time, a wild unrest, a
wistful yearning, and a repose, an absolute repose, a sort of all-wise
and philosophical calm.”
Trefethan broke off abruptly.
“You fellows think I am screwed. I'm not. This is only my fifth since
dinner. I am dead sober. I am solemn. I sit here now side by side with
my sacred youth. It is not I--'old' Trefethan--that talks; it is my
youth, and it is my youth that says those were the most wonderful eyes
I have ever seen--so very calm, so very restless; so very wise, so very
curious; so very old, so very young; so satisfied and yet yearning so
wistfully. Boys, I can't describe them. When I have told you about her,
you may know better for yourselves.”
“She did not stand up. But she put out her hand.”
“'Stranger,' she said, 'I'm real glad to see you.'
“I leave it to you--that sharp, frontier, Western tang of speech.
Picture my sensations. It was a woman, a white woman, but that tang!
It was amazing that it should be a white woman, here, beyond the last
boundary of the world--but the tang. I tell you, it hurt. It was like
the stab of a flatted note. And yet, let me tell you, that woman was a
poet. You shall see.”
“She dismissed the Indians. And, by Jove, they went. They took her
orders and followed her blind. She was hi-yu skookam chief. She told the
bucks to make a camp for me and to take care of my dogs. And they
did, too. And they knew enough not to get away with as much as a
moccasin-lace of my outfit. She was a regular She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed,
and I want to tell you it chilled me to the marrow, sent those little
thrills Marathoning up and down my spinal column, meeting a white woman
out there at the head of a tribe of savages a thousand miles the other
side of No Man's Land.
“'Stranger,” she said, 'I reckon you're sure the first white that ever
set foot in this valley. Set down an' talk a spell, and then we'll have
a bite to eat. Which way might you be comin'?'
“There it was, that tang again. But from now to the end of the yarn I
want you to forget it. I tell you I forgot it, sitting there on the edge
of that swan-skin robe and listening and looking at the most wonderful
woman that ever stepped out of the pages of Thoreau or of any other
man's book.
“I stayed on there a week. It was on her invitation. She promised to fit
me out with dogs and sleds and with Indians that would put me across
the best pass of the Rockies in five hundred miles. Her fly was pitched
apart from the others, on the high bank by the river, and a couple of
Indian girls did her cooking for her and the camp work. And so we talked
and talked, while the first snow fell and continued to fall and make a
surface for my sleds. And this was her story.
“She was frontier-born, of poor settlers, and you know what that
means--work, work, always work, work in plenty and without end.
“'I never seen the glory of the world,' she said. 'I had no time. I knew
it was right out there, anywhere, all around the cabin, but there was
always the bread to set, the scrubbin' and the washin' and the work that
was never done. I used to be plumb sick at times, jes' to get out into
it all, especially in the spring when the songs of the birds drove me
most clean crazy. I wanted to run out through the long pasture grass,
wetting my legs with the dew of it, and to climb the rail fence, and
keep on through the timber and up and up over the divide so as to get a
look around. Oh, I had all kinds of hankerings--to follow up the
canyon beds and slosh around from pool to pool, making friends with
the water-dogs and the speckly trout; to peep on the sly and watch the
squirrels and rabbits and small furry things and see what they was doing
and learn the secrets of their ways. Seemed to me, if I had time, I
could crawl among the flowers, and, if I was good and quiet, catch them
whispering with themselves, telling all kinds of wise things that mere
humans never know.'”
Trefethan paused to see that his glass had been refilled.
“Another time she said: 'I wanted to run nights like a wild thing, just
to run through the moonshine and under the stars, to run white and naked
in the darkness that I knew must feel like cool velvet, and to run and
run and keep on running. One evening, plumb tuckered out--it had been a
dreadful hard hot day, and the bread wouldn't raise and the churning had
gone wrong, and I was all irritated and jerky--well, that evening I
made mention to dad of this wanting to run of mine. He looked at me
curious-some and a bit scared. And then he gave me two pills to take.
Said to go to bed and get a good sleep and I'd be all hunky-dory in
the morning. So I never mentioned my hankerings to him, or any one any
more.'
“The mountain home broke up--starved out, I imagine--and the family came
to Seattle to live. There she worked in a factory--long hours, you
know, and all the rest, deadly work. And after a year of that she became
waitress in a cheap restaurant--hash-slinger, she called it. She said
to me once, 'Romance I guess was what I wanted. But there wan't no
romance floating around in dishpans and washtubs, or in factories and
hash-joints.'
“When she was eighteen she married--a man who was going up to Juneau to
start a restaurant. He had a few dollars saved, and appeared prosperous.
She didn't love him--she was emphatic about that, but she was all tired
out, and she wanted to get away from the unending drudgery. Besides,
Juneau was in Alaska, and her yearning took the form of a desire to see
that wonderland. But little she saw of it. He started the restaurant,
a little cheap one, and she quickly learned what he had married her
for..... to save paying wages. She came pretty close to running the
joint and doing all the work from waiting to dishwashing. She cooked
most of the time as well. And she had four years of it.
“Can't you picture her, this wild woods creature, quick with every old
primitive instinct, yearning for the free open, and mowed up in a vile
little hash-joint and toiling and moiling for four mortal years?
“'There was no meaning in anything,' she said. 'What was it all about!
Why was I born! Was that all the meaning of life--just to work and work
and be always tired!--to go to bed tired and to wake up tired, with
every day like every other day unless it was harder?' She had heard talk
of immortal life from the gospel sharps, she said, but she could
not reckon that what she was doin' was a likely preparation for her
immortality.
“But she still had her dreams, though more rarely. She had read a few
books--what, it is pretty hard to imagine, Seaside Library novels most
likely; yet they had been food for fancy. 'Sometimes,' she said, 'when
I was that dizzy from the heat of the cooking that if I didn't take
a breath of fresh air I'd faint, I'd stick my head out of the kitchen
window, and close my eyes and see most wonderful things. All of a sudden
I'd be traveling down a country road, and everything clean and quiet,
no dust, no dirt; just streams ripplin' down sweet meadows, and lambs
playing, breezes blowing the breath of flowers, and soft sunshine over
everything; and lovely cows lazying knee-deep in quiet pools, and young
girls bathing in a curve of stream all white and slim and natural--and
I'd know I was in Arcady. I'd read about that country once, in a book.
And maybe knights, all flashing in the sun, would come riding around a
bend in the road, or a lady on a milk-white mare, and in the distance
I could see the towers of a castle rising, or I just knew, on the next
turn, that I'd come upon some palace, all white and airy and fairy-like,
with fountains playing, and flowers all over everything, and peacocks
on the lawn..... and then I'd open my eyes, and the heat of the
cooking range would strike on me, and I'd hear Jake sayin'--he was my
husband--I'd hear Jake sayin', “Why ain't you served them beans? Think I
can wait here all day!” Romance!--I reckon the nearest I ever come to
it was when a drunken Armenian cook got the snakes and tried to cut my
throat with a potato knife and I got my arm burned on the stove before I
could lay him out with the potato stomper.
“'I wanted easy ways, and lovely things, and Romance and all that; but
it just seemed I had no luck nohow and was only and expressly born for
cooking and dishwashing. There was a wild crowd in Juneau them days, but
I looked at the other women, and their way of life didn't excite me.
I reckon I wanted to be clean. I don't know why; I just wanted to, I
guess; and I reckoned I might as well die dishwashing as die their way.”
Trefethan halted in his tale for a moment, completing to himself some
thread of thought.
“And this is the woman I met up there in the Arctic, running a tribe of
wild Indians and a few thousand square miles of hunting territory. And
it happened, simply enough, though, for that matter, she might have
lived and died among the pots and pans. But 'Came the whisper, came the
vision.' That was all she needed, and she got it.
“'I woke up one day,' she said. 'Just happened on it in a scrap of
newspaper. I remember every word of it, and I can give it to you.' And
then she quoted Thoreau's Cry of the Human:
“'The young pines springing up, in the corn field from year to year are
to me a refreshing fact. We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is
not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness
of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods
and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with
nature. He has glances of starry recognition, to which our saloons
are strangers. The steady illumination of his qenius, dim only because
distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared
with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles. The
Society Islanders had their day-born gods, but they were not supposed to
be of equal antiquity with the..... night-born gods.'
“That's what she did, repeated it word for word, and I forgot the tang,
for it was solemn, a declaration of religion--pagan, if you will; and
clothed in the living garmenture of herself.
“'And the rest of it was torn away,' she added, a great emptiness in her
voice. 'It was only a scrap of newspaper. But that Thoreau was a wise
man. I wish I knew more about him.' She stopped a moment, and I swear
her face was ineffably holy as she said, 'I could have made him a good
wife.'
“And then she went on. 'I knew right away, as soon as I read that, what
was the matter with me. I was a night-born. I, who had lived all my
life with the day-born, was a night-born. That was why I had never been
satisfied with cooking and dishwashing; that was why I had hankered to
run naked in the moonlight. And I knew that this dirty little Juneau
hash-joint was no place for me. And right there and then I said, “I
quit.” I packed up my few rags of clothes, and started. Jake saw me and
tried to stop me.
“'What you doing?” he says.
“'Divorcin' you and me,' I says. 'I'm headin' for tall timber and where
I belong.'”
“'No you don't,' he says, reaching for me to stop me. 'The cooking has
got on your head. You listen to me talk before you up and do anything
brash.'
“But I pulled a gun-a little Colt's forty-four--and says, 'This does my
talkin' for me.'
“And I left.”
Trefethan emptied his glass and called for another.
“Boys, do you know what that girl did? She was twenty-two. She had spent
her life over the dish-pan and she knew no more about the world than I
do of the fourth dimension, or the fifth. All roads led to her desire.
No; she didn't head for the dance-halls. On the Alaskan Pan-handle it
is preferable to travel by water. She went down to the beach. An Indian
canoe was starting for Dyea--you know the kind, carved out of a single
tree, narrow and deep and sixty feet long. She gave them a couple of
dollars and got on board.
“'Romance?' she told me. 'It was Romance from the jump. There were three
families altogether in that canoe, and that crowded there wasn't room to
turn around, with dogs and Indian babies sprawling over everything, and
everybody dipping a paddle and making that canoe go.' And all around the
great solemn mountains, and tangled drifts of clouds and sunshine. And
oh, the silence! the great wonderful silence! And, once, the smoke of
a hunter's camp, away off in the distance, trailing among the trees.
It was like a picnic, a grand picnic, and I could see my dreams coming
true, and I was ready for something to happen 'most any time. And it
did.
“'And that first camp, on the island! And the boys spearing fish in the
mouth of the creek, and the big deer one of the bucks shot just around
the point. And there were flowers everywhere, and in back from the beach
the grass was thick and lush and neck-high. And some of the girls went
through this with me, and we climbed the hillside behind and picked
berries and roots that tasted sour and were good to eat. And we came
upon a big bear in the berries making his supper, and he said “Oof!” and
ran away as scared as we were. And then the camp, and the camp smoke,
and the smell of fresh venison cooking. It was beautiful. I was with the
night-born at last, and I knew that was where I belonged. And for the
first time in my life, it seemed to me, I went to bed happy that night,
looking out under a corner of the canvas at the stars cut off black by a
big shoulder of mountain, and listening to the night-noises, and knowing
that the same thing would go on next day and forever and ever, for I
wasn't going back. And I never did go back.'
“'Romance! I got it next day. We had to cross a big arm of the
ocean--twelve or fifteen miles, at least; and it came on to blow when we
were in the middle. That night I was along on shore, with one wolf-dog,
and I was the only one left alive.'
“Picture it yourself,” Trefethan broke off to say. “The canoe was
wrecked and lost, and everybody pounded to death on the rocks except
her. She went ashore hanging on to a dog's tail, escaping the rocks and
washing up on a tiny beach, the only one in miles.
“'Lucky for me it was the mainland,' she said. 'So I headed right away
back, through the woods and over the mountains and straight on anywhere.
Seemed I was looking for something and knew I'd find it. I wasn't
afraid. I was night-born, and the big timber couldn't kill me. And on
the second day I found it. I came upon a small clearing and a tumbledown
cabin. Nobody had been there for years and years. The roof had fallen
in. Rotted blankets lay in the bunks, and pots and pans were on the
stove. But that was not the most curious thing. Outside, along the
edge of the trees, you can't guess what I found. The skeletons of eight
horses, each tied to a tree. They had starved to death, I reckon, and
left only little piles of bones scattered some here and there. And each
horse had had a load on its back. There the loads lay, in among the
bones--painted canvas sacks, and inside moosehide sacks, and inside the
moosehide sacks--what do you think?'”
She stopped, reached under a corner of the bed among the spruce boughs,
and pulled out a leather sack. She untied the mouth and ran out into my
hand as pretty a stream of gold as I have ever seen--coarse gold, placer
gold, some large dust, but mostly nuggets, and it was so fresh and rough
that it scarcely showed signs of water-wash.
“'You say you're a mining engineer,' she said, 'and you know this
country. Can you name a pay-creek that has the color of that gold!'
“I couldn't! There wasn't a trace of silver. It was almost pure, and I
told her so.
“'You bet,' she said. 'I sell that for nineteen dollars an ounce. You
can't get over seventeen for Eldorado gold, and Minook gold don't fetch
quite eighteen. Well, that was what I found among the bones--eight
horse-loads of it, one hundred and fifty pounds to the load.'
“'A quarter of a million dollars!' I cried out.
“'That's what I reckoned it roughly,' she answered. 'Talk about Romance!
And me a slaving the way I had all the years, when as soon as I ventured
out, inside three days, this was what happened. And what became of the
men that mined all that gold? Often and often I wonder about it. They
left their horses, loaded and tied, and just disappeared off the face of
the earth, leaving neither hide nor hair behind them. I never heard tell
of them. Nobody knows anything about them. Well, being the night-born, I
reckon I was their rightful heir.'”
Trefethan stopped to light a cigar.
“Do you know what that girl did? She cached the gold, saving out thirty
pounds, which she carried back to the coast. Then she signaled a passing
canoe, made her way to Pat Healy's trading post at Dyea, outfitted,
and went over Chilcoot Pass. That was in '88--eight years before the
Klondike strike, and the Yukon was a howling wilderness. She was afraid
of the bucks, but she took two young squaws with her, crossed the lakes,
and went down the river and to all the early camps on the Lower Yukon.
She wandered several years over that country and then on in to where I
met her. Liked the looks of it, she said, seeing, in her own words, 'a
big bull caribou knee-deep in purple iris on the valley-bottom.' She
hooked up with the Indians, doctored them, gained their confidence, and
gradually took them in charge. She had only left that country once, and
then, with a bunch of the young bucks, she went over Chilcoot, cleaned
up her gold-cache, and brought it back with her.
“'And here I be, stranger,' she concluded her yarn, 'and here's the most
precious thing I own.'
“She pulled out a little pouch of buckskin, worn on her neck like a
locket, and opened it. And inside, wrapped in oiled silk, yellowed with
age and worn and thumbed, was the original scrap of newspaper containing
the quotation from Thoreau.
“'And are you happy... satisfied?' I asked her. 'With a quarter of a
million you wouldn't have to work down in the States. You must miss a
lot.'
“'Not much,' she answered. 'I wouldn't swop places with any woman down
in the States. These are my people; this is where I belong. But there
are times--and in her eyes smoldered up that hungry yearning I've
mentioned--'there are times when I wish most awful bad for that Thoreau
man to happen along.'
“'Why?' I asked.
“'So as I could marry him. I do get mighty lonesome at spells. I'm just
a woman--a real woman. I've heard tell of the other kind of women that
gallivanted off like me and did queer things--the sort that become
soldiers in armies, and sailors on ships. But those women are queer
themselves. They're more like men than women; they look like men and
they don't have ordinary women's needs. They don't want love, nor little
children in their arms and around their knees. I'm not that sort. I
leave it to you, stranger. Do I look like a man?'
“She didn't. She was a woman, a beautiful, nut-brown woman, with a
sturdy, health-rounded woman's body and with wonderful deep-blue woman's
eyes.
“'Ain't I woman?' she demanded. 'I am. I'm 'most all woman, and then
some. And the funny thing is, though I'm night-born in everything else,
I'm not when it comes to mating. I reckon that kind likes its own kind
best. That's the way it is with me, anyway, and has been all these
years.'
“'You mean to tell me--' I began.
“'Never,' she said, and her eyes looked into mine with the straightness
of truth. 'I had one husband, only--him I call the Ox; and I reckon he's
still down in Juneau running the hash-joint. Look him up, if you ever
get back, and you'll find he's rightly named.'
“And look him up I did, two years afterward. He was all she said--solid
and stolid, the Ox--shuffling around and waiting on the tables.
“'You need a wife to help you,' I said.
“'I had one once,' was his answer.
“'Widower?'
“'Yep. She went loco. She always said the heat of the cooking would
get her, and it did. Pulled a gun on me one day and ran away with some
Siwashes in a canoe. Caught a blow up the coast and all hands drowned.'”
Trefethan devoted himself to his glass and remained silent.
“But the girl?” Milner reminded him.
“You left your story just as it was getting interesting, tender. Did
it?”
“It did,” Trefethan replied. “As she said herself, she was savage in
everything except mating, and then she wanted her own kind. She was very
nice about it, but she was straight to the point. She wanted to marry
me.
“'Stranger,' she said, 'I want you bad. You like this sort of life or
you wouldn't be here trying to cross the Rockies in fall weather. It's
a likely spot. You'll find few likelier. Why not settle down! I'll make
you a good wife.'
“And then it was up to me. And she waited. I don't mind confessing that
I was sorely tempted. I was half in love with her as it was. You know I
have never married. And I don't mind adding, looking back over my life,
that she is the only woman that ever affected me that way. But it was
too preposterous, the whole thing, and I lied like a gentleman. I told
her I was already married.
“'Is your wife waiting for you?' she asked.
“I said yes.
“'And she loves you?'
“I said yes.
“And that was all. She never pressed her point... except once, and then
she showed a bit of fire.
“'All I've got to do,' she said, 'is to give the word, and you don't get
away from here. If I give the word, you stay on... But I ain't going to
give it. I wouldn't want you if you didn't want to be wanted... and if
you didn't want me.'
“She went ahead and outfitted me and started me on my way.
“'It's a darned shame, stranger,” she said, at parting. 'I like your
looks, and I like you. If you ever change your mind, come back.'
“Now there was one thing I wanted to do, and that was to kiss her
good-bye, but I didn't know how to go about it nor how she would take
it.--I tell you I was half in love with her. But she settled it herself.
“'Kiss me,' she said. 'Just something to go on and remember.'
“And we kissed, there in the snow, in that valley by the Rockies, and
I left her standing by the trail and went on after my dogs. I was six
weeks in crossing over the pass and coming down to the first post on
Great Slave Lake.”
The brawl of the streets came up to us like a distant surf. A
steward, moving noiselessly, brought fresh siphons. And in the silence
Trefethan's voice fell like a funeral bell:
“It would have been better had I stayed. Look at me.”
We saw his grizzled mustache, the bald spot on his head, the puff-sacks
under his eyes, the sagging cheeks, the heavy dewlap, the general
tiredness and staleness and fatness, all the collapse and ruin of a man
who had once been strong but who had lived too easily and too well.
“It's not too late, old man,” Bardwell said, almost in a whisper.
“By God! I wish I weren't a coward!” was Trefethan's answering cry. “I
could go back to her. She's there, now. I could shape up and live many a
long year... with her... up there. To remain here is to commit suicide.
But I am an old man--forty-seven--look at me. The trouble is,” he lifted
his glass and glanced at it, “the trouble is that suicide of this sort
is so easy. I am soft and tender. The thought of the long day's travel
with the dogs appalls me; the thought of the keen frost in the morning
and of the frozen sled-lashings frightens me--”
Automatically the glass was creeping toward his lips. With a swift
surge of anger he made as if to crash it down upon the floor. Next came
hesitancy and second thought. The glass moved upward to his lips and
paused. He laughed harshly and bitterly, but his words were solemn:
“Well, here's to the Night-Born. She WAS a wonder.”