At the appointed time Ivan packed his supplies for his journey across
the narrow, rugged Peninsula in quest of help. He took three days’
rations, tied them up in Pete’s light caribou robe, that was in itself
sufficient protection from even severe cold, and strapped the pack on
his lean, well-muscled back. Pete gave him ungrudging respect as he
watched his preparations. Here was a man: the sharp, upreaching white
peaks appalled him not at all, and he would wrestle with the wilderness
powers as bravely and as successfully as Pete himself. The light pack
was as nothing to that lithe, tigerlike strength.
“Pete, I’m leaving you to take care of Mrs. Newhall,” he said simply. “I
know you’ll do it—as you’ve done before. She’ll be wholly in your
charge till I get back, and don’t let any harm befall her.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Pete assured him.
Ivan shook his lean shoulders carelessly, to settle the pack. “I won’t
be back for three days,” he went on casually, with no emphasis whatever
in his musical voice, “unless I choose to come back before—so I can’t
look after her personally. But I might say that if any harm _did_ befall
her, I would chase the man down, no matter what corner of the earth he
fled to, keeping after him and after him till I got him. When I did get
him——”
He paused, and Pete looked him squarely in the eyes. There was no doubt
whatever that this man meant what he said, and no doubt of his reason
for saying it. “That isn’t necessary, sir,” Pete told him stiffly.
“Well, I didn’t think it was, but I wanted you to understand, in case
you were tempted. I am a man myself, and I know what temptation is.”
Pete’s eyes blazed. “Temptation of that kind doesn’t come to men of our
race, unless they are perverts,” he said easily. He was somewhat pale,
but he lit his pipe with a steady match as he spoke. “I don’t know about
the inferior races.”
Ivan smiled inscrutably. It was impossible for him to be insulted by a
man in Pete’s supposed station in life, simply because such insult
implied equality that Ivan would never admit. He might punish Pete for
insubordination or lack of proper respect; perhaps he might kick him
back into his supposed place; but the words of an obvious inferior could
never so much as ruffle his complacency. “At some other place and
time—perhaps just before we sail—I’ll give you a chance to show
whether the Anglo-Saxon is superior to the Mongol. It would be really
diverting, for a moment. At present, both of us have work to do—you to
take care of the camp and I to go after supplies.” His voice changed and
softened, but it had never been perceptibly hard. “Keep up the hunt for
caribou,” he directed. “The boys haven’t done so well lately. Take care
of the meat and cure it as fast as possible.” Then he turned to say
good-by to Dorothy.
He found her in an uncertain mood. She had overheard part of the
significant conversation between Ivan and Pete—the first unfriendly
words they had had so far—and she had been perplexed by a queer mixture
of emotions. She was definitely betrothed to Ivan, she had made her bed
and was resolved to lie in it, yet in this minor controversy she was
unable definitely to take sides with her fiancé. When she tried to
admire Ivan’s cold deadliness, she found herself defending Pete’s
sturdy, Anglo-Saxon courage. When she tried to throw her sympathies to
her betrothed, she found herself—to some degree, at least—championing
Pete in her heart.
The thing puzzled her, and it mortified her too. At last she had to
attribute it to race ties and race loyalty—matters with which she had
never concerned herself particularly before.
She walked a short distance up the hill with Ivan; and her trust in
herself and her love for him swept back to her to the full when he gave
her a good-by kiss. What more could a woman ask in a lover than she had
in him? A love which, though physical in character, would carry him to
the ends of the earth for her, great personal charm, a brilliant
intellect, great wealth and a finesse of breeding and manners that even
the best of America—the Old South—could not surpass! This was all in
addition to his genius, that which made him the envied of all the world.
“Take care of yourself, Ivan,” she told him with a plaintive sweetness
that carried him off his feet. “You are all I have now. I have lost so
much, and I couldn’t bear to lose you.”
They clung together, and then she watched him as he strode away up the
hill. Sighing, she turned back to the camp.
She walked slowly, lost in her thoughts; and she halted on the hillside
to look down at the camp. Instantly she found herself glowing with a
kindly warmth that seemed to exude from her heart. There was an
atmosphere of home about this rude camp. Indeed, for the time being, it
_was_ home, shelter from the storm and the night. She was surprised at
the familiar manner in which she found herself regarding it, as though
she had lived here years and her happiness was bound up in it. She knew
in an instant that the glow that pervaded her was nothing more or less
than the primitive love of home.
She had got down to essentials out here. She had felt the threat of the
elements and the malevolence of the night, and she had found that even
this rude tent, with the fire smoldering without, was something to be
infinitely thankful for. Besides, her happiness was bound up in it. Here
she had definitely accepted Ivan’s love and given her own love in
return. Yet she felt that she must not follow this thought to its
logical conclusion, because it would only give rise to haunting doubts
such as she had agreed to shut from herself forever. If her joy in the
rude habitation was a mere matter of sentimental association only—that
she loved it simply because she loved Ivan—she would not now be
standing, glowing with pleasure, when Ivan was far away. Where one’s
heart is, there is home—but to-day her heart should be far away,
trudging the barren hills with Ivan. She had to admit that there was
some other, intrinsic quality about the camp that endeared it to her.
She saw the low camp fire over which Pete bent, cooking breakfast.
Fortune Joe—merely a native now, not the seer he had been last
night—was cutting wood with lusty strokes. The tent was warm from the
camp stove: the sharp wind menaced it in vain. Suddenly she knew she
would be wholly comfortable and safe while Ivan was away. She felt
inexplicably light-hearted.
Pete had her breakfast ready when she reached the camp, and his homely
face glowed when he brought it to her. He had taken especial pains
to-day—venison liver fried with bacon, coffee such as her colored mammy
herself could make, brown flapjacks not too thick, served with maple
syrup. His broad shoulders towered above her; and he was boyishly elated
when he saw she was pleased.
The day wore on, and his care of her, his watchfulness, was a wonder.
Although his work carried him far afield, he had cut fuel always ready
for her hand in case the fire burned low; he personally superintended
her meals, and he saw—with fine generalship—that at no time she was
left alone with Pavlof and Fortune Joe. The latter Indian, he felt, was
largely to be trusted; but he put no faith in the native priest.
When the day paled, and the dusk crept in from the sea, she appreciated
his care more and more. She found an actual pleasure in watching his
supper preparations, rejoicing in his agile movements, thrilled a
little, in spite of herself, by the play of his back muscles under his
heavy shirt; and she liked the way the fire’s glow reddened his homely,
weather-beaten face. . . . Some one else she had known, long ago, had in
this same manner squinted blue, friendly eyes in too bright light; and
the pucker of his humorous mouth, as he worked, was familiar some way
too.
He took special pains with her dinner. He made reflector biscuits, thin
and light, to be served with marmalade; he pot-roasted a fine canvasback
duck that Pavlof had decapitated with the pistol; he fried potatoes
crisp and brown. He watched her devour every mouthful of her portion,
then after he had remade the bed and built up the fire in the camp
stove, he turned to the task of washing dishes. Pavlof and Joe,
meanwhile, were cutting into strips for curing the caribou meat they had
procured in the day’s hunting.
“I wouldn’t mind washing the dishes to-night,” Dorothy told him in a
friendly tone. “Maybe you’d like to help the men take care of the
meat——”
“Couldn’t think of it,” Pete returned. “If you’ll excuse my saying so—I
suspect you’re not very experienced at it. But if you _should_ care to
help me dry ’em——”
They made quite a little party out of washing and drying the metal
plates and the crude, iron knives and forks. They talked easily, almost
companionably, and the time passed surprisingly swiftly for them both.
And soon it was deep dark, and night winds were blowing from the sea.
This work done, the girl started to turn away.
But she halted; and he saw her girlish profile in the soft light of the
camp fire. “Would you like to come and sit at the door of my tent a
little while?” she asked. Her voice was somewhat tremulous; but she did
not try to ask herself why. “I’m rather nervous to-night,” she went on
hastily. “Perhaps that would make me feel more secure. Don’t if you have
any camp work to do.”
Pete glanced about him. “Camp work is pretty well done, for to-night. I
will smoke my pipe once at your tent door, if you don’t mind. Human
companionship is very reassuring, very necessary in this North.”
She felt that he had expressed what she had groped for. “Anywhere, for
that matter.”
“Yes. Anywhere.”
She went in and sat comfortably on her bed, while he sat at the tent
mouth. They talked easily, surprisingly freely while the lesser stars
were emerging, and his pipe paled and glowed and paled again in the
gloom. She felt wholly secure and at peace.
“Sometimes there is a throwback in your speech, an accent or a choice of
a word that interests me immensely, Pete,” she told him. “I don’t want
to be curious—but curiosity is a very human trait, after all. Sometimes
I’m caused to think that you must have known something very different
from this—before you came here.”
“I did,” he answered quietly. “It’s nothing unusual, up here. This end
of Alaska is a port of missing men. I don’t see why the police don’t
look here first for them: a man who wants to get away finds himself up
here before he knows it—or in South America.”
She could not question this. Her own husband had come here in flight;
Ivan’s instinct had been to send him to South America. Yet she did not
think that this man had ever been guilty of real wickedness. He did not
appeal to her as that kind.
“And you are exiled from home?” she asked him bluntly. Yet there was no
hint of vulgar curiosity in her tone. Pete knew that she asked because
of sympathetic interest in him, such as is never resented by any normal
human being on the broad earth. The night is too dark and the storm too
wild for men to shut themselves away from human sympathy. He turned to
her with a grateful smile.
“Forever. But I can blame no one but myself. I guess I simply couldn’t
stand civilized existence. If you’d ask the trouble, I’d say—false
standards.”
This had been the cause of Peter’s downfall too: false standards of
which both Peter and herself had been guilty. “I’d know better, again,”
she heard him say. “I’d never sacrifice my birthright again—waste all I
have. But that’s always the song we exiles sing.”
It was the same with her, too. If she had to do it over again she would
never barter away her birthright for a mess of pottage. She had had all
possible opportunities for happiness, but together she and Peter had
wasted them; and no matter what she tried to make herself believe, no
matter what contentment she would ultimately find in Ivan’s arms, they
could never come again. Tears flooded her eyes.
She dropped down further on to her bunk. The fire in the camp stove
burned down to coals. She saw Peter knock out the ashes from his
pipe—lightly, so as not to disturb her—and for an instant he stood,
perfectly motionless, at her threshold. She was not afraid. A faint,
pale glow through the air draft in the front of the stove showed him
dimly, and something in the cast of the homely face, the half-obscured,
dim, sober curl of his lips, suggested a tenderness that she had never,
even in their most exalted moments, seen in the face of the magnificent
man and genius to whom to-day she had given her promise. She had seen
ardor, truly, longing and desire that bewildered her by its savage
intensity; but she had never found real tenderness, innate instinctive
chivalry. Every attention Ivan had ever paid her had been bent toward
one end: that of winning her wholly and completely and in the way the
Oriental wins his woman; he had never given her his soul’s silent
homage. She felt, at that moment, that from causes beyond her ken this
humble man had seen fit to give her a blessing; and in all their
associations Ivan had never blessed her.
“Good night, Pete,” she told him simply.
“Good night, Mrs. Newhall.” His answer came soft and moving from the
darkened threshold. “Sleep good.”
He meant that she need not be afraid of the dark. She could sleep
soundly, knowing that no harm could befall her. Though he himself stayed
in the dugout, this humble man would be on guard through the long, empty
hours.
As she drifted at half-sleep she was carried back to the first happy
months of her marriage with Peter. She remembered his enfolding arms,
and in them she had felt the same security that blessed her now. There
was an infinite, aching void; but at least she could sleep in peace and
in knowledge of safety.