DUST OF IDOLS
David Drennen's statement concerning the two powerful motives
responsible for the presence in the North Woods of the greater portion
of her hardy denizens had been essentially truthful. The shadow of
prison bars or perhaps the gaunt silhouette of the gallows, vivid in an
overstimulated fancy, has sent many a man roving; the whisper down the
world of yellow gold to be taken from the earth, transforming the
blackened claw gripping it into the potent fingers of a money king, has
entered the ear of many a wanderer and drawn him to such a land as
this. An evil nature, a flare of temper, a wrong done and redressed in
hot wrath and red blood, a mistake or a weakness or a wild spirit born
a hundred years too late, any of these things might send a man into the
North Woods. But Drennen, who made the statement to Ygerne Bellaire,
was in himself an exception to it.
For half a score of years this land of hard trails, this far out place
where man met man without veneer, where nature's breasts lay stripped
of covering and naked, where life was the old life of things elemental,
where primal laws were good laws, where there was room enough for the
strong and scant room for the weak, David Drennen had found a spacious
walled home. Half of the year his house had the lofty, snow-capped
mountains for its only walls, the sweeping blue arch for its roof, sun,
moon and stars for its lamps. There were months when he knew of no
other footfall than his own throughout the vastness of his house.
There had been times when, seeing the thin wisp of smoke against the
dawn telling of a camp fire five miles away, he had grumbled and
trampled out his own embers and moved on, seeking solitude.
He had brought into the mountains a heart at once sore and bitter. The
soreness had been drawn out of it in time; the bitterness had but grown
the more intense. Hard, mordacious, no man's friend . . . that was the
David Drennen who at Père Marquette's fête sought any quarrel to which
he might lay his hands. The world had battled and buffeted him; it had
showered blows and been chary of caresses; he had struck back,
hard-fisted, hard-hearted, a man whom a brutal life had made brutal in
its own image.
There had been a scar made in his world of men and women to mark his
leaving it, such a scar as a thorn leaves in the flesh when rudely
drawn out. A tiny cicatrix soon almost entirely lost as the niche
which had been his was filled and the healing over was perfected. It
doesn't take long for the grass to grow over the graves of the dead;
the dew forming upon the mounded turf is less like tears than like
glistening jewels to deck the earth in the joyous time of her bridehood
in the spring; the flight of birds over it and their little bursts of
melody are eloquent of an ecstasy which does not remember. How little
time then must pass to wipe out the memory of the passing of a David
Drennen from the busy thoroughfares into the secluded trails?
He had been a young man, the lightest hearted of his care-free set,
when the crash came. The chief component characteristics of the young
David Drennen of twenty were, perhaps, a careless generosity, a natural
spontaneous gaiety which accepted each day as it came, a strong though
unanalysed faith in his fellow being. Life made music in tuneful
chords upon the strings of his heart. The twin wells of love and faith
were always brimming for his friends; overflowing for the one man whose
act was to turn their waters brackish and bitter. That man was his
father, John Harper Drennen, a man prominent enough in the financial
world to make much copy for the newspapers up and down the country and
to occupy no little place in transoceanic cable messages when the story
broke.
A boy must have his hero worship. Rarely enough does he find his
Alexander the Great, his Washington or his Daniel Boone, his Spartacus
or his Horatius in his own household. But the motherless David had
proved the exception and had long ago begun to shape his own life in
the picture of his father's, investing him with attributes essentially
divine. John Harper Drennen was a great man; the boy made of him an
infallible hero who should have been a demigod in face of the crisis.
And when that crisis came his demigod fled before it, routed by the
vengeance seeking him.
Young Drennen had struck a man in the face for breaking the news to him
and had felt a virtuous glow as he called the man "Liar!" He
experienced a double joy upon him, the lesser one of his militant
manhood, the greater of realising that it had been granted him, even in
a small way, to fight a bit of his father's battle. He had gone out
upon the street and a newsboy's paper, thrust to him, offered him the
glaring lie in great black letters for a penny. He had torn the thing
across, flinging it away angrily. There would be a libel suit
to-morrow and such an apology as this editorial cur had never dreamed
he had it in him to write. He heard men talk of it in the subway and
laugh, and saw them turn wondering eyes to meet his glare. He made
short his trip home, anxious to enlist under his father's standard,
thrilled with the thought of gripping his father's hand.
When he found that his father, who should have returned two days ago
from a trip to Chicago had not come back, he despatched a telegram to
the lake city. The telegram was returned to him in due course of time;
his father was not in Chicago and had not been there recently. He
wired Boston, Washington, Philadelphia. His father was at none of his
hotels in any of these cities. The boy prepared himself in calm, cold
anger to wait for his father's return. But John Harper Drennen had
never returned.
During the week which dragged horribly, he refused to read the papers.
They were filled with such lies as he had no stomach for. Only the
knowledge that the older Drennen was eminently capable to cope with his
own destiny and must have his own private reasons for allowing this
hideous scandal to continue unrefuted, held him back from bursting into
more than one editorial room to wreak physical, violent vengeance
there. His respect for his father was so little short of reverent awe,
that he could take no step yet without John Harper's command. Quizzed
by the police, questioned by the Chief, knowing himself dogged wherever
he went, feeling certain that even his mail was no longer safe from
prying eyes, he said always the same thing:
"Some of you are fools, some liars! When Dad comes back . . ."
He had choked up under the keen eyes of the Chief. And what angered
him most was the look in the Chief's eyes. It was not incredulity; it
was merely pity.
At first the papers had it that John Harper Drennen had absconded with
fifty thousand dollars of the Eastern Mines Company's money. With
rapid investigation came ready amplification of the first meagre
details. Drennen's affairs were looked into and it was found that
through unwise speculations the man had been skirting on thin ice the
pool of financial ruin for a year. The deficit of fifty thousand grew
under the microscope of investigation to sixty thousand, eventually to
seventy-five thousand.
When at last David Drennen got the back numbers of the papers and
locked himself up in his father's library to work his way laboriously
through the columns of fact and surmise he was not the same David
Drennen who had struck a man in the face for suggesting to him that his
father was a thief. Here was the first sign of a weakening of faith;
here the first fear which strove wildly to prove itself a shadow. But
from shadow emerged certainty. He looked his spectre in the face and
it did not dissolve into thin air. When he had done he put his face
upon his arms and sobbed. The tardy but crushing sense of his hero's
guilt had stricken him; the thought that his father had in no way
confided in him, had left him without a word, perhaps without a
thought, broke his heart. He was never to be quite the same David
Drennen again.
He remained at his father's home through the weary months during which
the miserably sordid horror dragged on. One morning he packed into a
suitcase the few little articles which he felt were his own. He went
out of the house before the others came in; he had no desire to see the
home go, as everything else had gone, to pour its handful of golden
sand into the great hole which John Harper's ruin had left behind him.
It had been almost a year since the first news; and upon the day on
which David Drennen set his back to all he knew and his face toward
what might come to him, a paper brought the last word. He read it
calmly upon the train, wondering at himself that there was such a thing
as calm left to him. A man, looking over his shoulder, commented on
the news lightly. Drennen didn't answer. He was visualising the final
episode dully; the great, masterful body of his own father in the Paris
morgue, the ignominious grave, even the cowardly death, self-dealt.
"And he never wrote me," he muttered to himself.
There he was wrong, though he could not know it until months later when
the brief letter, forwarded to him by the Chief, reached him. His face
had been hard, because his heart was hard, when he read the note which
at last John Harper Drennen had written and which, sodden and blurred,
was found upon the dead body drawn from the Seine.
"Dear Davy," it had said. "Some day maybe you'll come to forgive me.
God dealt me a hard hand to play, boy. Be a man, Davy; for your
mother's sake if not for your dad's."
Drennen a year ago would have dropped his face into his hands and would
have wept over this letter; now he laughed at it. And the laugh, this
first one, was the laugh men came to know as Dave Drennen's laugh. It
was like a sneer and a curse and a slap in the face.
The hardest blow the fates could deal him had been delivered
mercilessly. But other relentless blows were to come after, and under
their implacable, relentless smiting the soul of the man was hardened
and altered and made over as is the bit of iron under the blacksmith's
hammer. Those characteristics which had been the essentials of the
spiritual man of last year were worked over; the fine steel springs of
buoyancy were beaten into thin knives of malignancy. That the work
might be done thoroughly there was left in him one spark which glowed
later on and grew into friendship for a man whom he met far in the
north where the Yukon country called to such men as Drennen. The
friendship fanned into life a lingering spark of the old generous
spirit. Drennen, gambling his life lightly, had won as careless
gamblers are prone to do. He made a strike; he trusted his new friend;
and his friend tricked, betrayed and robbed him. This blow and others
came with the gaunt years. At the end of them David Drennen was the
man who sought to quarrel with Kootanie George; he was a man like a
lone wolf, hunting alone, eating alone, making his lair alone, his
heart filled with hatred and bitterness and distrust. He came to
expect the savagery of the world which smote and smote and smote again
at him, and he struck back and snarled back, each day finding him a
bitterer man than the preceding day had left him. Long before he had
turned back from the Yukon to the North Woods, empty handed, empty
hearted, men had come to call him "No-luck" Drennen. And as though his
ill fortune were some ugly, contagious disease, they shunned him even
as invariably as he avoided them.
Men knew him in Wild Cat, two weeks hard going over an invisible trail
from MacLeod's; they knew him at Moosejaw, two hundred and fifty miles
westward of the Settlement; wherever there was news of gold found he
was known, generally coming silently with the first handful of
venturesome, restive spirits. But while his coming and his going were
marked and while eyes followed him interestedly men had given over
offering their hands in companionship. Now and then he moved among
them as a man must, but always was he aloof, standing stubbornly apart,
offering no man his aid in time of difficulty, flaring into blazing
wrath the few times on record when men showed sympathy and desire to
befriend him.
Superstition, abashed-eyed step daughter in the house of civilisation,
lifts her head defiantly in the wilderness. She is born of the
solitudes, a true daughter of the silent places. Here, where men were
few and scattered broadcast by the great hand of adventure across the
broken miles of all but impassable mountains, superstition is no longer
merely an incident but an essential factor in human life and destiny.
And here men long ago had come to frown when their questing eyes found
the great, gaunt form of David Drennen in the van of some mad rush to
new fields: He was unlucky; men who rubbed shoulders with him were
foredoomed to share his misfortune; the gold, glittering into their
eyes from a gash in the earth, would vanish when his shadow fell across
it.
In many things he had grown to be more like a wild beast than a man.
He had hunted with the human pack and he had found selfishness and
jealousy and treachery on every hand. He came to look upon these as
the essential characteristics of the human race. Even now that he was
wounded he saw but one sordid motive of greed under the hesitant offers
of help; even now he had been less like a wounded man than a stricken
wolf. The wolf would have withdrawn to his hidden lair; he would have
contented himself with scant food; he would have licked his wound clean
and have waited for it to heal; he would have snapped and snarled at
any intrusion, knowing the way of his fellows when they fall upon a
wounded brother. So Drennen.