THE LAW AND A MAN'S DESIRE
Drennan slept two hours that night. He awoke rested, refreshed, eager.
He did not need sleep. He was Youth's own, tireless, stimulated with
the golden elixir.
Ygerne must not be before him at the trysting place; she must not wait
for him a short instant. It was his place to be there to welcome her.
She would come with the early dawn; he must come earlier than the dawn
itself.
When he came to the old fallen log the smile upon his lips, in his
eyes, bespoke a deep, sweet tenderness. He had brought with him the
two gifts for her. He put the box of candy in the grass, covering it,
planning to have her search for it. He felt like a boy; she must join
with him in a childplay. The pendant necklace, its pearls as pure and
soft as tears, he placed upon the log itself, in a little hollow,
covering it with a piece of bark. Then he found her note.
It was very short; he read it at a sweeping glance. His brain caught
the words; his mind refused to grasp their meaning. And yet Ygerne had
written clearly:
"_Dear Mr. Drennen_: The greetings of Ygerne, Countess of Bellaire, to
the Son of a Thief! Thank you for a new kind of summer flirtation.
May your next one be as pleasant. A man of such wonderful generosity
deserves great happiness. Good-bye. YGERNE."
Simple enough. And yet the words meant nothing to him. By his foot
was a square box of chocolates peeping out at him. He had telegraphed
. . . where was it? . . . to Edmontville for them. They were for
Ygerne. There on the log, right where she had sat, under the little
chip of bark, was her necklace of pearls. She was coming for it in a
moment, coming like Aurora's own sweet self through the dawn. He had
telegraphed for that, too. It was his first present for her.
The Son of a Thief! The Countess of Bellaire! That meant David
Drennen, son of John Harper Drennen; it meant Ygerne, the girl-woman
who had come into David Drennen's life before it was too late, who had
made of him another man.
He sat down on the log and filled his pipe. The note he let lie, half
folded, upon his knee. His eyes went thoughtfully across the thin mist
hanging like gauze above the river; then turned expectantly toward the
Settlement. She would come in a moment. And the glory of her! The
eternal quivering, throbbing glory of the woman a man loves! She would
come and he would gather her into his arms. . . . For that the world
had been made, for that he had lived until now. . . .
He had lighted his pipe and was puffing at it slowly, each little cloud
of smoke coming at the regular interval from its brethren. And he did
not know that he was smoking. He was not thinking. For the moment he
was scarcely experiencing an emotion. He knew that Marshall Sothern
was John Harper Drennen; he knew that the Golden Girl had been sold; he
knew that a box of candy and a pearl necklace were waiting for Ygerne;
he knew that there was a note upon his knee which purported to be from
her. Each of these things was quite clear and separate in his mind;
the strange thing about them was that they had in some way lost
significance to him.
Presently, with a start, he took his pipe from his lips and ran a hand
across his forehead. What was he sitting here like a fool for? Either
Ygerne had written that note or she had not. If she had written it she
had done so either in jest or seriously. He turned back toward the
Settlement. He did not think of the jewelled thing hidden under a bit
of bark or the cardboard box in its nest in the grass.
He went swiftly. The town was sleeping, would not awake for another
hour. His eyes were upon Marquette's house as soon as the rambling
building came into view. There were no fires; window shades were
drawn, doors closed.
He came to Ygerne's window. It, too, was closed. Here, also, the
shade was down. He tapped softly. When there was no answer he tapped
again. Then he went to Marquette's door and knocked sharply.
"_Nom de nom_." It was Père Marquette's voice, sleepy and irritable.
The old man was fumbling with the bar or the lock or whatever it was
that fastened his door. He seemed an eternity in getting the thing
done. Then his towsled head and blinking eyes appeared abruptly.
"Where is Miss Bellaire?" said Drennen quietly. "I want a word with
her."
"Mees Bellaire? _Hein_?"
"Yes," answered Drennen a trifle impatiently, though he was holding
himself well in hand. "Miss Bellaire. I know it is early, but . . ."
Père Marquette blinked at him curiously with brightening, birdlike
eyes. He didn't like Drennen; God knows he had little enough reason to
see any good in this gaunt, wolf-like man. There was a dry cackle in
the old man's voice as he spoke again, the door closing slowly so that
only half of his face with one bright eye looked out.
"Early? _Mais, non, m'sieu_! It is late! M'am'selle, she is gone _il
y a quelques heures_, already! Pouf! Like that, in a hurry."
"Gone?" demanded Drennen. "Where? When?"
"Where? Who knows? When?" He shrugged. "Two, t'ree, four hours,
_peutêtre_ six."
"Who was with her?"
"Ho," cackled the old man so that Drennen's hands itched to be at the
withered throat, "where she go, there are men to follow! Me, when I am
yo'ng, before Mamma Jeanne make me happy, I . . ."
"Damn you and your Mamma Jeanne!" cried Drennen. "Tell me about this
girl. Who went with her?"
"Not so many," muttered Marquette, "because she go quiet, in the dark.
In the day the whole Settlement would follow, _non_? But Marc Lemarc,
he go; an' M'sieu Sefton, he go; an' M'sieu Ramon, he go. . . ."
"I'll give you a hundred dollars if you can tell me which way they
went!" broke in Drennen crisply. "I'll give you five hundred if you
can tell me why?"
"_Qui sait_?" grumbled Marquette. "They go, they go In the dark, they
go with horses runnin' like hell. M'am'selle sleep; then come Lemarc,
fas', to knock on her window. I hear. She dress damn fas', too, or
she don't dress at all; in one minute she's outside with Lemarc. I
hear Sefton; I hear Ramon Garcia, a little song in his throat. I hear
horses. I hear M'am'selle Ygerne laugh like it's fon! Then she wake
me an' she pay me; I see Lemarc give her money, gol' money, to pay.
Me, I go back to bed an' Mamma Jeanne suspec' it might be I flirt with
the M'am'selle by dark!"
He chuckled again and closed the door as Drennen turned abruptly and
went back down the street towards his dugout.
Marc Lemarc had robbed him of the ten thousand dollars. He began
there, strangely cool-thoughted. That didn't matter. He had half
expected it all along. He knew now, clearly, that, more than that, he
had half hoped for it. The money meant less than nothing to him; the
theft of it, he had thought, would show Ygerne just what sort of man
Lemarc was, would separate her from her companions, would draw her even
closer to him. But Ygerne, too, had gone with the money and with
Lemarc. Marquette had seen him hand her the gold that she might pay
her reckoning. Here was a contingency upon which he had not counted.
As soon as Lemarc had returned she had gone. Sefton had gone with
them. Ramon Garcia, too. Why Garcia?
A scene he had not forgotten, which now he could never forget, occupied
his mind so vividly that he did not see the material things among which
he was walking: Ramon Garcia at Ygerne's window, the gift of a few
field flowers, the kissing of a white hand.
Men who had known Drennen for years and who would have been surprised
at what was in the man's face yesterday, saw nothing new to note in him
to-day. He went his own way, he was silent, his face was hard and not
to be read. All day he was about the Settlement, in his own dugout a
large part of the time, going to his meals regularly at Joe's. It was
rumoured that he had sold his claim; men began to doubt it. He wasn't
scattering money as men had always done when they had made a fortune at
a turn of the wheel; he wasn't getting drunk which was the customary
thing; he wasn't even looking for a game of cards or dice. There was
no sign of any new purpose in the man.
And yet the purpose was there, taken swiftly, to be acted upon with a
cold leisure. Drennen was not hurrying now. There was no other horse
like Major, his recently purchased four-year-old, and Drennen knew it.
He had ridden Major hard yesterday; to-day the brute must rest and be
ready for more hard riding.
One thing only did Drennen do which excited mild interest, though the
reason for the act was naturally misunderstood. He went to Joe and
bought from him two heavy revolvers. Drennen had never been a gun man,
had ever relied upon his own hands in time of trouble. But now, Joe
figured the matter out, he had money and he meant to guard against a
hold-up.
Entire lack of haste was the only thing remarkable about David Drennen
to-day and through the days which followed. There was no hesitation,
no doubt, no being torn two ways. He had made up his mind what he was
going to do. It was settled and not to be reconsidered. But he would
not hurry. The very coolness with which his purpose was taken steadied
him to a strange deliberateness. He knew that it was folly to expect
to come up with Ygerne and the men with her immediately. It would take
time; they had fled hastily and they were in a country where pursuit
was necessarily slow. Was that not the reason why such people came
here? And he told himself grimly that it was an equal folly to desire
to come upon them too soon. The punishment he would mete out would be
the harder if their flight had seemed crowned with security.
Upon the second day he rode in widening circles about MacLeod's
Settlement. He hardly hoped to pick up a trail here where questing
hundreds in search of his gold had cut the soft spring ground into a
jumble of indecipherable tracks. But, beginning his own quest with a
painstaking thoroughness which omitted no chance however remote, he
spent the day in seeking.
At night he came again into camp. He saw to the Major's wants before
his own. He ate his meal at Joe's and having passed no word with any
man came back to his dugout.
The supreme blow which his destiny could give him had been smitten
relentlessly. He had received it like the slave who has been beaten so
many times that he no longer cries out or strikes back prematurely.
Like the tortured bond-man who makes no useless protest but hides in
his bosom the knife which one day he will plunge into his master's
throat, Drennen merely bided his time.
He saw no good in a world which had had no good to offer him. He no
longer looked for the light. New shoots of faith, bursting upward
under Ygerne's influence from the dry roots of the old, were in an
instant shrivelled and killed. He came to see that in an old world
there was no basic law but that law which had held from the first day
in the new world. There was no good; bad was only a term coined for
fools by other fools. Each man had his life given to him, and he could
do with it as he saw fit. Each wild thing in the depths of the North
Woods had its life given to it to do with as it saw fit. Each created
being, were it not maudlin, strove for itself alone. It took its own
food where it could get it, rending it with bared teeth and bloody jaws
from the weaker creature that had preyed upon a still weaker. It made
its lair where it chose, crushing under its careless body those other
still lesser things which had not sense enough or the opportunity to
slip out from under it. Love, as man looked upon it or pretended to
look upon it, was no real emotion but a poetical illusion. Nor was it
so much as truly poetical, since poetry is truth and this thing was a
lie. There was no love but the old, primal love of life, a blind,
unreasoning instinct. He did not love Ygerne; he had never loved
Ygerne because, in the nature of nature, there could be no such thing
as such a love.
But hatred was another matter. That was nature. A man, with all of
his bluster, cannot get away from nature. Don't the winters freeze and
kill him? Doesn't water drown him, fire burn him? Love had no place
in nature; hatred was a part of the one law, the primal law. The wolf
kills the rabbit in hot rage; the black ant tears down the soft-bodied
caterpillar not so much in hunger as in wrath.
The lower order of created beings seemed to Drennen to be the truly
higher order. For they did not philosophise; they killed their prey.
They did not reason and thus follow a blind goddess; they moved as
their swift instincts dictated and made no mistake. Now he did not
need to bolster up his purpose with seeking to wander through the
thousand lanes of reason's labyrinth; he did not need to seek the
fallacies of logic to tell him why he hated Ygerne Bellaire and Marc
Lemarc and Sefton and the Mexican. He hated them. There the fact
began and ended. One by one he would kill them until he came to
Ygerne. And if in her eyes he saw that the terror of death was greater
than the terror of the suffering he could inflict upon her living, then
he would kill her.
At first he thought only of these four. But after a while in his
thoughts there was room for another. . . . John Harper Drennen,
masquerading as Marshall Sothern. Drennen sneered at his old hero.
The old man was a fool like so many other fools. He had committed what
the world calls a crime and the weight of it had shown upon him.
Drennen's sneer was not for the wrong done but for the weakness of
allowing suffering to come afterward. The old man had seemed glad,
touched almost to tears, when his son had paid off the old score. . . .
And now Drennen's sneer was for himself. Why had he not kept that
forty thousand dollars? Money meant power and power was all that he
wanted. Power to crush men who would have crushed him had they been
able; power to seek his prey where he would and to pull it down.
Ygerne's note he never read the second time. He had had no need to.
He burned the paper and washed his hands free of the ashes which he had
crumpled in his palm.
The third day he rose early, saddled Major and left the Settlement,
riding slowly toward Lebarge. He had an idea that they might have gone
there to take the train. When half way to the railroad he met a man
who was pushing on strongly toward the north. The man stopped and
accosted him. It was the mounted police officer, Lieutenant Max.
"Mr. Drennen," said the lieutenant bruskly coming straight to the
business in hand after his way; "you come from MacLeod's?"
"Yes."
"You know two men named Sefton and Lemarc? And a girl named Bellaire?"
"Yes."
"Were they in MacLeod's when you left?"
"Why do you ask?" countered Drennen sharply.
"The law wants them," replied the lieutenant.
Drennen laughed.
"So do I!" he cried as he spurred his horse out of the trail, turning
eastward now, heading at random for Fanning instead of Lebarge.
As he forded the Little MacLeod he was cursing Max.
"Damn him," he muttered. "Are there not enough cheap law breakers?
Why must he seek to do my work for me?"
So began Drennen's quest for three men and one girl with grey eyes and
a sweet body that was like a song, a girl who had awakened the old,
dormant good in him and then had driven him so deep into the black
chasm that no light entered where he was.