"Out in the cold world, out in the street,
Nothing to wear and nothing to eat,
Fatherless, motherless, sadly I roam,
Child of misfortune, I'm driven from home."
A loud laugh followed, for Billy Goat was a popular person at Kowatin, in
the Saskatchewan country. He had an inimitable drollery, heightened by a
cast in his eye, a very large mouth, and a round, good-humored face; also
he had a hand and arm like iron, and was altogether a great man on a
"spree."
There had been a two days' spree at Kowatin, for no other reason than that
there had been great excitement over the capture and subsequent escape of
a prairie-rover who had robbed the contractor's money-chest at the
rail-head on the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Forty miles from Kowatin he
had been caught by, and escaped from, the tall, brown-eyed man with the
hard-bitten face who leaned against the open window of the tavern, looking
indifferently at the jeering crowd before him. For a police officer, he
was not unpopular with them, but he had been a failure for once, and, as
Billy Goat had said, "It tickled us to death to see a rider of the plains
off his trolley--on the cold, cold ground, same as you and me."
They did not undervalue him. If he had been less a man than he was, they
would not have taken the trouble to cover him with their drunken ribaldry.
He had scored off them in the past in just such sprees as this, when he
had the power to do so, and used the power good-naturedly and quietly--but
used it.
Then he was Sergeant Foyle, of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, on duty
in a district as large as the United Kingdom. And he had no greater
admirer than Billy Goat, who now reviled him. Not without cause, in a way,
for he had reviled himself to this extent that, when the prairie-rover,
Halbeck, escaped on the way to Prince Albert, after six months' hunt for
him and a final capture in the Kowatin district, Foyle resigned the Force
before the Commissioner could reproach him or call him to account. Usually
so exact, so certain of his target, some care had not been taken, he had
miscalculated, and there had been the Error of the Day. Whatever it was,
it had seemed to him fatal; and he had turned his face from the
barrack-yard.
Then he had made his way to the Happy Land Hotel at Kowatin, to begin life
as "a free and independent gent on the loose," as Billy Goat had said. To
resign had seemed extreme; because, though the Commissioner was vexed at
Halbeck's escape, Foyle was the best non-commissioned officer in the
Force. He had frightened horse-thieves and bogus land-agents and
speculators out of the country; had fearlessly tracked down a criminal or
a band of criminals when the odds were heavy against him. He carried on
his cheek the scars of two bullets, and there was one white lock in his
brown hair where an arrow had torn the scalp away as, alone, he drove into
the Post a score of Indians, fresh from raiding the cattle of an immigrant
trailing north.
Now he was out of work, or so it seemed; he had stepped down from his
scarlet-coated dignity, from the place of guardian and guide to
civilization, into the idleness of a tavern stoop.
As the little group swayed round him, and Billy Goat started another song,
Foyle roused himself as though to move away--he was waiting for the
mail-stage to take him south--
"Oh, father, dear father, come home with me now,
The clock in the steeple strikes one;
You said you were coming right home from the shop
As soon as your day's work was done.
Come home--come home--"
The song arrested him, and he leaned back against the window again. A
curious look came into his eyes, a look that had nothing to do with the
acts of the people before him. It was searching into a scene beyond this
bright sunlight and the far green-brown grass, and the little oasis of
trees in the distance marking a homestead, and the dust of the
wagon-wheels out on the trail beyond the grain-elevator--beyond the blue
horizon's rim, quivering in the heat, and into regions where this crisp,
clear, life-giving, life-saving air never blew.
"You said you were coming right home from the shop
As soon as your day's work was done.
Come home--come home--"
He remembered when he had first heard this song in a play called _Ten
Nights in a Bar-Room_, many years before, and how it had wrenched his
heart and soul, and covered him with a sudden cloud of shame and anger.
For his father had been a drunkard, and his brother had grown up a
drunkard, that brother whom he had not seen for ten years until--until--
He shuddered, closed his eyes, as though to shut out something that the
mind saw. He had had a rough life, he had become inured to the seamy side
of things--there was a seamy side even in this clean, free, wide land; and
he had no sentimentality; though something seemed to hurt and shame him
now.
"As soon as your day's work was done.
Come home--come home--"
The crowd was uproarious. The exhilaration had become a kind of delirium.
Men were losing their heads; there was an element of irresponsibility in
the new outbreak likely to breed some violent act, which every man of them
would lament when sober again.
Nettlewood Foyle watched the dust rising from the wheels of the stage,
which had passed the elevator and was nearing the Prairie Home Hotel, far
down the street. He would soon leave behind him this noisy ribaldry of
which he was the centre. He tossed his cheroot away. Suddenly he heard a
low voice behind him.
"Why don't you hit out, sergeant?" it said.
He started almost violently, and turned round. Then his face flushed, his
eyes blurred with feeling and deep surprise, and his lips parted in a
whispered exclamation and greeting.
A girl's face from the shade of the sitting-room was looking out at him,
half smiling, but with heightened color and a suppressed agitation. The
girl was not more than twenty-five, graceful, supple, and strong. Her chin
was dimpled; across her right temple was a slight scar. She had eyes of a
wonderful deep blue; they seemed to swim with light. As Foyle gazed at her
for a moment dumfounded, with a quizzical suggestion and smiling still a
little more, she said:
"You used to be a little quicker, Nett." The voice appeared to attempt
unconcern; but it quivered from a force of feeling underneath. It was so
long since she had seen him.
He was about to reply, but, at the instant, a reveller pushed him with a
foot behind the knees so that they were sprung forward. The crowd
laughed--all save Billy Goat, who knew his man.
Like lightning, and with cold fury in his eyes, Foyle caught the tall
cattleman by the forearm, and, with a swift, dexterous twist, had the
fellow in his power.
"Down--down to your knees, you skunk!" he said, in a low, fierce voice.
The knees of the big man bent--Foyle had not taken lessons of Ogami, the
Jap, for nothing--they bent, and the cattleman squealed, so intense was
the pain. It was break or bend; and he bent--to the ground and lay there.
Foyle stood over him for a moment, a hard light in his eyes, and then, as
if bethinking himself, he looked at the other roisterers and said:
"There's a limit, and he reached it. Your mouths are your own, and you can
blow off to suit your fancy, but if any one thinks I'm a tame coyote to be
poked with a stick--!" He broke off, stooped over, and helped the man
before him to his feet. The arm had been strained, and the big fellow
nursed it.
"Hell, but you're a twister!" the cattleman said, with a grimace of pain.
Billy Goat was a gentleman, after his kind, and he liked Sergeant Foyle
with a great liking. He turned to the crowd and spoke.
"Say, boys, this mine's worked out. Let's leave the Happy Land to Foyle.
Boys, what is he--what--is--he? What--is--Sergeant Foyle--boys?"
The roar of the song they all knew came in reply, as Billy Goat waved his
arms about like the wild leader of a wild orchestra:
"Sergeant Foyle, oh, he's a knocker from the West,
He's a chase-me-Charley, come-and-kiss-me tiger from the zoo;
He's a dandy on the pinch, and he's got a double cinch
On the gent that's going careless, and he'll soon cinch you:
And he'll soon--and he'll soon--cinch you!"
Foyle watched them go, dancing, stumbling, calling back at him, as they
moved toward the Prairie Home Hotel:
"And he'll soon--and he'll soon--cinch you!"
His under-lip came out, his eyes half closed, as he watched them. "I've
done my last cinch. I've done my last cinch," he murmured.
Then, suddenly, the look in his face changed, the eyes swam as they had
done a minute before at the sight of the girl in the room behind. Whatever
his trouble was, that face had obscured it in a flash, and the pools of
feeling far down in the depths of a lonely nature had been stirred.
Recognition, memory, tenderness, desire swam in his face, made generous
and kind the hard lines of the strong mouth. In an instant he had swung
himself over the window-sill. The girl had drawn away now into a more
shaded corner of the room, and she regarded him with a mingled anxiety and
eagerness. Was she afraid of something? Did she fear that--she knew not
quite what, but it had to do with a long ago?
"It was time you hit out, Nett," she said, half shyly. "You're more
patient than you used to be, but you're surer. My, that was a twist you
gave him, Nett. Aren't you glad to see me?" she added, hastily and with an
effort to hide her agitation.
He reached out and took her hand with a strange shyness and a
self-consciousness which was alien to his nature. The touch of her hand
thrilled him. Their eyes met. She dropped hers. Then he gathered himself
together. "Glad to see you? Of course, of course, I'm glad. You stunned
me, Jo. Why, do you know where you are? You're a thousand miles from home.
I can't get it through my head, not really. What brings you here? It's ten
years--ten years since I saw you, and you were only fifteen, but a fifteen
that was as good as twenty."
He scanned her face closely. "What's that scar on your forehead, Jo? You
hadn't that--then."
"I ran up against something," she said, evasively, her eyes glittering,
"and it left that scar. Does it look so bad?"
"No, you'd never notice it, if you weren't looking close as I am. You see,
I knew your face so well ten years ago."
He shook his head with a forced kind of smile. It became him, however, for
he smiled rarely; and the smile was like a lantern turned on his face; it
gave light and warmth to its quiet strength--or hardness.
"You were always quizzing," she said, with an attempt at a laugh--"always
trying to find things out. That's why you made them reckon with you out
here. You always could see behind things; always would have your own way;
always were meant to be a success."
She was beginning to get control of herself again, was trying hard to keep
things on the surface. "You were meant to succeed--you had to," she
added.
"I've been a failure--a dead failure," he answered, slowly. "So they say.
So they said. You heard them, Jo."
He jerked his head toward the open window.
"Oh, those drunken fools!" she exclaimed, indignantly, and her face
hardened. "How I hate drink! It spoils everything."
There was silence for a moment. They were both thinking of the same
thing--_of the same man_. He repeated a question.
"What brings you out here, Jo?" he asked, gently.
"Dorland," she answered, her face setting into determination and anxiety.
His face became pinched. "Dorl!" he said, heavily. "What for, Jo? What do
you want with Dorl?"
"When Cynthy died she left her five hundred dollars a year to the baby,
and--"
"Yes, yes, I know. Well, Jo?"
"Well, it was all right for five years--Dorland paid it in; but for five
years he hasn't paid anything. He's taken it, stolen it from his own child
by his own honest wife. I've come to get it--anyway, to stop him from
doing it any more. His own child--it puts murder in my heart, Nett! I
could kill him."
He nodded grimly. "That's likely. And you've kept Dorl's child with your
own money all these years?"
"I've got four hundred dollars a year, Nett, you know; and I've been
dressmaking--they say I've got taste," she added, with a whimsical smile.
Nett nodded his head. "Five years. That's twenty-five hundred dollars he's
stolen from his own child. It's eight years old now, isn't it?"
"Bobby is eight and a half," she answered.
"And his schooling, and his clothing, and everything; and you have to pay
for it all?"
"Oh, I don't mind, Nett; it isn't that. Bobby is Cynthy's child, and I
love him--love him; but I want him to have his rights. Dorl must give up
his hold on that money--or--"