After an instant Galen Albret turned slowly his massive head and
looked at her. He made no other movement, yet she staggered back
as though she had received a violent blow on the chest.
"Father!" she gasped.
Still slowly, gropingly, he arose to his feet, holding tight to the
edge of the table. Behind him unheeded the rough-built armchair
crashed to the floor. He stood there upright and motionless,
looking straight before him, his face formidable. At first his
speech was disjointed. The words came in widely punctuated gasps.
Then, as the wave of his emotion rolled back from the poise into
which the first shock of anger had thrown it, it escaped through
his lips in a constantly increasing stream of bitter words.
"You--you love him," he cried. "You--my daughter! You have been--a
traitor--to me! You have dared--dared--deny that which my whole
life has affirmed! My own flesh and blood--when I thought the
nearest _metis_ of them all more loyal! You love this man--this
man who has insulted me, mocked me! You have taken his part
against me! You have deliberately placed yourself in the class of
those I would hang for such an offence! If you were not my
daughter I would hang you. Hang my own child!" Suddenly his rage
flared. "You little fool! Do you dare set your judgment against
mine? Do you dare interfere where I think well? Do you dare deny
my will? By the eternal, I'll show you, old as you are, that you
have still a father! Get to your room! Out of my sight!" He took
two steps forward, and so his eye fell on Ned Trent. He uttered a
scream of rage, and reached for the pistol. Fortunately the
abruptness of his movement when he arose had knocked it to the
floor, so now in the blindness of a red anger he could not see it.
He shrieked out an epithet and jumped forward, his arm drawn to
strike. Ned Trent leaped back into an attitude of defence.
All three of those present had many times seen Galen Albret
possessed by his noted fits of anger, so striking in contrast to
his ordinary contained passivity. But always, though evidently in
a white heat of rage and given to violent action and decision, he
had retained the clearest command of his faculties, issuing
coherent and dreaded orders to those about him. Now he bad become
a raging wild beast. And for the spectators the sight had all the
horror of the unprecedented.
But the younger man, too, had gradually heated to the point where
his ordinary careless indifference could give off sparks. The
interview had been baffling, the threats real and unjust, the turn
of affairs when Virginia Albret entered the room most exasperating
on the side of the undesirable and unforeseen. In foiled escape,
in thwarted expedient, his emotions had been many times excited,
and then eddied back on themselves. The potentialities of as blind
an anger as that of Galen Albret were in him. It only needed a
touch to loose the flood. The physical threat of a blow supplied
that touch. As the two men faced each other both were ripe for the
extreme of recklessness.
But while Galen Albret looked to nothing less than murder, the
Free-Trader's individual genius turned to dead defiance and
resistance of will. While Galen Albret's countenance reflected the
height of passion, Trent was as smiling and cool and debonair as
though he had at that moment received from the older man an
extraordinary and particular favor. Only his eyes shot a baleful
blue flame, and his words, calmly enough delivered, showed the
extent to which his passion had cast policy to the winds.
"Don't go too far! I warn you!" said he. As though the words had
projected him bodily forward, Galen Albret sprang to deliver his
blow. The Free Trader ducked rapidly, threw his shoulder across
the middle of the older man's body, and by the very superiority of
his position forced his antagonist to give ground. That the
struggle would have then continued body to body there can be no
doubt, had it not been for the fact that the Factor's retrogressive
movement brought his knees sharply against the edge of a chair
standing near the side of the table. Albret lost his balance,
wavered, and finally sat down violently. Ned Trent promptly pinned
him by the shoulder into powerless immobility. Me-en-gan had
possessed himself of the fallen pistol, but beyond keeping a
generally wary eye out for dangerous developments, did not offer to
interfere. Your Indian is in such a crisis a disciplinarian, and
he had received no orders.
"Now," said Ned Trent, acidly, "I think this will stop right here.
You do not cut a very good figure, my dear sir," he laughed a
little. "You haven't cut a very good figure from the beginning,
you know. You forbade me to do various things, and I have done
them all. I traded with your Indians. I came and went in your
country. Do you think I have not been here often before I was
caught? And you forbade me to see your daughter again. I saw her
that very evening, and the next morning and the next evening."
He stood, still holding Galen Albret immovably in the chair,
looking steadily and angrily into the leader's eyes, driving each
word home with the weight of his contained passion. The girl
touched his arm.
"Hush! oh, hush!" she cried in a panic. "Do not anger him further!"
"When you forbade me to make love to her," he continued, unheeding,
"I laughed at you." With a sudden, swift motion of his left arm he
drew her to him and touched her forehead with his lips. "Look!
Your commands have been rather ridiculous, sir. I seem to have had
the upper hand of you from first to last. Incidentally you have my
life. Oh, welcome! That is small pay and little satisfaction."
He threw himself from the Factor and stepped back.
Galen Albret sat still without attempting to renew the struggle.
The enforced few moments of inaction had restored to him his
self-control. He was still deeply angered, but the insanity of
rage had left him. Outwardly he was himself again. Only a rapid
heaving of his chest answered Ned Trent's quick breathing, as the
two men glared defiantly at each other in the pause that followed.
"Very well, sir," said the Factor, curtly, at last. "Your time is
over. I find it unnecessary to hang you. You will start, on your
_Longue Traverse_ to-day."
"Oh!" cried Virginia, in a low voice of agony, and fluttered to her
lover's side.
"Hush! hush!" he soothed her. "There is a chance."
"You think so?" broke in Galen Albret, harshly. And looking at his
set face and blazing eyes, they saw that there was no chance. The
Free Trader shrugged his shoulders.
"You are going to do this thing, father," appealed Virginia, "after
what I have told you?"
"My mind is made up."
"I shall not survive him, father!" she threatened, in a low voice.
Then, as the Factor did not respond, "Do not misunderstand me. I
do not intend to survive him."
"Silence! silence! silence!" cried Galen Albret, in a crescendo
outburst. "Silence! I will not be gainsaid! You have made your
choice! You are no longer a daughter of mine!"
"Father!" cried Virginia, faintly, her lips going pale.
"Don't speak to me! Don't look at me! Get out of here! Get out
of the place! I won't have you here another day--another hour!
By----"
The girl hesitated for a moment, then ran to him, sinking on her
knees, and clasping his hand.
"Father," she pleaded, "you are not yourself. This has been very
trying to you. To-morrow you will be sorry. But then it will be
too late. Think, while there is yet time. He has not committed a
crime. You yourself told me he was a man of intelligence and
daring--a gentleman; and surely, though he has been hasty, he has
acted with a brave spirit through it all. See, he will promise you
to go away quietly, to say nothing of all this, never to come into
this country again without your permission. He will do this if I
ask him, for he loves me. Look at me, father. Are you going to
treat your little girl so--your Virginia? You have never refused
me anything before. And this is the greatest thing in all my
life." She held his hand to her cheek and stroked it, murmuring
little feminine, caressing phrases, secure in her power of
witchery, which had never failed her before. The sound of her own
voice reassured her, the quietude of the man she pleaded with. A
lifetime of petting, of indulgence, threw its soothing influence
over her perturbation, convincing her that somehow all this storm
and stress must be phantasmagoric--a dream from which she was even
now awakening into a clearer day of happiness. "For you love me,
father," she concluded, and looked up daintily, with a pathetic,
coquettish tilt of her fair head, to peer into his face.
Galen Albret snarled like a wild beast, throwing aside the girl, as
he did the chair in which he had been sitting. Ned Trent caught
her, reeling, in his arms.
For as is often the case with passionate but strong temperaments,
though the Factor had attained a certain calm of control, the
turmoil of his deeper anger had not been in the least stilled.
Over it a crust of determination had formed--the determination to
make an end by the directest means in his autocratic power of this
galling opposition. The girl's pleading, instead of appealing to
him, had in reality but stirred his fury the more profoundly. It
had added a new fuel element to the fire. Heretofore his
consciousness had felt merely the thwarting of his pride, his
authority, his right to loyalty. Now his daughter's entreaty
brought home to him the bitter realization that he had been
attained on another side--that of his family affection. This man
had also killed for him his only child. For the child had
renounced him, had thrust him outside herself into the lonely and
ruined temple of his pride. At the first thought his face twisted
with emotion, then hardened to cold malice.
"Love you!" he cried. "Love you! An unnatural child! An ingrate!
One who turns from me so lightly!" He laughed bitterly, eyeing her
with chilling scrutiny. "You dare recall my love for you!"
Suddenly he stood upright, levelling a heavy, trembling arm at her.
"You think an appeal to my love will save him! Fool!"
Virginia's breath caught in her throat. She straightened, clutched
the neckband of her gown. Then her head fell slowly forward. She
had fainted in her lover's arms.
They stood exactly so for an appreciable interval, bewildered by
the suddenness of this outcome; Galen Albret's hand outstretched in
denunciation; the girl like a broken lily, supported in the young
man's arms; he searching her face passionately for a sign of life;
Me-en-gan, straight and sorrowful, again at the door.
Then the old man's arm dropped slowly, His gaze wavered. The lines
of his face relaxed. Twice he made an effort to turn away. All at
once his stubborn spirit broke; he uttered a cry, and sprang
forward to snatch the unconscious form hungrily into his bear
clasp, searching the girl's face, muttering incoherent things.
"Quick!" he cried, aloud, the guttural sounds jostling one another
in his throat. "Get Wishkobun, quick!"
Ned Trent looked at him with steady scorn, his arms folded.
"Ah!" he dropped distinctly in deliberate monosyllables across the
surcharged atmosphere of the scene. "So it seems you have found
your heart, my friend!"
Galen Albret glared wildly at him over the girl's fair head.
"She is my daughter," he mumbled.