In the slowly breaking gloom of the cabin, with Marette's arms round
his neck, her soft lips given him to kiss, Kent for many minutes was
conscious of nothing but the thrill of his one great hope on earth come
true. What he had prayed for was no longer a prayer, and what he had
dreamed of was no longer a dream; yet for a space the reality of it
seemed unreal. What he said in those first moments of his exaltation he
would probably never remember.
His own physical existence seemed a thing trivial and almost lost, a
thing submerged and swallowed up by the warm beat and throb of that
other life, a thousand times more precious than his own, which he held
in his arms. Yet with the mad thrill that possessed him, in the embrace
of his arms, there was an infinite tenderness, a gentleness, that drew
from Marette's lips a low, glad whispering of his name. She drew his
head down and kissed him, and Kent fell upon his knees at her side and
crushed his face close down to her--while outside the patter of rain on
the roof had ceased, and the fog-like darkness was breaking with gray
dawn.
In that dawn of the new day Kent came at last out of the cabin and
looked upon a splendid world. In his breast was the glory of a thing
new-born, and the world, like himself, was changed. Storm had passed.
The gray river lay under his eyes. Shoreward he made out the dark
outlines of the deep spruce and cedar and balsam forests. About him
there was a great stillness, broken only by the murmur of the river and
the ripple of water under the scow. Wind had gone with the black
rainclouds, and Kent, as he looked about him, saw the swift dissolution
of the last shadows of night, and the breaking in the East of a new
paradise. In the East, as the minutes passed, there came a soft and
luminous gray, and after that, swiftly, with the miracle of far
Northern dawn, a vast, low-burning fire seemed to start far beyond the
forests, tinting the sky with a delicate pink that crept higher and
higher as Kent watched it. The river, all at once, came out of its last
drifting haze of fog and night. The scow was about in the middle of the
channel. Two hundred yards on either side were thick green walls of
forest glistening fresh and cool with the wet of storm and breathing
forth the perfume which Kent was drawing deep into his lungs.
In the cabin he heard sound. Marette was up, and he was eager to have
her come out and stand with him in this glory of their first day. He
watched the smoke of the fire he had built, hardwood smoke that drifted
up white and clean into the rain-washed air.
The smell of it, like the smell of balsam and cedar, was to Kent the
aroma of life. And then he began to clean out what was left of the
water in the bottom of the scow, and as he worked he whistled. He
wanted Marette to hear that whistle. He wanted her to know that day had
brought with it no doubt for him. A great and glorious world was about
them and ahead of them. And they were safe.
As he worked, his mind became more than ever set upon the resolution to
take no chances. He paused in his whistling for a moment to laugh
softly and exultantly as he thought of the years of experience which
were his surest safeguard now. He had become almost uncannily expert in
all the finesse and trickery of his craft of hunting human game, and he
knew what the man-hunters would do and what they would not do. He had
them checkmated at the start. And, besides--with Kedsty, O'Connor, and
himself gone--the Landing was short-handed just at present. There was
an enormous satisfaction in that. But even with a score of men behind
him Kent knew that he would beat them. His hazard, if there was peril
at all, lay in this first day. Only the Police gasoline launch could
possibly overtake them. And with the start they had, he was sure they
would pass the Death Chute, conceal the scow, and take to the untracked
forests north and west before the launch could menace them. After that
he would keep always west and north, deeper and deeper into that wild
and untraveled country which would be the last place in which the Law
would seek for them. He straightened himself and looked at the smoke
again, drifting like gray-white lace between him and the blue of the
sky, and in that moment the sun capped the tall green tops of the
highest cedars, and day broke gloriously over the earth.
For a quarter of an hour longer Kent mopped at the floor of the scow,
and then--with a suddenness that drew him up as if a whip-lash had
snapped behind him--he caught another aroma in the clean,
forest-scented air. It was bacon and coffee! He had believed that
Marette was taking her time in putting on dry footwear and making some
sort of morning toilet. Instead of that, she was getting breakfast. It
was not an extraordinary thing to do. To fry bacon and make coffee was
not, in any sense, a remarkable achievement. But at the present moment
it was the crowning touch to Kent's paradise. She was getting HIS
breakfast! And--coffee and bacon--To Kent those two things had always
stood for home. They were intimate and companionable. Where there were
coffee and bacon, he had known children who laughed, women who sang,
and men with happy, welcoming faces. They were home-builders.
"Whenever you smell coffee and bacon at a cabin," O'Connor had always
said, "they'll ask you in to breakfast if you knock at the door."
But Kent was not recalling his old trail mate's words. In the present
moment all other thoughts were lost in the discovery that Marette was
getting breakfast--for him.
He went to the door and listened. Then he opened it and looked in.
Marette was on her knees before the open door of the stove, toasting
bread on two forks. Her face was flushed pink. She had not taken time
to brush her hair, but had woven it carelessly into a thick braid that
fell down her back. She gave a little exclamation of mock
disappointment when she saw Kent.
"Why didn't you wait?" she remonstrated. "I wanted to surprise you."
"You have," he said. "And I couldn't wait. I had to come in and help."
He was inside the door and on his knees beside her. As he reached for
the two forks, his lips pressed against her hair. The pink deepened in
Marette's face, and the soft little note that was like laughter came
into her throat. Her hand caressed his cheek as she rose to her feet,
and Kent laughed back. And after that, as she arranged things on the
shelf table, her hand now and then touched his shoulder, or his hair,
and two or three times he heard that wonderful little throat-note that
sent through him a wild pulse of happiness. And then, he sitting in the
low chair and she on the stool, they drew close together before the
board that answered as a table, and ate their breakfast. Marette poured
his coffee and stirred sugar and condensed milk in it, and so happy was
Kent that he did not tell her he used neither milk nor sugar in his
coffee. The morning sun burst through the little window, and through
the open door Kent pointed to the glory of it on the river and in the
shimmering green of the forests slipping away behind. When they had
finished, Marette went outside with him.
For a space she stood silent and without movement, looking upon the
marvelous world that encompassed them. It seemed to Kent that for a few
moments she did not breathe. With her head thrown back and her white
throat bare to the soft, balsam-laden air she faced the forests. Her
eyes became suddenly filled with the luminous glow of stars. Her face
reflected the radiance of the rising sun, and Kent, looking at her,
knew that he had never seen her so beautiful as in these wonderful
moments. He held his own breath, for he also knew that Niska, his
goddess, was looking upon her own world again after a long time away.
Her world--and his. Different from all the other worlds God had ever
made; different, even, from the world only a few miles behind them at
the Landing. For here was no sound or whisper of destroying human life.
They were in the embrace of the Great North, and it was drawing them
closer, and with each minute nearer to the mighty, pulsing heart of it.
The forests hung heavy and green and glistening with the wet of storm;
out of them came the tremulous breath of life and the glory of living;
they hugged the shores like watchful hosts guarding the river from
civilization--and suddenly the girl held out her arms, and Kent heard
the low, thrilling cry that came to her lips.
She had forgotten him. She had forgotten everything but the river, the
forests, and the untrod worlds beyond them, and he was glad. For this
world that she was welcoming, that her soul was crying out to, was his
world, for ever and ever. It held his dreams, his hopes, all the
desires that he had in life. And when at last Marette turned toward him
slowly, his arms were reaching out to her, and in his face she saw that
same glory which filled her own.
"I'm glad--glad," she cried softly. "Oh, Jeems--I'm glad!"
She came into his arms without hesitation; her hands stroked his face;
and then she stood with her head against his shoulder, looking ahead,
breathing deeply now of the sweet, clear air filled with the elixir of
the hovering forests. She did not speak, or move, and Kent remained
quiet. The scow drifted around a bend. Shoreward a great moose splashed
up out of the water, and they could hear him afterward, crashing
through the forest. Her body tensed, but she did not speak. After a
little he heard her whisper,
"It has been a long time, Jeems. I have been away four years."
"And now we are going home, little Gray Goose. You will not be lonely?"
"No. I was lonely down there. There were so many people, and so many
things, that I was homesick for the woods and mountains. I believe I
would have died soon. There were only two things I loved, Jeems--"
"What?" he asked.
"Pretty dresses--and shoes."
His arms closed about her a little more tightly. "I--I understand," he
laughed softly. "That is why you came, that first time, with pretty
high-heeled pumps."
He bowed his head, and she turned her face to him. On her upturned
mouth he kissed her.
"More than any other man ever loved a woman I love you, Niska, little
goddess," he cried.
The minutes and the hours of that day stood out ever afterward in
Kent's life as unforgettable memories. There were times when they
seemed illusory and unreal, as though he lived and breathed in an
insubstantial world made up of gossamer things which must be the fabric
of dream. These were moments when the black shadow of the tragedy from
which they were fleeing pressed upon him, when the thought came to him
that they were criminals racing with the law; that they were not on
enchanted ground, but in deadly peril; that it was all a fools'
paradise from which some terrible shock would shortly awaken him. But
these periods of apprehension were, in themselves, mere shadows thrown
for a moment upon his happiness. Again and again the subconscious force
within him pounded home to his physical brain the great truth, that it
was all extraordinarily real.
It was Marette who made him doubt himself at times. He could not, quite
yet, comprehend the fulness of that love which she had given him. More
than ever, in the glory of this love that had come to them she was like
a child to him. It seemed to him in the first hours of the morning that
she had forgotten yesterday, and the day before, and ill the days
before that. She was going home. She whispered that to him so often
that it became a little song in his brain. Yet she told him nothing of
that home, and he waited, knowing that the fulfilment of her promise
was not far away. And there was no embarrassment in the manner of her
surrender when he held her in his arms, and she held her face up, so
that he could kiss her mouth and look into her glowing, lovely eyes.
What he saw was the flush of a great happiness, the almost childish
confession of it along with the woman's joy of possession. And he
thought of Kedsty, and of the Law that was rousing itself into life
back at Athabasca Landing.
And then she ran her fingers through his own and told him to wait, and
ran into the cabin and came out a moment later with her brush; and
after that she seated herself at the fulcrum of the big sweep and began
to brush out her hair in the sun.
"I'm glad you love it, Jeems," she said.
She unbound the thick braid and let the silken strands of it run
caressingly between her fingers. She smoothed it out, brushed it until
it was more beautiful than he had ever seen it, in that glow of the
sun. She held it up so that it rippled out in shimmering cascades about
her--and then, suddenly, Kent saw the short tress from which had been
clipped the rope of hair that he had taken from Kedsty's neck. And as
his lips tightened, crushing fiercely the exclamation of his horror,
there came a trembling happiness from Marette's lips, scarcely more
than the whisper of a song, the low, thrilling melody of _Le Chaudiere_.
Her arms reached up, and she drew his head down to her, so that for a
time his visions were blinded in that sweet smother of her hair.
The intimacy of that day was in itself like a dream. Hour after hour
they drifted deeper into the great North. The sun shone. The
forest-walled shores of the river grew mightier in their stillness and
their grandeur, and the vast silence of unpeopled places brooded over
the world. To Kent it was as if they were drifting through Paradise.
Occasionally he found it necessary to work the big sweep, for still
water was gradually giving way to a swifter current.
Beyond that there was no labor for him to perform. It seemed to him
that with each of these wonderful hours danger was being left farther
and still farther behind them. Watching the shores, looking ahead,
listening for sound that might come from behind--at times possessed of
the exquisite thrills of children in their happiness--Kent and Marette
found the gulf of strangeness passing swiftly away from between them.
They did not speak of Kedsty, or the tragedy, or again of the death of
John Barkley. But Kent told of his days in the North, of his aloneness,
of the wild, weird love in his soul for the deepest wildernesses. And
from that he went away back into dim and distant yesterdays, alive with
mellowed memories of boyhood days spent on a farm. To all these things
Marette listened with glowing eyes, with low laughter, or with breath
that rose or fell with his own emotions.
She told of her own days down at school and of their appalling
loneliness; of childhood spent in the forests; of the desire to live
there always. But she did not speak intimately of herself or her life
in its more vital aspects; she said nothing of the home in the Valley
of Silent Men, nothing of father or mother, sisters or brothers. There
was no embarrassment in her omissions. And Kent did not question. He
knew that those were among the things she would tell him when that
promised hour came, the hour when he would tell her they were safe.
There began to possess him now a growing eagerness for this hour, when
they should leave the river and take to the forests. He explained to
Marette why they could not float on indefinitely. The river was the one
great artery through which ran the blood of all traffic to the far
North. It was patrolled. Sooner or later they would be discovered. In
the forests, with a thousand untrod trails to choose, they would be
safe. He had only one reason for keeping to the river until they passed
through the Death Chute. It would carry them beyond a great swampy
region to the westward through which it would be impossible for them to
make their way at this season of the year. Otherwise he would have gone
ashore now. He loved the river, had faith in it, but he knew that not
until the deep forests swallowed them, as a vast ocean swallows a ship,
would they be beyond the peril that threatened them from the Landing.
Three or four times between sunrise and noon they saw life ashore and
on the stream; once a scow tied to a tree, then an Indian camp, and
twice trappers' shacks built in the edge of little clearings. With the
beginning of afternoon Kent felt growing within him something that was
not altogether eagerness. It was, at times, a disturbing emotion, a
foreshadowing of evil, a warning for him to be on his guard. He used
the sweep more, to help their progress in the current, and he began to
measure time and distance with painstaking care. He recognized many
landmarks.
By four o'clock, or five at the latest, they would strike the head of
the Chute. Ten minutes of its thrilling passage and he would work the
scow into the concealment he had in mind ashore, and no longer would he
fear the arm of the law that reached out from the Landing. As he
planned, he listened. From noon on he never ceased to listen for that
distant _putt, putt, putt_, that would give them a mile's warning of the
approach of the patrol launch.
He did not keep his plans to himself. Marette sensed his growing
uneasiness, and he made her a partner of his thoughts.
"If we hear the patrol before we reach the Chute, we'll still have time
to run ashore," he assured her. "And they won't catch us. We'll be
harder to find than two needles in a haystack. But it's best to be
prepared."
So he brought out his pack and Marette's smaller bundle, and laid his
rifle and pistol holster across them.
It was three o'clock when the character of the river began to change,
and Kent smiled happily. They were entering upon swifter waters. There
were places where the channel narrowed, and they sped through rapids.
Only where unbroken straight waters stretched out ahead of them did
Kent give his arms a rest at the sweep. And through most of the
straight water he added to the speed of the scow. Marette helped him.
In him the exquisite thrill of watching her slender, glorious body as
it worked with his own never grew old. She laughed at him over the big
oar between them. The wind and sun played riot in her hair. Her parted
lips were rose-red, her cheeks flushed, her eyes like sun-warmed rock
violets. More than once, in the thrill of that afternoon flight, as he
looked at the marvelous beauty of her, he asked himself if it could be
anything but a dream. And more than once he laughed joyously, and
paused in his swinging of the sweep, and proved that it was real and
true. And Kent thanked God, and worked harder.
Once, a long time ago, Marette told him, she had been through the
Chute. It had horrified her then. She remembered it as a sort of death
monster, roaring for its victims. As they drew nearer to it, Kent told
her more about it. Only now and then was a life lost there now, he
said. At the mouth of the Chute there was a great, knife-like rock,
like a dragon's tooth, that cut the Chute into two roaring channels. If
a scow kept to the left-hand channel it was safe. There would be a
mighty roaring and thundering as it swept on its passage, but that
roaring of the Chute, he told her, was like the barking of a harmless
dog.
Only when a scow became unmanageable, or hit the Dragon's Tooth, or
made the right-hand channel instead of the left, was there tragedy.
There was that delightful little note of laughter in Marette's throat
when Kent told her that.
"You mean, Jeems, that if one of three possible things doesn't happen,
we'll get through safely?"
"None of them is possible--with us," he corrected himself quickly.
"We've a tight little scow, we're not going to hit the rock, and we'll
make the left-hand channel so smoothly you won't know when it happens."
He smiled at her with splendid confidence. "I've been through it a
hundred times," he said.
He listened. Then, suddenly, he drew out his watch. It was a quarter of
four. Marette's ears caught what he heard. In the air was a low,
trembling murmur. It was growing slowly but steadily. He nodded when
she looked at him, the question in her eyes.
"The rapids at the head of the Chute!" he cried, his voice vibrant with
joy. "We've beat them out. _We're safe_!"
They swung around a bend, and the white spume of the rapids lay half a
mile ahead of them. The current began to race with them now. Kent put
his whole weight on the sweep to keep the scow in mid-channel.
"We're safe," he repeated. "Do you understand, Marette? _We're safe_!"
He was speaking the words for which she had waited, was telling her
that at last the hour had come when she could keep her promise to him.
The words, as he gave them voice, thrilled him. He felt like shouting
them. And then all at once he saw the change that had come into her
face. Her wide, startled eyes were not looking at him, but beyond. She
was looking back in the direction from which they had come, and even as
he stared her face grew white.
"_Listen_!"
She was tense, rigid. He turned his head. And in that moment it came to
him above the growing murmur of the river--the _putt, putt, putt_ of the
Police patrol boat from Athabasca Landing!
A deep breath came from between his lips. When Marette took her eyes
from the river and looked at him, his face was like carven rock. He was
staring dead ahead.
"We can't make the Chute," he said, his voice sounding hard and unreal
to her. "If we do, they'll be up with us before we can land at the
other end. We must let this current drive us ashore--_now_."
As he made his decision, he put the strength of his body into action.
He knew there was not the hundredth part of a second to lose. The
outreaching suction of the rapids was already gripping the scow, and
with mighty strokes he fought to work the head of his craft toward the
westward shore. With swift understanding Marette saw the priceless
value of a few seconds of time. If they were caught in the stronger
swirl of the rapids before the shore was reached, they would be forced
to run the Chute, and in that event the launch would be upon them
before they could make a landing farther on. She sprang to Kent's side
and added her own strength in the working of the sweep. Foot by foot
and yard by yard the scow made precious westing, and Kent's face
lighted up with triumph as he nodded ahead to a timbered point that
thrust itself out like a stubby thumb into the river. Beyond that point
the rapids were frothing white, and they could see the first black
walls of rock that marked the beginning of the Chute.
"We'll make it," he smiled confidently. "We'll hit that timbered point
close inshore. I don't see where the launch can make a landing anywhere
within a mile of the Chute. And once ashore we'll make trail about five
times as fast they can follow it." Marette's face was no longer pale,
but flushed with excitement. He caught the white gleam of teeth between
her parted lips. Her eyes shone gloriously, and he laughed.
"You beautiful little fighter," he cried exultantly. "You--you--"
His words were cut short by a snap that was like the report of a pistol
close to his ears. He pitched forward and crashed to the bottom of the
scow, Marette's slim body clutched in his arms as he fell. In a flash
they were up, and mutely they stared where the sweep had been. The
blade of it was gone. Kent was conscious of hearing a little cry from
the girl at his side, and then her fingers were gripping tightly again
about his thumb. No longer possessed of the power of guidance, the scow
swung sideways. It swept past the wooded point. The white maelstrom of
the lower rapids seized upon it. And Kent, looking ahead to the black
maw of the death-trap that was waiting for them, drew Marette close in
his arms and held her tight.