Philip Steele's pencil drove steadily over the paper, as if the mere
writing of a letter he might never mail in some way lessened the
loneliness.
The wind is blowing a furious gale outside. From off the lake come
volleys of sleet, like shot from guns, and all the wild demons of
this black night in the wilderness seem bent on tearing apart the huge
end-locked logs that form my cabin home. In truth, it is a terrible
night to be afar from human companionship, with naught but this roaring
desolation about and the air above filled with screeching terrors. Even
through thick log walls I can hear the surf roaring among the rocks and
beating the white driftwood like a thousand battering-rams, almost at
my door. It is a night to make one shiver, and in the lulls of the storm
the tall pines above me whistle and wail mournfully as they straighten
their twisted heads after the blasts.
To-morrow this will be a desolation of snow. There will be snow from
here to Hudson's Bay, from the Bay to the Arctic, and where now there
is all this fury and strife of wind and sleet there will be unending
quiet--the stillness which breeds our tongueless people of the North.
But this is small comfort for tonight. Yesterday I caught a little mouse
in my flour and killed him. I am sorry now, for surely all this trouble
and thunder in the night would have driven him out from his home in the
wall to keep me company.
It would not be so bad if it were not for the skull. Three times in the
last half-hour I have started to take it down from its shelf over my
crude stone fireplace, where pine logs are blazing. But each time I have
fallen back, shivering, into the bed-like chair I have made for myself
out of saplings and caribou skin. It is a human skull. Only a short time
ago it was a living man, with a voice, and eyes, and brain--and that
is what makes me uncomfortable. If it were an old skull, it would be
different. But it is a new skull. Almost I fancy at times that there is
life lurking in the eyeless sockets, where the red firelight from the
pitch-weighted logs plays in grewsome flashes; and I fancy, too, that in
the brainless cavities of the skull there must still be some of the old
passion, stirred into spirit life by the very madness of this night. A
hundred times I have been sorry that I kept the thing, but never more so
than now.
How the wind howls and the pines screech above me! A pailful of snow,
plunging down my chimney, sends the chills up my spine as if it were the
very devil himself, and the steam of it surges out and upward and hides
the skull. It is absurd to go to bed, to make an effort to sleep, for
I know what my dreams would be. To-night they would be filled with this
skull--and with visions of a face, a woman's face--
Thus far had Steele written, when with a nervous laugh he sprang from
his chair, and with something that sounded very near to an oath, in the
wild tumult of the storm, crumpled the paper in his hand and flung it
among the blazing logs he had described but a few moments before.
“Confound it, this will never do!” he exclaimed, falling into his own
peculiar habit of communing with himself. “I say it won't do, Phil
Steele; deuce take it if it will! You're getting nervous, sentimental,
almost homesick. Ugh, what a beast of a night!”
He turned to the rude stone fireplace again as another blast of snow
plunged down the chimney.
“Wish I'd built a fire in the stove instead of there,” he went on,
filling his pipe. “Thought it would be a little more cheerful, you know.
Lord preserve us, listen to that!”
He began walking up and down the hewn log floor of the cabin, his hands
deep in his pockets, puffing out voluminous clouds of smoke. It was
not often that Philip Steele's face was unpleasant to look upon, but
to-night it wore anything but its natural good humor. It was a strong,
thin face, set off by a square jaw, and with clear, steel-gray eyes
in which just now there shone a strange glitter, as they rested for
a moment upon the white skull over the fire. From his scrutiny of the
skull Steele turned to a rough board table, lighted by a twisted bit
of cotton cloth, three-quarters submerged in a shallow tin of caribou
grease. In the dim light of this improvised lamp there were two letters,
opened and soiled, which an Indian had brought up to him from Nelson
House the day before. One of them was short and to the point. It was an
official note from headquarters ordering him to join a certain Buck Nome
at Lac Bain, a hundred miles farther north.
It was the second letter which Steele took in his hands for the
twentieth time since it had come to him here, three hundred miles
into the wilderness. There were half-a-dozen pages of it, written in a
woman's hand, and from it there rose to his nostrils the faint, sweet
perfume of hyacinth. It was this odor that troubled him--that had
troubled him since yesterday, and that made him restless and almost
homesick to-night. It took him back to things--to the days of not so
very long ago when he had been a part of the life from which the letter
came, and when the world had seemed to hold for him all that one could
wish. In a retrospective flash there passed before him a vision of those
days, when he, Mr. Philip Steele, son of a multimillionaire banker,
was one of the favored few in the social life of a great city; when
fashionable clubs opened their doors to him, and beautiful women smiled
upon him, and when, among others, this girl of the hyacinth letter held
out to him the tempting lure of her heart. Her heart? Or was it the
tempting of his own wealth? Steele laughed, and his strong white teeth
gleamed in a half-contemptuous smile as he turned again toward the fire.
He sat down, with the letter still in his hands, and thought of some
of those others whom he had known. What had become of Jack Moody, he
wondered--the good old Jack of his college days, who had loved this girl
of the hyacinth with the whole of his big, honest heart, but who hadn't
been given half a show because of his poverty? And where was Whittemore,
the young broker whose hopes had fallen with his own financial ruin;
and Fordney, who would have cut off ten years of his life for her--and
half-a-dozen others he might name?
Her heart! Steele laughed softly as he lifted the letter so that the
sweet perfume of it came to him more strongly. How she had tempted him
for a time! Almost--that night of the Hawkins' ball--he had surrendered
to her. He half-closed his eyes, and as the logs crackled in the
fireplace and the wind roared outside, he saw her again as he had seen
her that night--gloriously beautiful; memory of the witchery of her
voice, her hair, her eyes firing his blood like strong wine. And this
beauty might have been for him, was still his, if he chose. A word from
out of the wilderness, a few lines that he might write to-night--
With a sudden jerk Steele sat bolt upright. One after another he
crumpled the sheets of paper in his hand and tossed all but the
signature page into the fire. The last sheet he kept, studied it for a
little--as if her name were the answer to a problem--then laid it aside.
For a few moments there remained still the haunting sweetness of the
hyacinth. When it was gone, he gave a last searching sniff, rose to his
feet with a laugh in which there was some return of his old spirit,
hid that final page of her letter in his traveling kit and proceeded to
refill his pipe.
More than once Philip Steele had told himself that he was born a
century or two after his time. He had admitted this much to a few of
his friends, and they had laughed at him. One evening he had opened his
heart a little to the girl of the hyacinth letter, and after that she
had called him eccentric. Within himself he knew that he was unlike
other men, that the blood in him was calling back to almost forgotten
generations, when strong hearts and steady hands counted for manhood
rather than stocks and bonds, and when romance and adventure were not
quite dead. At college he took civil engineering, because it seemed
to him to breathe the spirit of outdoors; and when he had finished he
incurred the wrath of those at home by burying himself for a whole year
with a surveying expedition in Central America.
It was this expedition that put the finishing touch to Philip Steele.
He came back a big hearted, clear minded young fellow, as bronzed as an
Aztec--a hater of cities and the hothouse varieties of pleasure to which
he had been born, and as far removed from anticipation of his father's
millions as though they had never been. He possessed a fortune in his
own right, but as yet he had found no use for the income that was piling
up. A second expedition, this time to Brazil, and then he came back--to
meet the girl of the hyacinth letter. And after that, after he had
broken from the bondage which held Moody, and Fordney, and Whittemore,
he went back to his many adventures.
It was the North that held him. In the unending desolations of snow
and forest and plain, between Hudson's Bay and the wild country of the
Athabasca, he found the few people and the mystery and romance which
carried him back, and linked him to the dust-covered generations he had
lost. One day a slender, athletically built young man enlisted at Regina
for service in the Northwest Mounted Police. Within six months he
had made several records for himself, and succeeded in having himself
detailed to service in the extreme North, where man-hunting became the
thrilling game of One against One in an empty and voiceless world. And
no one, not even the girl of the hyacinth letter, would have dreamed
that the man who was officially listed as “Private Phil Steele, of the
N.W.M.P.,” was Philip Steele, millionaire and gentleman adventurer.
None appreciated the humor of this fact more than Steele himself, and he
fell again into his wholesome laugh as he placed a fresh pine log on the
fire, wondering what his aristocratic friends--and especially the
girl of the hyacinth letter--would say if they could see him and his
environment just at the present moment. In a slow, chuckling survey he
took in the heavy German socks which he had hung to dry close to the
fire; his worn shoe-packs, shining in a thick coat of caribou grease,
and his single suit of steaming underwear that he had washed after
supper, and which hung suspended from the ceiling, looking for all the
world, in the half dusk of the cabin, like a very thin and headless man.
In this gloom, indeed, but one thing shone out white and distinct--the
skull on the little shelf above the fire. As his eyes rested on it,
Steele's lips tightened and his face grew dark. With a sudden movement
he reached up and took it in his hands, holding it for a moment so that
the light from the fire flashed full upon it. In the left side, on a
line with the eyeless socket and above the ear, was a hole as large as a
small egg.
“So I'm ordered up to join Nome, the man who did this, eh?” he muttered,
fingering the ragged edge. “I could kill him for what happened down
there at Nelson House, M'sieur Janette. Some day--I may.”
He balanced the skull on his finger tips, level with his chin.
“Nice sort of a chap for a Hamlet, I am,” he went on, whimsically. “I
believe I'll chuck you into the fire, M'sieur Janette. You're getting on
my nerves.”
He stopped suddenly and lowered the skull to the table.
“No, I won't burn you,” he continued, “I've brought you this far and
I'll pack you up to Lac Bain with me. Some morning I'll give you to
Bucky Nome for breakfast. And then, M'sieur--then we shall see what we
shall see.”
Later that night he wrote a few words on a slip of paper and tacked
the paper to the inside of his door. To any who might follow in his
footsteps it conveyed this information and advice:
NOTICE!
This cabin and what's in it are quasheed by me. Fill your gizzard but
not your pockets.
Steele, Northwest Mounted.