From beside his prisoner in the deep gloom Philip saw Thorpe and his
wife come out of the cabin a minute later and hurry away through the
night. Then he dragged the guard into the prison, relocked the door,
left the key in the lock, and returned to Hodges' office to replace the
old clothes for his uniform. Not until he stood looking down upon the
dead body again did the enormity of his own offense begin to crowd upon
him. But he was not frightened nor did he regret what he had done.
He turned out the light, sat down, coolly filled his pipe, and began
turning the affair over, detail by detail, in his mind. He had, at
least, followed Inspector MacGregor's injunction--he had followed his
conscience. Hodges had got what he deserved, and he had saved a man and
a woman.
But in spite of his first argument, he knew that MacGregor had not
foreseen a tragedy of this sort, and that, in the eyes of the law, he
was guilty of actively assisting in the flight of two people who could
not possibly escape the penalty of justice--if caught. But they would
not be caught. He assured himself of that, smiling grimly in the
darkness. No one at Wekusko could explain what had happened.
He was positive that the guard had not recognized him, and that he
would think one of Thorpe's friends had effected the rescue. And
MacGregor--Philip chuckled as he thought of the condemning evidence in
his possession, the strange orders which would mean dismissal for the
inspector, and perhaps a greater punishment, if he divulged them. He
would be safe in telling MacGregor something of what had occurred in the
little cabin. And then, as he sat in this grim atmosphere of death, a
thought came to him of M'sieur Janette's skull, of Bucky Nome, and of
the beautiful young wife at Lac Bain.
If Mrs. Becker could know of this, too--if Bucky Nome, buried somewhere
deep in the northern wilderness, could only see Hodges as he lay
there, dead on the cabin floor! To the one it would be a still greater
punishment, to the other a warning. And yet, even as he thought of the
colonel's wife and of her flirtation with Nome, a vision of her face
came to him again, filled with the marvelous sweetness, the purity, and
the love which had enthralled him beside the campfire. In these moments
it was almost impossible for him to convince himself that she had
forgotten her dignity as a wife even for an hour. Could he have been
mistaken? Had he looked at her with eyes heated by his own love, fired
by jealousy? If she had smiled upon him instead of upon Bucky Nome, if
her cheeks had flushed at his words, would he have thought that she
had done wrong? As if in answer to his own questions, he saw again the
white, tense face of the colonel, her husband, and he laughed harshly.
For several hours Philip remained in the shelter of Hodges' office. With
early dawn he stole out into the forest, and a little later made his
appearance in camp, saying that he had spent the night at Le Pas. Not
until an hour later was it discovered that Hodges had been killed, the
guard made a prisoner, and that Thorpe and his wife were gone. Philip
at once took charge of affairs and put a strain on his professional
knowledge by declaring that Thorpe had undoubtedly fled into the North.
Early in the afternoon he started in pursuit.
A dozen miles north of the Wekusko camp he swung at right angles to the
west, traveled fifteen miles, then cut a straight course south. It was
three days later before he showed up at Le Pas, and learned that no one
had seen or heard of Thorpe and his wife. Two days later he walked into
MacGregor's office. The inspector fairly leaped from his chair to greet
him.
“You got them, Steele!” he cried. “You got them after the mur--the
killing of Hodges?”
Philip handed him a crumpled bit of paper.
“Those were your latest instructions, sir,” he replied quietly. “I
followed them to the letter.”
MacGregor read, and his face turned as white as the paper he held. “Good
God!” he gasped.
He reeled rather than walked back to his desk, dropped into a chair
and buried his face in his arms, his shoulders shaking like those of a
sobbing boy. It was a long time before he looked up, and during these
minutes Philip, with his head bowed low to the other, told him of all
that had happened in the little room at Wekusko. But he did not say that
it was he who had surprised the guard and released Thorpe and his wife.
At last MacGregor raised his head.
“Philip,” he said, taking the young man's hand in both his own, “since
she was a little girl and I a big, strapping playmate of nineteen, I
have loved her. She is the only girl--the only woman--I have ever loved.
You understand? I am almost old enough to be her father. She was never
intended for me. But things like this happen--sometimes, and when she
came to plead with me the other day I almost yielded. That is why I
chose you, warned you--”
He stopped, and a sob rose in his breast.
“And at last you did yield,” said Philip.
The inspector gazed at him for a moment in silence. Then he said:
“It was ten years ago, on her seventeenth birthday, that I made her a
present of a little silver-bound autograph book, and on the first page
of that book I wrote the words which saved her husband--and her. Do you
understand now, Philip? It was her last card, and she played it well.”
He smiled faintly, and then said, as if to no one but himself, “God
bless her!”
He looked down on the big, tawny head that was bowed again upon the
desk, and placed his hands on the other's shoulders.
“God bless her!” echoed Philip.
“You are not alone in your sorrows, Felix MacGregor,” he said softly.
“You asked me if I was beauty-proof. Yes, I am. And it is because of
something like this, because of a face and a soul that have filled
my heart, because of a woman that is not mine, and never can be mine,
because of a love which ever burns, and must never be known--it is
because of this that I am beauty-proof. God bless this little woman,
MacGregor--and you--and I--will never ask where she has gone.”
MacGregor's hand reached out and gripped his own in silence. In that
hand-clasp there was sealed a pact between them, and Philip returned to
his barracks room to write a letter, in care of his father, to the man
and woman whom he had helped to escape into the south. He spent the
greater part of that day writing. It was late in the afternoon that
Moody came in with the mail.
“One for you, Phil,” he said, tossing a letter on Philip's table. “Looks
as though it had been through a war.”
Philip picked up the letter as the sergeant left him. He dropped his pen
with a low whistle. He could see at a glance that the letter had come an
unusual journey. It was dirty, and crumpled, and ragged at the ends--and
then, on the back of it, he found written in ink, “Lac Bain.” His
fingers trembled as he tore open the envelope. Swiftly he read. His
breath came in a gasping cry from between his lips, his face turned
as white as the crumpled paper, and then, as suddenly, a flush of
excitement leaped into his cheeks, replacing the pallor. His eyes
seemed blinded before he had half finished the letter, and his heart was
pounding with suffocating force.
This was what he read:
My Dear Philip Steele:
Your letter, and the skull, came to us to-day. I thank God that chance
brought me into my Isobel's room in time, or I fear for what might have
happened. It was a terrible punishment, my dear Steele, for her--and for
me. But I deserved it more than she. That very night--after Isobel left
the table--she insisted that I explain. When I returned to the room
below, you were gone. I waited, and then went to your cabin. You
know why I did not find you. Steele, Isobel is not my wife. She is my
daughter.
Mrs. Becker had planned to come with me to Lac Bain from Fort Churchill,
and we wrote the factor to that effect. But we changed our plans. Mrs.
Becker returned on the London ship, and Isobel came with me. In a spirit
of fun she suggested that for the first few hours she be allowed to pass
as--well, you understand. The joke was carried too far. When she
met you--and Bucky Nome--it ceased to be a joke, and almost became a
tragedy. For those few minutes before the fire Isobel used her disguise
as a test. She came to me, before you joined us, and whispered to me
that Nome was a scoundrel, and that she would punish him before the
evening was over. In the short space of that evening she knew that she
had met one of the most despicable of blackguards in Nome, and one of
the noblest of men in you. And not until she saw on you the effect of
what she was doing did everything dawn fully upon her.
You know what happened. She left the table suddenly, overcome by shame
and terror. When I returned later, and told her that I could not find
you, it was impossible to comfort her. She lay in her bed crying all
that night. I am telling you all this, because to me my daughter is one
of the two most precious things on earth, the sweetest and purest little
girl that ever breathed. I can not describe to you the effect upon her
of the skull and the letter. Forgive us--forgive me. Some day we may
meet again,
Sylvester Becker.
Like one in a dream Philip picked up the torn envelope. Something
dropped from it upon the table--a tiny cluster of violets that had been
pressed and dried between the pages of a book, and when he took them in
his fingers, he found that their stems were tied with a single thread of
golden hair!