"I shall treat you very nicely if you make no attempt to escape, M'sieu
David. Isn't that fair?"
"Fair!" he cried, choking back an explosion that would have vented
itself on a man. "Don't you realize what has happened? Don't you know
that according to every law of God and man I should arrest you and give
you over to the Law? Is it possible that you don't comprehend my own
duty? What I must do?"
If he had noticed, he would have seen that there was no longer the
flush of color in her cheeks. But her eyes, looking straight at him,
were tranquil and unexcited. She nodded.
"That is why you must remain a prisoner, M'sieu David, It is because I
do realize, I shall not tell you why that happened behind the rock, and
if you ask me, I shall refuse to talk to you. If I let you go now, you
would probably have me arrested and put in jail. So I must keep you
until St. Pierre comes. I don't know what to do--except to keep you,
and not let you escape until then. What would you do?"
The question was so honest, so like a question that might have been
asked by a puzzled child, that his argument for the Law was struck
dead. He stared into the pale face, the beautiful, waiting eyes, saw
the pathetic intertwining of her slim fingers, and suddenly he was
grinning in that big, honest way which made people love Dave Carrigan.
"You're--doing--absolutely--right," he said.
A swift change came in her face. Her cheeks flushed. Her eyes filled
with a sudden glow that made the little violet-freckles in them dance
like tiny flecks of gold.
"From your point of view you are right," he repeated, "and I shall make
no attempt to escape until I have talked with St. Pierre. But I can't
quite see--just now--how he is going to help the situation."
"He will," she assured him confidently.
"You seem to have an unlimited faith in St. Pierre," he replied a
little grimly.
"Yes, M'sieu David. He is the most wonderful man in the world. And he
will know what to do."
David shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps, in some nice, quiet place, he
will follow the advice Bateese gave you--tie a stone round my neck and
sink me to the bottom of the river."
"Perhaps. But I don't think he will do that I should object to it."
"Oh, you would!"
"Yes. St. Pierre is big and strong, afraid of nothing in the world, but
he will do anything for me. I don't think he would kill you if I asked
him not to." She turned to resume her task of cleaning up the breakfast
things.
With a sudden movement David swung one of the' big chairs close to her.
"Please sit down," he commanded. "I can talk to you better that way. As
an officer of the law it is my duty to ask you a few questions. It
rests in your power to answer all of them or none of them. I have given
you my word not to act until I have seen St. Pierre, and I shall keep
that promise. But when we do meet I shall act largely on the strength
of what you tell me during the next tea minutes. Please sit down!"
X
In that big, deep chair which must have been St. Pierre's own,
Marie-Anne sat facing Carrigan. Between its great arms her slim little
figure seemed diminutive and out of place. Her brown eyes were level
and clear, waiting. They were not warm or nervous, but so coolly and
calmly beautiful that they disturbed Carrigan. She raised her hands,
her slim fingers crumpling for a moment in the soft, thick coils of her
hair. That little movement, the unconscious feminism of it, the way she
folded her hands in her lap afterward, disturbed Carrigan even more.
What a glory on earth it must be to possess a woman like that! The
thought made him uneasy. And she sat waiting, a vivid, softly-breathing
question-mark against the warm coloring of the upholstered chair.
"When you shot me," he began, "I saw you, first, standing over me. I
thought you had come to finish me. It was then that I saw something in
your face--horror, amazement, as though you had done something you did
not know you were doing. You see, I want to be charitable. I want to
understand. I want to excuse you if I can. Won't you tell me why you
shot me, and why that change came over you when you saw me lying there?"
"No, M'sieu David, I shall not tell." She was not antagonistic or
defiant. Her voice was not raised, nor did it betray an unusual
emotion. It was simply decisive, and the unflinching steadiness of her
eyes and the way in which she sat with her hands folded gave to it an
unqualified definiteness.
"You mean that I must make my own guess?"
She nodded.
"Or get it out of St. Pierre?"
"If St. Pierre wishes to tell you, yes."
"Well--" He leaned a little toward her. "After that you dragged me up
into the shade, dressed my wound and made me comfortable. In a hazy
sort of way I knew what was going on. And a curious thing happened. At
times--" he leaned still a little nearer to her--"at times--there
seemed to be two of you!"
He was not looking at her hands, or he would have seen her fingers
slowly tighten in her lap.
"You were badly hurt," she said. "It is not strange that you should
have imagined things, M'sieu David."
"And I seemed to hear two voices," he went on.
She made no answer, but continued to look at him steadily.
"And the other had hair that was like copper and gold fire in the sun.
I would see your face and then hers, again and again--and--since
then--I have thought I was a heavy load for your hands to drag up
through that sand to the shade alone."
She held up her two hands, looking at them. "They are strong," she said.
"They are small," he insisted, "and I doubt if they could drag me
across this floor."
For the first time the quiet of her eyes gave way to a warm fire. "It
was hard work," she said, and the note in her voice gave him warning
that he was approaching the dead-line again. "Bateese says I was a fool
for doing it. And if you saw two of me, or three or four, it doesn't
matter. Are you through questioning me, M'sieu David? If so, I have a
number of things to do."
He made a gesture of despair. "No, I am not through. But why ask you
questions if you won't answer them?"
"I simply can not. You must wait."
"For your husband?"
"Yes, for St. Pierre."
He was silent for a moment, then said, "I raved about a number of
things when I was sick, didn't I?"
"You did, and especially about what you thought happened in the sand.
You called this--this other person--the Fire Goddess. You were so near
dying that of course it wasn't amusing. Otherwise it would have been.
You see MY hair is black, almost!" Again, in a quick movement, her
fingers were crumpling the lustrous coils on the crown of her head.
"Why do you say 'almost'?" he asked.
"Because St. Pierre has often told me that when I am in the sun there
are red fires in it. And the sun was very bright that afternoon in the
sand, M'sieu David."
"I think I understand," he nodded. "And I'm rather glad, too. I like to
know that it was you who dragged me up into the shade after trying to
kill me. It proves you aren't quite so savage as--"
"Carmin Fanchet," she interrupted him softly. "You talked about her in
your sickness, M'sieu David. It made me terribly afraid of you--so much
so that at times I almost wondered if Bateese wasn't right. It made me
understand what would happen to me if I should let you go. What
terrible thing did she do to you? What could she have done more
terrible than I have done?"
"Is that why you have given your men orders to kill me if I try to
escape?" he asked. "Because I talked about this woman, Carmin Fanchet?"
"Yes, it is because of Carmin Fanchet that I am keeping you for St.
Pierre," she acknowledged. "If you had no mercy for her, you could have
none for me. What terrible thing did she do to you, M'sieu?"
"Nothing--to me," he said, feeling that she was putting him where the
earth was unsteady under his feet again. "But her brother was a
criminal of the worst sort. And I was convinced then, and am convinced
now, that his sister was a partner in his crimes. She was very
beautiful. And that, I think, was what saved her."
He was fingering his unlighted cigar as he spoke. When he looked up, he
was surprised at the swift change that had come into the face of St.
Pierre's wife. Her cheeks were flaming, and there were burning fires
screened behind the long lashes of her eyes. But her voice was
unchanged. It was without a quiver that betrayed the emotion which had
sent the hot flush into her face.
"Then--you judged her without absolute knowledge of fact? You judged
her--as you hinted in your fever--because she fought so desperately to
save a brother who had gone wrong?"
"I believe she was bad."
The long lashes fell lower, like fringes of velvet closing over the
fires in her eyes. "But you didn't know!"
"Not absolutely," he conceded. "But investigations--"
"Might have shown her to be one of the most wonderful women that ever
lived, M'sieu David. It is not hard to fight for a good brother--but if
he is bad, it may take an angel to do it!"
He stared, thoughts tangling themselves in his head. A slow shame crept
over him. She had cornered him. She had convicted him of unfairness to
the one creature on earth his strength and his manhood were bound to
protect--a woman. She had convicted him of judging without fact. And in
his head a voice seemed to cry out to him, "What did Carmin Fanchet
ever do to you?"
He rose suddenly to his feet and stood at the back of his chair, his
hands gripping the top of it. "Maybe you are right," he said. "Maybe I
was wrong. I remember now that when I got Fanchet I manacled him, and
she sat beside him all through that first night. I didn't intend to
sleep, but I was tired--and did. I must have slept for an hour, and SHE
roused me--trying to get the key to the handcuffs. She had the
opportunity then--to kill me."
Triumph swept over the face that was looking up at him. "Yes, she could
have killed you--while you slept. But she didn't. WHY?"
"I don't know. Perhaps she had the idea of getting the key and letting
her brother do the job. Two or three days later I am convinced she
would not have hesitated. I caught her twice trying to steal my gun.
And a third time, late at night, when we were within a day or two of
Athabasca Landing, she almost got me with a club. So I concede that she
never did anything very terrible to me. But I am sure that she tried,
especially toward the last."
"And because she failed, she hated you; and because she hated you,
something was warped inside you, and you made up your mind she should
be punished along with her brother. You didn't look at it from a
woman's viewpoint. A woman will fight, and kill, to save one she loves.
She tried, perhaps, and failed. The result was that her brother was
killed by the Law. Was not that enough? Was it fair or honest to
destroy her simply because you thought she might be a partner in her
brother's crimes?"
"It is rather strange," he replied, a moment of indecision in his
voice. "McVane, the superintendent, asked me that same question. I
thought he was touched by her beauty. And I'm sorry--very sorry--that I
talked about her when I was sick. I don't want you to think I am a bad
sort--that way. I'm going to think about it. I'm going over the whole
thing again, from the time I manacled Fanchet, and if I find that I was
wrong--and I ever meet Carmin Fanchet again--I shall not be ashamed to
get down on my knees and ask her pardon, Marie-Anne!"
For the first time he spoke the name which she had given him permission
to use. And she noticed it. He could not help seeing that--a flashing
instant in which the indefinable confession of it was in her face, as
though his use of it had surprised her, or pleased her, or both. Then
it was gone.
She did not answer, but rose from the big chair, and went to the
window, and stood with her back toward him, looking out over the river.
And then, suddenly, they heard a voice. It was the voice he had heard
twice in his sickness, the voice that had roused him from his sleep
last night, crying out in his room for Black Roger Audemard. It came to
him distinctly through the open door in a low and moaning monotone. He
had not taken his eyes from the slim figure of St. Pierre's wife, and
he saw a little tremor pass through her now.
"I heard that voice--again--last night," said David. "It was in this
cabin, asking for Black Roger Audemard."
She did not seem to hear him, and he also turned so that he was looking
at the open door of the cabin.
The sun, pouring through in a golden flood, was all at once darkened,
and in the doorway--framed vividly against the day--was the figure of a
man. A tense breath came to Carrigan's lips. At first he felt a shock,
then an overwhelming sense of curiosity and of pity. The man was
terribly deformed. His back and massive shoulders were so twisted and
bent that he stood no higher than a twelve-year-old boy; yet standing
straight, he would have been six feet tall if an inch, and splendidly
proportioned. And in that same breath with which shock and pity came to
him, David knew that it was accident and not birth that had malformed
the great body that stood like a crouching animal in the open door. At
first he saw only the grotesqueness of it--the long arms that almost
touched the floor, the broken back, the twisted shoulders--and then,
with a deeper thrill, he saw nothing of these things but only the face
and the head of the man. There was something god-like about them,
fastened there between the crippled shoulders. It was not beauty, but
strength--the strength of rock, of carven granite, as if each feature
had been chiseled out of something imperishable and everlasting, yet
lacking strangely and mysteriously the warm illumination that comes
from a living soul. The man was not old, nor was he young. And he did
not seem to see Carrigan, who stood nearest to him. He was looking at
St. Pierre's wife.
The look which David saw in her face was infinitely tender. She was
smiling at the misshapen hulk in the door as she might have smiled at a
little child. And David, looking back at the wide, deep-set eyes of the
man, saw the slumbering fire of a dog-like worship in them. They
shifted slowly, taking in the cabin, questing, seeking, searching for
something which they could not find. The lips moved, and again he heard
that weird and mysterious monotone, as if the plaintive voice of a
child were coming out of the huge frame of the man, crying out as it
had cried last night, "HAS-ANY-ONE-SEEN-BLACK-ROGER-AUDEMARD?"
In another moment St. Pierre's wife was at the deformed giant's side.
She seemed tall beside him. She put her hands to his head and brushed
back the grizzled black hair, laughing softly into his upturned face,
her eyes shining and a strange glow in her cheeks. Carrigan, looking at
them, felt his heart stand still. WAS THIS MAN ST. PIERRE? The thought
came like a lightning flash--and went as quickly; it was impossible and
inconceivable. And yet there was something more than pity in the voice
of the woman who was speaking now.
"No, no, we have not seen him, Andre--we have not seen Black Roger
Audemard. If he comes, I will call you. I promise, Michiwan. I will
call you!"
She was stroking his bearded cheek, and then she put an arm about his
twisted shoulders, and slowly she turned so that in a moment or two
they were facing the sun--and it seemed to Carrigan that she was
talking and sobbing and laughing in the same breath, as that great,
broken hulk of a man moved out slowly from under the caress of her arm
and went on his way. For a space she looked after him. Then in a swift
movement she closed the door and faced Carrigan. She did not speak, but
waited. Her head was high. She was breathing quickly. The tenderness
that a moment before had filled her face was gone, and in her eyes was
the blaze of fighting fires as she waited for him to speak--to give
voice to what she knew was passing in his mind.