He showed his card to a policeman, pulled Dickie after him, and they

found themselves in an inner circle of the inferno. Before them a tall,

hideous warehouse broke forth into a horrible beauty. It was as though a

tortured soul had burst bars. It roared and glowed and sent up petals of

smoky rose and seeds of fire against the blue-black sky. The crowds

pressed against the ropes and turned up their faces to drink in the

terror of the spectacle.

Lorrimer had out his notebook. "Damn fires!" he said. "They bore me. Does

all this look like anything to you? That fire and those people and their

silly faces all tilted up and turned red and blue and purple--"

He was talking to himself, and so, really, was Dickie when he made his

own statement in a queer tone of frightened awe. "They look like a flower

garden in Hell," he whispered.

Lorrimer threw up his chin. "Say that again, will you?" he snapped out.

"Go on! Don't stop! Tell me everything that comes into your damn young

head of a wandering Martian! Fly at it! I'll take you down."

"You mean," said Dickie, "tell you what I think this looks like?"

"That's what I mean, do."

Dickie smiled a queer sort of smile. He had found a listener at last. A

moment later Lorrimer's pencil was in rapid motion. And the reporter's

eyes shot little stabbing looks at Dickie's unselfconscious face. When

it was over he snapped an elastic round his notebook, returned it to his

pocket, and laid his hand on Dickie's thin, tense arm.

"Come along with me, Dick," said Lorrimer. "You've won. I've been

fighting you and my duty to my neighbor for a fortnight. Your waiter days

are over. I've adopted you. I'm my brother's keeper all right. We'll both

go hungry now and then probably, but what's the odds! I need you. I

haven't been able to hand in a story like that for years. I'm a burnt-out

candle and you're the divine fire. I'm going to educate the life out of

you. I'm going to train you till you wish you'd died young and

ungrammatical in Millings. I may not be much good myself," he added

solemnly, "but God gave me the sense to know the real thing when I see

it. I've been fighting you, calling myself a fool for weeks. Come along,

young fellow, don't hang back, and for your credit's sake close your lips

so you won't look like a case of arrested development. First we'll say

good-bye to the hash-hole and the white apron and then I'll take you up

to your sky parlor and we'll talk things over."

"God!" said Dickie faintly. It was a prayer for some enlightenment.

CHAPTER VIII

DESERTION

Hilliard rode up along Hidden Creek on a frosty October morning.

Everywhere now the aspens were torches of gold, the cottonwood trees

smoky and gaunt, the ground bright with fallen leaves. He had the look of

a man who has swept his heart clean of devils...his face was keen with

his desire. He sang as he rode--sweetly an old sentimental Spanish song,

something his mother had taught him; but it was not of his mother he

thought, or only, perhaps, deep down in his subconsciousness, of that

early mother-worship, age-old and most mysterious, which now he had

translated and transferred.

"Sweet, sweet is the jasmine flower--

Let its stars guide thee.

Sweet is the heart of a rose...

Sweet is the thought of thee...

Deep in my heart..."

The dogs were off coursing the woods that afternoon, and the little

clearing lay as still as a green lake under the threatening crest of the

mountain. Cosme slipped from his horse, pulled the reins over his head,

and left him to graze at will.

Miss Blake opened the ranch-house door at his knock. She greeted him with

a sardonic smile. "I don't know whether you'll see your girl or not,"

she said. "Give her time to get over her tantrums."

Cosme turned a lightning look upon her. "Tantrums? Sheila?"

"Oh, my friend, she has a devil of her own, that little angel-face! Make

yourself comfortable." Miss Blake pointed him to a chair. "I'll tell her

you're here."

She went to the foot of the ladder, which rose from the middle of the

living-room floor, and called heartily, an indulgent laugh in her voice,

"You, Sheila! Better come down! Here's your beau."

There was no answer.

"Hear me, Sheila? Mis-ter Cos-me Hill-iard."

This time some brief and muffled answer was returned. Miss Blake smiled

and went over to her elk-horn throne. There she sat and sewed--an

incongruous occupation it looked.

Cosme was leaning forward, elbows on knees, his face a study of

impatience, anger, and suspicion.

"What made her mad?" he asked bluntly.

"O-oh! She'll get over it. She'll be down. Sheila can't resist a young

man. You'll see."

"What did you do?" insisted the stern, crisp, un-western voice. When

Cosme was angry he reverted rapidly to type.

"Why," drawled Miss Blake, "I crept up when she was drying her hair and I

cut it off." She laughed loudly at his fierce start.

"Cut off her hair! What right--?"

"No right at all, my friend, but common sense. What's the good of all

that fluffy stuff hanging about and taking hours of her time to brush

and wash and what-not. Besides"--she shot a look at him--"it's part of

the cure."

"By the Lord," said Cosme, "I'd like you to explain."

The woman crossed her legs calmly. She was still indulgently amused.

"Don't lose your head, young man," she advised. "Better smoke."

After an instant Cosme rolled and lighted a cigarette and leaned back in

his chair. His anger had settled to a sort of patient contempt.

"I've put her into breeches, too," said Miss Blake.

"What the devil! What do you mean? She has a will of her own,

hasn't she?"

"Oh, yes. But you see I've got Miss Sheila just about where I want her.

She's grateful enough for her food and the roof over her head and for the

chance I'm giving her."

"Chance?" He laughed shortly. "Chance to do all your heavy work?"

"Why not say _honest_ work? It's something new to her."

There was a brief, thunderous silence. Cosme's cigarette burned between

his stiff fingers. "What do you mean?" he asked, hoarse with the effort

of his self-control.

She looked at him sharply now. "Are you Paul Carey Hilliard's son--the

son of Roxana Hilliard?" she asked. She pointed a finger at him.

"Yes," he answered with thin lips. His eyes narrowed. His face was all

Latin, all cruel.

"Well"--Miss Blake slid her hands reflectively back and forth on the bone

arms of her chair. She had put down her work. "I was just thinking," she

said slowly and kindly, "that the son of your mother would be rather

extra careful in choosing the mother of his sons."

"I shall be very careful," he answered between the thin lips. "I _am_

being careful."

She fell back with an air of relief. "Oh," she said, as though

illuminated. "O-oh! I understand. Then it's all right. I didn't read

your game."

His face caught fire at her apparent misunderstanding.

"I don't read yours," he said.

"Game? Bless you, I've no game to play. I'm giving Sheila her chance. But

I'm not going to give her a chance at the cost of your happiness. You're

too good a lad for that. I thought you were going to ask her to be your

wife. And I wasn't going to allow you to do it--blind. I was going to

advise you to come back three years from now and see her again. Maybe

this fine clean air and this life and this honest work and the training

she gets from me will make her straight. My God! Cosme Hilliard, have you

set eyes on Hudson? What kind of girl travels West from New York at

Sylvester Hudson's expense and in his company and queens it in the suite

at his hotel?"

"Miss Blake," he muttered, "do you _know_ this?"

The cigarette had burnt itself out. Cosme's face was no longer cruel. It

was dazed.

She laughed shortly. "Why, of course, I know Sheila. I know her whole

history--and it's some history! She's twice the age she looks. Do you

think I'd have her here with me this way without knowing the girl? I tell

you, I want to give her a chance. I don't care if you try to test her

out. I'd like to see if two months has done anything for her. She was

real set on being a good girl when she quit Hudson. I don't _know_, but

I'm willing to bet that she'll turn you down."

From far away up the mountain-side came the fierce baying of the dog

pack. Cosme pulled himself together and stood up. His face had an

ignorant, baffled look, the look of an unskilled and simple mind

caught in a web.

"I reckon she--she isn't coming down," he said slowly, without lifting

his eyes from the floor. "I reckon I'll be going. I won't wait."

He walked to the door, his steps falling without spring, and went out and

so across the porch and the clearing to his horse.

At the sound of the closing door there came a flurry of movement in the

loft. The trap was raised. Sheila came quickly down the ladder. She was

dressed in a pair of riding-breeches and her hair was cropped like Miss

Blake's just below the ears. The quaintest rose-leaf of a Rosalind she

looked, just a wisp of grace, utterly unlike a boy. All the soft, slim

litheness with its quick turns revealed--a little figure of unconscious

sweet enchantment. But the face was flushed and tear-stained, the eyes

distressed. She stood, hands on her belt, at the foot of the ladder.

"Why has he gone? Why didn't he wait?"

Miss Blake turned a frank, indulgent face. But it was deeply

flushed. "Oh, shucks!" she said, "I suppose he got tired. Why didn't

you come down?"

Sheila sent a look down her slim legs. "Oh, because I _am_ a fool. Miss

Blake--did you _really_ burn my two frocks--both of them?" Her eyes

coaxed and filled.

"It's all they're fit for, my dear. You can make yourself new ones. You

know it's more sensible and comfortable, too, to work and ride in

breeches. I know what I'm doing, child.--I've lived this way quite a

number of years. You look real nice. I can't abide female floppery,

anyhow. What's it a sign of? Rotten slavery." She set her very even teeth

together hard as she said this.

But Sheila was neither looking nor listening. She had heard horse's

hoofs. Her cheeks flamed. She ran to the door. She stood on the porch

and called.

"Cosme Hilliard! Come back!"

There was no answer. A few minutes later she came in, pale and puzzled.

"He didn't even wave," she said. "He turned back in his saddle and stared

at me. He rode away staring at me. Miss Blake--what did you say to him?

You were talking a long time."

"We were talking," said Miss Blake, "about dogs and how to raise 'em. And

then he up and said goodbye. Oh, Sheila, it's all right. He'll be back

when he's got over being miffed. Why, he expected you to come tumblin'

down the ladder head over heels to see him--a handsome fellow like that!

Shucks! Haven't you ever dealt with the vanity of a young male before?

It's as jumpy as a rabbit. Get to work."

And, as though to justify Miss Blake's prophecy, just ten days later,

Hilliard did come again. It was a Sunday and Sheila had packed her

lunch and gone off on "Nigger Baby" for the day. The ostensible object

of her ride was a visit to the source of Hidden Creek. Really she was

climbing away from a hurt. She felt Hilliard's wordless departure and

prolonged absence keenly. She had not--to put it euphemistically--many

friends. Her remedy was successful. Impossible, on such a ride, to

cherish minor or major pangs. She rode into the smoky dimness of

pine-woods where the sunlight burned in flecks and out again across the

little open mountain meadows, jeweled with white and gold, blue and

coral-colored flowers, a stained-glass window scattered across the

ground. From these glades she could see the forest, an army of tall

pilgrims, very grave, going up, with long staves in their hands, to

worship at a high shrine. The rocks above were very grave, too, and

grim and still against the even blue sky. Across their purplish gray a

waterfall streaked down struck crystal by the sun. An eagle turned in

great, swinging circles. Sheila had an exquisite lifting of heart, a

sense of entire fusion, body blessed by spirit, spirit blessed by body.

She felt a distinct pleasure in the flapping of her short, sun-filled

hair against her neck, at the pony's motion between her unhampered

legs, at the moist warmth of his neck under her hand--and this physical

pleasure seemed akin to the ecstasy of prayer.

She came at last to a difficult, narrow, cañon trail, where the pony

hopped skillfully over fallen trees, until, for very weariness of his

choppy, determined efforts, she dismounted, tied him securely, and made

the rest of her climb on foot. Hidden Creek tumbled near her and its

voice swelled. All at once, round the corner of a great wall of rock, she

came upon the head. It gushed out of the mountain-side in a tumult of

life, not in a single stream, but in many frothy, writhing earth-snakes

of foam. She sat for an hour and watched this mysterious birth from the

mountain-side, watched till the pretty confusion of the water, with its

half-interpreted voices, had dizzied and dazed her to the point of

complete forgetfulness of self. She had entered into a sort of a trance,

a Nirvana ... She shook herself out of it, ate her lunch and scrambled

quickly back to "Nigger Baby." It was late afternoon when she crossed the

mountain glades. Their look had mysteriously changed. There was something

almost uncanny now about their brilliance in the sunset light, and when

she rode into the streaked darkness of the woods, they were full of

ghostly, unintelligible sounds. To rest her muscles she was riding with

her right leg thrown over the horn as though on a side saddle--a great

mass of flowers was tied in front of her. She had opened her shirt at the

neck and her head was bare. She was singing to keep up her heart. Then,

suddenly, she had no more need of singing. She saw Cosme walking toward

her up the trail.

His face lacked all its vivid color. It was rather haggard and stern. The

devils he had swept out of his heart a fortnight earlier had, since then,

been violently entertained. He stepped out of the path and waited for

her, his hands on his hips. But, as she rode down, she saw this look

melt. The blood crept up to his cheeks, the light to his eyes. It was

like a rock taking the sun. She had smiled at him with all the usual

exquisite grace and simplicity. When she came beside him, she drew rein,

and at the same instant he put his hand on the pony's bridle. He looked

up at her dumbly, and for some reason she, too, found it impossible to

speak. She could see that he was breathing fast through parted lips and

that the lips were both cruel and sensitive. His hand slid back along

"Nigger Baby's" neck, paused, and rested on her knee. Then, suddenly, he

came a big step closer, threw both his arms, tightening with a python's

strength, about her and hid his face against her knees.

"Sheila," he said thickly. He looked up with a sort of anguish into her

face. "Sheila, if you are not fit to be the mother of my children, you

are _sure_ fit for any man to love."

Her soft, slim body hardened against him even before her face. They

stared at each other for a minute.

"Let me get down," said Sheila.

He stepped back, not quite understanding. She dropped off the horse,

dragging her flowers with her, and faced him. She did not feel small or

slender. She felt as high as a hill, although she had to look up at him

so far. Her anger had its head against the sky.

"Why do you talk about a man's love?" she asked him with a queer sort

of patience. "I think--I hope--that you don't know anything about a

man's love, oh, the _way_ men love!" She thought with swift pain of

Jim, of Sylvester; "Oh, the _way_ they love!" And she found that,

under her breath, she was sobbing, "Dickie! Dickie!" as though her

heart had called.

"Will you take back your horse, please?" she said, choking over these

sobs which hurt her more at the moment than he had hurt her. "I'll never

ride on him again. Don't come back here. Don't try to see me any more. I

suppose it--it--the way you love me--is because I was a barmaid, because

you heard people speak of me as 'Hudson's Queen.'" She conquered one of

the sobs. "I thought that after you'd looked into my face so hard that

night and stopped yourself from--from--my lips, that you had understood."

She shook her head from side to side so violently, so childishly, that

the short hair lashed across her eyes. "No one ever will understand!" She

ran away from him and cried under her breath, "Dickie! Dickie!"

She ran straight into the living-room and stopped in the middle of the

floor. Her arms were full of the flowers she had pulled down from "Nigger

Baby's" neck.

"What did you want to bring in all that truck--?" Miss Blake began,

rising from the pianola, then stopped. "What's the matter with you?" she

asked. "Did your young man find you? I sent him up the trail." Her red

eyes sparkled.

"He insulted me!" gasped Sheila. "He dared to insult me!" She was

dramatic with her helpless young rage. "He said I wasn't fit to--to be

the mother of his children. And"--she laughed angrily, handling behind

Cosme's back the weapon that she had been too merciful to use--"and _his_

mother is a murderess, found guilty of murder--and of worse!"

A sort of ripple of sound behind made her turn.

Cosme had followed her, was standing in the open door, and had heard her

speech. The weapon had struck home, and she saw how it had poisoned all

his blood.

He vanished without a word. Sheila turned back to Miss Blake a paler

face. She let fall all her flowers.

"Now he'll never come back," she said.

She climbed up the ladder to her loft.

There she sat for an hour, listening to the silence. Her mind busied

itself with trivial memories. She thought of Amelia Plecks.... It would

have comforted her to hear that knock and the rattle of her dinner tray.

The little sitting-room at Hudson's Hotel, with its bit of tapestry and

its yellow tea-set and its vases filled with flowers, seemed to her

memory as elaborate and artificial as the boudoir of a French princess.

Farther than Millings had seemed from her old life did this dark little

gabled attic seem from Millings. What was to be the end of this strange

wandering, this withdrawing of herself farther and farther into the

lonely places! She longed for the noise of Babe's hearty, irrepressible

voice with its smack of chewing, of her step coming up the stairs to that

little bedroom under Hudson's gaudy roof. Could it be possible that she

was homesick for Millings? For the bar with its lights and its visitors

and its big-aproned guardian? Her lids were actually smarting with tears

at the recollection of Carthy's big Irish face.... He had been such a

good, faithful watch-dog. Were men always like that--either watch-dogs

or wolves? The simile brought her back to Hidden Creek. It grew darker

and darker, a heavy darkness; the night had a new soft weight. There

began to be a sort of whisper in the stillness--not the motion of pines,

for there was no wind. Perhaps it was more a sensation than a sound, of

innumerable soft numb fingers working against the silence ... Sheila got

up, shivering, lighted her candle, and went over to the small, four-paned

window under the eaves. She pressed her face against it and started back.

Things were flying toward her. She opened the sash and a whirling scarf

of stars flung itself into the room. It was snowing. The night was blind

with snow.

CHAPTER IX

WORK AND A SONG

On the studio skylight the misty autumn rain fell that night, as the snow

fell against Sheila's window-panes, with a light tapping. Below it Dickie

worked. He had very little leisure now for stars or dreams. For the first

time in his neglected and mismanaged life he knew the pleasure of

congenial work; and this, although Lorrimer worked him like a slave. He

dragged him over the city and set his picture-painting faculty to labor

in dark corners. Dickie, every sense keen and clean, was not allowed to

flinch. No, his freshness was his value. And the power that was in him,

driven with whip and spur, throve and grew and fairly took the bit in its

teeth and ran away with its trainer.

"Look here, my lad," Lorrimer had said that morning, "you keep on laying

hands on the English language the way you've been doing lately and I'll

have to get a job for you on the staff. Then my plagiarism that has been

paying us both so well comes to an end. I won't have the face to edit

stuff like this much longer." Lorrimer did not realize in his amazement

that Dickie's mind had always busied itself with this exciting and

nerve-racking matter of choosing words. From his childhood, in the face

of ridicule and outrage, he had fumbled with the tools of Lorrimer's

trade. No wonder that now knowledge and practice, and the sort of

intensive training he was under, magically fitted all the jumbled odds

and ends into place. Dickie had stopped looking over his shoulder. The

pursuing pack, the stealthy-footed beasts of the city, had dropped

utterly from his flying imagination. There was only one that remained

faithful--that craving for beauty--half-god, half-beast. Against him

Dickie still pressed his door shut. Lorrimer's gift of work had not

quieted the leader of the pack. But it had brought Dickie something that

was nearly happiness. The very look of him had changed; he looked driven

rather than harried, keen rather than harassed, eager instead of vague,

hungry rather than wistful. Only, sometimes, Dickie's brain would

suddenly turn blank and blind from sheer exhaustion. This happened to him

now. The printed lines he was studying lost all their meaning. He put his

forehead on his hands. Then he heard that eerie, light tapping above him

on the skylight. But he was too tired to look up.

It was on that very afternoon when Sheila rode down the trail with her

flowers tied before her on the saddle, singing to keep up her heart. It

was that very afternoon when she had cried out half-consciously for

"Dickie--Dickie--Dickie"--and now it was, as though the cry had traveled,

that a memory of her leapt upon his mind; a memory of Sheila singing.

She had come into the chocolate-colored lobby from one of her rides with

Jim Greely. She had held a handful of cactus flowers. She had stopped

over there by one of the windows to put them in a glass. And to show

Dickie, a prisoner at his desk, that she did not consider his

presence--it was during the period of their estrangement--she had sung

softly as a girl sings when she knows herself to be alone: a little

tender, sad chanting song, that seemed made to fit her mouth. The pain

her singing had given him that afternoon had cut a picture of her on

Dickie's brain. Just because he had tried so hard not to look at her. Now

it jumped out at him against his closed, wet lids. The very motions of

her mouth came back, the positive dear curve of her chin, the

throat there slim against the light. Hard work had driven her

image a little from his mind lately; it returned now to revenge

his self-absorption--returned with a song.

Dickie got up and wandered about the room. He tried to hum the air, but

his throat contracted. He tried to whistle, but his lips turned stiff. He

bent over his book--no use, she still sang. All night he was tormented by

that chanting, hurting song. He sobbed with the hurt of it. He tossed

about on his bed. He could not but remember how little she had loved him.

All at once there came to him a mysterious and beautiful release. It

seemed that the cool spirit, detached, winged, drew him to itself or

became itself entirely possessed of him. He was taken out of his pain

and yet he understood it. And he began suddenly, easily, to put it into

words. The misery was ecstasy, the hurt was inspiration, the song sang

sweetly as though it had been sung to soothe and not to make him suffer.

"Oh, little song you sang to me"--

Ah, yes, at heart she had been singing to him--

"A hundred, hundred days ago,

Oh, little song, whose melody

Walks in my heart and stumbles so;

I cannot bear the level nights,

And all the days are over-long,

And all the hours from dark to dark

Turn to a little song ..."

Dickie, not knowing how he got there, was at his table again. He was

writing. He was happy beyond any conception he had ever had of happiness.

That there was agony in his happiness only intensified it. The leader of

the wolf-pack, beast with a god's face, the noblest of man's desires,

that passionate and humble craving for beauty, had him by the throat.

So it was that Dickie wrote his first poem.

CHAPTER X

WINTER

Winter snapped at Hidden Creek as a wolf snaps, but held its grip as a

bulldog holds his. There came a few November days when all the air and

sky and tree-tops were filled with summer again, but the snow that had

poured itself down so steadily in that October storm did not give way. It

sank a trifle at noon and covered itself at night with a glare of ice. It

was impossible to go anywhere except on snow-shoes. Sheila quickly

learned the trick and plodded with bent knees, limber ankles, and

wide-apart feet through the winter miracle of the woods. It was another

revelation of pure beauty, but her heart was too sore to hold the

splendor as it had held the gentler beauty of summer and autumn. Besides,

little by little she was aware of a vague, encompassing uneasiness. Since

the winter jaws had snapped them in, setting its teeth between them and

all other life, Miss Blake had subtly and gradually changed. It was as

though her stature had increased, her color deepened. Sometimes to Sheila

that square, strong body seemed to fill the world. She was more and more

masterful, quicker with her orders, charier of her smiles, shorter of

speech and temper. Her eyes seemed to grow redder, the sparks closer to

flame, as though the intense cold fanned them.

Once they harnessed the dogs to the sled and rode down the country for

the mail. The trip they made together. Sheila sat wrapped in furs in

front of the broad figure of her companion, who stood at the back of the

sledge, used a long whip, and shouted to the dogs by name in her great

musical voice of which the mountain echo made fine use. They sped close

to the frozen whiteness of the world, streaked down the slopes, and were

drawn soundlessly through the columned vistas of the woods. Here, there,

and everywhere were tracks, of coyotes, fox, rabbit, martin, and the

little pointed patteran of winter birds, yet they saw nothing living.

"What's got the elk and moose this season?" muttered Miss Blake. Nothing

stirred except the soft plop of shaken snow or the little flurry of

drifting flakes. These frost-flakes lay two inches deep on the surface of

the snow, dry and distinct all day in the cold so that they could be

blown apart at a breath. Miss Blake was cheerful on this journey. She

sang songs, she told brief stories of other sled trips. At the

post-office an old, lonely man delivered them some parcels and a vast

bagful of magazines. There was a brief passage of arms between him and

Miss Blake. She accused him of withholding a box of cartridges, and would

not be content till she had poked about his office in dark corners. She

came out swearing at the failure of her search. "I needed that shot,"

she said. "My supply is short. I made sure it'd be here to-day." There

were no letters for either of them, and Sheila felt again that queer

shiver of her loneliness. But, on the whole, it was a wonderful day, and,

under a world of most amazing stars, the small, valiant ranch-house, with

its glowing stove and its hot mess of supper, felt like home.... Not long

after that came the first stroke of fate.

The little old horse left them and, though they shoed patiently for miles

following his track, it was only to find his bones gnawed clean by

coyotes or by wolves. Sheila's tears froze to her lashes, but Miss

Blake's face went a little pale. She said nothing, and in her steps

Sheila plodded home in silence. That evening Miss Blake laid hands on

her.... They had washed up their dishes. Sheila was putting a log on the

fire. It rolled out of her grasp to the bearskin rug and struck Miss

Blake's foot. Before Sheila could even say her quick "I'm sorry," the

woman had come at her with a sort of spring, had gripped her by the

shoulders, had shaken her with ferocity, and let her go. Sheila fell

back, her own hands raised to her bruised shoulders, her eyes

phosphorescent in a pale face.

"Miss Blake, how dare you touch me!"

The woman kicked back the log, turned a red face, and laughed.

"Dare! You little silly! What's to scare me of you?"

An awful conviction of helplessness depressed Sheila's heart, but she

kept her eyes leveled on Miss Blake's.

"Do you suppose I will stay here with you one hour, if you treat me

like this?"

That brought another laugh. But Miss Blake was evidently trying to make

light of her outbreak. "Scared you, didn't I?" she said. "I guess you

never got much training, eh!"

"I am not a dog," said Sheila shortly.

"Well, if you aren't"--Miss Blake returned to her chair and took up a

magazine. She put the spectacles on her nose with shaking hands. "You're

my girl, aren't you? You can't expect to get nothing but petting from

me, Sheila."

If she had not been icy with rage, Sheila might have smiled at this. "I

don't know what you mean, Miss Blake, by my being your girl. I work for

you, to be sure. I know that. But I know, too, that you will have to

apologize to me for this."

Miss Blake swung one leg across the other and stared above her glasses.

"Apologize to _you_!"

"Yes. I will allow nobody to touch me."

"Shucks! Go tell that to the marines! You've never been touched, have

you? Sweet sixteen!"

Hudson's kiss again scorched Sheila's mouth and her whole body burned.

Miss Blake watched that fire consume her, and again she laughed.

"I'm waiting for you to apologize," said Sheila again, this time between

small set teeth.

"Well, my girl, wait. That'll cool you off."

Sheila stood and felt the violent beating of her heart. A log in the wall

snapped from the bitter frost.

"Miss Blake," she said presently, a pitiful young quaver in her voice,

"if you don't beg my pardon I'll go to-morrow."

Miss Blake flung her book down with a gesture of impatience. "Oh, quit

your nonsense, Sheila!" she said. "What's a shaking! You know you can't

get out of here. It'd take you a week to get anywhere at all except into

a frozen supper for the coyotes. Your beau's left the country--Madder

told me at the post-office. Make the best of it, Sheila. Lucky if you

don't get worse than that before spring. You'll get used to me in time,

get broken in and learn my ways. I'm not half bad, but I've got to be

obeyed. I've got to be master. That's me. What do you think I've come

'way out here to the wilderness for, if not because I can't stand

anything less than being master? Here I've got my place and my dogs and a

world that don't talk back. And now I've got you for company and to do my

work. You've got to fall into line, Sheila, right in the ranks. Once,

some one out there in the world"--she made a gesture, dropped her chin on

her big chest, and looked out under her short, dense, rust-colored

eyelashes--"tried to break _me_. I won't tell you what he got. That's

where I quit the ways of women--yes, ma'am, and the ways of men." She

stood up and walked over to the window and looked out. The dogs were

sleeping in their kennels, but a chain rattled. "I've broke the

wolf-pack. You've seen them wriggle on their bellies for me, haven't you?

Well, my girl, do you think I can't break you?" She wheeled back and

stood with her hands on her hips. It was at that moment that she seemed

to fill the world. Her ruddy eyes glowed like blood. They were not quite

sane. That was it. Sheila went suddenly weak. They were not _quite_

sane--those red eyes filled with sparks.

The girl stepped back and sat down in her chair. She bent forward,

pressed her hands flat together, palm to palm between her knees, and

stared fixedly down at them. She made no secret of her desperate

preoccupation.

Miss Blake's face softened a little at this withdrawal. She came back to

her place and resumed her spectacles.

"I'll tell you why I'm snappy," she said presently. "I'm scared."

This startled Sheila into a look. Miss Blake was moistening her lips.

"That horse--you know--the coyotes got him. I guess he went down and they

fell upon him. Well, he was to feed the dogs with until I could get my

winter meat."

"What do you mean?"

"That's what I buy 'em for. Little old horses, for a couple of bits,

and work 'em out and shoot 'em for dog-feed. Well, Sheila, when they're

fed, they're dogs. But when they're starved--they're wolves ... And I

can't think what's come to the elk this year. To-morrow I'll take out my

little old gun."

To-morrow and the next day and the next she took her gun and strapped on

her shoes and went out for all day long into the cold. Each time she came

back more exhausted and more fierce. Sheila would have her supper ready

and waiting sometimes for hours.

"The dogs have scared 'em off," said Miss Blake. "That must be the

truth." She let the pack hunt for itself at night, and they came back

sometimes with bloody jaws. But the prey must have been small, for they

were not satisfied. They grew more and more gaunt and wolfish. They would

howl for hours, wailing and yelping in ragged cadence to the stars.

Table-scraps and brews of Indian meal vanished and left their bellies

almost as empty as before.

"And," said Miss Blake, "we got to eat, ourselves."

"Hadn't we better go down to the post-office or to Rusty?" Sheila asked

nervously.

Miss Blake snapped at her. "Harness that team now? As much as your life

is worth, Sheila! And we can't make it on foot. We'd drop in our tracks

and freeze. If it comes to the worst we may have to try it, but--oh, I'll

get something to-morrow."

But to-morrow brought no better luck. During the hunting the dogs were

left on their chains, and Sheila, through the lonely hours, would watch

them through the window and could almost see the wolfishness grow in

their deep, wild eyes. She would try to talk to them, pat them, coax them

into doggy-ness. But day by day they responded more unwillingly. All but

Berg: Berg stayed with her in the house, lay on her feet, leaned against

her knee. He shared her meals. He was beginning to swing his heart from

Miss Blake to her, and this was the second cause for strife.

Since that one outbreak, Sheila had gone carefully. She was dignified,

aloof, very still. She obeyed and slaved as she had never done in the

summer days. The dread of physical violence hung on her brain like a

cloud. She encouraged Berg's affection, and wondered, if it came to a

struggle, whether he would side with her. She was given the opportunity

to put this matter to the test.

Miss Blake was very late that night. It was midnight, a stark midnight of

stars and biting cold, when Berg stood up from his sleep and barked his

low, short bark of welcome. Outside the other dogs broke into their

clamor, drowning all other sound, and in the midst of it the door flew

rudely open. Miss Blake stood and clung to the side of the door. Her face

was bluish-white. She put out her hand toward Sheila, clutching the air.

Sheila ran over to her.

"You're hurt?"

"Twisted my blamed ankle. God!" She hobbled over, a heavy arm round

Sheila, to her chair and sat there while the girl gave her some brandy,

removed the snowshoes, and cut away the boot from a swollen and

discolored leg.

"That's the end of my hunting," grunted the patient, who bore the agony

of rubbing and bathing stoically. "And, I reckon, I couldn't have stood

much more." She clenched her hand in Berg's mane. "God! Those dogs! I'll

have to shoot them--next." Sheila looked up to her with a sort of

horrified hope. There was then a way out from that fear.

"I'd rather die, I think," said the woman hoarsely. "I love those dogs."

Sheila looked up into a tender and quivering face--the face of a mother.

"They mean something to me--those brutes. I guess I kind of centered my

heart on 'em--out here alone. I raised 'em up, from puppies, all but Berg

and the mother. They were the cutest little fellows. I remember when

Wreck got porcupine quills in his nose and came to me and lay on his back

and whined to me. It was as if he said, 'Help me, momma.' Sure it was.

And he pretty near died. Oh, damn! If I have to shoot 'em I might just as

well shoot myself and be done with it...Thanks, Sheila. I'll eat my

supper here and then you can help me to bed. When my ankle's all well, we

can have a try for the post-office, perhaps." She leaned back and drew

Berg roughly up against her. She caressed him. He made little soft,

throaty sounds of tenderness.

Sheila came back with a tray and, as she came, Berg pulled himself away

from his mistress and went wagging over to greet her.

"Come here!" snapped Miss Blake. Berg hesitated, cuddled close to Sheila,

and kept step beside her.

Miss Blake's eyes went red. "Come here!" she said again. Berg did not

cringe or hasten. He reached Miss Blake's chair at the same instant as

Sheila, not a moment earlier.

Miss Blake pulled herself up. The tray went shattering to the floor. She

hobbled over to the fire, white with the anguish, took down the whip from

its nail. At that Berg cringed and whined. The woman fell upon him with

her terrible lash. She held herself with one hand on the mantel-shelf,

while with the other she scored the howling victim. His fur came off his

back under the dreadful, knife-edge blows.

"Oh, stop!" cried Sheila. "Stop! You're killing him!" She ran over and

caught Miss Blake's arm.

"Damn you!" said the woman fiercely. She stood breathing fast. Sweat

of pain and rage and exertion stood out on her face. "Do _you_ want

that whip?"

She half-turned, lifting her lash, and at that, with a snarl, Berg

crouched himself and bared his teeth.

Miss Blake started and stared at him. Suddenly she gave in. Pain and

anger twisted her spirit.

"You'd turn my Berg against me!" she choked, and fell heavily down on the

rug in a dead faint.

When she came to she was grim and silent. She got herself with scant

help to bed, her big bed in the corner of the living-room, and for a week

she was kept there with fever and much pain. Berg lay beside her or

followed Sheila about her work, and the woman watched them both with

ruddy eyes.

CHAPTER XI

THE PACK

In January a wind blew steadily from the east and snow came as if to

bury them alive. The cabin turned to a cave, a small square of warmth

under a mountain of impenetrable white; one door and one window only,

opening to a space of sun. Against the others the blank white lids of

winter pressed. Sheila shoveled this space out sometimes twice a day.

The dog kennels were moved into it, and stood against the side of a

snow-bank eight feet high, up which, when they were unchained, the

gaunt, wolfish animals leapt in a loosely formed pack, the great mother,

Brenda, at their head, and padded off into the silent woods in their

hungry search for food.

But, one day, they refused to go. Miss Blake, her whip in her hand,

limped out. The snow had stopped. The day was still and bright again

above the snowy firs, the mountain scraped against the blue sky like a

cliff of broken ice. The dogs had crept out of their houses and were

squatted or huddled in the sun. As she came out they rose and strained at

their tethers. One of them whined. Brenda, the mother, bared her teeth.

One by one, as they were freed, they slunk close to Miss Blake, looking

up into her face. They crowded close at her heels as she went back to the

house. She had to push the door to in their very jaws and they pressed

against it, their heads hung low, sniffing the odor of food. Presently a

long-drawn, hideous howling rose from them. Time and again Miss Blake

drove them away with lash and voice. Time and again they came back. They

scratched at the threshold, whimpered, and whined.

Sheila and Miss Blake gave them what food they would have eaten

themselves that day. It served only to excite their restlessness, to hold

them there at the crack of the door, snuffling and slobbering. The outer

circle slept, the inner watched. Then they would shift, like sentries.

They had a horrible sort of system. Most of that dreadful afternoon Miss

Blake paced the floor, trying to strengthen her ankle for the trip to the

post-office. At sunset, when the small snow-banked room was nearly dark,

she stopped, threw up her head, and looked at Sheila. The girl was

sitting on the lowest step of the ladder washing some dried apples. Her

face had thinned to a silvery wedge between the thick square masses of

her hair. There was a haunted look in her clear eyes. The soft mouth had

tightened.

"How in God's name," said Miss Blake, "shall I get 'em on their

chains again?"

Sheila stopped her work, and her lips fell helplessly apart. She looked

up at the older woman and shook her head.

Miss Blake's fear snapped into a sort of frenzy. She gritted her teeth

and stamped. "You simpleton!" she said. "You never have a notion in

your head."

Sheila stood up quickly. Something told her that she had better be on her

feet. She kept very still. "You will know better than I could what to do

about the dogs," she said quietly. "They'll go back on their chains for

you, I should think. They're afraid of you."

"Aren't you?" Miss Blake asked roughly.

"No. Of course not."

"You little liar! You're scared half out of your wits. You're scared of

the whole thing--scared of the snow, scared of the cold, scared of the

dogs, and scared sick of me. Come, now. Tell me the truth."

It was almost her old bluff, bullying tone, but back of it was a

disorder of stretched nerves. Sheila weighed her words and tried to

weigh her thoughts.

"I don't think I am afraid, Miss Blake. Why should I be afraid of the

dogs, if you aren't? And why should I be afraid of you? You have been

good to me. You are a good woman."

At this Miss Blake threw back her head and laughed. She was terribly like

one of the dogs howling. There was something wild and wolfish in her

broad neck and in the sound she made. And she snapped back into silence

with wolfish suddenness.

"If you're not scared, then," she scoffed, "go and chain up the dogs

yourself."

For an instant Sheila quite calmly balanced the danger out of doors

against the danger within.

"I think," she said--and managed one of her drifting smiles--"I think I

am a great deal more afraid of the dogs than I am of you, Miss Blake."

The woman studied her for a minute in silence, then she walked over to

her elk-horn throne and sat down on it.

She leaned back in a royal way and spread her dark broad hands across the

arms.

"Well," she said coolly, "did you hear what I said? Go out and chain up

the dogs!"

Sheila held herself like a slim little cavalier. "If I go out," she said

coolly, "I will not take a whip. I'll take a gun."

"And shoot my dogs?"

"Miss Blake, what else is left for us to do? We can't let them claw down

the door and tear us into bits, can we?"

"You'd shoot my dogs?"

"You said yourself that we might have to shoot them."

Miss Blake gave her a stealthy and cunning look. "Take my gun, then"--her

voice rose to a key that was both crafty and triumphant--"and much good

it will do you! There's shot enough to kill one if you are a first-rate

shot. I lost what was left of my ammunition the day I hurt my ankle. The

new stuff is down at the post-office by now, I guess."

The long silence was filled by the shifting of the dog-watch outside the

door.

"We must chain them up at any cost," said Sheila. Her lips were dry and

felt cold to her tongue.

"Go out and do it, then." The mistress of the house leaned back and

crossed her ankles.

"Miss Blake, be reasonable. You have a great deal of control over the

dogs and I have none. I _am_ afraid of them and they will know it.

Animals always know when you're afraid..." Again she managed a smile.

"I shall begin to think you are a coward," she said.

At that Miss Blake stood up from her chair. Her face was red with a

violent rush of blood and the sparks in her eyes seemed to have broken

into flame.

"Very good, Miss," she said brutally. "I'll go out and chain 'em up and

then I'll come back and thrash you to a frazzle. Then you'll know how to

obey my orders next time."

She caught up her whip, swung it in her hand, and strode to the door.

"And mind you, Sheila, you won't be able to hide yourself from me. Nor

make a getaway. I'll lock this door outside and winter's locked the

other. You wait. You'll see what you'll get for calling me a coward. Your

friend Berg's gone off on a long hunt ... he's left his friends outside

there and he's left you.... Understand?"

She shouted roughly to the dogs, snapped her whip, threw open the door,

and stepped out boldly. She shut the door behind her and shot a bolt. It

creaked as though it had grown rusty with disuse.

In the stillness--for, except for a quick shuffling of paws, there was no

sound at first--Sheila chose her weapon of defense. She took down from

its place the Eskimo ivory spear, and, holding it short in her hand, she

put herself behind the great elk-horn chair. Her Celtic blood was

pounding gloriously now. She was not afraid; though if there had been

time to notice it, she would have confessed to an abysmal sense of horror

and despair. And again she wondered at her own loneliness and youth and

the astounding danger that she faced. Yes, it was more astonishment than

any other emotion that possessed her consciousness. The horror was below

the threshold practicing its part.

Then anger, astonishment, horror itself were suddenly thrown out of her.

She was left like an empty vessel waiting to be filled with fear. Miss

Blake had cried aloud, "Help, Sheila! Help!" This was followed by a

dreadful screaming. Sheila dropped her spear and leapt to the door. On

it, outside, Miss Blake beat and screamed, "Open, for God's sake!"

Sheila shouted in as dreadful a key. "On your side--the bolt! Miss

Blake--the bolt!"

Fingers clawed at the bolt, but it would not slip. Through all the

horrible sounds the woman made, Sheila could hear the snarling and

leaping and snapping of the dogs. She dashed to the small, tight window,

broke a pane with her fist, and thrust out her arm. She meant to reach

the bolt, but what she saw took the warm life out of her. Miss Blake had

gone down under the whirling, slobbering pack. The screaming had stopped.

In that one awful look the poor child saw that no human help could save.

She dropped down on the floor and lay there moaning, her hands pressed

over her ears....

So she lay, shuddering and gasping, the great part of the night. At last

the intense cold drove her to the fire. She heaped up the logs high and

hung close above them. Her very heart was cold. Liquid ice moved

sluggishly along her veins. The morning brought no comfort or courage to

her, only a freshening of horror and of fear. The dogs had gone, and all

the winter world lay still about the house.

She was shaken by a regular pulse of nervous sobbing. But, driven by a

sort of restlessness, she made herself coffee and forced some food down

her contracted throat. Then she put on her coat, took down Miss Blake's

six-shooter and cartridge belt, and saw, with a slight relaxing of the

cramp about her heart, that there were four shots in the chamber. Four

shots and eight dogs, but--at least--she could save herself from _that_

death! She strapped the gun round her slim hips, filled her pockets with

supplies--a box of dried raisins, some hard bread, a cake of chocolate,

some matches--pulled her cap down over her ears, and took her snowshoes

from the wall. With closed eyes she put her arm out through the broken

pane, and, after a short struggle, slipped the rusty bolt. Then she went

over to the door and, leaning against it, prayed. Even with the

mysterious strength she drew from that sense of kinship with a superhuman

Power, it was a long time before she could force herself to open. At

last, with a big gasp, she flung the door wide, skirted the house, her

hands against the logs, her eyes shut, ran across the open space,

scrambled up the drift, tied on her snowshoes, and fled away under the

snow-laden pines. There moved in all the wilderness that day no more

hunted and fearful a thing.

The fresh snow sunk a little under her webs, but she was a featherweight

of girlhood, and made quicker and easier progress than would have been

possible to any one else but a child. And her fear gave her both strength

and speed. Sometimes she looked back over her shoulder; always she

strained her ears for the pad of following feet. It was a day of rainbows

and of diamond spray, where the sun struck the shaken snow sifted from

overweighted branches. Sheila remembered well enough the route to the

post-office. It meant miles of weary plodding, but she thought that she

could do it before night. If not, she would travel by starlight and the

wan reflection of the snow. There was no darkness in these clear, keen

nights. She would not tell herself what gave her strength such impetus.

She thought resolutely of the post-office, of the old, friendly man, of

his stove, of his chairs and his picture of the President, of his gun

laid across two nails against his kitchen wall--all this, not more than

eighteen miles away! And she thought of Hilliard, too; of his young

strength and the bold young glitter of his eyes.

She stopped for a minute at noon to drink some water from Hidden Creek

and to eat a bite or so of bread. She was pulling on her gloves again

when a distant baying first reached her ears. She turned faint, seemed to

stand in a mist; then, with her teeth set defiantly, she started again,

faster and steadier, her body bent forward, her head turned back. Before

her now lay a great stretch of undulating, unbroken white. At its farther

edge the line of blue-black pines began again. She strained her steps to

reach this shelter. The baying had been very faint and far away--it might

have been sounded for some other hunting. She would make the woods, take

off her webs, climb up into a tree and, perhaps, attracted by those four

shots--no, three, she must save one--some trapper, some unimaginable

wanderer in the winter forest, would come to her and rescue her before

the end. So her mind twisted itself with hope. But, an hour later, with

the pines not very far away, the baying rose so close behind that it

stopped her heart. Twenty minutes had passed when above a rise of ground

she saw the shaggy, trotting black-gray body of Brenda, the leader of the

pack. She was running slowly, her nose close to the snow, casting a

little right and left over the tracks. Sheila counted eight--Berg, then,

had joined them. She thought that she could distinguish him in the rear.

It was now late afternoon, and the sun slanted driving back the shadows

of the nearing trees, of Sheila, of the dogs. It all seemed

fantastic--the weird beauty of the scene, the weird horror of it. Sheila

reckoned the distance before her, reckoned the speed of the dogs. She

knew now that there was no hope. Ahead of her rose a sharp, sudden

slope--she could never make it. There came to her quite suddenly, like a

gift, a complete release from fear. She stopped and wheeled. It seemed

that the brutes had not yet seen her. They were nose down at the scent.

One by one they vanished in a little dip of ground, one by one they

reappeared, two yards away. Sheila pulled out her gun, deliberately aimed

and fired.

A spurt of snow showed that she had aimed short. But the loud, sudden

report made Brenda swerve. All the dogs stopped and slunk together

circling, their haunches lowered. Wreck squatted, threw up his head, and

howled. Sheila spoke to them, clear and loud, her young voice ringing out

into that loneliness.

"You Berg! Good dog! Come here."

One of the shaggy animals moved toward her timidly, looking back,

pausing. Brenda snarled.

"Berg, come here, boy!"

Sheila patted her knee. At this the big dog whined, cringed, and began

to swarm up the slope toward her on his belly. His eyes shifted, the

struggle of his mind was pitifully visible--pack-law, pack-power, the

wolf-heart and the wolf-belly, and against them that queer hunger for the

love and the touch of man. Sheila could not tell if it were hunger or

loyalty that was creeping up to her in the body of the beast. She kept

her gun leveled on him. When he had come to within two feet of her, he

paused. Then, from behind him rose the starved baying of his brothers.

Sheila looked up. They were bounding toward her, all wolf these--but more

dangerous after their taste of human blood than wolves--to the bristling

hair along their backs and the bared fangs. Again she fired. This time

she struck Wreck's paw. He lifted it and howled. She fired again. Brenda

snapped sideways at her shoulder, but was not checked. There was one shot

left. Sheila knew how it must be used. Quickly she turned the muzzle up

toward her own head.

Then behind her came a sharp, loud explosion. Brenda leapt high into

the air and fell at Sheila's feet. At that first rifle-shot, Berg fled

with shadow swiftness through the trees. For the rest, it was as though

a magic wall had stopped them, as though, at a certain point, they fell

upon death. Crack, crack, crack--one after another, they came up,

leapt, and dropped, choking and bleeding on the snow. At the end Sheila

turned blindly. A yard behind her and slightly above her there under

the pines stood Hilliard, very pale, his gun tucked under his arm, the

smoking muzzle lowered. Weakly she felt her way up toward him, groping

with her hands.

He slid down noiselessly on his long skis and she stood clinging to his

arm, looking up dumbly into his strained face.

"I heard your shots," he said breathlessly. "You're within a hundred

yards of my house.... For months I've been trying to make up my mind to

come to you. God forgive me, Sheila, for not coming before!"

Swinging his gun on its strap across his shoulder, he lifted her in his

arms, and, like a child, she was carried through the silence of the

woods, all barred with blood-red glimmers from a setting sun.

CHAPTER XII

THE GOOD OLD WORLD AGAIN

Hilliard carried Sheila into the house that he had built for her and laid

her down in that big bedroom that "got the morning sun." For a while it

seemed to him that she would never open her eyes again, and when she did

regain consciousness she was so prostrate with her long fear and the

shock of Miss Blake's death that she lay there too weak to smile or

speak, too weak almost to breathe. Hilliard turned nurse, a puzzled,

anxious nurse. He would sit up in his living-room half the night, and

when sleep overpowered his anxiety he would fall prone on the elk-hide

rug before his fire.

At last Sheila pulled herself up and crept about the house. She spent

a day in the big log chair before Hilliard's hearth, looking very wan,

shrinking from speech, her soft mouth gray and drawn.

"Aren't you ever going to smile for me again?" he asked her, after a long

half-hour during which he had stood as still as stone, his arm along the

pine mantelshelf, looking at her from the shelter of a propping hand.

She lifted her face to him and made a pitiful effort enough. But it

brought tears. They ran down her cheeks, and she leaned back and closed

her lids, but the crystal drops forced themselves out, clung to her

lashes, and fell down on her clenched hands. Hilliard went over to her

and took the small, cold hands in both of his.

"Tell me about what happened, Sheila," he begged her. "It will help."

Word by difficult word, he still holding fast to her hands, she sobbed

and gasped out her story, to which he listened with a whitening face. He

gripped her hands tighter, then, toward the end, he rose with a sharp

oath, lit his cigarette, paced to and fro.

"God!" he said at the last. "And she told you I had gone from the

country! The devil! I can't help saying it, Sheila--she tortured you. She

deserved what God sent her."

"Oh, no!"--Sheila rocked to and fro--"no one could deserve such dreadful

terror and pain. She--she wasn't sane. I was--foolish to trust her ... I

am so foolish--I think I must be too young or too stupid for--for all

this. I thought the world would be a much safer place." She looked up

again, and speech had given her tormented nerves relief, for her eyes

were much more like her own, clear and young again. "Mr. Hilliard--what

shall I do with my life, I wonder? I've lost my faith and trustingness.

I'm horribly afraid."

He stood before her and spoke in a gentle and reasonable tone. "I'll tell

you the answer to that, ma'am," he said. "I've thought that all out

while I've been taking care of you."

She waited anxiously with parted lips.

"Well, ma'am, you see--it's like this. I'm plumb ashamed of myself

through and through for the way I have acted toward you. I was a fool to

listen to that dern lunatic. She told me--lies about you."

"Miss Blake did?"

"Yes, ma'am." His face crimsoned under her look.

Sheila closed her eyes and frowned. A faint pink stole up into her face.

She lifted her lids again and he saw the brightness of anger. "And, of

course, you took her lies for the truth?"

"Oh, damn! Now you're mad with me and you won't listen to my plan!"

He was so childish in this outbreak that Sheila was moved to dim

amusement. "I'm too beaten to be angry at anything," she said. "Just tell

me your plan."

"No," he said sullenly. "I'll wait. I'm scared to tell you now!"

She did not urge him, and it was not till the next morning that he spoke

about his plan. She had got out to her chair again and had made a

pretense of eating an ill-cooked mess of canned stuff which he had

brought to her on a tray. It was after he had taken this breakfast away

that he broke out as though his excitement had forced a lock.

"I'm going down to Rusty to-day," he said. His eyes were shining. He

looked at her boldly enough now.

"And take me?" Sheila half-started up. "And take me?"

"No, ma'am. You're to stay here safe and snug." She dropped back. "I'll

leave everything handy for you. There's enough food here for an army

and enough fuel.... You're as safe here as though you were at the foot

of God's throne. Don't look like that, girl. I can't take you. You're

not strong enough to make the journey in this cold, even on a sled. And

we can't"--his voice sunk and his eyes fell--"we can't go on like this,

I reckon."

"N-no." Sheila's forehead was puckered. Her fingers trembled on the arms

of her chair. "N-no...." Then, with a sort of quaver, she added, "Oh, why

can't we go on like this?--till the snow goes and I can travel with you!"

"Because," he said roughly, "we can't. You take my word for it." After a

pause he went on in his former decisive tone. "I'll be back in two or

three days. I'll fetch the parson."

Sheila sat up straight.

His eyes held hers. "Yes, ma'am. The parson. I'm going to marry

you, Sheila."

She repeated this like a lesson. "You are going to marry me...."

"Yes, ma'am. You'll have three days to think it over. If you don't want

to marry me when the parson comes, why, you can just go back to Rusty

with him." He laughed a little, came over to her, put a hand on each arm

of her chair, and bent down. She shrank back before him. His eyes had the

glitter of a hawk's, and his red and beautiful lips were soft and eager

and--again--a little cruel.

"No," he said, "I won't kiss you till I come back--not even for good-bye.

Then you'll know how I feel about you. You'll know that I believe that

you're a good girl and, Sheila"--here he seemed to melt and falter

before her: he slipped down with one of his graceful Latin movements and

hid his forehead on her knees--"Sheila, my _darling_--that I know you are

fit--oh, so much more than fit--to be the mother of my children ..."

In half an hour, during which they were both profoundly silent, he came

to her again. He was ready for his journey. She was sitting far back in

her chair, her slim legs stretched out. She raised inscrutable eyes

wide to his.

"Good-bye," he said softly. "It's hard to leave you. Good-bye."

She said good-bye even more softly with no change in her look. And he

went out, looking at her over his shoulder till the last second. She

heard the voice of his skis, hissing across the hard crust of the snow.

She sat there stiff and still till the great, wordless silence settled

down again. Then she started up from her chair, ran across to the window,

and saw that he was indeed gone. She came storming back and threw

herself down upon the hide. She cried like a deserted child.

"Oh, Cosme, I'm afraid to be alone! I'm afraid! Why did I let you go?

Come back! Oh, please come back!"

* * * * *

It was late that night when Hilliard reached Rusty, traveling with all

his young strength across the easy, polished surface of the world. He was

dog-tired. He went first to the saloon. Then to the post-office. To his

astonishment he found a letter. It was postmarked New York and he

recognized the small, cramped hand of the family lawyer. He took the

letter up to his bedroom in the Lander Hotel and sat on the bed, turning

the square envelope about in his hands. At last, he opened it.

"MY DEAR COSME [the lawyer had written ... he had known Hilliard as a

child], It is my strong hope that this letter will reach you promptly and

safely at the address you sent me. Your grandfather's death, on the

fifteenth instant, leaves you, as you are no doubt aware, heir to his

fortune, reckoned at about thirty millions. If you will wire on receipt

of this and follow wire in person as soon as convenient, it will greatly

facilitate arrangements. It is extremely important that you should come

at once. Every day makes things more complicated ... in the management

of the estate. I remain, with congratulations,

"Sincerely your friend, ..."

The young man sat there, dazed.

He had always known about those millions; the expectation of them had

always vaguely dazzled his imagination, tampered more than he was aware

with the sincerity of his feelings, with the reality of his life; but now

the shower of gold had fallen all about him and his fancy stretched its

eyes to take in the immediate glitter.

Why, thought Hilliard, this turns life upside down ... I can begin to

live ... I can go East. He saw that the world and its gifts were as truly

his as though he were a fairy prince. A sort of confusion of highly

colored pictures danced through his quick and ignorant brain. The blood

pounded in his ears. He got up and prowled about the little room. It was

oppressively small. He felt caged. The widest prairie would have given

him scant elbow-room. He was planning his trip to the East when the

thought of Sheila first struck him like a cold wave ... or rather it was

as if the wave of his selfish excitement had crashed against the wave of

his desire for her. All was foam and confusion in his spirit. He was

quite incapable of self-sacrifice--a virtue in which his free life and

his temperament had given him little training. It was simply a war of

impulses. His instinct was to give up nothing--to keep hold of every

gift. He wanted, as he had never in his life wanted anything before, to

have his fling. He wanted his birthright of experience. He had cut

himself off from all the gentle ways of his inheritance and lived like a

very Ishmael through no fault of his own. Now, it seemed to him that

before he settled down to the soberness of marriage, he must take one

hasty, heady, compensating draft of life, of the sort of life he might

have had. He would go East, go at once; he would fling himself into a

tumultuous bath of pleasure, and then he would come back to Sheila and

lay a great gift of gold at her feet. He thought over his plans,

reconstructing them. He got pen and ink and wrote a letter to Sheila. He

wrote badly--a schoolboy's inexpressive letter. But he told his story and

his astounding news and drew a vivid enough picture of the havoc it had

wrought in his simplicity. He used a lover's language, but his letter was

as cold and lumpish as a golden ingot. And yet the writer was not cold.

He was throbbing and distraught, confused and overthrown, a boy of

fourteen beside himself at the prospect of a holiday ... It was a stolen

holiday, to be sure, a sort of truancy from manliness, but none the less

intoxicating for that. Cosme's Latin nature was on top; Saxon loyalty and

conscience overthrown. He was an egoist to his finger-tips that night. He

did not sleep a wink, did not even try, but lay on his back across the

bed, hands locked over his hair while "visions of sugar plums danced

through his head." In the morning he went down and made his arrangements

for Sheila, a little less complete, perhaps, than he had intended, for he

met a worthy citizen of Rusty starting up the country with a sled to

visit his traps and to him he gave the letter and confided his

perplexities. It was a hasty interview, for the stage was about to start.

"My wife will sure take your girl and welcome; don't even have to ask

her," the kind-eyed old fellow assured Hilliard. "We'll be glad to have

her for a couple of months. She'll like the kids. It'll be home for her.

Yes, sir"--he patted the excited traveler on the shoulder--"you pile

into the stage and don't you worry any. I'll be up at your place before

night and bring the lady down on my sled. Yes, sir. Pile in and don't

you worry any."

Cosme wrung his hand, avoided his clear eye, and climbed up beside the

driver on the stage. He did not look after the trapper. He stared

ahead beyond the horses to the high white hill against a low and heavy

sky of clouds.

"There's a big snowstorm a comin' down," growled the driver. "Lucky if we

make The Hill to-day. A reg'lar oldtimer it's agoin' to be. And

cold--ugh!"

Cosme hardly heard this speech. The gray world was a golden ball for him

to spin at his will. Midas had touched the snow. The sleigh started with

a jerk and a jingle. In a moment it was running lightly with a crisp,

cutting noise. Cosme's thoughts outran it, leaping toward their gaudy

goal ... a journey out to life and a journey back to love--no wonder his

golden eyes shone and his cheeks flushed.

"You look almighty glad to be going out of here," the driver made

comment.

Hilliard laughed an explosive and excited laugh. "No almighty gladder

than I shall be to be coming back again," he prophesied.

But to prophesy is a mistake. One should leave the future humbly on the

knees of the gods. That night, when Hilliard was lying wakeful in his

berth listening to the click of rails, the old trapper lay under the

driving snow. But he was not wakeful. He slept with no visions of gold or

love, a frozen and untroubled sleep. He had caught his foot in a trap,

and the blizzard had found him there and had taken mercy on his pain.

They did not find his body until spring, and then Cosme's letter to

Sheila lay wet and withered in his pocket.

CHAPTER XIII

LONELINESS

The first misery of loneliness takes the form of a restless inability to

concentrate. It is as if the victim wanted to escape from himself. After

Cosme's departure Sheila prowled about the silent cabin, began this bit

of work and that, dropped it, found herself staring vaguely, listening,

waiting, and nervously shook herself into activity again. She tried to

whistle, but it seemed like somebody else's music and frightened her

ears. At dusk she fastened sacking across the uncurtained windows,

lighted both Cosme's lamps, bringing the second from her bedroom, and

heaped up a dancing and jubilant fire upon the hearth. In the midst of

this illumination she sat, very stiff and still, in the angular

elk-hide-covered chair, and knitted her hands together on her knee. Her

mind was now intensely active; memories, thoughts, plans, fancies racing

fast and furious like screen pictures across her brain. And they seemed

to describe themselves in loud whispers. She had difficulty in keeping

these voices from taking possession of her tongue.

"I don't want to talk to myself," she murmured, and glanced over

her shoulder.

A man has need of his fellows for a shield. Man is man's shelter from

all the storm of unanswered questions. Where am I? What am I? Why am

I?--No reply. No reassuring double to take away the ghost-sense of self,

that unseen, intangible aura of personality in which each of us moves as

in a cloud. In the souls of some there is an ever-present Man God who

will forever save them from this supreme experience. Sheila's religion,

vague, conventional, childish, faltered away from her soul. Except for

her fire, which had a sort of sympathy of life and warmth and motion, she

was unutterably alone. And she was beginning to suffer from the second

misery of solitude--a sense of being many personalities instead of one.

She seemed to be entertaining a little crowd of confused and

argumentative Sheilas. To silence them she fixed her mind on her

immediate problem.

She tried to draw Hilliard close to her heart. She had an honest hunger

for his warm and graceful beauty, for his young strength, but this

natural hunger continually shocked her. She tried not to remember the

smoothness of his neck as her half-conscious hands had slipped away from

it that afternoon when he raised her from the snow. It seemed to her that

her desire for him was centered somewhere in her body. Her mind remained

cool, detached, critical, even hostile. She disliked the manner of his

wooing--not that there should have been any insult to the pride of a

nameless little adventurer, Hudson's barmaid, a waif, in being told that

she was a "good girl" and fit to be the mother of this young man's

children. But Sheila knew instinctively that these things could not be

said, could not even be thought of by such a man as Marcus Arundel. She

remembered his words about her mother.... Sheila wanted with a great

longing to be loved like that, to be so spoken of, so exquisitely

entreated. A phrase in Hudson's letter came to her mind, "I handled you

in my heart like a flower" ... Unconsciously she pressed her hand against

her lips, remembered the taste of whiskey and of blood. If only it had

been Dickie's lips that had first touched her own. Blinding tears fell.

The memory of Dickie's comfort, of Dickie's tremulous restraint, had a

strange poignancy.... Why was he so different from all the rest? So much

more like her father? What was there in this pale little hotel clerk who

drank too much that lifted him out and up into a sort of radiance? Her

memory of Dickie was always white--the whiteness of that moonlight of

their first, of that dawn of their last, meeting. He had had no chance in

his short, unhappy, and restricted life--not half the chance that young

Hilliard's life had given him--to learn such delicate appreciations, such

tenderness, such reserves. Where had he got his delightful, gentle

whimsicalities, that sweet, impersonal detachment that refused to yield

to stupid angers and disgusts? He was like--in Dickie's own fashion she

fumbled for a simile. But there was no word. She thought of a star, that

morning star he had drawn her over to look at from the window of her

sitting-room. Perhaps the artist in Sylvester had expressed itself in

this son he so despised; perhaps Dickie was, after all, Hudson's great

work ... All sorts of meanings and symbols pelted Sheila's brain as she

sat there, exciting and fevering her nerves.

In three days Hilliard would be coming back. His warm youth would

again fill the house, pour itself over her heart. After the silence,

his voice would be terribly persuasive, after the loneliness, his eager,

golden eyes would be terribly compelling! He was going to "fetch the

parson" ... Sheila actually wrung her hands. Only three days for this

decision and, without a decision, that awful, helpless wandering, those

dangers, those rash confidences of hers. "O God, where are you? Why don't

you help me now?" That was Sheila's prayer. It gave her little comfort,

but she did fall asleep from the mental exhaustion to which it brought at

least the relief of expression.

When she woke, she found the world a horrible confusion of storm. It

could hardly be called morning--a heavy, flying darkness of drift, a wind

filled with icy edges that stung the face and cut the eyes, a wind with

the voice of a driven saw. The little cabin was caught in the whirling

heart of a snow spout twenty feet high. The firs bent and groaned. There

is a storm-fear, one of the inherited instinctive fears. Sheila's little

face looked out of the whipped windows with a pinched and shrinking

stare. She went from window to hearth, looking and listening, all day. A

drift was blown in under the door and hardly melted for all the blazing

fire. That night she couldn't go to bed. She wrapped herself in blankets

and curled herself up in the chair, nodding and starting in the circle of

the firelight.

For three terrible days the world was lost in snow. Before the end of

that time Sheila was talking to herself and glad of the sound of her own

hurried little voice. Then, like God, came a beautiful stillness and the

sun. She opened the door on the fourth morning and saw, above the fresh,

soft, ascending dazzle of the drift, a sky that laughed in azure, the

green, snow-laden firs, a white and purple peak. She spread out her hands

to feel the sun and found it warm. She held it like a friendly hand. She

forced herself that day to shovel, to sweep, even to eat. Perhaps Cosme

would be back before night. He and the parson would have waited for the

storm to be over before they made their start. She believed in her own

excuses for five uneasy days, and then she believed in the worst of all

her fears. She had a hundred to choose from--Cosme's desertion, Cosme's

death.... One day she spent walking to and fro with her nails driven into

her palms.

* * * * *

Late that night the white world dipped into the still influence of a full

white moon. Before Hilliard's cabin the great firs caught the light with

a deepening flush of green, their shadows fell in even lavender tracery

delicate and soft across the snow, across the drifted roof. The smoke

from the half-buried chimney turned to a moving silver plume across the

blue of the winter night sky--intense and warm as though it reflected an

August lake.

The door of the cabin opened with a sharp thrust and Sheila stepped

out. She walked quickly through the firs and stood on the edge of the

open range-land, beyond and below which began the dark ridge of the

primeval woods. She stood perfectly still and lifted her face to the

sky. For all the blaze of the moon the greater stars danced in

radiance. Their constellations sloped nobly across her dazzled vision.

She had come very close to madness, and now her brain was dumb and

dark as though it had been shut into a blank-walled cell. She stood

with her hands hanging. She had no will nor wish to pray. The knowledge

had come to her that if she went out and looked this winter Pan in the

face, her brain would snap, either to life or death. It would burst its

prison ... She stared, wide-eyed, dry-eyed, through the immense cold

height of air up at the stars.

All at once a door flew open in her soul and she knew God ... no visible

presence and yet an enveloping reality, the God of the savage earth, of

the immense sky, of the stars, the God unsullied and untempted by man's

worship, no God that she had ever known, had ever dreamed of, had ever

prayed to before. She did not pray to Him now. She let her soul stand

open till it was filled as were the stars and the earth with light....

The next day Sheila found her voice and sang at her work. She gave

herself an overwhelming task of cleaning and scrubbing. She was on her

knees like a charwoman, sniffing the strong reek of suds, when there came

a knocking at her door. She leapt up with pounding heart. But the

knocking was more like a scraping and it was followed by a low whine. For

a second Sheila's head filled with a fog of terror and then came a homely

little begging bark, just the throaty, snuffling sob of a homeless puppy.

Sheila took Cosme's six-shooter, saw that it was loaded, and, standing in

the shelter of the door, she slowly opened it. A few moments later the

gun lay a yard away on the soapy, steaming floor and Berg was held tight

in her arms. His ecstasy of greeting was no greater than her ecstasy of

welcome. She cried and laughed and hugged and kissed him. That night,

after a mighty supper, he slept on her bed across her feet. Two or three

times she woke and reached her hand down to caress his rough thick coat.

The warmth of his body mounted from her feet to her heart. She thought

that he had been sent to her by that new God. As for Berg, he had found

his God again, the taming touch of a small human hand.

* * * * *

It was in May, one morning in May--she had long ago lost count of her

days--when Sheila stepped across her sill and saw the ground. Just a

patch it was, no bigger than a tablecloth, but it made her catch her

breath. She knelt down and ran her hands across it, sifted some gravel

through her fingers. How strange and various and colorful were the atoms

of stone, rare as jewels to her eyes so long used to the white and violet

monotony of snow. Beyond the gravel, at the very edge of the drift, a

slender crescent of green startled her eyes and--yes--there were a dozen

valorous little golden flowers, as flat and round as fairy doubloons.

Attracted by her cry, Berg came out, threw up his nose, and snuffed.

Spring spoke loudly to his nostrils. There was sap, rabbits were

about--all of it no news to him. Sheila sat down on the sill and hugged

him close. The sun was warm on his back, on her hands, on the boards

beneath her.

"May--May--May--" she whispered, and up in the firs quite suddenly, as

though he had thrown reserve to the four winds, a bluebird repeated her

"May--May--May" on three notes, high, low, and high again, a little

musical stumble of delight. It had begun again--that whistling-away of

winter fear and winter hopelessness.

The birds sang and built and the May flies crept up through the snow and

spun silver in the air for a brief dazzle of life.

The sun was so warm that Berg and Sheila dozed on their doorsill. They

did little else, these days, but dream and doze and wait.

The snow melted from underneath, sinking with audible groans of

collapse and running off across the frozen ground to swell Hidden

Creek. The river roared into a yellow flood, tripped its trees, sliced

at its banks. Sheila snowshoed down twice a day to look at it. It was a

sufficient barrier, she thought, between her and the world. And now,

she had attained to the savage joy of loneliness. She dreaded change.

Above all she dreaded Hilliard. That warmth of his beauty had faded

utterly from her senses. It seemed as faint as a fresco on a

long-buried wall. Intrusion must bring anxiety and pain, it might bring

fear. She had had long communion with her stars and the God whose name

they signaled. She, with her dog friend under her hand, had come to

something very like content.

The roar of Hidden Creek swelled and swelled. After the snow had shrunk

into patches here and there under the pines and against hilly slopes,

there was still the melting of the mountain glaciers.

"Nobody can possibly cross!" Sheila exulted. "A man would have to risk

his life." And it was in one of those very moments of her savage

self-congratulation when there came the sound of nearing hoofs.

She was sitting on her threshold, watching the slow darkness, a

sifting-down of ashes through the still air. It was so very still that

the little new moon hung there above the firs like faint music. Silver

and gray, and silver and green, and violet--Sheila named the delicacies

of dappled light. The stars had begun to shake little shivers of radiance

through the firs. They were softer than the winter stars--their keenness

melted by the warm blue of the air. Sheila sat and held her knees and

smiled. The distant, increasing tumult of the river, so part of the

silence that it seemed no sound at all, lulled her--Then--above it--the

beat of horse's hoofs.

At first she just sat empty of sensation except for the shock of those

faint thuds of sound. Then her heart began to beat to bursting; with

dread, with a suffocation of suspense. She got up, quiet as a thief. The

horse stopped. There came a step, rapid and eager. She fled like a

furtive shadow into the house, fell on her knees there by the hearth, and

hid her face against the big hide-covered chair. Her eyes were full of

cold tears. Her finger-tips were ice. She was shaking--shuddering,

rather--from head to foot. The steps had come close, had struck the

threshold. There they stopped. After a pause, which her pulses filled

with shaken rhythm, her name was spoken--So long it had been since she

had heard it that it fell on her ear like a foreign speech.

"Sheila! Sheila!"

She lifted her head sharply. It was not Hilliard's voice.

"Sheila--" There was such an agony of fear in the softly spoken

syllables, there was such a weight of dread on the breath of the speaker,

that, for very pity, Sheila forgot herself. She got up from the floor and

moved dazedly to meet the figure on the threshold. It was dimly outlined

against the violet evening light. Sheila came up quite close and put her

hands on the tense, hanging arms. They caught her. Then she sobbed and

laughed aloud, calling out in her astonishment again and again, softly,

incredulously--

"_You_, Dickie? Oh, Dickie, Dickie, it's--_you_?"

CHAPTER XIV

SHEILA AND THE STARS

Hilliard's first messenger had been hindered by death. Several times it

seemed that his second messenger would suffer the same grim prevention.

But this second messenger was young and set like steel to his purpose. He

left the railroad at Millings, hired a horse, crossed the great plain

above the town and braved the Pass, dangerous with overbalanced weights

of melting snow. There, on the lonely Hill, he had his first encounter

with that Arch-Hinderer. A snow-slide caught him and he left his horse

buried, struggling out himself from the cold smother like a maimed insect

to lie for hours by the road till breath and life came back to him. He

got himself on foot to the nearest ranch, and there he hired a fresh

horse and reached Rusty, at the end of the third day.

Rusty was overshadowed by a tragedy. The body of the trapper, Hilliard's

first messenger, had been found under the melting snow, a few days

before, and to the white-faced young stranger was given that stained and

withered letter in which Hilliard had excused and explained his

desertion.

Nothing, at Rusty, had been heard of Sheila. No one knew even that she

had ever left Miss Blake's ranch--the history of such lonely places is a

sealed book from snowfall until spring. Their tragedies are as dumb as

the tragedies of animal life. No one had ever connected Sheila's name

with Hilliard's. No one knew of his plans for her. The trapper had set

off without delay, not even going back to his house, some little distance

outside of Rusty, to tell his wife that he would be bringing home a

lodger with him. There was, to be sure, at the office a small bundle of

letters all in the same hand addressed to Miss Arundel. They had to wait,

perforce, till the snow-bound country was released.

"It's not likely even now," sly and twinkling Lander of the hotel told

Dickie, "that you can make it to Miss Blake's place. No, sir, nor to

Hilliard's neither. Hidden Creek's up. She's sure some flood this time of

the year. It's as much as your life's good for, stranger."

But Dickie merely smiled and got for himself a horse that was "good in

deep water." And he rode away from Rusty without looking back.

He rode along a lush, wet land of roaring streams, and, on the bank of

Hidden Creek, there was a roaring that drowned even the beating of his

heart. The flood straddled across his path like Apollyon.

A dozen times the horse refused the ford--at last with a desperate toss

of his head he made a plunge for it. Almost at once he was swept from the

cobbled bed. He swam sturdily, but the current whirled him down like a

straw--Dickie slipped from the saddle on the upper side so that the

water pressed him close to the horse, and, even when they both went

under, he held to the animal with hands like iron. This saved his life.

Five blind, black, gasping minutes later, the horse pulled him up on the

farther bank and they stood trembling together, dazed by life and the

warmth of the air.

It was growing dark. The heavy shadow of the mountain fell across them

and across the swollen yellow river they had just escaped. There began to

be a dappling light--the faint shining of that slim young moon. She was

just a silver curl there above the edge of the hill. In an hour she would

set. Her brightness was as shy and subtle as the brightness of a smile.

The messenger pulled his trembling body to the wet saddle and, looking

about for landmarks that had been described to him, he found the faint

trail to Hilliard's ranch. Presently he made out the low building under

its firs. He dropped down, freed the good swimmer and turned him loose,

then moved rapidly across the little clearing. It was all so still.

Hidden Creek alone made a threatening tumult. Dickie stopped before he

came to the door. He stood with his hands clenched at his sides and his

chin lifted. He seemed to be speaking to the sky. Then he stumbled to the

door and called,

"Sheila--"

She seemed to rise up from the floor and stand before him and put her

hands on his arms.

A sort of insanity of joy, of childish excitement came upon Sheila when

she had recognized her visitor. She flitted about the room, she laughed,

she talked half-wildly--it had been such a long silence--in broken,

ejaculatory sentences. It was Dickie's dumbness, as he leaned against the

door, looking at her, that sobered her at last. She came close to him

again and saw that he was shivering and that streams of water were

running from his clothes to the floor.

"Why, Dickie! How wet you are!"--Again she put her hands on his arms--he

was indeed drenched. She looked up into his face. It was gray and drawn

in the uncertain light.

"That dreadful river! How did you cross it!"

Dickie smiled.

"It would have taken more than a river to stop me," he said in his old,

half-demure, half-ironical fashion. And that was all Sheila ever heard of

that brief epic of his journey. He drew away from her now and went over

to the fire.

"Dickie"--she followed him--"tell me how you came here. How you

knew where I was. Wait--I'll get you some of Cosme's clothes--and a

cup of tea."

This time, exhausted as he was, Dickie did not fail to stand up to take

the cup she brought him. He shook his head at the dry clothes. He didn't

want Hilliard's things, thank you; he was drying out nicely by the fire.

He wasn't a bit cold. He sat and drank the tea, leaning forward, his

elbows on his knees. He was, after all, just the same, she decided--only

more so. His Dickie-ness had increased a hundredfold. There was still

that quaint look of having come in from the fairy doings of a midsummer

night. Only, now that his color had come back and the light of her lamp

shone on him, he had a firmer and more vital look. His sickly pallor had

gone, and the blue marks under his eyes--the eyes were fuller, deeper,

more brilliant. He was steadier, firmer. He had definitely shed the

pitifulness of his childhood. And Sheila did not remember that his mouth

had so sweet a firm line from sensitive end to end of the lips.

Her impatience was driving her heart faster at every beat.

"You _must_, please, tell me everything now, Dickie," she pleaded,

sitting on the arm of Hilliard's second chair. Her cheeks burned; her

hair, grown to an awkward length, had come loose from a ribbon and fallen

about her face and shoulders. She had made herself a frock of

orange-colored cotton stuff--something that Hilliard had bought for

curtains. It was a startling color enough, but it could not dim her gypsy

beauty of wild dark hair and browned skin with which the misty and

spiritual eyes and the slightly straightened and saddened lips made

exquisite disharmony.

Dickie looked up at her a minute. He put down his cup and got to his

feet. He went to stand by the shelf, half-turned from her.

"Tell me, at least," she begged in a cracked key of suspense, "do you

know anything about--_Hilliard_?"

At that Dickie was vividly a victim of remorse.

"Oh--Sheila--damn! I _am_ a beast. Of course--he's all right. Only, you

see, he's been hurt and is in the hospital. That's why I came."

"You?--Hilliard?--Dickie. I can't really understand." She pushed back her

hair with the same gesture she had used in the studio when Sylvester

Hudson's offer of "a job" had set her brain whirling.

"No, of course. You wouldn't." Dickie spoke slowly again, looking at the

rug. "I went East--"

"But--Hilliard?"

He looked up at her and flashed a queer, pained sort of smile. "I am

coming to him, Sheila. I've got to tell you _some_ about myself before I

get around to him or else you wouldn't savvy--"

"Oh." She couldn't meet the look that went with the queer smile, for it

was even queerer and more pained, and was, somehow, too old a look for

Dickie. So she said, "Oh," again, childishly, and waited, staring at

her fingers.

"I went to New York because I thought I'd find you there, Sheila. Pap's

hotel was on fire."

"Did you really burn it down, Dickie?"

He started violently. "_I_ burned it down? Good Lord! No. What made you

think such a thing?"

"Never mind. Your father thought so."

Dickie's face flushed. "I suppose he would." He thought it over, then

shrugged his shoulders. "I didn't. I don't know how it started ... I went

to New York and to that place you used to live in--the garret. I had the

address from the man who took Pap there."

"The studio? _Our_ studio?--_You_ there, Dickie?"

"Yes, ma'am. I lived there. I thought, at first, you might

come ... Well"--Dickie hurried as though he wanted to pass quickly over

this necessary history of his own experience--"I got a job at a hotel."

He smiled faintly. "I was a waiter. One night I went to look at a fire.

It was a big fire. I was trying to think out what it was like--you know

the way I always did. It used to drive Pap loco--I must have been talking

to myself. Anyway, there was a fellow standing near me with a notebook

and a pencil and he spoke up suddenly--kind of sharp, and said: 'Say that

again, will you?'--He was a newspaper reporter, Sheila ... That's how I

got into the job. But I'm only telling you because--"

Sheila hit the rung of her chair with an impatient foot. "Oh, Dickie! How

silly you are! As if I weren't _dying_ to hear all about it. How did you

get 'into the job'? What job?"

"Reporting," said Dickie. He was troubled by this urgency of hers. He

began to stammer a little. "Of course, the--the fellow helped me a lot.

He got me on the staff. He went round with me. He--he took down what I

said and later he--he kind of edited my copy before I handed it in.

He--he was almighty good to me. And I--I worked awfully hard. Like Hell.

Night classes when I wasn't on night duty, and books. Then, Sheila, I

began to get kind of crazy over words." His eyes kindled. And his face.

He straightened. He forgot himself, whatever it was that weighed upon

him. "Aren't they wonderful? They're like polished stones--each one a

different shape and color and feel. You fit 'em this way and that and

turn 'em and--all at once, they shine and sing. God! I never knowed what

was the matter with me till I began to work with words--and that _is_

work. Sheila! Lord! How you hate them, and love them, and curse them, and

worship them. I used to think I wanted _whiskey_." He laughed scorn at

that old desire; then came to self-consciousness again and was

shamefaced--"I guess you think I am plumb out of my head," he apologized.

"You see, it was because I was a--a reporter, Sheila, that I happened to

be there when Hilliard was hurt. I was coming home from the night courts.

It was downtown. At a street-corner there was a crowd. Somebody told me;

'Young Hilliard's car ran into a milk cart; turned turtle. He's hurt.'

Well, of course, I knew it'd be a good story--all that about Hilliard and

his millions and his coming from the West to get his inheritance--it had

just come out a couple of months before...."

"His millions?" repeated Sheila. She slipped off the arm of her chair

without turning her wide look from Dickie and sat down with an air of

deliberate sobriety. "His inheritance?" she repeated.

"Yes, ma'am. That's what took him East. He had news at Rusty. He wrote

you a letter and sent it by a man who was to fetch you to Rusty. You were

to stay there with his wife till Hilliard would be coming back for you.

But, Sheila, the man was caught in a trap and buried by a blizzard. They

found him only about a week ago--with Hilliard's letter in his pocket."

Dickie fumbled in his own steaming coat. "Here it is. I've got it."

"Don't give it to me yet," she said. "Go on."

"Well," Dickie turned the shriveled and stained paper lightly in restless

fingers. "That morning in New York I got up close to the car and had my

notebook out. Hilliard was waiting for the ambulance. His ribs were

smashed and his arm broken. He was conscious. He was laughing and talking

and smoking cigarettes. I asked him some questions and he took a notion

to question _me_. 'You're from the West,' he said; and when I told him

'Millings,' he kind of gasped and sat up. That turned him faint. But when

they were carrying him off, he got a-holt of my hand and whispered, 'Come

see me at the hospital.' I was willing enough--I went. And they took me

to him--private room. And a nice-looking nurse. And flowers. He has lots

of friends in New York--Hilliard, you bet you--" It was irony again and

Sheila stirred nervously. That changed his tone. He moved abruptly and

came and sat down near her, locking his hands and bending his head to

study them in the old way. "He found out who I was and he told me about

you, Sheila, and, because he was too much hurt to travel or even to

write, he asked me to go out and carry a message for him. Nothing would

have kept me from going, anyway," Dickie added quaintly. "When I learned

what had been happening and how you were left and no letters coming from

Rusty to answer his--well, sir, I could hardly sit still to hear about

all that, Sheila. But, anyway--" Dickie moved his hands. They sought the

arms of his chair and the fingers tightened. He looked past Sheila. "He

told me then how it was with you and him. That you were planning to be

married. And I promised to find you and tell you what he said."

"What did he say?"

Dickie spoke carefully, using his strange gift. With every word his

face grew a trifle whiter, but that had no effect upon his eloquence.

He painted a vivid and touching picture of the shattered and wistful

youth. He repeated the shaken words of remorse and love. "I want her to

come East and marry me. I love her. Tell her I love her. Tell her I can

give her everything she wants in all the world. Tell her to come--" And

far more skillfully than ever Hilliard himself could have done, Dickie

pleaded the intoxication of that sudden shower of gold, the

bewildering change in the young waif's life, the necessity he was under

to go and see and touch the miracle. There was a long silence after

Dickie had delivered himself of the burden of his promise. The fire

leapt and crackled on Hilliard's forsaken hearth. It threw shadows and

gleams across Dickie's thin, exhausted face and Sheila's inscrutably

thoughtful one.

She held out her hand.

"Give me the letters now, Dickie."

He handed her the bundle that had accumulated in Rusty and the little

withered one taken from the body of the trapper. Sheila took them and

held them on her knee. She pressed both her hands against her eyes; then,

leaning toward the fire, she read the letters, beginning with that one

that had spent so many months under the dumb snow.

Berg, who had investigated Dickie, leaned against her knee while she

read, his eyes fixed upon her. She read and laid the pile by on the table

behind her. She sat for a long while, elbows on the arms of her chair,

fingers laced beneath her chin. She seemed to be looking at the fire, but

she was watching Dickie through her eyelashes. There was no ease in his

attitude. He had his arms folded, his hands gripped the damp sleeves of

his coat. When she spoke, he jumped as though she had fired a gun.

"It is not true, Dickie, that things were--were that way between Cosme

and me ... We had not settled to be married ..." She paused and saw that

he forced himself to sit quiet. "Do you really think," she said, "that

the man that wrote those letters, loves me?" Dickie was silent. He would

not meet her look. "So you promised Hilliard that you would take me back

to marry him?" There was an edge to her voice.

Dickie's face burned cruelly. "No," he said with shortness. "I was going

to take you to the train and then come back here. I am going to take up

this claim of Hilliard's--he's through with it. He likes the East. You

see, Sheila, he's got the whole world to play with. It's quite true." He

said this gravely, insistently. "He can give you everything--"

"And you?"

Dickie stared at her with parted lips. He seemed afraid to breathe lest

he startle away some hesitant hope. "I?" he whispered.

"I mean--_you_ don't like the East?--You will give up your work?"

"Oh--" He dropped back. The hope had flown and he was able to breathe

again, though breathing seemed to hurt. "Yes, ma'am. I'll give up

newspaper reporting. I don't like New York."

"But, Dickie--your--words? I'd like to see something you've written."

Dickie's hand went to an inner pocket.

"I wanted you to see this, Sheila," His eyes were lowered to hide a

flaming pride. "My _poems_."

Sheila felt a shock of dread. Dickie's _poems_! She was afraid to read

them. She could not help but think of his life at Millings, of that

sordid hotel lobby ... Newspaper stories--yes--that was imaginable.

But--poetry? Sheila had been brought up on verse. There was hardly a

beautiful line that had not sung itself into the fabric of her brain.

"Poems?" she repeated, just a trifle blankly; then, seeing the hurt in

his face, about the sensitive and delicate lips, she put out a quick,

penitent hand. "Let me see them--at once!"

He handed a few folded papers to her. They were damp. He put his face

down to his hands and looked at the floor as though he could not bear to

watch her face. Sheila saw that he was shaking. It meant so much to him,

then--? She unfolded the papers shrinkingly and read. As she read, the

blood rushed to her checks for shame. She ought never to have doubted

him. Never after the first look into his face, never after hearing him

speak of the "cold, white flame" of an unforgotten winter night. Dickie's

words, so greatly loved and groped for, so tirelessly pursued in the face

of his world's scorn and injury, came to him, when they did come, on

wings. In the four short poems, there was not a word outside of his inner

experience, and yet she felt that those words had blown through him

mysteriously on a wind--the wind that fans such flame--

"Oh, little song you sang to me

A hundred, hundred days ago,

Oh, little song whose melody

Walks in my heart and stumbles so;

I cannot bear the level nights,

And all the days are over-long,

And all the hours from dark to dark

Turn to a little song--"

"Like the beat of the falling rain,

Until there seems no roof at all,

And my heart is washed with pain--"

"Why is a woman's throat a bird,

White in the thicket of the years?--"

Sheila suddenly thrust back the leaves at him, hid her face and fell to

crying bitterly. Dickie let fall his poems; he hovered over her, utterly

bewildered, utterly distressed.

"Sheila--h-how could they possibly hurt you so? It was your song--your

song--Are you angry with me--? I couldn't help it. It kept singing in

me--It--it hurt."

She thrust his hand away.

"Don't be kind to me! Oh--I am ashamed! I've treated you _so_! And--and

snubbed you. And--and condescended to you, Dickie. And shamed you.

You--! And you can write such lines--and you are great--you will be very

great--a poet! Dickie, why couldn't I see? Father would have seen. Don't

touch me, please! I can't bear it. Oh, my dear, you must have been

through such long, long misery--there in Millings, behind that desk--all

stifled and cramped and shut in. And when I came, I might have helped

you. I might have understood ... But I hurt you more."

"Please don't, Sheila--it isn't true. Oh,--_damn_ my poems!"

This made her laugh a little, and she got up and dried her eyes and sat

before him like a humbled child. It was quite terrible for Dickie. His

face was drawn with the discomfort of it. He moved about the room,

miserable and restless.

Sheila recovered herself and looked up at him with a sort of wan

resolution.

"And you will stay here and work the ranch and write, Dickie?"

"Yes, ma'am." He managed a smile. "If you think a fellow can push a

plough and write poetry with the same hand."

"It's been done before. And--and you will send me back to Hilliard

and--the good old world?"

Dickie's artificial smile left him. He stood, white and stiff, looking

down at her. He tried to speak and put his hand to his throat.

"And I must leave you here," Sheila went on softly, "with my stars?"

She got up and walked over to the door and stood, half-turned from him,

her fingers playing with the latch.

Dickie found part of his voice.

"What do you mean, Sheila, about your stars?"

"You told me," she said carefully, "that you would go and work and then

come back--But, I suppose--"

That was as far as she got. Dickie flung himself across the room. A chair

crashed. He had his arms about her. He was shaking. That pale and tender

light was in his face. The whiteness of a full moon, the whiteness of a

dawn seemed to fall over Sheila.

"He--he can give you everything--" Dickie said shakily.

"I've been waiting"--she said--"I didn't know it until lately. But I've

been waiting, so long now, for--for--" She closed her eyes and lifted her

soft sad mouth. It was no longer patient.

That night Dickie and Berg lay together on the hide before the fire,

wrapped in a blanket. Dickie did not sleep. He looked through the

uncurtained, horizontal window, at the stars.

"You've got everything else, Hilliard," he muttered. "You've got the

whole world to play with. After all, it was your own choice. I told you

how it was with me. I promised I'd play fair. I did play fair." He sighed

deeply and turned with his head on his arm and looked toward the door of

the inner room. "It's like sleeping just outside the gate of Heaven,

Berg," he said. "I never thought I'd get as close as that--" He listened

to the roar of Hidden Creek. "It won't be long, old fellow, before we

take her down to Rusty and bring her back." Tears stood on Dickie's

eye-lashes. "Then we'll walk straight into Heaven." He played with the

dog's rough mane. "She'll keep on looking at the stars," he murmured.

"But I'll keep on looking at her--_Sheila_."

But Sheila, having made her choice, had shut her eyes to the world and to

the stars and slept like a good and happy child.