Evelyn he shook his head disparagingly. "Damn pletty gal, but not good
business ploposition!" He then turned a considering attention upon
Sarah, and nodded his head approvingly. "She all light. Fat squaw!
Skukum squaw. Not lightfoot gadabout! Damfine cook, eh?" he inquired of
the maid. "Squat by fire, fly venison, leady chiefs leturn flom hunting?
Shake!" He held out a covenanting hand.
"What, me become the bride of a heathen!" shrieked Sarah, horrified.
"Me no heathen," indignantly protested Chilkat Jo. "Me swear, gamble,
dlink like hell, plenty wives, laise Cain, all same as white man."
"Joseph, my son, I will revise your code later," Maclane told him.
"Meanwhile, this is not a marriage proposition. Are you willing to help
Miss Durant here with her household chores--as a favor, you know," he
hastened to add.
"Not as a favor at all," broke in Evelyn, in a high, hard voice. "I wish
to engage a man-servant, at good wages; one who knows his place and can
take orders, and----"
Her voice died before the Indian's fixed regard. "No squaw say to me,
Mush! Get up, there! like dog. Mush! Lie down like dog. Me damn high
muckamuck Skukum chief!" Wrapping more closely about him the blanket
that, with a boiled shirt and store trousers, formed his costume, he
re-entered the mission with the unsurpassable dignity of his race.
Evelyn rose without a glance in the direction of Scarlett, who had
rejoined them. "Come, Sarah. Thank you very much for all your good
offices, Mr. Maclane. I anticipate the suggestion you and the Sergeant
are obviously about to make: that I cook, wash, scrub, sew for myself."
"Considering the conditions of camp life, my dear, it might be wise,"
acquiesced the minister, as he shook hands.
"Just for a lark, ye know," murmured Scarlett, pacifically, saluting.
But though her pretty lip trembled, Evelyn held her head high and passed
him without a sign.
VII
PEACE, PERFECT PEACE
Feeling that on her father's return she could requite the obligation a
thousandfold, Evelyn consented to remain with her party as guests of
Perdu's Grand Hotel while the shack at Lost Shoe Creek was being made
ready for their tenancy.
Perdu, lying on a large lake of the same name, is port of entry, and
base of supplies, to the goldfields beyond. Being at that time in the
third year of its existence it had a highly developed social and
commercial life. For in its initial season a camp is likely to be a
bedlam of frenzied maniacs shrieking, Gold, gold, gold! The second
season witnesses a slump proportioned to the inflated values of its
predecessor. But if it weathers to a third, then some sort of poise is
attained, as steady industries develop and existence seeks a normal
plane. The fancy-women who flock wherever the nuggets are thickest, now
segregate themselves in a secluded quarter of the township; married men
send for their families, while the unblessed bachelor whistles "The Girl
I Left Behind Me," or pays attention to the schoolteacher. On all sides
one sees the effort, sometimes pitiful, always human and worthy, from
the harsh matrix of the wilderness to wrest a home. And then follow the
petty complexities of a miscalled civilization. To Evelyn's surprise,
after the first warm tender of hospitality, she encountered the same
restricted social conditions in Perdu that obtain in villages on the
"outside," as the world beyond the mountains in northern latitudes is
termed. Women left cards on her; heads of rival cliques warned her one
against the other; the wife of the principal grocer planned a tea in her
honor.
On a brilliant summer morning, without cloud or shadow, mountains and
valleys alike lying exposed to a broadside of sun that had been warming
to its work since four hours after midnight, Evelyn set out to return
the visit of the town surveyor's wife. A short cut through the clustered
willow bushes brought her to the back door of their cabin, where she
came upon the hostess at her washtubs, while from the doorstep the town
surveyor was cleaning his teeth publicly. Wholly unembarrassed, the
good people greeted their visitor with cordiality, and conducted her
into the living-room, where babies, cot beds and cooking commingled with
such observances of decency and taste as a woman of refinement, no
matter how overworked, seems somehow generally able to contrive. In
point of cultivation, so Evelyn soon discovered, her new acquaintances
were fully her equal. Delighted as they professed themselves to be that
her stay would be of long duration, yet to the plans she outlined for
her projected improvement of the district they showed an almost marked
indifference. When she dropped hints about the free library she intended
to establish, Mr. Grayson began quite inappositely to brag of having
made more money the previous winter by lumbering than in the way of his
profession, owing to the fact that "up here, thank God! no one, man or
woman, loses caste by honest labor of any sort." When she alluded to the
art furniture she thought of importing for her domicile, Mrs. Grayson
cautioned her to be very careful of her lamp chimneys, the commonest
kind costing fifty cents at local stores, because, so the storekeepers
said, of the exorbitant freight rates that prevailed. Also she advised
Evelyn to start right in and do her own washing, as the local laundries
charged something over four dollars for a dozen simple pieces. When Miss
Durant mentioned the theatre she was arranging to have built, the opera
troupe with which she already was negotiating for a series of
performances to beguile the long Klondike winter, the Graysons merely
said, almost with sarcasm, "How nice!" adding that the camp contrived to
get up some fair entertainments of its own in the hall over the
truckman's stable. Coming to the conclusion that they were jealous lest
her advent should undermine the social prestige which, so Hastie had
informed her, they enjoyed, Evelyn rose to take her leave and, kindly
wishful to put them at their ease, admired the babies, the bearskin
rugs, the horns of mountain sheep and goat upon the wall, the view, the
two geraniums in pots upon the window-sill; accepted an invitation to a
wild-strawberry picnic, offered to teach them bridge, and departed in a
glow of self-gratulation at her tact in dealing with the envious and
small-minded.
On the hotel piazza she found the minister waiting for her, and with him
Scarlett. To the latter she had not spoken since the day of their
difference, for such she chose to consider it, in regard to Gelly. True,
more than once she had caught sight of him galloping down the road or
striding by on some official errand, but never had she lifted a finger
to delay him, nor he appeared conscious of her presence.
[Illustration: DEPARTED IN A GLOW OF SELF CONGRATULATION AT HER TACT.]
Ignoring his greeting, in high good humor with herself and all the
world, Evelyn opened fire. "Mr. Maclane, I wish you would tell that
young man he owes me an apology."
Scarlett suppressed a gratified smile. "Mr. Maclane, will ye convey to
the speaker that she'll have to prove the debt for me to pay it?"
"Tell him the last time we met he put me in the wrong," said Evelyn,
prettily, the glow of her goodness toward the envious Graysons still
upon her. "He behaved as though he thought me narrow, contemptible--and
the worst is, the shoe pinches, because in a tiny degree I fear it may
have been true."
She waited with a charming air of penitence for contradiction, but, to
her astonishment, none came.
Instead, "I'm a brute, just," Scarlett remorsefully described himself.
"Who am I to hold ye up the looking-glass? I'll never be so rude again."
"Oh"--Miss Durant stiffened perceptibly--"I do not usually find the
reflection unbearable to contemplate."
"I've lived so long in the open, in primitive conditions," Scarlett,
unmindful of her interruption, went on, "I always blurt out whatever
pops into my mind. Well, there's precedent. In Eden, Adam must have
called a spade a spade."
"Ah, my young friend, but there's no record of his having called Eve a
spade," observed Maclane, with a twinkle in his eye.
"Faith, I'll drop the spade, then," laughed the Irishman, "if she'll let
me call her Eve!"
"Tell him," laughed Miss Durant, with heightened color, "that he goes
too far."
"Tell her I'd go farther--to any lengths, for her, so long as it didn't
take me from her side."
"Tell him he's kissed the blarney-stone."
"Tell her I only practiced on it to keep my hand in till she should
come."
"How dare you!" cried Evelyn, feeling that she ought to be very angry.
"Come, come, my children, peace," prescribed Maclane. "Miss Durant, I am
here as a petitioner. One of my dear Indians, in fact the sister-in-law
of Chilkat Jo, has a baby----"
"Velly damfine Clistian baby!" interpolated the trader, who was sitting
on the step near by, whittling out a toy canoe.
"Oh, Joseph!" the minister protested, "when will you learn that a damn
baby cannot be a Christian baby--nor a Christian baby a damn baby. We
are to baptize the little one this morning," he told Evelyn. "And I am
asked to beg you to stand godmother."
"For a heathen unregenerate, miss!" Sarah put her head out of the window
just behind the group. "Don't you mix yourself up with that truck!"
"I'm a bit of a heathen nowadays myself." Maclane stopped Chilkat Jo's
angry outburst. "My dear Indians have converted me."
"I wonder you aren't afraid of being tried for heresy, sir," commented
Sarah, "talking that loose way."
"Perhaps I should be," agreed Maclane, "in the cities across yon
mountains. But here they hold us in a charmed circle, and who can escape
their spell?" He pointed to the lake, brilliantly ablaze, like a vessel
holding wondrous depths of color, in which the snow-capped peaks with
their V-shaped crevasses lay mirrored like cameos in turquoise relief.
"My Indians--in my civilized days I used to preach hell-fire to them,
till they scorned me for it, crying, 'Our children when they die become
birds of song. Why, then, should we give them to you Christians to be
burned?' Then, again, though I knew him to be a saint, dedicated in
Christ's name to the service of his fellow-men, I used to avoid my
brother, the Catholic priest, because his doctrines on the surface
differed from my own! Again, my Indians taught me, scoffing, 'If
Christianity makes enemies of her ministers, why, we want none of it.'
Yes, all that I have given the heathen have they requited me a
hundredfold, making me a Christian through the Christ I try to show to
them!"
"I will do what you ask me only too gladly, Mr. Maclane!" cried Evelyn,
understanding that this was the good minister's way of making peace
between herself and Chilkat Jo. "I shall be proud of my godchild; and I
promise it the finest cup from Tiffany's----"
"No, no! No presents, please," enjoined Maclane. "Only kindness,
neighborliness, and an appreciation of the heathen virtues. The Sergeant
here has consented to be godfather."
"The Sergeant!" involuntarily exclaimed Evelyn.
"Aye! In the short time he has been in charge, he has completely won the
hearts of the tribe of Raven and Frog. No baptism complete without
him."
"Oh, as a sponsor, I'm painting the town red," admitted the Irishman.
"And the Claim has a regular column of feeble-minded puns upon the
epidemic. Well, I only hope the Scarlett creepers won't turn to Scarlett
runners, in time of battle."
"I will tell Lallah that you consent. Be ready, both, please, when you
hear the chapel bell," directed the minister, going to the mission.
Scarlett lingered, but as Evelyn took no notice of him, "Thankee for the
pressing invitation," he remarked, drawing up a chair and seating
himself beside her. "And are ye beginning to feel acclimated among us
savages?"
"Oh, you are doing your best!" Evelyn assured him. "Though I must say,
even for the wilderness, the ideas of social distinction seem curiously
lax. Why, as his head waiter is off on a spree, Mr. Hastie has offered
me the place--three hundred dollars a month and tips!"
"Good pay," commented Scarlett. "Why don't ye take it? I'd ask no better
for my own sister, if I had one."
Evelyn tossed her head. "To pass dishes to unwashed barbarians in
corduroys who gobble off their knives and drink from their saucers.
Even for your own sister," she could not forbear asking, "wouldn't you
consider the situation rather primitive?"
"I should, and that's the situation's saving grace," he promptly
replied, "since primitive man is woman's best friend, once she makes him
realize she will not let him be her enemy."
Against her will, Evelyn looked at the speaker with reluctant
admiration, forced to recognize that however ignorant of class
distinctions the poor young man might be, his was certainly no ordinary
mentality. Accordingly, woman-like, she harked back to personalities,
hoping in shallow waters to take him, through his very superiority, at a
disadvantage. "Oh, we have nothing to complain of on the score of
friendliness," she laughed. "Our matrimonial opportunities seem limited
only by the number of single men within proposing radius. No, Sergeant,
I am not the belle. That proud position is disputed by Sarah and the
plainest orphan, who also is the most muscular, because they frankly
tell us, in a land where hired labor is not to be had a man must marry
to get some one to cook and wash for him. However, such few score of
proposals as have come my way, I honestly can brag, are for myself,
since I am not considered a specially useful 'household proposition,'
and oddly enough my great wealth seems not to impress these
poverty-stricken millionaires in the least degree."
"Oh, I tell ye, in a mining camp one gets down to first principles, or
lack of them," commented the soldier. "It's chaos, till man and woman
together evolve a paradise."
Evelyn waited, hoping he also would propose to her in order that she
might refuse him, not kindly, with the consideration she had shown the
other poor victims who had laid their hearts at her feet, but with
scathing denunciation of his insolence. Instead of improving his
opportunity, however, the soldier rose. "Ye'll bid me to the wedding,
Miss Durant?"
"In what capacity--officially, or as a guest?"
"Not as a mourner, that I swear."
"I may decide to elope."
"Impossible! In my bally those that want a marriage license have to come
to me."
"I've always had a leaning toward the nobility," remarked Evelyn, rather
maliciously. "Are there no men of title in the camp?"
"A handful or so of younger sons," Scarlett informed her, "and a
pathetic lot in the main they are. 'Remittance Men,' we call them,
because they are on allowance to stay away from home, avowedly that in a
new country they may turn over a new leaf, but in reality that their
families may be spared the shame of witnessing their final
disintegration. Be good to such when ye come across them, Miss Durant,
for the sake of what they ought to be, but don't marry them, for the
whole lot of them together wouldn't make one decent man."
Evelyn laughed, but her face crimsoned. "Dear, dear! And suppose, after
all, you disapprove my choice?"
"Faith, I'll exercise my official prerogative and take ye in charge
myself! Meanwhile, I must turn my attention toward yonder suspect." He
indicated a person with the deportment of a personage, who, dressed in
the height of fashion, was strolling, tourist-wise, kodak in hand, down
the village street.
"Why, who can that be?" Evelyn leaned forward with interest.
"That's my own question. He travels under the name of the Count St.
Hilaire."
"There's something very familiar about his appearance. I wonder if I
mayn't have met him at Newport, or Washington. If so, bring him here
that I may renew the acquaintance, Sergeant, please."
"I'll search his title first." Scarlett ran down the veranda steps. "Now
look out for trouble," he muttered to himself, seeing the stranger pause
opposite a cottage in the Indian quarter, and level his camera at the
totem-pole in front of it.
A crowd of angry Indians who had been squatting on mats in the sunshine,
making moccasins and weaving baskets, instantly rose and swarmed about
him, vehemently protesting in Chinook against this insult to their
sacred emblems, Chilkat Jo acting as interpreter.
"Shame, shame, cursed shame to photoglaph the Laven and the Flog!" he
cried, alluding to the totem's tribal device. "Velly godam Clistian
shame!"
"Hold on!" cried Scarlett, impartially, interposing his tall form
between the evidently frightened foreigner and the avenging group.
"Mais--ze Klondike barber-pole--I no steal him; je vous jure, gendarme!
I make ze photographie!"
"Yes, but unless you pay them for it to show your good will, the Indians
think you are marking them for death," the Sergeant instructed him.
"All right, honest Injun," he in turn assured the crowd. "Only
sun-picture. Big man pay you big money."
"Why," exclaimed Evelyn's astonished voice at Scarlett's elbow, "it is
my courier, Alphonse--he has let his beard grow! That is the kodak he
stole from me!"
"Sacre papier, ze mademoiselle!" shrieked the man, recognizing her; and
off he set as fast as his trembling limbs could carry him, Scarlett,
reinforced by the children of the Raven and the Frog, in hot pursuit.
"It's only what you might have expected, miss," remarked Sarah,
consolingly, as in mortified silence Evelyn returned to the veranda.
"The French is a deceitful nation. They always have to talk in a foreign
language so you can't understand 'em."
"It's all right!" Flushed and breathless, Scarlett came up. "He ran
plump into Barney's arms. Here's your camera, Miss Durant. Later I'll
get you to appear against the Count--just a formality, you know."
"I shall do nothing of the sort!" declared Evelyn loftily. "Instead, you
can fine me any amount you please for contempt of court. You doubtless
will enjoy doing it! As for the kodak, you can give it back to Alphonse.
I shall never touch it again!"
"Miss, you are ungrateful," Sarah reproved her, "and the young man
wounded in the fracas!"
"Wounded!" cried Evelyn, in dismay.
"Oh," disclaimed Scarlett, who was shaking his fingers as if to cast a
pain from them, "it's nothing. Only in protecting the Count's beauty
from an irate populace I gave my wrist a twist."
"Oh, a sprained wrist is nothing to boast of," derided Miss Durant.
"That's why I wasn't boasting of it." Scarlett turned to go.
"Nevertheless"--Evelyn put a detaining hand lightly on his arm--"I took
a course in First Aid to the Injured to fit myself for this life, and I
know that a sprain ought to be treated with something, for fear
something or other should set in. Sarah," she asked in a whisper, "what
treatment does one give a sprain?"
"Fermentation," prompted the maid, sagaciously.
"That's it: fomentation! Please, Sarah, go fetch me--whatever one needs
for fomentation."
"Believe me, it is not necessary." Scarlett gave his hand another shake.
"It soon will be all right."
"Sit here!" Evelyn motioned him, peremptorily, to a chair beside her.
"No, on this side. A soldier's first duty should be to obey."
"Ah, well, my arms are ever at your service, even in times of peace."
Scarlet leaned back, luxuriously, as she rolled up his sleeve.
"Of course, you understand I should do this for anybody," observed
Evelyn, sponging his wrist with the warm water Sarah had provided.
"Of course, ye understand I should fight in defence of anybody's
property," he matched her. "'Tis for that I draw my pay."
"Is it tender?" inquired Evelyn, pillowing his hand upon her lap and
dabbing it softly with a towel.
"Tender's not half the word for it." The patient turned his face aside.
"It's the limit of tenderness, and has to be treated on the homeopathic
principle."
"Miss, he makes light of it!" cried Sarah, who, under a harsh exterior,
was, by nature, kind. "But his poor brow is simply wrung with anguish."
She mopped the beads of perspiration that stifled mirth had brought upon
the Sergeant's comely forehead.
"Let us talk of other things to distract him," ordained Evelyn. "Come,
Sergeant, tell us all about yourself. Begin at the very beginning."
"Faith, like most babies," he complied, "I began by being the child of
my parents."
"Poor but honest folk, no doubt. Go on!"
"They died before my remembrance of them. I infer the honesty and
inherit the poverty. I was brought up by an aunt and uncle, who didn't
want me. One time when I came home from school for the holidays my aunt
just looked up from her novel and remarked, 'Oh, Jerry, how dirty you
are!' So I ran away to make my fortune."
"Which consists of something over a dollar a day and your keep."
"And the prospect of a pension for my widow."
"Your widow!" Evelyn dropped the hand she was engaged in bandaging. "I
didn't know----"
"Oh, I haven't got one yet," Scarlett hastened to assure her. "But I
shall, please God, if I live long enough."
"Sergeant, you are talking nonsense," said Evelyn. "Pain has made you
flighty."
"'Way up in the seventh heaven," assented Scarlett. "Don't be so cruel
as to call me down."
"There!" Having stuck a final pin in the handkerchief she had bound
about the wrist, Evelyn folded the soldier's arm across his breast.
"Sarah, go fetch me another sash, will you? I'm going to use this one
for a sling."
"Which color shall I get you, miss?" asked the maid, preparing to obey.
Evelyn shrugged her shoulders with indifference. "I don't care--though I
should think your own taste would lead you to see that blue goes best
with this frock. There, Sergeant"--having made a creditable cradle of
the ribbon for the soldier's arm and knotted it behind his neck, she
came in front of him and surveyed her work admiringly--"that will do, I
think. Now, remember, it must not be unbound for four and twenty hours.
Promise! I wish you would stop laughing in that silly way and tell me if
it feels all right, really."
"Joyous, beyond words," Scarlett affirmed. "I only wish I were that chap
in the mythology with a hundred hands--and every blessed one of them in
need of fomentation."
"I suppose you say these inane things to me because you think me
incapable of appreciating sense," commented Miss Durant. "Just because
all my poor little efforts to do good up here have seemed superfluous.
Oh, yes"--she checked the protest that rose to his lips--"you all have
been kindness personified, but I do not think you quite understand me,"
she complained, with the injured quaver of one who at heart knows
herself to be understood only too well. "I'm really not such an
overbearing, ill-natured girl; only, I acknowledge, a wee bit spoiled.
You see, after my mother died, when I was still a very small child, in
Colorado, my father sent me to a fashionable school in San Francisco,
and there I began to feel that in Colorado we had been quite savage.
Then, in my early 'teens I was put at another still more fashionable
school in Chicago, where I was made to feel that in San Francisco I had
been hopelessly Western. Next, I moved on to an ultra-fashionable school
in New York, where it was tacitly impressed on me that in Chicago we had
been positively vulgar. After this came a course of Dresden, Vienna,
London, Paris, by which I realized that in New York I had been
provincial, crude. On my return I felt myself cosmopolitan, a finished
product. Yet, in this short space up here you all have made me wonder
if, after all, all the time, I have not been a bit of a snob. Yes, you
can't contradict me. I know. A thoroughbred would have taken things as
she found them--would be at home anywhere, while I----" Having amazed
herself far more even than her hearer by this unexpected burst of
confidence, Miss Durant amazed herself still more by an unexpected burst
of tears.
"Poor child!" Scarlett compassionated her, while liking her thoroughly
for her candor. "Dear, dear little Evelyn, it's libelling yourself you
are, although it's true, and that's the sweetest part of it. Here, take
mine!" As she was hunting, between inconsolable sniffs, for the
handkerchief with which she herself had bandaged him, he tendered her
his own.
"Oh, the sprain--your wrist!" cried Evelyn, in alarm.
"That's all right," Scarlett reassured her, while drying her eyes with
the hand he had removed for the purpose from the sling. "It was the
other one that got the twist."