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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Murder Point, by Coningsby Dawson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Murder Point
+       A Tale of Keewatin
+
+
+Author: Coningsby Dawson
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 13, 2009  [eBook #29400]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MURDER POINT***
+
+
+E-text prepared by David T. Jones and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Canada Team (http://www.pgdpcanada.net) from
+digital material generously made available by Internet Archive/American
+Libraries (http://www.archive.org/details/americana) and the Google Books
+Library Project (http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/library.html)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive/American Libraries
+      (see http://www.archive.org/details/murderpointatal00dawsgoog)
+      or
+      the Google Books Library Project
+      (see http://books.google.com/books?id=x2omAAAAMAAJ&oe=UTF-8).
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDER POINT
+
+    *    *    *    *    *
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+The House of the Weeping Woman
+          Hodder and Stoughton, London
+
+The Worker and Other Poems
+          The Macmillan Co., New York
+
+    *    *    *    *    *
+
+
+MURDER POINT
+
+A Tale of Keewatin
+
+by
+
+CONINGSBY WILLIAM DAWSON
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Hodder & Stoughton
+New York
+George H. Doran Company
+
+Copyright, 1910, by
+George H. Doran Company
+
+The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                  PAGE
+
+    I. John Granger of Murder Point                         1
+   II. The Unbidden Guest                                  13
+  III. The Devil in the Klondike                           25
+   IV. Spurling's Tale                                     42
+    V. Cities Out of Sight                                 53
+   VI. The Pursuer Arrives                                 74
+  VII. The Corporal Sets Out                               86
+ VIII. The Last of Strangeways                            100
+   IX. The Break-up of the Ice                            112
+    X. A Message from the Dead                            120
+   XI. The Love of Woman                                  144
+  XII. He Reviews His Marriage, and is Put to the Test    162
+ XIII. The Dead Soul Speaks Out                           186
+  XIV. Spurling Makes a Request                           210
+   XV. Manitous and Shades of the Departed                225
+  XVI. In Hiding on Huskies' Island                       240
+ XVII. The Forbidden River                                257
+XVIII. The Betrayal                                       272
+  XIX. The Hand in the Doorway                            283
+   XX. Spurling Takes Fright                              297
+  XXI. The Murder in the Sky                              305
+ XXII. The Blizzard                                       318
+XXIII. The Last Chance                                    334
+
+
+MURDER POINT
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+JOHN GRANGER OF MURDER POINT
+
+
+John Granger, agent on the Last Chance River in the interests of
+Garnier, Parwin, and Wrath, independent traders in the territory of
+Keewatin, sat alone in his store at Murder Point. He sat upon an
+upturned box, with an empty pipe between his lips. In the middle of
+the room stood an iron stove which blazed red hot; through the single
+window, toward which he faced, the gold sun shone, made doubly
+resplendent in its shining by the reflected light cast up by the
+leagues of all-surrounding snow and ice.
+
+Speaking to himself, as is the habit of men who have lived many months
+alone in the aboriginal silence of the North, "Well, and what next?"
+he asked.
+
+He had been reviewing the uses to which he had put his thirty years of
+life, and was feeling far from satisfied. That a man of breeding, who
+had been given the advantages of a classical and university education,
+and was in addition an English barrister, should at the age of thirty
+be conducting an independent trader's store in a distant part of
+northern Canada did not seem right; Granger was conscious of the
+incongruity. During the past two years and a half he had obstinately
+refused to examine his career, had fought against introspection, and
+had striven to forget.
+
+In this he had been wise, for Keewatin is not a good place wherein to
+_remember_ and to balance the ledger of the soul; it is too remote
+from human habitation, too near to God--its vastness has robbed it of
+all standards, so that small misdemeanours may seem huge and
+disastrous as the sin of Cain. Madness lurks in its swampy creeks and
+wanders along the edges of its woodland seas, so that the border-line
+between natural and supernatural is very faintly marked.
+
+But to-day Granger had given way before the wave of emotional memories
+and had permitted his mind to recapitulate all the happiness which he
+had lost; and with this result, that like a child in a darkened house
+he feared to advance and stood still trembling, questioning the
+future, anticipating and dreading that which was next to come. It was
+the second week in April; the break-up of the winter had almost begun;
+the spring was striding up from the south and a cry of travel was in
+the air, both hopeful and melancholy. The world would soon be growing
+young again. Even in this desperate land the scars of the frost would
+soon be obliterated; but to his own life, he was painfully aware, the
+spring had vouchsafed no promise of return. Was it gone forever? he
+asked.
+
+At the present moment he was remembering London and St. James's Park
+with its banks of daffodils and showers of white may-blossom, its
+groups of laughing children at play, its parade of black-coated
+horsemen, with here and there the scarlet flash of a Life-guard as he
+sped trotting by, and for bass accompaniment to this music of the Joy
+of Life the continual low thunder which in the Mall the prancing
+hoofs of countless carriage-horses strummed.
+
+Now it was Piccadilly in which he wandered, returning from the west
+with his back toward the setting sun; the street-lamps had just been
+kindled, and ahead of him, massed above the housetops, the blue-grey
+clouds of evening hung. He watched the faces of the people as they
+passed, some eager, some jaded, some pleasure-seeking, some smug, and
+he strove to conjecture their aim in life. At the Circus he paused
+awhile, breathing deep and filling out his lungs with fragrance of
+violets and narcissi, which flower-girls clamoured for him to
+purchase. He bought a bunch and smiled faintly, contrasting the
+beautiful significance of the name of the vendor's profession with the
+slatternly person to whom it was applied. Then onwards he went to
+Leicester Square where the dazzling lights of music-halls flared and
+quickened, and scarlet-lipped Folly smiled out upon him from street
+corners, and beckoned through the dusk. In the old days it had always
+been when he had attained this point in his advance that the pleasure
+of London had failed, leaving him with a cramped sensation, a frenzied
+desire for escape, and an overwhelming sense of the inherent
+rottenness of western civilisation. It was upon such occasions that he
+saw, or thought he saw, the inevitable tendency of European cities to
+emasculate and corrupt the rugged nobilities of mankind. A revolt
+against artificiality had followed. Immediately, there in the heart of
+the world's greatest city, there had grown up about him the mirage of
+the primeval forest, whose boughs are steeped in silence, borne up by
+tall bare trunks, which lured him on to explore and adventure through
+untried lands, where quiet grows intense and intenser at each new
+step, till he should arrive at that ultimate contentment for which he
+blindly sought.
+
+He laughed at the memory, smiling bitterly at the manner in which that
+former self had been beguiled. As if to give emphasis to his jest he
+arose from his box, lounged over to the window, cleared its panes of
+mist with his hand, and gazed out upon the landscape of his choice. It
+stared back at him with immobile effrontery, with the glazed
+wide-parted eyes of the prostrate prize-fighter who, in his falling,
+has been stunned--eyes in which hatred is the only sign of life. He
+threw back his head and guffawed at the conceit, as though it had been
+conceived by a brain and given utterance to by a voice other than his
+own. Then he paused, drew himself erect, and his face went white; he
+had heard of solitary men in Keewatin who had commenced by laughing to
+themselves, and had ended by committing murder or suicide. Yet, as he
+stood in thought, he acknowledged the truth of the image; his
+existence on the Last Chance River was one long and wearisome struggle
+between himself and the intangible prize-fighter, whoever he might
+be,--Nature, the Elemental Spirit hostile to Creation, Keewatin, the
+Devil, call him what you like. Sometimes he had had the better of the
+combat, in which case days of peace had followed; but for the most
+part he stood at bay or crouched upon his knees, watching for his
+opportunity to rise; at his strongest he had only just sufficed to
+hold his invisible antagonist in check, battling for a victory which
+had been already awarded. He had long despaired of winning; the only
+question which now troubled him was "How long shall I be able to
+fight?"
+
+A certain story current in the district, concerning a Hudson Bay
+factor, flashed through his mind. At the beginning of the frost his
+fort had been stricken with smallpox; one by one his six white
+companions had died and the Indians had fled in terror, leaving him
+alone in the silence. In the unpeopled solitude of the long dark
+winter days and nights which had followed, he had grown strangely
+curious as to the welfare of his soul, and had petitioned God that it
+might be disembodied so that he might gaze upon it with his living
+eyes. After a week of continuous prayer, he had fastened on his
+snowshoes, and gone out upon the ice to seek God's sign. He had not
+travelled far before he had come to the mound where his six companions
+lay buried. There against the dusky sky-line he had seen a famished
+wolf standing over a scooped-out grave. So the factor had had his
+sign, and had looked upon his disembodied soul with his own eyes.
+
+When the ice broke up and the first canoe of half-breed voyageurs
+swept up to the fort, they had been met by a man who crawled upon
+hands and knees, and snarled like a husky or a coyote.
+
+Granger shrugged his shoulders and shuddered. He thanked his God that
+the spring was near by. Upon one thing he was determined, that
+whatever happened, though he should have to die--by his own hand, he
+would not grovel into Eternity upon his hands and knees as had that
+factor of the Hudson Bay.
+
+For relief from the turbulence of his thoughts he turned his attention
+to the frozen quiet of the world without. Not a feature in the
+landscape had changed throughout all the past five months. He had
+nothing new to learn about it: he had even committed to memory where
+each separate shadow would fall at each particular hour of the day.
+Straight out of the west the river ran so far as eye could reach,
+until it came to Murder Point. At close of day it seemed a molten
+pathway which led, without a waver, from Granger's store directly to
+the heart of the sun. Having arrived at the Point, the Last Chance
+River swept round to the northeast, and then to the north, until in
+many curves it poured its waters into the distant Hudson Bay. Its
+banks, in the open season, which lasted from May to October, were low
+and muddy; the country through which it flowed, known as the barren
+lands, was for the most part flat and densely wooded with a stunted
+growth of black spruce, jackpine, tamarack, poplar, willow, and birch.
+The river was the only highway: much of the forest which lay back from
+its banks was entirely unexplored on account of its swamps and the
+closeness of its underbrush. There were places within three miles of
+Murder Point where a white man had never travelled, and some where not
+even the Indians could penetrate. Partly for this reason the district
+was rich in game: the caribou, moose, lynx, bear, wolf, beaver,--
+wolverine, and all the smaller fur-bearing animals of the North
+abounded there. Seventy miles to the southwestward lay the nearest
+point of white habitation, where stood the Hudson Bay Company's Fort
+of God's Voice. Between Murder Point and the coast, for two hundred
+and fifty miles, there was no white settlement until the river's mouth
+was reached, where the Company's House of the Crooked Creek had been
+erected on the shores of the Bay. With his nearest neighbours, seventy
+miles distant at God's Voice, Granger had no intercourse, for he was
+regarded by them as an outcast inasmuch as he was an independent
+trader. Once was the time when Prince Rupert's _Company of Adventurers
+of England trading in the Hudson's Bay_ had held the monopoly of the
+fur trade over all this territory, from the Atlantic seaboard to the
+Pacific Coast; then to have been caught trapping or trading privately
+had meant almost certain death to the trespasser. Now that the powers
+of the Company had been curtailed, the only manner in which a Hudson
+Bay factor could show his displeasure toward the interloper was by
+ignoring his presence--a very real penalty in a land of loneliness,
+where, at the best, men can only hope to meet once or twice a
+year--and by rendering his existence as unbearable and silent as
+possible in every lawful and private way. In the art of ostracising,
+Robert Pilgrim, the factor at God's Voice, was a past master; during
+the two and a half years that Granger had been in Keewatin he had had
+direct communication with no one of the Company's white employees. On
+occasions certain of its Cree Indians and half-breed trappers had come
+to him stealthily, at dead of night, to see whether he would not offer
+them better terms for their season's catch of furs, or to inquire
+whether he would not give them liquor in exchange, the selling of
+which to an Indian in Keewatin is a punishable offence. These were
+usually loose characters who, being heavily in debt to the Company,
+were trying to postpone payment by selling to Granger on the sly; yet,
+even these men, when day had dawned, would pass him on the river
+without recognition, as if he were a stick or a block of ice. However,
+only by dealing with such renegades could he hope to pick up any
+profit for the proprietors of his store. His every gain was a loss to
+the factor, and _vice versa_; therefore by Robert Pilgrim he was not
+greatly beloved.
+
+Pilgrim was a man of conservative principles, who looked back with
+longing to the days when a factor was supreme in his own domain,
+holding discretionary powers over all his people's lives, who, after
+the giving of a third warning to an independent trader found poaching
+in his district, could dispose of him more or less barbarously
+according to his choice. Now that every man, whatever his company, had
+an equal right to gather furs in the Canadian North, he considered
+that he and his employers were being robbed; wherefore he made it his
+business to see that no friendship existed between any of his
+subordinates and the man at Murder Point. Hence it happened that in
+summer when the canoes and York boats, and in winter when the
+dog-teams and runners from God's Voice, went up and down river by the
+free-trading store of Garnier, Parwin and Wrath, no head was turned,
+and no sign given that anyone was aware that a white man, yearning for
+a handshake and the sound of spoken words, was regarding them with
+sorrowful eyes from the wind-swept spit of land.
+
+Two years and a half ago, on his first arrival, Granger had laughed at
+the factor's petty persecution and had pretended not to mind. Since
+then, as his isolation had grown on him, his temper had changed, his
+pride had given way, until, in the January of the present year, he had
+journeyed down to the Company's fort, and had implored them to speak
+to him, if only to curse him, that his reason might be saved. The
+gates of the fort had been clanged in his face, and he had been
+silently threatened with a loaded rifle, till resurrected shame had
+driven him away.
+
+He had since heard that Pilgrim had said on that occasion, "I knew
+that he would come and that this would happen sooner or later. I've
+been waiting for it; but he's held out longer than the last one."
+
+This remark explained to Granger how it was that, when he had arrived
+in Winnipeg, having just returned from the Klondike, and had applied
+to his acquaintance Wrath for employment, his request had been so
+readily granted. He had marvelled at the time that he, who had had
+next to no experience in Indian trading, should have met with
+immediate engagement, and have been given sole charge of an outpost.
+Now he knew the reason; he had been given his job because his
+employers could get no one else to take it. From the first day of his
+coming to Murder Point strange stories had reached his ears concerning
+the diverse and sudden ways in which its bygone agents had departed
+this life: some by committing murder against themselves; some by
+committing murder against others; some, having gone mad, by wandering
+off into the winter wilderness to die; others, who were reckoned sane,
+by attempting to make the six hundred and eighty mile journey back to
+civilisation alone across the snow and ice. These rumours he had not
+credited at first, supposing them to be fictions invented by Pilgrim
+for the purpose of shattering his confidence, and thus inducing him to
+leave at once. The last remark of the factor, however, inasmuch as it
+had been reported to him by an honest man, the Jesuit priest Père
+Antoine, had proved to him that they were not all lies. When he had
+questioned Père Antoine himself, the kindly old man had shaken his
+head, refusing to answer, and had departed on his way. This had
+happened shortly after the occurrence in January; since then Granger
+had been less than ever happy in his mind.
+
+Luckily for him, about this time Beorn Ericsen, the Man with the Dead
+Soul, as he was named, the only white Company trapper in the district,
+had quarrelled with the factor over the price which had been offered
+him for a silver fox; in revenge he had betaken himself to Granger,
+bringing with him his half-breed daughter, Peggy, and his son,
+Eyelids. Their chance coming had saved his sanity; moreover it had
+furnished him with something to think about, besides himself, namely
+Peggy. His courtship of her had been short and informal, as is the way
+of white men when dealing with women of a darker shade: within a week
+he had taken her to himself. But Peggy had had ideas of her own upon
+the nebulous question of morals, ideas which she had gained in the two
+years during which she had attended a Catholic school in Winnipeg; she
+had refused to be regarded as a squaw, since the blood which flowed in
+her veins was fully half white, and, after staying with him for a
+fortnight, had taken herself off, joining her father on a hunting
+trip, giving Granger clearly to understand that she would not live
+with him again until Père Antoine should have come that way and united
+them according to the rites of the Roman Church.
+
+As he stood by the window looking out across the frost-bound land
+which once, years since, in Leicester Square, he in his ignorance had
+so much desired, he re-pondered these events and, "Well, and what
+next?" he asked.
+
+The touch of spring in the air, recalling him to England and the old
+days, had made him realise among other things what this marriage with
+a half-breed girl, supposing he consented, must entail. It would
+exile him forever. No matter howsoever well he might prosper, or rich
+he might become, or whatsoever stroke of good fortune might visit him,
+he could never return to his English mother and English friends,
+bringing with him a half-breed wife and children who had Indian blood.
+If he married her, he would become what Pilgrim had named him--an
+outcast. If he did not marry her, she would refuse to live with him,
+and he would be left lonely as before and would probably become
+insane. Since he was never likely to become either prosperous, or
+rich, or fortunate, would it not be better for him to provide for his
+immediate happiness, he asked, and let the future take care of itself?
+Even while he asked the question another woman intruded her face: she
+was slim, and fair, and delicately made, and was disguised in the male
+attire of a Yukon placer-miner. She seemed to be asking him to
+remember her.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, as if defying Fate: turning
+away from the window, he reseated himself upon the upturned box by the
+red-hot stove.
+
+Pooh! he'd been a fool to give way to retrospection. He was no
+exception to the general rule; most men mismanaged their careers--more
+or less. Still, he was bound to confess that he had done so rather
+more than less. Oh well, he would settle down to his fate. As for that
+other girl in the Yukon miner's dress, who would keep intruding
+herself, she also must be forgotten.
+
+But at that point, perversely enough, he began to think about her.
+What was she doing at the present time? Where was she? Did she still
+remember him? Had she made her fortune up there out of their last big
+strike? How had she construed his sudden and unexplained departure? He
+swore softly to himself, and rising, went over to the window again.
+Then he pressed closer as if to make certain of something, gazing up
+the long glimmering stretch of frozen river to the west.
+
+There was a strange man coming down; strange to those parts, at any
+rate, though Granger seemed to recognise something familiar in his
+stride. He was driving his dogs furiously, lashing them on with
+frenzied brutality, coming on apace, turning his head ever and again
+from side to side, peering across his shoulder and looking behind, as
+if he feared a thing which followed him--which was out of sight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE UNBIDDEN GUEST
+
+
+Granger, having withdrawn himself to one side of the window so that he
+might not be observed from the outside, watched the stranger's
+approach in anxious silence. Nearer and nearer he came, till in that
+still air it was possible to hear the panting of his huskies as they
+lunged forward in the traces, jerking their bodies to right and left
+as they desperately strove to escape the descending lash of the
+punishing whip. The man himself tottered as he ran, stubbing the toes
+of his snowshoes every now and then as he took a new step. Once from
+sheer weakness he nearly fell, whereupon the dogs came to a sudden
+halt, sat down on their haunches, and gazed wistfully round; in a
+second he had recovered himself, with an angry oath had straightened
+out his team in their traces, and was once more speeding toward
+Granger's shack. The impression which his mode of travelling conveyed
+was that of flight; but from whom and whither can a man flee in
+Keewatin? Both he and his animals were evidently exhausted; they must
+have journeyed continuously through the previous day and night, and
+still they were in haste. "Well, all the better for me," thought the
+watcher, "for if he is so weary he cannot choose but stay; and if he
+stays with me, though he be a Company man, he will have to speak."
+
+Then fear seized hold of Granger lest Robert Pilgrim's discipline, or
+the enmity of the man himself, might be such that, though he
+endangered his life by the procedure, he would refuse the hospitality
+of a hated private trader. "Nonsense," said the voice of hope, "to
+where can he be travelling at this season of the year unless to Murder
+Point? Before ever he gets to the coast and Crooked Creek the winter
+will have broken up, and northwards there is nowhere else to go."
+
+So, as is the way with men who have exhausted this world's resources
+for rendering them aid, he began to pray; not decorously, with
+reverent, well-chosen words, but fiercely, with repetition, and below
+his breath. "My God, don't let him pass," he said; "make him stop
+here. Make him stop here, and spend with me at least one night." Then,
+when he had petitioned God, thinking perhaps that He would not hear
+him, he commenced to call upon Lord Jesus Christ. He clenched his
+hands in his excitement till the nails broke into the flesh. There was
+a God in Keewatin after all, there must be, since He had sent to him
+this stranger.
+
+All the while that he was praying and exclaiming thus, he was trying
+to judge of the man's errand from his dress. He was clad in the
+regulation capote of the Hudson Bay Company's employee; it was of a
+dark material, probably duffel, which reached to the knees. On his
+head was a fur-skin cap, over which he had drawn the hood of his
+capote so far down that his features could not be discerned. About his
+waist went a sash of scarlet, such as is worn by the Northwest
+_métis_. His legs were swathed in duffel leggings, so that they
+appeared to be of enormous size. On his feet he wore moose-hide
+moccasins which extended part way up his legs, and to these his
+five-foot snowshoes were attached. His whip he carried in his left
+hand. About this last there was something familiar. Who was it that he
+had known in the past who had driven his dogs left-handed, and had had
+that swinging, plunging stride? The memory refused to concentrate, so
+he strove to guess at the man's identity by the process of
+elimination. He could not be a Hudson Bay mail-carrier bringing him a
+letter, for the factor refused to deliver all missives addressed to
+Murder Point. It was not probable that he was an express messenger of
+Gamier, Parwin, and Wrath, sent up post-haste from Winnipeg; they
+could have nothing of such importance to say to him that it could not
+wait for the open season, when travelling is less expensive. Nor was
+he a trapper bound on a friendly or business visit to the store; for,
+in the first place, this man was no Indian (he could tell that by the
+way in which he lifted his feet in running), and, in the second, he
+had no friend, nor any man in the district, save Ericsen, who would be
+seen with him in the open daylight. A foolish, strangling expectancy
+rose up within him. Might he not be the bearer of important and good
+news from the homeland? What news? Oh, anything! That his father, the
+visionary explorer of Guiana, who twenty years ago had set out on his
+last mad search for El Dorado, the fabled city of the Incas, and who
+for many years had been given up for dead, had returned at length with
+gold, successful from his quest--or, at the least, that his mother had
+relented and wanted him back. Speedily his hope turned to agonising
+suspense. Perhaps he was coming to tell him that his mother in England
+was dead. Then he laughed hysterically, remembering that Mr. Wrath was
+not the sort of man to regard any death as serious, unless it were
+his own.
+
+By this time the stranger had covered the intervening two miles of
+river and was within thirty yards of the Point. He was slowing down.
+He had halted. His exhausted dogs were already curling themselves up
+beneath a snow-bank, wisely snatching a moment's rest as soon as it
+was offered them. Careless of their welfare, leaving them as they were
+to tangle up their traces, he was commencing to ascend the mound
+towards the store. Despite the clamour of welcome which raged within
+him, Granger did not stir; the influence of the North Land was upon
+him, compelling him to self-repression, making him stern and
+forbidding in his manner as was the appearance of the world without.
+From his hiding by the window he watched the man; as he did so a vague
+sense of fear and loathing took the place of gladness.
+
+His approach was slow and hesitating; continually he paused to gaze
+back along the river as if in search of a pursuer, then suddenly
+forward toward the shack as if for spying eyes which were reading his
+secret. Before he had come near enough to be recognised, he had pulled
+the hood still further forward, holding it together above his mouth
+with his right hand, so that of his face only his eyes were visible.
+With his left hand he fumbled in his breast, and Granger knew that he
+grasped a loaded weapon. "Does he mean to kill me?" he wondered; yet
+he made no effort to bar the door, or to reach for the rifle which
+hung on the wall above his head. He only smiled whimsically; amused
+that anyone should waste so much care over robbing a man of a
+possession which he himself so little valued--his life. Personally
+he would welcome so easy a method of departure from Keewatin--one
+which was quite respectable, and would attach no responsibility to
+himself. When all has been said, there remain but two qualities of
+fear: the fear of life, and the fear of death. Granger was only
+conscious of the first, therefore he could afford to be amazingly
+daring under the present circumstances. Now he could no longer see the
+man, for he was standing beneath the walls of the shack; but he could
+hear that he was listening, and could hear him gasp for breath. One,
+two, three slow footsteps, and the latch was raised and the door flung
+wide. He waited for his guest to enter, and then, because he delayed,
+"Come inside," he cried; "confound you, you're letting in the cold
+air."
+
+He heard the snowshoes lifted across the threshold and rose to greet
+the stranger who, so soon as he had entered, made fast the door and
+confronted him without a word, still hiding his face from sight. He
+was a tall man, well over six feet and proportionately broad of chest;
+he had to stoop his head as he stood in the store, since the roof was
+none too high.
+
+After some seconds spent in silent gazing, "Well, and what d'you
+want?" asked the trader. The man made no reply, but tossed him a screw
+of paper which, when he had unfolded it and smoothed it out, read,
+_"Do all that is in your power to help the bearer. I am responsible.
+Destroy this so soon as it is read."_ The note was unsigned, but it
+was in the handwriting of Wrath. Granger slid back the door of the
+grate and watched the scrap of paper vanish in a little spurt of
+flame. Then he looked up, and seeing that the man still stood
+regarding him and had removed none of his garments, not even his
+snowshoes from which the crusted ice was already melting, "All right,"
+he said; "I'll do my best. You must be tired, and have come a long
+journey."
+
+"I have," said the stranger, throwing back his hood, and for the first
+time displaying his face.
+
+Granger sprang forward with a startled cry, and seized the newcomer by
+his mittened hand. "By God, it's Spurling!"
+
+In a flash all the winter had thawed out of his nature and the spring,
+which he had despaired of, had returned. Once more he was an emotional
+living creature, with a throbbing heart and brain, instead of a
+carcass which walked, and was erect, and muttered occasional words
+with its mouth as if it were alive, and was in reality a dead thing to
+which burial had been denied.
+
+"Yes, it's Spurling," replied the traveller in a hoarse, uneager
+voice; then, "Has anyone been here before me?"
+
+Granger shook his head, and instinctively stood back a pace from this
+leaden-eyed, unresponsive stranger, who had been his friend.
+
+Spurling was quick to notice the revulsion. "And are you going to
+desert me and turn me out?"
+
+"Desert you! If you knew how lonely I have been you wouldn't ask that
+question."
+
+"I ought to know," he answered, and going over to the window looked
+out, turning his head from side to side in that furtive manner which
+Granger had noted in him when he had first seen him advancing across
+the ice.
+
+Facing about suddenly, he asked, "Is there any way out of here, except
+down there?" pointing to the river frozen in its bed, stretching away
+interminably to the west, through groves of icicles, and marble
+forest, like a granite roadway hewn out and levelled by a giant,
+vanished race.
+
+"There is no other," Granger replied, "unless you include the way out
+which is trodden by the dead."
+
+Spurling started almost angrily at the mention of this last pathway of
+escape, and scowled. It was evident that the fear which made his life
+a burden was the fear of death--which was proof to Granger that he had
+not been long in Keewatin. However, he controlled himself and
+murmured, "Six hundred and eighty miles is a long journey, and it's
+all that to Winnipeg. Within a fortnight the ice will break, and then
+for almost a month the only way will be impassable. Thank God for
+that!" Addressing himself to Granger, "And what lies ahead?" he asked.
+
+"The forest and three hundred odd miles of this Last Chance River till
+you come to the Hudson Bay and the House of the Crooked Creek."
+
+"Is there nothing in between?"
+
+"Only the Forbidden River, which neither white man nor Indian ever
+travels; it joins the Last Chance a hundred miles ahead."
+
+"Ah, the Forbidden River! And no one ever travels there! Why not? Is
+it shallow or rapid? But then there is the winter; it cannot be that
+there's anything that doesn't freeze up here."
+
+"Oh, it freezes right enough."
+
+"Then?"
+
+"The Indians are afraid to travel it."
+
+"Of what are they afraid?"
+
+"Manitous, and shades of the departed."
+
+For the first time Spurling's face relaxed, the hunted expression
+went out of his eyes; he almost smiled. "Well, I'm not afraid of
+them," he said.
+
+He commenced to unfasten his snowshoes and to take off the heavier
+portions of his dress. Granger stood by and watched him; he was
+puzzled by the man's manner, and heartsick with disappointment. What
+was the reason for the change which had crept over him in the three
+years since they had parted, and why had he made this journey at this
+season of the year, in haste, without warning? Six hundred and eighty
+miles seemed a long way to travel in winter, through a desolate land,
+only to tell your most intimate friend that you are not afraid of
+manitous and shades of the departed.
+
+He recalled the man whom he had known, so generous and open-hearted,
+who had walked with him at night beneath the London gas-lamps, sharing
+and comprehending those dreams and enthusiasms which others had
+derided, or compassionated as delusions of the mad. This was the man
+who had given him what might have been his chance, had he only been
+able to use it aright. Like a tawdry curtain drawn up at a Christmas
+pantomime on a dazzling transformation scene, so, at the memory, the
+veil of the present was instantly removed, revealing only the flashing
+splendours of past things, which lay behind. This same body which now
+crouched basely here before him had belonged to a hero once--to the
+man who, five long years since, had pushed on in spite of defeat,
+carrying with him by his courage his despairing companion over the
+deadly Skaguay trail. The Skaguay, where bodies of horses lay
+unburied, spreading pestilence abroad every hundred yards of the way;
+where the army of gold-seekers turning back was as great as the army
+pressing on; and those of the attack had momentarily to stand aside,
+so narrow was the path, for the wounded and spent of the retreat, who
+passed them by with ashen faces, some of them with death in their
+eyes, bidding them, "Turn back! Turn back! You will never get through
+alive."
+
+Many a time when his shoulders were bruised and broken, and he ached
+in every limb, and his clothes were sodden with rain, which he knew
+must shortly become stiff as boards when night had fallen and it had
+begun to freeze, and perhaps another horse had fallen and been left
+beside the trail, he also would have joined the retreat right gladly,
+unashamed of his cowardice, had not Spurling picked up his load with a
+laugh and dragged him on. What a fine brave fellow he had been in
+those early Yukon days! Why, it was he who, when they had reached the
+summit of that heart-breaking pass, had rescued young Mordaunt. Jervis
+Mordaunt, with a single horse, had packed his entire outfit
+single-handed to the topmost point of the trail, and then, when the
+hardest part of his journey had been accomplished and his goal was
+already in sight, his horse had given out and died. When they had come
+up with him, his beast had been dead three days, and, because he could
+not afford a new one, he had been packing his stuff on his own narrow
+shoulders into Bennett, whence the start by water for Dawson had to be
+made--a hopeless task, for Mordaunt was not a strong fellow, but slim
+and extraordinarily girlish in frame. Many of the travellers who had
+already attained the summit were flinging away their outfits and
+turning back in panic, terrified by stories which they had heard of
+winter and starvation in the Klondike; those who still trudged
+doggedly forward were too selfishly preoccupied with visions of gold,
+and their own concerns, and fears lest the rivers and lakes should
+close up, to render him aid. Not so Spurling; in those days he was
+never too busy to lend an unfortunate a helping hand; besides, like
+most brave men, the thing which he valued highest was courage, and he
+was taken with the young chap's pluck. "I'm fairly broad," he had
+said, "and before the river freezes there's plenty of time for all
+three of us to get drowned. So look sharp, my girl, and hand your
+bundles up." From the first day he had nicknamed Mordaunt "The Girl,"
+because he was so surpassingly modest and had no beard to shave. So he
+and Spurling had shouldered Mordaunt's burden, and had made him their
+partner, and had carried him through to the gold-fields alive.
+
+Where was Jervis now? he wondered; then his thoughts returned to the
+panorama of that eventful journey. He remembered how in the mouth of
+the Windy Arm on Tagish Lake, when the sail swung round and sent him
+spinning overboard, he would most certainly have perished in those
+chill waters had not Spurling jumped in and held him up till the boat
+put back. It was Spurling's hand which had kept the boat steady in the
+boiling rapids of the White Horse, when he and Mordaunt had lost their
+nerve--yes, that same hand which was now plucking restlessly at the
+untrimmed beard which fringed that crafty, sullen face. How incredible
+it seemed that this body should contain the same man, and that the
+change should have taken place in five years! He contrasted that
+big-shouldered, song-singing fellow who had given them of his endless
+store of courage when their own was spent, compelling them to go
+through the mush ice at Five Fingers, and the drift ice at Fort
+Selkirk, and had landed them safely at Dawson almost against their
+will, the last boat through before the Klondike froze up, with this
+secretive hang-dog individual who slunk through an unpeopled
+wilderness, twisting his neck from side to side, as though he already
+felt the halter there--like a Seven Dials assassin, fearful of arrest.
+There he sat by the window, with eyes fixed uncannily on the west,
+watching for the follower whom he could not see, but only felt.
+
+He turned round uncomfortably, feeling that Granger's eyes were upon
+him; then rose up abruptly, saying, "Ha, I was forgetting! My dogs
+must be fed."
+
+Granger watched him go out, and was glad of relief from his presence.
+If anyone had come to him a week ago and had said, "Druce Spurling
+will be here this day or next," his joy would have surpassed all
+bounds. Now he realised that there is a worse evil than solitude--the
+compulsory companionship of a man who once was, and is no longer, your
+friend. "Ach!" he muttered shivering, "I feel as if I had been sitting
+with my feet in an open grave." Then remorsefully he added, "The poor
+chap's in trouble. He was good to me in days gone by: I'll do my best
+to help him. Perhaps that's the kind of offal that I appeared to
+Robert Pilgrim when I made my journey to God's Voice last January, and
+he threatened to shoot me; yet, God forbid that I ever looked like
+that. Maybe that which I seem to see in Spurling is only the reflected
+change in myself. Christ pity us lonely men!"
+
+From the window he could see how Spurling was gathering his dogs
+around him, leading them past the Point northward to a bend where they
+could not be seen by a man approaching from up-river. What was the
+meaning of such precaution? Why had he been so urgently requested to
+help the one man in the world whom he was most likely to help without
+urging, since he had been his closest friend? Why had he been ordered
+to destroy the note immediately when read? And why had Spurling, whom
+he had thought to be in Klondike making his pile, or having taken
+advantage of the secret knowledge which he had unwisely shared with
+him, to be in Guiana, sailing up the Great Amana seeking El Dorado,
+travelled these thousands of miles by sea and land only to visit him
+here in Keewatin thus surlily? Was it to hide? Well, if that was his
+purpose, there wasn't much chance of his being followed, or if
+followed, found.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE DEVIL IN THE KLONDIKE
+
+
+Spurling, having returned from feeding his dogs, had reseated himself
+by the window, but he had not again spoken. When Granger had informed
+him that a meal was ready, and had called to him to come and partake,
+he had only shaken his head. When, however, it had been brought to
+him, he had eaten hungrily, bolting his food like a famished husky,
+yet never looking at what he ate, for his eyes were directed along the
+river-bed. He used neither fork nor spoon, carrying whatever was set
+before him hastily to his mouth in his hands. His whole attitude was
+one of hurry; he rested in haste, as if begrudging the moments which
+were lost from travel.
+
+Had he been the foremost runner in some great race, who had fallen at
+the last lap, and, waiting to recover himself before making the final
+dash toward the tape, watched anxiously lest his next rival should
+round the bend, and surprise him before he was up on his feet again,
+he could not have been more tensely excited. His breath came in gasps
+and spasms; his body jerked and trembled even while he sat. He began
+to do things, and did not finish them. He opened his mouth to speak,
+and was silent. He half rose to his feet, and fell back again. He
+turned his head to look at Granger, then thought better of it, and
+continued staring into the west. Granger watched him, and wondered
+what might be the secret which he was hesitating to impart. Was his
+mind a blank through weariness? Was he arguing out some dreadful
+problem within himself? Or was he only mad?
+
+What frail and isolated creatures we are!--when once our power of
+communicating thought is gone, though we breathe and move above the
+earth, we are more distant one from another than if we were truly
+dead; for, when a soul has totally forsaken its body, and the body has
+ceased to express, we, who live, can at least imagine that the thing
+departed sometimes returns and hovers within ourselves. To live and be
+silent is a remoter banishment from Life than the irrevocable exile
+decreed by Death.
+
+Granger could now see that the change which he had noted in Spurling
+might quite well have been the work of a month or two months, and was
+due to trouble and neglect. The man was unwashed and unfed, and for
+many nights he had not slept. His eyes were ringed and bloodshot with
+fatigue, and with incipient snow-blindness. His cheeks were sunken and
+cadaverous with too much travel; his body was limp with over-work.
+Should the cause of his excitement be suddenly removed, he would
+collapse; it was nervous courage which upheld him. And there, despite
+all these alterations for the worse, he could still discern the old
+Spurling--the man whom he had loved. The brows retained their old
+frown of impudent defiance, and the mouth its good-humoured, reckless
+contempt. These had been overlaid by some baser passion, it was true;
+but they remained, showed through, and seemed recoverable. As he
+looked, the memory flashed through his mind of Spurling at his
+proudest--on that night at the Mascot dance-hall, when they had
+carried into Dawson City the news of the great bonanza they had struck
+at Drunkman's Shallows. He was standing on a table, surrounded by a
+group of miners, leading the singing, roaring out the doggerel chorus
+of a local mining ballad:
+
+    "Oh, we'll be there with our bags of gold
+      When the Judgment trumpets blare,
+    When the stars drop dead and the moon stands cold,
+      Tell the angels we'll be there."
+
+Ha, the power of the man and his consciousness of conquest!
+
+Half to himself he began to hum the tune, beating time on the bare
+boards with his moccasined feet. In a moment Spurling had jumped up,
+"For God's sake, stop! I can't endure that," he cried. "Oh, to think
+of it, that I am come to this, and that it is like this we meet after
+all these years!" He covered his face with his hands, and, sinking
+weakly back in the chair, commenced to sob. Granger went towards him,
+and bending over him, flung an arm around his neck. For the moment the
+body before him was forgotten; the noble spirit of the man who had
+once stood by and helped him, was alone remembered. "Druce, tell me
+all," he said.
+
+"I can't; you would shun me."
+
+"Then why did you come if you could not trust me?"
+
+"There was nowhere else to go--no other way of escape. They were all
+around me."
+
+"Who were all around you?"
+
+"Those who had come to take me to be hanged."
+
+Granger gasped, and shrank aside. Then his worst conjecture was
+correct--it was as bad as that! murder had been done.
+
+Spurling drew himself up suddenly, throwing back his hands and
+uncovering a face of ghastly paleness. One might have supposed that he
+had been the startled witness to the confession, instead of the man
+who had made it.
+
+"What was that I said just now?" he asked. "You must not believe it.
+It is not true; I am tired and overstrained. They've hunted me so long
+that I myself have come almost to believe their squalid accusations.
+Don't look at me like that; I tell you I am innocent. . . . Oh well,
+perhaps I did fire the shot; but, if I did, it was an accident. I
+didn't know that the rifle had gone off until I saw him drop . . . and
+when I laid my hand on him to lift him up, I found that he was dead.
+Ugh! Then I hid him in a hole in the ice, and, because he had been my
+friend, I thought he would lie quiet forever there and never tell."
+
+While these words had been in the saying, Granger had drawn nearer and
+nearer, so that now the two men stood face to face, almost touching,
+staring into one another's eyes. Who was this friend who had been
+shot? Could it have been Mordaunt? He seized hold of Spurling by the
+throat with both hands, and shook him violently, crying, "What was her
+name? Will you tell me that?"
+
+Spurling wrenched himself free and his eyes blazed threateningly. "It
+wasn't a woman," he said; "thank God, I haven't sunk to that." Then
+more slowly, gazing fixedly on Granger as if to calculate how far it
+was safe to confide, "and he wasn't a friend of yours," he added.
+
+Granger turned away from the window that the murderer might not see
+his countenance; his lips moved as if he prayed. He passed his hand
+before his eyes as a man does who has been temporarily blinded by a
+sudden flash. He had become terribly aware how near he had been to
+committing the crime for which this man was hunted. The knowledge of
+that fact gave him sympathy, a lack of which is always based on
+ignorance. The compassionate man is invariably one who has been
+greatly tempted. In those few seconds whilst he withdrew himself, the
+whole portentous problem was argued out, "By how much is this man who
+intends, better than that man who accomplishes his crime?" He
+concluded that the difference was not one of virtue, but only of
+opportunity--which entailed no credit on himself. He had passed
+through Spurling's temptation scatheless, therefore he could afford
+him tenderness.
+
+"Druce," he said, speaking tremblingly, "it is terrible how far two
+men can drift apart in the passage of three short years."
+
+"Then why did you leave me?" asked Spurling sulkily, not yet reassured
+of his safety, nor recovered from his rough usage.
+
+"I left you because I feared that I might do the deed for which you
+are now in flight."
+
+Spurling sat up astonished. "Lord!" he exclaimed, "have all men felt
+like that? I've often wondered why it was that you went away that
+night, leaving no message and abandoning your claim. Pray, who were
+you fearful of murdering?"
+
+"Listen. If I tell you, it may make it easier for you to believe me,
+in spite of what has just happened, when I say that I sincerely want
+to help you."
+
+He was interrupted. "I suppose you know," said Spurling with a
+shocking attempt at merriment, "that you are losing the thousand
+dollars which has been offered for my capture alive or dead? It's only
+fair to tell you that. If any man is to make a profit by my hanging,
+I'd rather that the man should be a friend."
+
+It was as though one should make an indecent jest in the presence of a
+woman newly dead.
+
+"I deserved that you should say that," Granger replied. "But listen to
+me this once, for we may never meet again; who knows, in this land of
+death? I want to explain to you how it was that I behaved as I did,
+and to ask your forgiveness."
+
+"Then make haste," said Spurling, as he drew his chair nearer the
+window, and returned his gaze to the west.
+
+Without the dark was falling, though the sky was still faintly stained
+with red. It was thus he sat in the unlighted room as they talked
+together through the night, a shadowy outline against the misty panes
+which never stirred, but stared far away across the frozen quiet of
+the land.
+
+Granger spoke again. "You know with what hopes we set out on our
+journey to Dawson; how we went there not for the greed of gold, but
+for the sake of that other and more secret adventure which, as a boy,
+I promised my father I would undertake when I grew to be a man--an
+adventure which the Yukon gold could make possible and could purchase.
+That was my frame of mind throughout all the time that we were poor up
+there. That first winter in the Klondike, when we were nearly starved,
+and our money gave out because our grub was exhausted and the price of
+provisions ran so high, when we were thankful to work for almost any
+wages on Wrath's diggings if only we might get food and keep warm, we
+still kept our faith in one another and our purpose in sight. You'll
+remember how we used to talk together throughout those long dark days
+when, from November to February, we scarcely ever saw the sun and the
+thermometer sometimes stood at fifty below, and how we would plan for
+our great expedition to El Dorado, when our fortunes should be made,
+comforting ourselves for our present privations with thoughts of the
+land which Raleigh described. Those, despite their misery, were my
+best days--I had hope then. Little Mordaunt would sit beside us, with
+his face in his hands and his eyes opened wide with wonder, listening
+to what we said; when we had finished he would beg us to take him
+also, offering as his share, if he should be first to make his pile,
+to pay the way for all of us. It was then that we three made the
+compact which should be binding, that whenever our joint fortunes,
+whether owned by one alone, or two, or in equal proportions by all
+together, should amount to fifty thousand dollars, we would regard it
+as common to us all, and, throwing up our workings, would leave the
+Yukon for Guiana, in search of El Dorado. We were good comrades then,
+and did not calculate what ruin the avarice of gain may bring about in
+men.
+
+"When spring came, we set out to seek the gold which should redeem us,
+which lay just underground. All that summer we travelled and found
+only pay-dirt or colours, and at times not even that, till we came to
+the Sleeping River and pitched our camp at what was afterwards
+Drunkman's Shallows. How discouraged we were! We talked of turning
+back, saying that nothing of worth had ever been found in the Sleeping
+River. We called ourselves fools for having wasted our time up there.
+Then, on what we had determined should be the last night of our camp,
+when we had made up our minds to return next day, Eric Petersen came
+by and joined us. He also had found nothing; worse still, had spent
+all he had, and, being down in the mouth, got drunk--not decently, but
+gloriously intoxicated. Somewhere about midnight, when, after twenty
+hours of shining, the sun had disappeared and the world was still
+bright as day, and we were all sleeping, he got up and went down to
+the river to bathe his aching head, and stumbled on the banks and,
+falling in, was nearly drowned. You heard him cry and, waking, ran
+down to the water's edge. As you stooped to pull him out, you saw
+that, where his foot had stumbled on the bank, it had kicked up a
+nugget. Then you roused us and, when we had prospected and found that
+gold was really there, we each staked a claim, and you an extra one as
+discoverer, and set off that same night on the run to register.
+
+"It was on the evening of the day we recorded that you had your great
+time at the Mascot, leading the singing, and being toasted all round.
+It seemed to me I had reached El Dorado that night,--and now I know
+that I never shall. So, after the fun was over, we went back to work
+our claims, and toiled day and night till the river froze up. The
+stampede had followed us, and every yard of likely land was staked for
+miles below and above. My claim yielded next to nothing, and
+Mordaunt's soon pinched out; but your two were the richest on the
+Shallows.
+
+"I was soon compelled to work for you for wages. Mordaunt, when he had
+taken ten thousand dollars out of his claim, agreed to do likewise.
+We should both have left you at that time and gone away to prospect
+afresh, had it not been for our early understanding that whatever we
+earned was owned conjointly. Just before the winter closed down upon
+us, we had taken out nearly fifty thousand dollars, the figure at
+which we had agreed to quit the Yukon; I had one, Mordaunt ten, and
+you had thirty-five thousand dollars--forty-six thousand in all.
+Mordaunt and I talked to you about selling out and starting on our
+greater quest, but you held us to the fifty-thousand limit, saying
+that six months' postponement more or less would make no difference,
+and that we had better have too much than too little capital in hand
+before our start was made. We yielded to your judgment inasmuch as you
+were the richest man, never suspecting that you were already
+contemplating going back on your bargain to share and share alike with
+us.
+
+"But after the burning had commenced, and the winter had settled down
+for good, and the days had grown short and gloomy, we noticed a change
+in your manner--one of which you, perhaps, were not fully conscious.
+Your conversation became masterful and abrupt; you made us feel that
+we were your hired men, and were no longer partners in a future and
+nobler enterprise. Gradually the certainty dawned upon us that you had
+repudiated your compact, and did not include us in your plans. Gold
+for its own sake I had never cared about as you had; I only valued it
+for the power it had to forward me in the quest of which I had dreamed
+since I was a child--the following in my father's footsteps and
+discovering of the city of the Incas, and, perhaps, of my father
+himself.
+
+"When I had seen you growing rich whilst I remained a poor man, I had
+felt no jealousy; for I trusted in the promise we had exchanged and
+relied on your honesty in keeping your word. But, when I had perceived
+your new intention, something went wrong inside my brain, so that I
+began to construe all your former good as bad. I thought that from the
+first you had never intended to keep your word, and had brought me
+into the Klondike to get me out of the way, so that, possessed of the
+secret information which I had given you, you might steal a march on
+me, and set out for El Dorado by yourself. Whether that was your
+purpose I do not know; but, for doubting you, you can scarcely blame
+me. So, day by day, as I descended the shaft to the bed-rock, and
+piled up billets of wood, and kindled them, throwing out the muck,
+drifting with the streak, sending up nuggets to the surface, and dirt
+which often averaged ten dollars to the pan, I said to myself, 'Every
+shovelful you dig out, and every fire you light, and every billet you
+stack, is helping Spurling to betray you the earlier.'
+
+"At first I would not believe my own judgment, but drove my anger down
+by replying, 'He is no traitor; he is my friend.' But at night when I
+came up, and you spoke to me pityingly about my hard luck and your own
+increasing wealth, I knew what you meant. Mordaunt didn't seem to
+mind; he had ten thousand dollars of his own, so he only said, 'Give
+him time. He's all right. He'll remember and come round. His head's
+turned for the moment by his fortune and he's lost his standards of
+what is just. I daresay if this happened to you or me, we should have
+been as bad.'
+
+"But that did not comfort me much, for I thought, 'A man who can
+betray and lie to you once, can always lie and betray.' I could not
+sleep at night for thinking about it and I brooded over it all the
+day; there was ever before my eyes the vision of you, sailing up the
+Great Amana without me.
+
+"If nothing else had happened and it had remained at that, I suppose I
+should have finished my winter's contract with you and have gone out
+again in the spring, either with Mordaunt or alone, prospecting for
+myself. As it was, I began to argue with myself. 'What better right
+has Spurling to this gold than I?' I said. 'If I had chosen this
+claim, as I might have done, all the wealth which is now his would
+have been mine. Had that been the case, I should have held to my
+bargain and have dealt squarely by him. Since he refuses to allow me
+the share which he promised me, I have a right to take it.'
+
+"You know what followed, how I hid some nuggets in my shirt, and you
+accused me and discovered them. You called me a thief, and threatened
+to expose me to the law of the mining camp. I told you that, since we
+had made that agreement to share conjointly whatever we found, I had
+as big a right to take charge of some of the gold as you yourself.
+Then you laughed in my face and struck me, asking if that was the
+usual way in which a labourer spoke to his employer. That blow drove
+me mad. I made no reply, for I had become suddenly crafty; I awaited a
+revenge that was certain and from which there could be no rebound.
+From that day forward the lust to kill was upon me; wherever I looked
+I saw you dead, and was glad. When the Northern Lights shot up they
+seemed to me, instead of green or yellow, to be always crimson, the
+bloodcolour. When they crept and rustled through the snow along the
+mountain heights, I fancied that they were a band of murderers who
+fled from their crime, and turned, and beckoned, and pointed to me,
+and whispered 'Come.' As my imagination wrought within me I grew
+silent; not even Mordaunt could rouse me. But he guessed what was
+happening, and would often come to me and say, 'Don't get
+down-hearted. Whatever Spurling does, I still hold to my promise. You
+and I are partners with a common fund. We have eleven thousand dollars
+already, so cheer up.'
+
+"But it wasn't envy of your wealth had driven me mad; it was fear lest
+you should go off and leave me behind, and should get to Guiana and to
+El Dorado first. I couldn't shake off my hallucination however much I
+tried--which wasn't much; always and everywhere I could see you dead.
+You know that the Klondike with its few hours of winter daylight, its
+interminable nights, its pale-green moon which seems to shine forever
+in a steely cloudless sky, and its three long months when men rarely
+see the sun, is not a much better place than Keewatin in which to heal
+a crippled mind. So, with the passage of time, there was worse to
+come.
+
+"One morning as I came to the shaft, I found a stranger waiting there.
+It was dark, I could not see his face; since he said nothing, I passed
+him and, descending to the bed-rock, commenced to scatter the last
+night's burning that I might get at the thawed-out muck. Presently I
+heard the sound of someone following, and the creak of the rope as he
+let himself down in the bucket. I thought it was you, so I did not
+turn, but sulkily went on with my work. The footsteps came after me
+wherever I went, standing behind me. At last I swung round in anger,
+supposing that you had come to torment me; at that moment I had it in
+my heart to strike you dead. In the light of the scattered fire, I
+discovered that it was not you, but instead a man of about my height
+and breadth. 'What d'you want?' I asked him. He did not answer. 'Who
+sent you here?' I said. He was silent. Then I grew frightened; seizing
+a smouldering brand, having puffed it to a blaze, I thrust it before
+his face--and saw _myself_.
+
+"I was down there all alone and underground; no one could have heard
+me had I cried for help. In my terror I grew foolish and laughed
+aloud; _it seemed to me so odd that I should have such fear of
+myself_. When I had grown quiet, 'Who sent you here?' I asked again.
+
+"At last he answered, 'You called me.'
+
+"'What have you come for?' I questioned.
+
+"'To murder Spurling,' he replied.
+
+"Then in a choking whisper I muttered, 'Who are you?'
+
+"And he answered me, 'Your baser self.'
+
+"I looked for a way of escape, but he stood between me and the mouth
+of the shaft; to get out I would have had to pass him. I tried to make
+him speak with me again that I might draw him aside, and so might slip
+past him and get above ground; but he refused to stir. Then I grew
+fascinated, and went near him, and peered into his face. He was like
+me, yet unlike; he was more evil--what I might become at my worst. He
+was to me what you were, when you just now arrived, to the man whom I
+loved in London, and who saved my life in Tagish Lake. Having studied
+his body and his face I loathed him, and drew myself away to the
+farthest hiding-place. There I crouched beside the gold streak for
+ten hours until the last glow of fire had died out, and I was left in
+darkness. Then, though I could not see him, I knew that he was there.
+
+"At last Mordaunt came and called to me. I begged him to come down.
+Thinking I was wounded, he lit a lantern and descended in haste. As he
+approached, I looked to see where _myself_ had been standing; but,
+though I had felt him there the moment before, directly Mordaunt came
+he vanished. In my horror I told Mordaunt everything--and what do you
+think the little fellow did? Instead of laughing at me, or fleeing
+from me for his life because I was mad, he set down his lamp and,
+throwing his arms about me, knelt down there on the bed-rock and
+prayed. If it hadn't been for Mordaunt I should certainly have killed
+you in the days which followed. Whenever I was alone or in your
+company, that thing, which was my baser self, was there. He would
+stand behind you, so that you could not see him, with his hand
+upraised as if about to strike. He would beckon to me that I also
+should get behind you, and when you spoke to me contemptuously or
+harshly the evil of his face would reflect a like passion in me
+against you. But whenever Mordaunt was present he vanished, and I had
+rest from temptation; therefore I say that Mordaunt saved you.
+
+"I kept on hoping that when spring came I would be able to leave, and
+thus rid myself of my evil dread; but the longer I stayed the greater
+grew my peril. At length the crisis came.
+
+"You had been down river across the ice to Dawson on the spree and to
+arrange for the carriage of your bullion to Seattle. It was night, and
+I was just returning from the shaft, where I had been giving a last
+look to the burning. I had a rifle in my hand, and, as I arrived at
+the door of the cabin, raising my eyes, saw you coming up-stream with
+your dogs, with your head bent low as if you were tired. Also I saw in
+the moonlight that _that other_ was noiselessly following you, stride
+by stride, stealing up behind. I saw him waving his arms to me,
+gesticulating madly and signing to me to kneel down and fire.
+
+"Suddenly all power of resistance left me; with my eyes upon his face,
+the memory of all the wrongs which you had dealt me, and my hatred of
+you, swam uppermost in my mind. I knelt down in the snow to take
+steadier aim and had my finger on the trigger, when the gun was
+snatched from behind. I turned fiercely round and found Mordaunt
+standing there. 'Quick,' he said, 'come inside.' He thrust the rifle
+beneath a pile of furs, and bade me tumble into my bunk and pretend
+sleep. Shortly after, I heard you come in and say that one of your
+dogs had been shot dead; but I did not stir. You came over and gazed
+down suspiciously at me, but seemed satisfied with Mordaunt's account
+of how I had been lying there for the past two hours wearied out with
+the day's work. Next day I could not look you in the eyes; also the
+memory of a woman I had loved had come suddenly back and changed me,
+making me ashamed. So two nights later I gathered together the few
+things I had and, abandoning my claim, fled.
+
+"If I could not trust myself with you, I could not trust myself in the
+Yukon. Every miner travelling with gold seemed to me a possible victim
+for my crime. I went about in fear lest I should see that evil thing,
+which called himself _myself_, returning to keep me company through
+life. I fled to escape him and, hoping to leave him behind me in the
+Klondike, went over the winter trail to Skaguay, the route by which
+two years earlier we had fought our way up, took steamer to Vancouver
+and came on thence to Winnipeg. My money was all but exhausted when I
+got there, I was broken in spirit and at my wit's end. By chance I met
+with Wrath, on whose claim in our first winter we had worked. He had
+gone back to his independent trading, and, at my request for
+employment, sent me up here to look after his interests at Murder
+Point. I was glad to come; after my experience on the Sleeping River,
+I was distrustful of myself in the company of men, never knowing when
+that _foreshadowing of my evil desires_ might not return to hound me
+on to fresh villainies and despair. For one who wished to be alone,
+Heaven knows, I chose well. You're not burdened with too much society
+in Keewatin--that isn't the complaint which is most often heard."
+
+Outside the night had long since settled down--a night which with snow
+and starlight was not dark, but shadowy and ghostlike, making the
+interval between two days a long-protracted dusk beneath which it was
+possible to see for miles. Far away in the forest a timber-wolf howled
+dismally; the huskies in the river-bed, seated on their haunches,
+lifted up their heads and echoed his complaint. Then all was still
+again, nothing was audible except the occasional low booming of the
+ice, when a crack rent its path across the surface and far below the
+river shook its gyves, as though clapping its hands in expectation of
+the freedom of the spring to come.
+
+Against the window the silhouette of Spurling loomed up, with the
+drifting dimness of the starlight for background, and the square of
+surrounding darkness for a frame of sombre plush; he seemed a
+man-portrait whom some painter had condemned forever to motionlessness
+and silence with the magic of his brush, and had nailed on a
+stretcher, and had hung up for ornament.
+
+At last he turned his head and stared into the blackness of the room,
+searching with his eyes for Granger. "So the deed which you feared to
+do, I have done," he said. "And here we sit together again, now that
+three years have passed; I, the man whom you hoped to murder and the
+man who has committed your crime; you, the man who stole from me,
+fired on me, missed aim, and ran away, and yet who at this present
+time are my judge. It is very strange! One would have supposed that
+with the breadth of a continent between us, you in Keewatin, I in
+Yukon, we need never have met. There is a meaning in this happening;
+God intends that you should help me to escape."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+SPURLING'S TALE
+
+
+Granger from his place beside the red-hot stove said nothing, but
+bowed his head. Spurling saw his action through the darkness and took
+courage.
+
+"There is not much to tell," he said. "After you left us, my luck
+seemed to vanish. My great bonanza pinched out, as Mordaunt's had
+done. I spent the spring and summer in washing out the gold from my
+winter's dump, and in sinking shafts to locate another streak which I
+might follow in the winter to come. I found none, but at first I did
+not lose confidence. I had plenty of capital and could well afford to
+spend some of it in exploration. I was quite sure that my two claims
+contained a hundred times as much gold as I had taken out--all I had
+to do was to find its location.
+
+"What Mordaunt said to you about me was true--my sudden good fortune
+had turned my head; I flung my earnings right and left, spending them
+on the most foolish extravagances, and still remained avaricious. I
+developed a mania for asserting my power and getting myself talked
+about. You know that in those days a new 'millionaire' in the Klondike
+was expected to do some of that; if, when he came to Dawson, he was
+sparing, and refused to treat the town to half-dollar drinks till
+everyone was drunk, they'd take him by his legs and arms and batter
+him against a wall until he gave in and cried, 'Yes.' Why, I've seen
+men set to and pan out from the sawdust on the floor of a saloon the
+gold which I had scattered. I performed such follies as made
+Swiftwater Bill famous when, after he had squabbled with his
+'lady-friend,' and he saw her ordering eggs, of which she happened to
+be fond, he bought up every egg in town at a dollar a piece, nine
+hundred in all, and smashed them, to spite her, against the side of
+her house. I was a confounded fool; if I hadn't been, I shouldn't have
+quarrelled with you, and we shouldn't have been here now--we might
+have been in El Dorado, perhaps.
+
+"Well, when I'd blown a good part of my money over stupidities for
+which I scarcely received even pleasure in return, I awoke to the fact
+that my workings had ceased to bear. Already the Sleeping River had
+got a bad name and was deserted; it was a commonplace that 'Drunkman's
+Shallows was played out.' I wouldn't acknowledge it. I took pride in
+the Shallows because I had discovered them; I wasted the remainder of
+my money in buying up other men's useless claims, and in engaging men
+to work them. Towards the end, even I had to own to myself that the
+streaks had pinched out and the Shallows were barren; but out of
+desperate bravado I kept on until my money was at an end. Then, when I
+was clean broke, I chose out a partner and went prospecting once
+again.
+
+"At first we found nothing, for, as I say, when you left me my luck
+departed. For months we wandered, finding only pay and colours, till
+we entered the Squaw River and discovered what we wanted at Gold Bug
+Bend. We stayed there working and testing the dirt till well into
+January; then one day we drifted into a streak which panned out
+twenty dollars to the pan, and so we knew at last that we had struck
+it. We eyed one another suspiciously, for we each of us remembered how
+you had been treated, and we began to talk about the necessity of
+recording our claims and discovery. Neither of us would trust the
+other to go alone, for we both wanted the claim on which we had been
+working, where the rich streak had been located, so we set out
+together. At first we travelled leisurely, speaking to one another;
+but soon we grew silent, and began to race. My partner was a lighter
+built man than I, and had the better team of dogs, and carried no gun.
+Very soon he began to draw away from me; but I relied on my superior
+strength to catch him up, for the journey was long. Then, somehow, as
+he ran farther and farther ahead, the belief grew up within me, that,
+whatever I might do, God meant him to get there first as a punishment
+to me for what I had done to you. At that thought all my lust after
+power, and the memory of the mastery which I had lost, came back, and
+I said, 'I will outwit God this time, however.'
+
+"Mechanically, almost without thinking, I levelled my gun and
+fired--and saw my partner drop. When I came up with him, he was lying
+face-downwards, with his arms stretched out before him along the
+ground. I turned him over and called on him to rouse. I kicked him
+with the toe of my snowshoe, and tried to get angry, pretending to
+myself that he was shamming. Then I knelt down beside him and covered
+him with a robe, deceiving myself that he had fainted and would
+presently awake. After I had waited for what seemed to be ages, I
+called him by name, and, when he did not stir, I laid my finger on his
+eyeballs--and so I knew that he was dead. When I knew that, fear got
+hold upon me; at every crack of the ice I persuaded myself that
+someone was coming up or down the frozen river, or had already seen
+me, and lay hidden behind a snow-ridge, watching all my doings. So I
+took up my comrade, and thrust him upright into a hole in the ice,
+trusting that because he had been my friend he would understand, and
+never tell. But his arms, which he had extended in falling, stuck out
+above the surface, as if signing my secret to all the world. They had
+grown stiff and frozen, and I could not bend them, so I knocked off,
+and piled up around and above them, blocks of ice.
+
+"Then, because I was fearful lest my coming alone without my partner
+into Dawson to record a claim might arouse suspicion, I turned back to
+the Gold Bug Bend. There I stayed and drifted with the streak for
+three months, and thawed out at least sixty thousand dollars' worth of
+muck. I had time to think things over. I came to the conclusion that I
+could not record my claim, since that might bring the miners up who
+would notice that my partner was missing; neither could I take down my
+dust to Dawson to express it to the outside, since that also would
+lead to questions being asked as to where I'd got it, seeing that it
+was so great in amount. So I determined to lie quiet until the summer
+time, and then to wash out only so much gold as I could carry about
+myself.
+
+"There was little chance of my being discovered on the Squaw River,
+for it is seldom travelled, and I calculated that in four months' time
+when the spring had come, the river would float the body far away to
+where it never would be found, or if found, then at a time when it
+would be unrecognisable. But in my first calculation I had not
+reckoned with my loneliness, and the horror which comes of knowledge
+of hidden crime. By the end of March I could stand it no longer and
+set out for Dawson, where there were men in whose company I could
+forget.
+
+"Soon after I got there the winter broke up and, by the first of May,
+though the Klondike itself was still frozen solid to its river-bed,
+the snow and ice from the country and rivers to the south, which had
+been exposed to the rays of the sun, had thawed and, draining into it,
+had created a shallow torrent which, running between the banks above
+the ground-ice, gave an appearance of the Klondike in full flood. Very
+soon the water over-flowed, so that houses were deluged and men had to
+take to boats and the roofs of their cabins for safety; it looked as
+though Dawson would be washed away. The drifting ice commenced to pack
+and pile against the bridge above the town; unless the jam could be
+broken before the ground-ice loosened, the bridge must collapse. Some
+men volunteered to blow it up with dynamite. In so doing they caused
+the ground-ice to tear itself free from the bottom so that, the water
+getting underneath, it floated up and pressed the pack against the
+floor of the bridge, forming, for a half-minute, an impassable barrier
+against the torrent rushing down. The flood rose behind it like a
+tidal wave, tossing on its crest a gigantic floe, standing waist-deep
+in which I saw, for the second during which it flashed in the sun, a
+frozen man, whom I recognised, who gazed upright towards me with his
+arms upstretched--only for a second, then the bridge went down and the
+water leapt over it, driving timbers, and floe, and man below the
+surface, carrying them northwards passed the city, out of sight.
+
+"The thing had been so sudden that only a few of those who were
+watching had realised what had happened; of these still fewer had seen
+the man; and of these only one had known and recognised my partner, as
+I had done. None of them could say for certain whether the man they
+had seen upon the floe had been alive or dead. In the confusion which
+followed the catastrophe this rumour was at first regarded as an idle
+tale to which no one paid much attention. But, when that one man who
+had seen and recognised came to me and inquired as to my partner's
+whereabouts, and I could give him no satisfactory answers, curiosity
+was aroused.
+
+"The Mounted Police instituted a search for the body, but as yet it
+was not found.
+
+"I was half-minded to leave the country and go outside. Would to God I
+had! But I was afraid that such conduct, following immediately upon
+this occurrence, would attract attention. I returned to the Squaw
+River and spent the half of another year up there. Then one day in
+November an Indian, who was passing up-river, stepped into my cabin
+and told me that the Mounted Police were searching for me. When I
+asked him why, he said that the English friends of my partner had been
+inquiring for him, and that I was known to have been the last man to
+be seen in his company. When that had been said, I knew the meaning of
+the sight I had witnessed when the bridge gave--my partner had sent
+his body down river on the first of the flood to warn me of my danger,
+as if he would say, '_Escape while you can; it will soon be
+discovered_.'
+
+"I gathered together what gold I could carry and, travelling by night
+only that I might not be noticed (and you know how long November
+nights can be in the Yukon), I struck the trail for Skaguay--the route
+by which two and a half years before you had fled. I got out
+undetected, as I thought, and arrived at Vancouver. There I read in a
+paper that at Forty-Mile the body had been found. I was seized with
+panic and hurried on to Winnipeg; on the way I was alarmed to find
+that I was being shadowed. I escaped my follower on my arrival there
+and sought out Wrath, the only man I knew in town. I was sure that I
+could trust him if he were sufficiently heavily bribed; so I gave him
+all the gold I had, and told him the truth, and offered to furnish him
+with such information as would enable him to go up and stake the rich
+bonanza which I had left behind on the Squaw River--all this if he
+would only help me to escape. He agreed to accept my terms, despite
+the risks he was taking in helping to conceal a criminal. He told me
+that you were up here, and said that it was no good going East, or
+striking down to the States, since all the railroads would be watched,
+and that my only chance lay in making a dash due north for Keewatin.
+He gave me a guide for the first three hundred miles of the journey,
+and the swiftest team of huskies he had. He smuggled me out to
+Selkirk, and gave me introductions to such men as could be trusted on
+the way. Before I left, I heard that they had made me an outlaw by
+placing a thousand dollars on my head.
+
+"I've travelled day and night since then, only halting when my
+strength gave out, or when I had to hide till darkness came that I
+might pass unobserved by a Company's outpost.
+
+"And I'm followed; I know that. I have not seen him, but I can feel
+that he is drawing nearer, and now is not far behind. I knew that if
+I could reach you, in spite of what has happened between us, you would
+save me. Granger, you must save me, if not for the sake of what I am,
+then because of what I once was to you in our London days. I know that
+I've deteriorated and have become bad; but it was more the fault of
+the country than of the man. You know what happens to a fellow who
+lives up there, how greedy and gloomy he gets, always feeling that the
+gold is underground and that he must get to it even at the expense of
+his honour and his life. You've felt it, you came near doing what I
+have done. If Mordaunt hadn't stopped you, you would have stood where
+I now stand."
+
+Granger broke in upon the frenzy of his appeal, asking abruptly,
+"Where is Mordaunt now?"
+
+If his face had not been in the shadow, Granger would have seen how
+Spurling's lips tightened as to withstand sudden pain, and his body
+shuddered at that question. "Oh, Mordaunt is all right," he said. "He
+left the Yukon soon after you left--he said that the fun was spoilt
+without you. I daresay he's seeking for El Dorado or else is married."
+
+"You are sure of that?" asked Granger.
+
+"Sure of what? All I know is that he quarrelled with me over your
+affair because he thought that I had not used you justly; shortly
+afterwards we broke up our partnership, and I was told that he had
+gone out through Alaska, via Michael to Seattle."
+
+When the man at the back of the room said nothing, Spurling asked in a
+tone of horror, "Why, you don't think that I killed him too, do
+you,--just because I have owned to shooting one man?"
+
+"I don't know what to think," replied Granger, speaking slowly; "no,
+certainly I do not think that you killed him, _too_."
+
+"Then, what?"
+
+"Never mind, since the matter's in doubt I will help you. What do you
+propose to do?"
+
+"Go on till I come to the Forbidden River, and hide there till the
+hunt for me is over, and they think that I am dead."
+
+"And then, if you survive?"
+
+"Creep back into the world and begin life all afresh."
+
+"And how can I help you?"
+
+"By lending me a fresh team, for mine is all tired out, and giving me
+provisions for my journey, and delaying my pursuer when he arrives."
+
+"How shall I delay him!"
+
+"Oh, you will know when you see him--there are many ways, some of
+which are very effectual." Spurling played with the butt of his
+revolver as he said these words, and looked at Granger tentatively,
+then looked aside. "For instance, the winter is breaking up and he
+might fall through the ice; or while he is staying here several of his
+dogs might die; or, at the least, you can tell him that you have not
+seen me and persuade him that he has passed me by. If he refuses to
+believe that, you can suggest that I have left the river and gone into
+the forest, and so put him off my track--anything to give me time."
+
+"He would scarcely believe the last," said Granger, "for on the Last
+Chance there is only one trail--by the river up and down. And I want
+you to understand Spurling, that if I do help you it will be by clean
+means; I intend to play fair all round."
+
+"Play fair! Do you call it fair play when a nation sets out to hunt
+one man? I have only done what thousands have thought and intended.
+What better is the man who effects my capture, and gets the thousand
+dollars which they have set upon my head, and sends me to the
+scaffold, than I myself who without premeditation shot a man. You're a
+nice one to talk about playing fair to the fellow who gave you your
+chance, and was your friend, and whom you tried to murder! Which of
+us, do you suppose, is the cleaner man?"
+
+Granger did not answer; through the last few hours he had been asking
+himself that same question. Spurling, thinking he had offended, began
+to plead afresh. "Oh, John, if you knew all that I have suffered you
+would pity me. God knows I've repented for what I did with drops of
+blood. If I'd only thought before I acted, I might have known that I
+stood to gain nothing by it. What good was the gold to me when I got
+it? I could only hide it, and wealth is not wealth when you have to
+keep it secret to yourself."
+
+He paused exhausted, and fell back drooping in his chair. Granger's
+pity had been aroused. "Druce," he said, "I have promised that I will
+help you; you must be content with that."
+
+Spurting clutched at his hand and pressed it to his lips. "And there
+are things which you need not tell him?" he questioned. "Say that
+there are things that you will not tell."
+
+"There are things that I will not tell," Granger repeated. "I will not
+tell him that I have seen you, and will refuse to give him help."
+
+Spurling's eyes had again sought out the west and the intervening
+stretch of sky, where from the east the reflected light of dawn had
+already begun to spread.
+
+"I don't like the look of it," he muttered; "I can feel that he is not
+far behind. Every time I look up-river I expect to see him, a dull
+brown shadow, hurrying down between the banks of white. I must be
+going; while I stay I cannot rest."
+
+So, when all had been got ready and Granger had supplied him with a
+new outfit and an untired team of dogs, he accompanied him out on to
+the Point where the dawn was breaking. Then he told him of a cache
+which Beorn had made at the mouth of the Forbidden River, which he
+might open, and from which he could get supplies if his own ran short.
+He went with him a mile down the ice, that he might guide him round a
+part of the trail which was rotten and unsafe to travel. At parting,
+Spurling grasped his hand; pointing back to the danger spot he
+whispered, "That is one of the things which you need not tell." Before
+he could answer him, he had lashed up his dogs and was on his way
+northwards. It was then that the thought of a final test flashed
+through Granger's mind. "Spurling, Spurling," he called, "did you know
+that Mordaunt was a woman and not a man?"
+
+Whether he had heard Granger could not tell, for he did not halt or
+turn his head; driving yet more furiously, urging his huskies forward
+with the whip and shouting them on, he vanished round the bend.
+
+Granger stood gazing after him, listening to the last faint echo of
+his cries; then he turned slowly and walked through the half-light
+back to his lonely store. Over to his right, above the horizon the red
+sun leapt. He did not raise his eyes; but, as he walked, he whispered
+over and over to himself words which seemed incredible, "And, if it
+had not been for her, _I_ should have been like that."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+CITIES OUT OF SIGHT
+
+
+In Keewatin the human intellect stands forever at a halt, awed in the
+presence of a limitless serenity for which it can find no better name
+than God, since, of all things which are incalculable, He seems most
+infinite.
+
+In this land of rivers and solitude Man is unnecessary, disregarded,
+and plays no part; if, after two hundred odd years of white, and many
+centuries of Indian habitation, Man were to withdraw himself
+to-morrow, he would leave no permanent record of his sojourn
+there--only a few outposts and forts, several far-scattered
+independent traders' stores, one or two missions and fishing-stations,
+all of them built of wood, which within a decade would have crumbled
+to decay, over which the tangled forest would silently close up.
+Instinctively he knows himself for an impudent intruder on something
+which is sacred; he hears continually what Adam heard when he stole of
+the fruit which was forbidden, God walking in the garden in the cool
+of the day--the accusing footsteps of God. His brain is staggered by
+an unchartered immensity in which he has no portion, which he can only
+watch. His individual worth to the universe is dwarfed by the
+imminence of the All: so nothing seems very serious which is only
+personal and, since all things which we apprehend must become in some
+sense personal, nothing is very important. The procession of human
+effort becomes a spectacle at sight of which Homeric laughter may
+sometimes be permissible, but tears never. If a man once gives way to
+weeping in Keewatin, he will weep always. Only by the exercise of a
+self-restraint which at first seems brutal can life be endured there.
+
+Granger, as he walked toward his store under the shadow of the dawn,
+was conscious of all this. The land was wrapped in the intensest
+quiet; the very crunch of his snowshoes seemed a profanation, though
+he trod lightly. When he had ascended the Point, he paused and gazed
+back. Already the thaw had commenced; down the still white face of the
+country, which lay at his feet like a shrouded corpse, the tears had
+begun to trinkle, though the eyes were tranquil and fast shut; the
+sight was as astounding to him as if a man six months dead should be
+seen to stir within his coffin of glass. Here and there in the expanse
+of forest he could see flashes of green and brown, of tree-tops from
+which the snow had fallen. The river-banks, which yesterday had seemed
+chiselled out of solid marble, were to-day tunnelled and scarred with
+tiny rills and watercourses which groped their way feebly riverwards.
+As he stood in silence meditating, he was startled by the whirr of
+wings, and looking southward descried the advance-guard of the first
+flock of ducks. "Ha, the spring has come," he cried; but immediately
+he checked his ecstasy, for his eyes had again caught sight of the
+emotionless expression on that great white face with its closed eyes
+turned toward the sun. Though no voice spoke it seemed to him to say,
+making by its silence its meaning plain, "There is nothing of which
+the importance is so great that we should forsake our calm."
+
+He felt rebuked for vulgarity, as though he had been found shouting in
+a cathedral-nave where priests were praying for the peace of souls of
+the departed. He desired to hide himself; entering his shack, he
+pushed to the door. He was tired; his brain ached with thought, and
+his thought was disjointed. He could not believe that Spurling had
+ever come; it was all an hallucination. Thinking about the past had
+made him imagine all that, or else he had dreamed it in the night. He
+went over detail by detail all that had seemed to him to happen; and
+even then, when it fitted reasonably together, he could not be
+certain. It was too monstrous that Spurling should have become like
+that! He would not believe it. Then his anxiety for Mordaunt sprang up
+and commenced to craze him. The terrible question throbbed through his
+mind, "Is Mordaunt dead?"
+
+The mania for questions grew upon him. Three separate voices spoke
+clamorously at once: "Is Mordaunt dead?"
+
+"Did Spurling murder him?"
+
+"Am I mad?"
+
+He stumbled to the far end of the room and flung himself down in his
+bunk, burying his face in its coverings that he might shut out the
+light and gain a moment's rest. But his imaginings followed and knelt
+beside him.
+
+"Well, if I must think," he whispered, "I will think of that which is
+best." He beckoned from out the shadows his memory of Mordaunt's face,
+and gave himself over to recalling all that it once had meant. They
+had nicknamed him "The Girl" because of his shyness and modesty, and
+had not always been particular in the jokes which they had made at his
+expense. Yes, and he had had a woman's ways from first to last.
+Nothing that had happened had been able to coarsen him; he had never
+given way to loose talk or brutal jests, and in the presence of
+suffering had invariably been full of tenderness.
+
+Good heavens! pass on to the crisis--to that day when he had come to
+the top of the shaft and called down to him! He had answered his call,
+praying him in an agonized voice to descend and rescue him. He could
+see him now approaching hurriedly, yet cautiously, through the
+darkness, lifting high up his swinging lamp so that its rays fell
+across his face. He could still remember how absurd it had seemed to
+suppose that a creature, so small and fragile, could save him from
+_that other_. Yet he had; and after that, because of the relief he
+felt, he had confessed. Then, in a moment of compassionate
+self-forgetfulness, Mordaunt had placed his arms about him and had
+drawn down his head upon his breast--an action of which no man in
+dealing with another man was ever capable; the mother-instinct was
+manifested there. In the flickering lamplight, with his head pressed
+close to his companion's breast, feeling its rise and fall at each
+struggling intake of the breath, crouching underground upon the
+bed-rock, he had guessed the secret--_that Mordaunt was not a man_.
+From that hour he had loved her. She had never known that he shared
+her secret. Thank God, he had remained so much a gentleman that he had
+not told her that! Who she was, why she had come to the Klondike, what
+was her proper name, he had not permitted himself to inquire; for him
+it had been sufficient that she was a woman, and that he loved her,
+and that he was unworthy of her love. After she had seen him shoot at
+Spurling he had avoided her, lest by contact with him she should be
+defiled. He had vaguely hoped at the time of leaving that the day
+might come, after he had cleansed himself and proved himself a man,
+when he might seek her out and ask her to be his wife. Through the
+last three years he had lived for that. To have asked her then would
+have been an insult, an act of cowardice. How would an upright woman
+answer a man whom she had just saved from homicide? How would she
+regard a man who had discovered the secret of her sex in such a
+manner, because of her compassion, and had not had the decency to keep
+that knowledge secret even from herself? So he had fled from the
+Shallows for a double reason; that he might not do violence to
+Spurling, and that he might not betray himself to her. He had left her
+without a hint of his going, or a word of explanation.
+
+What had she thought of him? He had often wondered that. Had she also
+loved him, and not dared to speak about it? He half-suspected that. If
+she had loved him and had spoken out, he would not have married her at
+that time, when even he despised himself; to have done so would have
+been to drag her down. Still, he could not help speculating as to what
+she had said and thought on that morning when she awoke in the winter
+dreariness, and, gazing round the cabin, found that he had vanished.
+Had she regretted him, and had she sometimes, when Spurling had become
+intolerable, gone aside and wept? After three years, though he had
+loved her, he could only recall her by her man's name, and picture her
+in her man's dress.
+
+Then, while he thought with closed eyes, that awful question came
+again, "Is Mordaunt dead?"
+
+Whilst she was in the world it had been possible for him to strive to
+be straightforward and courageous; but, _if she was dead_ . . .! If
+Spurling had murdered her, if he had lied to him and _she_ was his
+partner, what then? Well, that all depended on whether Spurling had
+known her sex. If not, what a revenge he would take when he should
+confront him, and inform him that he had murdered a woman, and not a
+man! He knew Spurling; for him the public ignominy of being hanged
+would be as nothing compared with such private knowledge--it would
+thrust him into Hell in this life.
+
+Ah, but that could not be; God would not allow it! Spurling himself
+had said that he had not sunk so low as that. Yet, in case it might be
+so, he would keep his word and help him to escape--from the Mounted
+Police, but not from himself. He would be the executioner if there
+must be one. The law should not rob him of his revenge. He would save
+Spurling's life in case he might need to take it.
+
+Then, unbidden and against his will, there rose up the image of the
+man who had saved his life in Tagish Lake. Spurling had forestalled
+him, bribed him beforehand, by restoring him his own life in exchange
+for the life which he was doomed to take. Did that not make amends?
+Also he had rescued Mordaunt from disaster on the Skaguay trail, where
+he would certainly have perished had he been left. He had done
+unconsciously that which Granger proposed to do of set purpose--saved
+a life that he might take it. Did not that in some measure make
+amends? The problem was too complicated; it must work itself out in
+its own way. Yet, it would be a bitter irony if, after he had
+travelled a continent to avoid this deed, he should be forced to kill
+Spurling in the end--Spurling, who had come to him of his own accord.
+Still more burlesque would it be if, after Spurling was at rest, he
+should be hanged in his stead.
+
+But perhaps Mordaunt was not dead.
+
+To rid himself of these morbid questionings, he would give his remoter
+memory the reins to-day, at whatever cost; it was pleasanter to
+remember bygone unpleasantness than to live with the ills which
+threatened his present life. He recollected how some one had once
+asked Carlyle, "Why does the Past always seem so much happier than the
+Present?" And Carlyle's stern reply, "Because the fear has gone out of
+it." How odd it seemed to him that he should be recalling Carlyle up
+there in Keewatin! Yet, because that answer was true, he took up the
+thread of his London life again, that so, with the drug of memory, he
+might lay to rest his immediate misfortunes. He was a little boy again
+in the old red house on Clapton Common. One by one he entered its
+homely rooms with their ancient furniture, quaint wall-paper, and
+general look of substantial comfort. Once more he leant out of the
+bow-window at the back and gazed beyond the hill, upon which the house
+was built, up which gardens climbed, divided by creeper-covered walls
+of crumbling brick, down to where at its foot the river ran through
+flats and marshes. Far away, a little to the right, old Woodford
+raised its head; to the left Chingford, as yet unmodernized, showed
+up; and straight ahead, at a distance of seven miles, the steeple of
+High Beech, in the kindly habitable forest of Epping, was in sight.
+This was the house in which he had first dreamed the dream by the
+glamour of which he had been led astray. His father had dreamed the
+same dream, and his grandfather before him; it seemed to be a part of
+the walls and masonry, so interwoven was it with his memories of that
+house. It had been the first faery-story which he had ever listened
+to, and had been told to him for the most part in that back room with
+the bow-window, as he had sat on his grand-father's knee on winters'
+nights.
+
+The first time that he had heard it he could not have been more than
+five, and his father was absent, so his grandfather said, pursuing the
+dream on the other side of the world. This was the story as he
+remembered it. "In the land of Guiana there is a golden city named
+Manoa, but El Dorado in the Spanish language, which stands on the
+shores of a vast inland lake whose waters are salt, which is called
+Parima, and which is two hundred leagues in length. Juan Martinez was
+the first white man to visit it, and he did so through no fault of his
+own! When he was with the Spanish army at the port of Morequito, the
+store of powder, of which he had charge, caught fire and was
+destroyed. His commander, Diego Ordas, was so enraged that he
+sentenced him to death; but being appealed to by the soldiery with
+whom Martinez was a favourite, he commuted his punishment to
+this--that he should be set in a canoe alone, without any victual,
+only with his arms, and so turned loose on the great river. By the
+grace of God he floated down stream and was captured by certain
+Indians, who, never having seen a European before or anyone of that
+colour, carried him into a land to be wondered at, and so from town to
+town, until he came to the golden city of Manoa of which Inca was
+emperor. Now the emperor, when he beheld him, knew him to be a
+Christian, for not long since his brethren had been vanquished by the
+Spaniards in Peru; therefore he had him lodged in his palace and
+ordered that he should be respectfully entertained. There Martinez
+lived for seven months, and all that while was not allowed to wander
+beyond the city's walls lest he should discover the country's secrets,
+for he had been brought thither blindfold and had been fifteen days in
+the passage. When, years later, he came to die, he confessed to a
+priest that he had entered Manoa at high noon and that then his
+captors had uncovered his eyes, and that he had travelled all that day
+till nightfall through its streets and all the next, from the rising
+to the setting of the sun, of so great extent was it, until he arrived
+at the palace. It was Martinez who had given to Manoa its name of El
+Dorado, because its roadways were paved with gold, and there was so
+great an abundance of that metal there that, before the emperor would
+carouse with his captains, all those who were to pledge him were
+stripped naked, and their bodies anointed with white balsam, over
+which through hollow canes was blown by slaves the dust of fine gold,
+so that when his guests sat down to drink with him, they glistened
+yellow in the sun like gilded statues.
+
+"When Martinez had obtained his freedom and returned to Trinidad, and
+told his story, many other adventurers set out in quest of Manoa; but
+none so much as saw it save only Pedro de Urra. He, after incredible
+labours, at length arrived at a mountain peak whence, looking down,
+far away in the distance he could just descry the shining roofs of
+palaces and golden domes of Inca temples, wherein, he was told, were
+stored gold images of women and children more beautiful than God had
+yet wrought into flesh and blood. But his strength was spent and his
+troops were famished, also the Incas' armies were moving forward to
+check his advance; therefore he had to retreat, and to return to the
+seacoast, where he fretted away his life in dreaming of the
+splendours of which he had only just had sight. Fifty years later
+Berreo, governor of Trinidad, set out from Nuevo Reyno with seven
+hundred horse and slaves, and descended the Cassanar river, bound upon
+the same errand. What with fever and poisonous water he lost many of
+his men and cattle, so that, when he reached the Province of Amapaia,
+he had but one hundred and twenty soldiers left, and these were sick
+and dying; and so he also was forced to abandon his search. And this
+man Raleigh captured, and from him extorted his secrets, when he
+sailed to discover and conquer El Dorado for Queen Elizabeth, having
+in his company Jacob Whiddon, the English pirate, and George Gifford
+who was captain of the Lion's Whelp.
+
+"All the way across the ocean they studied the records of the
+adventurers who had sought before them, till they had them all by
+memory; for they hoped to find those same wonders which Lopez says
+that Pizarro found in the first home of the Incas: 'A royal city where
+all the vessels of the emperor's house, table, and kitchen, were of
+gold and silver, and the meanest of silver and copper for strength and
+hardness of metal. He had in his wardrobe hollow statues of gold which
+seemed giants, and the figures in proportion and bigness of all the
+beasts, birds, trees, and herbs that earth produceth; and of all the
+fishes that the sea or waters of his kingdom breedeth. He had also
+ropes, budgets, chests, and troughs of gold and silver, heaps of
+billets of gold, that seemed wood marked out to burn. Finally, there
+was nothing in his country whereof he had not the counterfeit in gold.
+Yea, and they say, that the Incas had a garden of pleasure in an
+island near Puna, where they went to recreate themselves when they
+would take the air of the sea, which had all kinds of garden-herbs,
+flowers, and trees of gold and silver, an invention and magnificence
+till then never seen. Besides all this, he had an infinite quantity of
+silver and gold unwrought in Cuzco.' The counterpart of all these
+marvels Raleigh hoped to find, when he had sailed up the Orinoco to
+its watershed.
+
+"So, when he had gathered all the information which he could from
+Berreo, he departed and rowed up the river in the galego boat of the
+Lion's Whelp, till on the fourth day he dropped into the waters of the
+Great Amana. Up the Great Amana he travelled, always getting news of
+his city, always being told that it was farther inland. On the banks
+of this river grew diverse sorts of fruit good to eat, flowers and
+trees of such variety as were 'sufficient to make ten books of
+herbals.' And everywhere he saw multitudes of birds of all colours,
+some carnation, some crimson, some orange-tawny, purple, watchet, and
+of all other sorts, so that, as he himself has said, 'It was unto us a
+great good passing of the time to behold them, besides the relief we
+found in killing some store of them; and still as we rowed, the deer
+came down feeding by the water's side, as if they had been used to the
+keeper's call.'
+
+"Lured on by these delights, he journeyed farther inland until at last
+he came to the first great silver mine; but here the Orinoco and all
+the other rivers had risen from four to five feet in height, so that
+it was not possible by the strength of man or with any boat whatsoever
+to row into the river against the stream. However, before his return,
+one day as it drew towards sunset, he had sight of a crystal mountain,
+which was said to be studded with diamonds and precious stones, which
+shone afar off, the appearance of which was like to that of a white
+church tower of exceeding height. Over the summit rushed a mighty
+river, which touched no part of the mountainside, and fell with a
+great clamour as if a thousand bells were knocked together; so, though
+he did not find El Dorado, he was somewhat comforted by the marvel of
+this sight. Also, before he left he saw _El Madre del Oro_, the mother
+of gold, which proved that treasure lay not far underground."
+
+So, hour after hour, and night after night, the old man had told his
+magic story of the search for El Dorado to the little boy. And
+sometimes he would vary it with other tales and legends of men who had
+gone upon quests equally wild; of Ponce de Leon, who had sought for
+the Bimini Isle, where arose a fountain whose waters could cause men
+to grow young again; of the Sieur D'Ottigny, who set sail for the
+Unknown in search of wealth, singing songs as if bound for a bridal
+feast; and of Vasseur, who first brought news of the distant
+Appalachian Mountains, whose slopes teem with precious metals and with
+gems beyond price. But always the narration would return to El Dorado
+on the shores of Parima. Then the little boy would ask, "But, Grandpa,
+is it true, or is it only a faery-tale? Was there ever such a city,
+and does it exist to-day?" Whereupon the old gentleman would grow very
+serious and would reply, "Certainly there is such a city, my dear; for
+when I was young I went in search of it, and your father is out there
+finding it to-day."
+
+After which answer he would get out maps, and show the child the red
+lines, which were his own journeys, and the exact spot in the
+watershed of the Orinoco where he believed the city to stand. Then
+they would reason about it together, bending low beneath the lamp,
+tracing out the various routes of past explorers, until his mother
+came in and, seeing what they were so busy about, carried him off to
+bed. At an early age he discovered that his mother approved neither of
+the grand-father's stories, nor of her husband's absence. She was
+often at pains to tell him that there was no such city, that the
+stories were all fables, and that his grandpapa had wasted his fortune
+and talents in its search. But the boy believed in the fables, for he
+liked to think of his father as sailing up the Great Amana, where the
+deer feed along the banks, until at last he came to the golden city
+where the men are like gilded statues. He was sure that his papa would
+return rich one day, bringing with him an Inca princess for his son to
+marry.
+
+But, when his father did return, he brought back with him only a
+fever-shattered body for his wife to nurse, and a plucky belief that
+he would succeed next time. Ah, but those were good days which he had
+spent by his father's bedside, when he had gazed on that fair-haired,
+soldierly man who had trodden in Raleigh's footsteps! He remembered
+how his father had laughed when he had asked in awe-struck tones
+whether he might be allowed to kiss his hands, and how he had said,
+"If I do not find, you will seek for it some day"--and then he had
+felt proud. How eagerly he had listened when the two explorers, father
+and son, had sat together and had talked over their various travels!
+And how he could remember his father's account of his latest journey!
+His mother had been out at the time when it was related; they never
+mentioned these matters in her presence because they pained her;
+moreover, if she was near by when they were talked about, she would
+contrive some excuse for snatching the boy away. They had watched
+their opportunity, however, and his father had told him.
+
+He had set out in a canvas sailing boat, and had ascended the Orinoco
+for twenty days. Every now and then he had come to rapids, where he
+had had to go ashore to carry his boat, or to marshes, where he had
+had to wade. As he travelled farther from the mainland, his Indian
+guides had deserted him till there was none left, and he had had to go
+on alone. Day by day he had passed by great rocks, on which there was
+writing engraved, which, perhaps, contained directions for travellers
+who, ages since, had been bound for that same city; but they were now
+of no use to him, because they were written in a forgotten language
+and in an alphabet which not even the Indians could understand. So he
+had gone on until at last he came to the crystal mountain, and the
+waterfall which Raleigh had described; and after that he had travelled
+further than even great Raleigh himself, or any other white man. It
+was at this point that the boy had gasped and asked to be allowed to
+kiss his father's hands.
+
+Then his father had told him how beyond the mountain there had seemed
+to be nothing but tangled wood and swamp, and how he had caught fever
+and wandered on in delirium until, when he came to himself, he had
+found himself standing on the shores of what had once been a vast
+inland lake, but which had now become partially dry, through which it
+was only possible to wade. So he left his boat and waded on, sometimes
+shoulders high, for four days; for, though he was racked with pains,
+he would not give up because he believed the lake to be Parima. On
+the evening of the fourth day, when his strength was almost spent and
+he was ready to sink with faintness, he came to an island and saw in
+the distance, in the light of the setting sun, golden spires and the
+roofs of houses many miles away, which he knew to be El Dorado. But by
+this time he had only two days' provisions left and dared not venture
+further; so he, like Pedro de Urra, having come within sight of his
+desire, had been compelled to turn back. Of his return journey he said
+nothing; Granger learnt that from his mother in later years. It had
+been made in agonies of hunger and thirst, which had nearly robbed him
+of his life. Nevertheless, his father had told him that, so soon as he
+got well again, he was going back, and that he would reach El Dorado
+this time. True to his word, when his fever had left him, he had bade
+them all good-bye, making his son secretly promise that, if he should
+not come back, when he became a man, he would follow him in the quest.
+Then had come the two years of anxious waiting in which they had had
+no news of him, and the final acceptance of the belief that he was
+dead. But his grandfather would not lose faith; he himself had once
+been missing for five years. He said that his son had reached the
+city, and was pushing homeward through the Andes on to the Pacific
+side. Night by night, in that back room with the bow-window, he had
+collected his records and studied them beneath the lamp. "He must be
+about here by now," he would say, pointing to a certain place. But the
+boy's mother had only smiled sadly, saying, "Is he not yet
+undeceived?" Then one evening they had left him in his chair, and had
+not heard him come up to bed, and in the morning had found him sitting
+stiff and silent in the sunshine, with the map of Guiana spread out
+before him and his finger on the spot where he had written EL DORADO,
+the magic word.
+
+The child had never forgotten that sight, its impression had sunk deep
+into his nature; somehow it had become symbolic for him of loyalty to
+one's chosen purpose in life. As he had once asked permission to kiss
+his father's hands, so, when there was no one in the room to watch
+him, he had stolen up and smoothed his hands with reverence against
+the cushions of the chair where the old grey head had last rested--but
+he had never sat there. After the old man's death, all things in that
+room became objects for his veneration. It was just this capacity in
+the small boy for hero-worship which his mother never tried to
+understand; so he kept his secret, and thus began the breach which was
+presently to widen. From that day Granger had pledged himself, when he
+should become a man, to go in search of his father and to inherit his
+quest; and to such a nature as Granger's that childish pledge was
+binding. He could never be persuaded that his father was dead; he
+always spoke and thought of him as a soldierly fair-haired man, living
+in a desirable land hard by a garden, like to that of the isle near
+Puna, which had herbs and flowers and trees of gold and silver, one
+who was an honoured guest in the emperor's house where the meanest
+utensils were of silver and copper for strength. At first, when only
+he and his mother were left, he had spoken to her of these fancies;
+but she had shown herself more and more averse to their mention, so he
+had learnt to keep his longings to himself.
+
+His mother was a practical woman, born of a race of lawyers and
+diplomatists. Hence she coveted above all things for her son, as she
+had done for his father before him, the certainties of life--social
+recognition and a banking-account; she had no sympathy with theories,
+however heroic, or with any kind of success which was not obvious and
+within hand-stretch. She was one of those safe people who always
+choose to-day's salary, if it be promptly paid, in preference to the
+more generous triumph of a to-morrow which may never come. She was
+wisely parsimonious in all things and, daring nothing herself, had no
+patience with natures which were more courageous. Much of her own
+money, and all of her husband's, had been spent by him in his
+fruitless explorations of Guiana. Now that he was gone, she discreetly
+invested what was left of her fortune, and deprived herself of all
+luxuries, so that when the time should come, her boy should have his
+chance in life unembarrassed by his father's previous reckless
+expenditures. She was proud of her son, for he was handsome; but she
+never realised that half a day of spoken love and sympathy can
+purchase more friendship than twenty years of benefits punctually and
+dutifully conferred--still less did she recognise the necessity for a
+mother consciously to cultivate a friendship with her boy. Not that
+she was ungentle; she craved his affection, but she made the mistake
+of demanding it as her right--all of which is the same as saying that
+she was mentally insensitive, and was unaware that with thoughtful
+people the road to the heart must first lead through the mind; of
+people's minds she was incurious. She gave her son the kind of
+education which befits men to inherit rather than to earn. His wishes
+were never consulted; nor even when he went to university was he given
+any choice. Like a dumb brute beast he was goaded forward without
+knowledge of his destination, and was expected to be grateful to the
+hand which kept him moving, and prevented him from turning aside.
+
+He permitted this well-intentioned despotism not through any lack of
+spirit, but partly because it was well-intentioned, and mostly because
+his immediate present seemed of little consequence to him. He felt
+himself to be an embryo prophet who awaited his hour; when that should
+strike, he would concentrate. Not until he was twenty-two years of age
+did he expostulate, and by that time it was too late; his training had
+made him dependent upon money for success. His mother had the money,
+and she selected the Bar as a suitable profession for him; then it was
+that he broke his twelve years' silence, and scandalised her with the
+information that his great ambition was to follow in his father's
+footsteps, and to find both him and El Dorado, fulfilling the promise
+which he had given as a child. Startled by this unexpected confession,
+she had charged him with disloyalty and ingratitude to herself; to
+avoid complications and a breach which he foresaw would become
+irreparable, he had accepted her choice and studied for a barrister.
+This utterance of his secret, however, had only served to make him
+aware of the intensity of his own desire. He could not work, he could
+not rest, he could not apply his mind; always he saw before him the
+tropic river with its multitude of carnation, crimson, and
+orange-tawny birds, its low green banks where the deer come down to
+graze, and far ahead and visionary the swampy lake, built on whose
+shore the golden city raises up its head. So books, and law, and
+London became for him the custodians of his captivity--things to be
+hated and despised.
+
+In the three years which followed he had made one friend, a mining
+engineer, by name Druce Spurling. In him he had confided, and Spurling
+had responded with a sympathy which did him credit, kindling to the
+romance of the story. He had tested with his expert knowledge the
+evidence which Granger had laid before him for the belief that such a
+city as El Dorado had existed, and he had been satisfied--or, at any
+rate, had been made certain that in the watershed of the Orinoco gold
+was yet to be found in great quantities, as in the Spaniard's time. He
+had promised that, so soon as he had the capital, he would help him in
+his quest. Granger coveted the journey for its adventure, and the
+opportunity of fulfilling his promise to his father; Spurling only for
+its possibilities of attaining wealth. In their community of ambition
+this difference of purpose was lost to sight. Then, when Granger was
+twenty-five and had just completed his course of reading for the Bar,
+his great chance came. It was the year of the Klondike gold-rush and
+Spurling was going out; he wanted a partner, and offered to take
+Granger with him if he, in return, would promise to give him one third
+of all the gold he mined. Their idea was that, with the money thus
+earned, they would be able to provide funds for the following up of
+their dream of El Dorado. Granger accepted the offer at once, partly
+influenced by his desire to prove to his mother that he _could_ do
+something by himself. After a painful farewell, he had departed to
+seek his fortune in the North World.
+
+Ah, how his mother had cried when he went away! He recalled all that
+to-day, now that he was in Keewatin, and gazed back incredulously upon
+that mistaken former self, wondering whether he could have been really
+like that. London, indeed! What would he not give to be in London
+to-day; to stand in Fleet Street, listening to the roar of the passing
+traffic and brushing shoulders with living, companionable men? Ah
+well, what good purpose would it serve to think about it! He had
+chosen his own fate. Here he was at Murder Point, and he would soon be
+married to Peggy, after which, no matter what avalanche of good luck
+befell him, there would be no return. What would his proud old mother
+say to a little half-breed grandchild? The mere thought made him
+smile. In cynical self-derision, he pictured himself accompanied by
+his Indian tribe, knocking at the door of the old red house on Clapton
+Common--and his reception there. He gave a name to his picture, and it
+was "_The Return of the Ne'er-do-well_."
+
+    *    *    *    *    *
+
+His brain was getting cloudy; he could not tell whether he was asleep
+or awake. He felt as if he had been bound hand and foot so that he
+could not stir, and had been raised aloft to a dizzy height. He knew
+that he was far above the earth, for he was very cold and was
+conscious of mists which drifted across his face and left it damp.
+Suddenly he discovered that he could open his eyes. Looking down, he
+saw with supernatural distinctness the entire course of the frozen
+river-bed. Far to the north he could descry Spurling, plodding
+desperately on across the thawing ice. A few miles to the west,
+perhaps an hour's journey from Murder Point, he could see a second
+figure, tall, soldierly, erect, which approached with swift clean
+strides, through the solitude, inevitably as Fate--the symbol of
+Justice in pursuit of Crime. He watched with fascination how the
+distance between the hunter and the hunted narrowed; only one thing
+could save the criminal from capture--the intervention of Murder
+Point.
+
+And then the cloud rolled back again; he closed his eyes, and lost
+consciousness in untroubled forgetfulness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE PURSUER ARRIVES
+
+
+He was awakened by a man bending over him and holding a lighted match
+to his face. Careless as usual of preserving his life, he did not
+attempt to rise or defend himself, but simply gazed back indifferent
+and a little bewildered. He did not recognise the man; he was an utter
+stranger. As if wearied with an inspection which did not interest him,
+he turned his eyes away, and found that the room had become dark. How
+many hours he had slept, he could not calculate; perhaps nine or ten.
+He wondered what had made the night return so quickly. He looked
+toward the window, and saw that it was blinded with snow; and, as he
+listened, could hear the roaring of the wind, and, in the lull which
+followed, the rustling and settling down of the flakes. Then the match
+went out, and neither of them could perceive the other's face. Granger
+arose and pushed back the shutter of the stove, that so they might get
+a little light. "I needn't ask you to make yourself at home," he said;
+"you've done that already."
+
+The stranger did not reply, but surveyed him closely all the while.
+
+"You must have had good company out there to be so silent now that you
+have arrived."
+
+Then the man spoke. "What's your name?" he asked abruptly. "Is it
+Granger?"
+
+"I was always told so, and have as yet found no good reason for
+believing otherwise."
+
+"Then this is the store of Garnier, Parwin, and Wrath, to which I was
+directed by Robert Pilgrim of God's Voice?"
+
+"That is right, but I don't often have the pleasure of entertaining
+guests from God's Voice."
+
+The stranger paused in doubt, as though choosing the best words to
+say; then he blurted out, "But you're a gentleman?"
+
+"I hope so."
+
+"An Oxford man?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What college?"
+
+"Corpus."
+
+"Did you row in the Eight?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I thought so. At what time?"
+
+"When Corpus went up five places and bumped the House on the last
+night."
+
+"I was stroke in the 'Varsity boat that year, and rowed at six in the
+Christ Church Eight that night."
+
+"Then you must be Strangeways?"
+
+"Yes, Corporal Strangeways of the Northwest Mounted Police, but
+Strangeways of the Oxford boat at one time. I fancied I knew you; you
+rowed at seven for Corpus, and it was you who won that race."
+
+"I and seven others," laughed Granger; "but what brings you up here at
+this time?"
+
+"We'll talk about that later. At present I'm hungry; I've hardly had a
+meal since I left God's Voice."
+
+"Then you're travelling in haste?"
+
+"Yes, in haste."
+
+Granger set to work to prepare a meal, while Strangeways talked to him
+of the Cornmarket, the Turl, and the Hinkseys, running over the
+familiar geography for the sheer pleasure of recalling kindly Oxford
+names. Presently he asked him if he remembered the little maid who had
+served in the river-inn of the King's Arms at Sanford. Granger had had
+a summer love-affair with that same maid, as had many a young
+water-man before and after him. One quiet Sunday evening, when her
+fickle passion had reached its short-lived height, he had even been
+allowed the felicity of accompanying her to vespers at the quaint old
+Norman Church, which lay snuggled away in woods behind the Thames.
+They had returned to the inn by a roundabout way, through the meadows
+beneath the twilight, speaking all manner of intense things, and, very
+wonderfully, believing both themselves and their sayings to be
+sincere. When he had entered his skiff and pushed out from the bank,
+she had called him back and royally permitted him to give her his
+first and, as it proved, only kiss. But he had not known that, and had
+rowed elated Oxfordwards between the hayfields, dreaming his ecstasy
+on into the future--when it had already achieved its climax, and
+slipped out of his life. Since then it had come to seem very simple
+and absurd, as do all love affairs, however august, which are lived
+down--for no love affair was ever outlived. So, because he had been
+fond of her, he was glad to listen to Strangeways, even when he
+related her newer conquests over more recent undergrads, and her later
+romantic history. By all accounts she was a modern Helen of Troy,
+uncontaminate, forever fair and forever juvenile.
+
+And all the while he was listening, Granger was planning by what
+means he might detain Strangeways, and hazarding what progress
+Spurling had made by this time in his escape. "A life for a life," he
+thought; "and Spurling once saved my life. Until I have cancelled that
+debt, even though Mordaunt has been slain, I will stand by him."
+
+Throughout the winter months all meals were the same at Murder Point,
+consisting of black tea, salt bacon, and bannocks, which are a kind of
+hard biscuit, made of flour and water mixed to a thick paste and then
+baked. This diet becomes pretty monotonous, but is the traveller's
+universal fare in Keewatin. In those far regions men are not
+particular how or what they eat; of necessity they abandon the
+refinements of civilisation as needless and cumbrous. To-day, however,
+partly to protract his stay and so give Spurling time, partly to
+assert his waning gentility, the memory of which in its heyday
+Strangeways shared, he attempted to be lavish, to set a table, and to
+entertain. For cloth he spread a dress-length of gaudy muslin, such as
+Indians purchase for their squaws. He opened some tins of canned goods
+that he might provide his guest with more than one course. He built up
+his fire, and commenced to cook. All this used up time; and the
+expending of time was what he most desired.
+
+When the meal was finished Strangeways rose up restlessly, as though
+he had just remembered his errand, and went to the door to see what
+progress the storm had made. The moment the door was opened the wind
+swept in, driving a fall of snow before it.
+
+"It seems to me," said Granger, "that you're going to be snow-bound
+for a time. This'll make travelling dangerous, for the thaw has
+already weakened the ice in places and now the snow'll cover them
+over, making them appear safe. It's strange, for blizzards don't often
+happen so late as this."
+
+"Well, there's one comfort," said Strangeways, "it's the same for all
+alike; if I'm delayed, so is someone else."
+
+Granger turned his back on him, and walked over to the window where he
+stood tapping on the glass, attempting to dislodge the snow which had
+spread itself out like a blanket across the panes. "Poor devil," he
+said, "I pity him, whoever he is. He can find no place of shelter in
+all the three hundred and twenty miles which stretch between God's
+Voice and Crooked Creek, unless he comes here or falls in with some
+trapper's camp."
+
+"Then you have had no one here lately?"
+
+"No, I haven't seen an Indian for over a month. They don't visit me so
+late in the winter as this; they wait for the open season, when they
+can bring in their furs by water."
+
+"But the man I'm speaking of is white. He drives a team of five grey
+huskies, the leader of which has a yellow face and a patch of
+brindled-brown upon its right hindquarters. Haven't you seen such an
+one go by within the last twenty-four hours?"
+
+Granger shook his head; "Perhaps you've passed him on the way," he
+suggested; "if he knew that you were following him, he may have dodged
+you purposely and doubled back."
+
+"He knew all right; it was because he knew that I was following that
+he fled. I can hardly have passed him, for he was seen by a half-breed
+ten miles from God's Voice, and I've travelled slowly and kept a
+careful watch between there and here. Besides I tracked his trail to
+within an hour's journey of the Point, until the snow came down and
+obliterated it. He was going weakly at the last; both man and dogs
+must have been spent."
+
+"Then he must be somewhere to the westward, between the spot where you
+lost his trail and here."
+
+"Perhaps, but the argument against that is that his trail was at least
+twelve hours old. Anyhow, I shall have to wait until this blizzard is
+over. During that time he may struggle in from the west, or, if he has
+gone by, may be driven back here for shelter by the gale."
+
+Granger had not thought of that contingency, that Spurling might be
+driven back by the weather, might push open the door at any moment and
+give him the lie before Strangeways. Perhaps a look of fear passed
+across his face, which betrayed him. At any rate, the next thing he
+heard was Strangeways, saying to him in a careless voice, "Of course,
+between gentlemen it is scarcely necessary to ask you whether you are
+telling the truth!"
+
+"It is scarcely necessary."
+
+"Then I beg your pardon for asking."
+
+"You needn't. You've got to do your duty irrespective of caste;
+whatever I once was, you can see for yourself what I am."
+
+"Yes, a gentleman down on his luck; but still a gentleman. Strange how
+one gets knocked about by life, isn't it? I little thought when I
+caught a glimpse of you, leaning on your oar exhausted at the end of
+that race, that the next time we should meet would be up here. It's
+curious the things a fellow remembers. Our boats were alongside, just
+off the Merton barge; the first thing I saw when I recovered and sat
+up on my slide was your face, deadly pale, almost within hand-stretch.
+I don't recall ever to have seen you again until I struck that match
+an hour ago and held it to you, and you opened your eyes; then it all
+came back. When you were sleeping you looked haggard, just about the
+same as you did then. If I'd seen you awake, I don't suppose I should
+have remembered. . . . I didn't even know where Keewatin was in those
+days. If anyone had told me that it was a village near Jericho I
+should have believed him. I daresay you were nearly as ignorant; and
+now we're here in your shack."
+
+Granger, anxious to keep Strangeway's attention from his pursuit, and
+his own thoughts occupied, inquired, "And what brought you into the
+Northwest Territories?"
+
+"Oh, the usual thing--a girl. She was ward to my father, and was to
+inherit a considerable property when she came of age. I was in love
+with her, and my father was keen that I should marry her; there was
+only one hindrance, that her opinion didn't coincide with ours. I
+found out that my father was trying to break her spirit, and force her
+to his will. I couldn't allow that; so, having nothing better to do, I
+left home and came to Canada for a while. Mind you, I'm not condemning
+my father; he thought that he was doing the best for both our sakes.
+But I wish he'd left us alone; if he had, I daresay it would have come
+out all right. She was one of those girls of whom the physiognomists
+say, 'Can be led by kindness, but cannot be driven.' The moment she
+was ordered to do a thing, which in the ordinary course of events she
+might have chosen to do of her own free will, she refused and hated
+it.
+
+"When I got to Montreal I was confronted by that stupid superstition
+of the Canadians, that every young Englishman who has had a better
+education than themselves, and is possessed of a private income from
+the old country, must be a remittance-man and a ne'er-do-well--that
+he's been sent out because he wasn't wanted by his family. I tried to
+get employment; not that I needed it, but because I wanted to work.
+The moment I opened my lips and didn't speak dialect or slang, and
+displayed hands which were not workman's hands, I was shown out. So I
+drifted west to Calgary and, after doing a little ranching there,
+enlisted in the Mounted Police."
+
+"Do you like it?"
+
+"Oh, yes, it's rather a lark, arresting the people who at first
+affected to despise you. I can always keep myself cheerful by the
+humour of that. If you've lost your sense of the ridiculous, you'd
+better join the Northwest Mounted Police--for an Englishman the cure's
+certain."
+
+"And how about the girl?"
+
+"She did a Gilbert and Sullivan trick. After I'd left home my father
+guessed the reason of my departure, and instead of giving her a rest,
+redoubled his efforts to make her marry me, that so he might bring me
+back. He was fond of both of us; we'd been brought up together, and he
+couldn't bear the idea of either of us being separated from himself.
+He made an awful mess of things, poor old gentleman; he persecuted her
+with his arguments to such an extent that one morning he woke up and
+found that she had vanished. He made all sorts of inquiries, but to
+the day of his death could never get any news of her whereabouts."
+
+Strangeways paused and commenced to light his pipe. Granger, who had
+become interested in the story, waited a minute for him to proceed,
+but when he had kindled his tobacco and still sat smoking in silence,
+"Well, and what next?" he asked.
+
+"That is all," said Strangeways; "now tell me about yourself."
+
+"I went into the Klondike with the gold-rush of nearly five years ago.
+I travelled with a man named Spurling, and a young chap named Jervis
+Mordaunt, whom we chummed up with in our passage over the Skaguay." He
+was conscious that Strangeways had jerked out his foot and was looking
+hard at him. He paid no attention to that, but proceeded leisurely
+with his tale. He conceived that it would answer his purpose better,
+in order that he might make the corporal unsuspicious of his share in
+Spurling's escape, to speak of him in a hostile manner, and to mention
+all the small and private faults which he could place to his
+discredit. He told a story of personal disputes between himself and
+his partners over the working of claims, which left the impression
+that Spurling and Mordaunt had always sided together against himself,
+and that finally he, getting sick of the climate, and quarrellings,
+and his continuous bad luck, had come outside, travelled to Winnipeg,
+and taken service with Garnier, Parwin, and Wrath, because he was in
+danger of starving. Of El Dorado, or his real reason for leaving the
+Yukon, he said nothing.
+
+When he had ended, Strangeways, who had never for a second removed his
+gaze, inquired in a hoarse, strained voice, "And this man Mordaunt,
+what was he like?"
+
+"Oh, he was a slim little fellow; we nicknamed him 'The Girl' because
+of his ways, and because he was so slight."
+
+"How old was he?"
+
+"He couldn't have been more than eighteen when we first met him, for
+he never had to shave."
+
+"Did he ever tell you anything about himself, where he came from, who
+were his family, or anything like that?"
+
+"Not that I remember; he was always very close about himself. But what
+makes you ask these questions? Do you think that you recognise him?"
+
+Strangeways rose up and paced the room, betraying his agitation, but
+when he spoke his voice was level and restrained. "By God, I hope
+not," he said.
+
+Every moment Granger dreaded that he would hear him say that Mordaunt
+was dead, and yet he wanted certainty. He watched Strangeways pacing
+up and down, and longed to question him, yet was fearful that in so
+doing he would betray his own secret. At last he could bear the
+suspense no longer; that regular walking to and fro tortured him, it
+was like the constant swinging of a pendulum and made him giddy to
+look at. When he spoke, it was in a voice so shrill that it surprised
+himself.
+
+"Tell me once and for all," he cried, "has anything happened to him?
+Is he dead?"
+
+Strangeways halted, and regarded him with a look half-stern,
+half-compassionate.
+
+"As for Spurling, you hated him, did you not?" he inquired.
+
+Granger clenched his hands and his voice trembled. "I hated him so
+much," he said, "that there were times when I would gladly have struck
+him dead."
+
+"Then, why didn't you?"
+
+Granger started; the question was spoken so fiercely, and was so
+searching and direct. It aroused him to a sense of his danger, and
+helped him to recover himself.
+
+"In the first place you would have hanged me, and in the second there
+was Mordaunt." As soon as he had said it, he knew that he had made a
+slip.
+
+"And why Mordaunt?"
+
+He hesitated a minute, gathering himself together. He could feel the
+scrutiny of Strangeways' eyes and was conscious that he was breathing
+hard.
+
+The question was repeated, "And why Mordaunt?"
+
+"Because Mordaunt was such a clean fellow that I couldn't do anything
+shabby in his presence," he said.
+
+"How clean?" Strangeways persisted.
+
+"Why, in every way; he was so honourable."
+
+"But I thought you said just now that he always sided with Spurling
+when it came to a dispute?"
+
+"So he did in a sense. He never seemed to think that the thing we
+quarrelled about was worth while, and treated it all with a well-bred
+contempt. Spurling was usually the one who was unjust, and I the one
+who complained; so I was usually the one to start the wrangle.
+Therefore, though he despised Spurling, he always seemed to blame me
+for my pettiness."
+
+Strangeways turned on him his honest, manly gaze, as if he were about
+to ask again, "Is that the truth?" But he did not say it. Granger felt
+a cur for lying, but he was determined to fight for Spurling's life,
+and, if that were necessary, for his own revenge.
+
+"And you have not seen Spurling go by the Point?" asked Strangeways.
+
+"No." He said it quite ordinarily, as if he were answering a
+commonplace. Then he realised that he had been caught in a trap and
+had not manifested enough surprise. He slowly raised up his eyes,
+shame-facedly, like a schoolboy detected cribbing, when the master
+steals up behind.
+
+"I'm afraid, after all, that you are not a gentleman," was all that
+Strangeways said.
+
+Granger shrank back and flushed as if he had been struck across the
+face; he did not attempt to defend himself or expostulate. The wind
+had died down outside; it was evident that the storm had spent itself.
+In the silence which followed he could hear the padding steps of the
+huskies going round the house, and the sound of them sniffing about
+the door. Strangeways, who had been fastening on his snowshoes
+preparatory to departure, walked across the room and raised the latch.
+He stepped out, leaving the door open behind him. A bar of moonlight
+leapt instantly inside, as it had been a fugitive who had been kept
+long waiting. Then he heard the voice of Strangeways calling,
+"Granger, Granger."
+
+He rose up hurriedly, thinking that perhaps Spurling had been driven
+back by the blizzard and was returning to his danger. When he reached
+the threshold he saw only this--the moon tossing restlessly in a
+cloudy sky, shining above a shadowy land of white; Strangeways
+standing twenty paces distant with his back towards him; and, seated
+on their haunches between Strangeways and the threshold, five lank
+grey huskies, one of which had a patch of brindled-brown upon its
+right hindquarters and a yellow face.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE CORPORAL SETS OUT
+
+
+It would have been easy to shoot Strangeways at that time, and he must
+have known it; yet, he was so much a gentleman that he accepted the
+risk, and had the decency to turn his back when circumstances
+compelled him to give a man the lie. Granger wondered whether courtesy
+was the motive; or whether he was only testing him out of curiosity,
+to see of what fresh vulgarity of deceit he was capable.
+
+As he stood in the doorway, his gaze wandered from the broad shoulders
+of Corporal Strangeways, late stroke of the 'Varsity Eight, to the
+treacherous eyes of the gaunt grey beast before him which, by reason
+of its unusual markings and untimely appearance, had once and forever
+thrown Spurling's game away. There was something Satanic and
+suggestive of evil about those green and jasper eyes, and the manner
+in which they blinked out upon him from the furious yellow head. Were
+they prompting him to crime, saying, "Why don't you fire? He can't
+defend himself; see, his back is turned?" No, not that. He
+half-believed that the brute was endowed with human intelligence, and
+had betrayed his late master of set purpose--perhaps, in revenge for
+the many beatings he had received on the trail from Selkirk to Murder
+Point. There was a vileness in the creature's look that was degrading
+and stirred up hatred--and surely, the lowest kind of enmity which
+can be entertained by man is toward a unit of the dumb creation. That
+he should feel so, humiliated and angered Granger. Was there not
+enough of ignominy for him to endure without that? He drew his
+revolver, took aim at this yellow devil--but could not fire. The beast
+did not cringe and run away, zigzagging to avoid the bullets, stooping
+low on its legs, as is the habit of huskies when firearms are pointed
+at them; it sat there patiently blinking, a little in advance of its
+four grey comrades, with a mingled expression of amusement and boredom
+in its attitude, like a sleepy old bachelor uncle at a Christmas
+entertainment when Clown and Harlequin commence their threadbare jests
+and fooleries. He might have been yawning and saying to himself, "Hang
+it all! Why do I stay? I know the confounded rubbish by heart--all
+that these fellows will do and say."
+
+Granger's hand dropped to his side; this wolf-dog looked so far from
+ignorant--so much wiser than himself. Could it be that he also was
+playing in the game? Was it possible that he also was intent on
+helping Spurling? Well, then, he should have his chance.
+
+For himself the season for deception was at an end; he had lied to
+gain time for the fugitive, now let him see what truth could effect.
+He waded through the snow to Strangeways, tapped him on the shoulder,
+and was made painfully aware of the opinion held of him by the way in
+which the corporal screwed his shoulder aside.
+
+"I suppose I seem to you a pretty mean kind of a beast?"
+
+"I suppose you do."
+
+"I seem so to myself; but I have an excuse to make--that this man once
+saved my life."
+
+"So you're a hero in disguise?"
+
+"No, but I couldn't go back on a man who had done that."
+
+"I fail to see that that is a reason why you should have lied."
+
+"I called it an excuse."
+
+"In this case the words mean the same."
+
+"Well, then, I had a reason: if the person whom Spurling murdered is
+the person whom I . . ."
+
+"Indeed! So you knew that much, did you?" At mention of the word
+"murdered," Strangeways had swung fiercely round and confronted
+Granger.
+
+"Yes, I know that much. And if the man whom Spurling murdered is the
+man whom I suspect him to be, I had intended to dispense with law and
+to exact the penalty slowly, up here whence there is no escape,
+myself."
+
+"Then you'll be sorry to hear that you've lied to no purpose. The
+person whom Spurling murdered was not a man, you damned scoundrel."
+
+Strangeways turned sharply away from him, and, moving as briskly on
+his snowshoes as the unpacked state of the snow would allow, commenced
+methodically to go about the store in ever widening circles. He
+evidently suspected that the fugitive was still in hiding there, or
+had been at the time of his arrival, and had since escaped, in which
+case the snow would bear traces of his flight. When he had searched
+the mound in vain, he turned his attention to the river-bed where his
+team of dogs was stationed. Granger, watching him from above, saw that
+he had halted suddenly and was bending down. Then he heard him
+calling his dogs together and saw him harnessing them quickly into his
+sledge. Panic seized him lest Strangeways should drive away without
+telling him the name of _this thing, which was not a man_, which
+Spurling had murdered, and _whether the deed had been done in the
+Klondike_. Also he was curious to see for himself what it was that he
+had found in the snow down there, which made him so eager to set out.
+He ploughed his way down the hillside, breaking through the surface
+and slipping as he ran, till he arrived out of breath at the
+river-bank. Then he saw the meaning of this haste; approaching the
+Point from the northward was a muffled track, partially obliterated by
+the snow which had since fallen, which, on reaching Murder Point,
+doubled back, returning northward whence the traveller had come. It
+meant to Granger that, while he and Strangeways had been seated
+together recalling old times in the store, Spurling had come back. For
+what reason? No man would fight his way through a blizzard without
+good purpose; he would lie down where he was till the storm had spent
+itself, lest he should wander from his trail. This man had everything
+to lose by turning back. Then he discovered that the snow was speckled
+with dots of black, and, stooping down, discerned that they were drops
+of blood. Some of the blood-marks were fresh; the tracks themselves
+had been made, perhaps, within the last three hours. Spurling must
+have met with an accident, and, returning to the Point for help, had
+seen the stranger's dogs and sledge, and turning northwards again had
+fled. So thought Granger.
+
+Strangeways, in the meanwhile, was examining the feet of his leader.
+Presently he stood erect, and asked in a low voice, "Did you do
+that?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Look for yourself."
+
+Granger looked, and saw that the balls of the leader's forefeet had
+been gashed several times with a knife.
+
+"How should I have done it?" he replied. "I've been in your company
+every minute since you arrived."
+
+"Who did it, then?"
+
+"You know as well as I."
+
+"And what do you think of a man who could do that?"
+
+"That he was very desperate."
+
+"I should call him a Gadarene swine."
+
+Strangeways stood in angry thought for a few seconds; then he jerked
+up his head, and asked, "Can you lend me another team of huskies? Be
+careful when you answer that you tell me the truth this time."
+
+Granger smiled at the childishness of such threatening.
+
+"You will gain nothing by speaking like that," he said. "Unfortunately
+for you, unlike Spurling, I am not afraid of death--I should welcome
+it. Yet, while I live, I am curious; therefore I will promise you help
+on one condition, that you tell me who has been murdered, and where."
+
+Strangeways lifted his eyes and surveyed Granger, asking himself, "And
+is this statement also a lie?" But, when he spoke there were the
+beginnings of a new respect in his voice. "So you are not afraid of
+death?" he said. "Well, then, I owe you an apology for what I have
+called you, for I am; I am horribly afraid. I am afraid that I shall
+die before I have avenged this death."
+
+"Tell me, who was it that was killed?" cried Granger, impatiently.
+"Was it a girl? There was a girl whom I loved in the Klondike; you
+don't know how you make me suffer."
+
+"Don't I?" replied Strangeways, grimly; and then with affected
+indifference, "There are a good many girls in the Klondike; the body
+of this one was found washed ashore near Forty-Mile."
+
+"What's her name?"
+
+"That's what I'm here to find out."
+
+"Did Spurling know that she was a woman when he shot her?"
+
+"So you know that also--that he shot her? Whether he knew, I don't
+care; the fact remains that she is dead and that he is suspected."
+
+"Only suspected?"
+
+"Well, . . ."
+
+"By God!" cried Granger, bringing down his fist in Strangeways' face,
+"but you shall tell me! Was her name Mordaunt, and was she his
+partner, and did she wear a man's disguise?"
+
+Strangeways turned his head and dodged aside so that the blow fell
+lightly; drawing his revolver, he covered his opponent. Granger
+advanced close up, until the barrel of the revolver touched his face;
+then he halted and waited.
+
+Strangeways watched him; looked into his eyes amazed; then lowered his
+weapon and laughed nervously. "Oh," he said, "I remember, you are not
+afraid of death."
+
+"But I am of madness and suspense."
+
+Strangeways did not reply at once. Perhaps a sudden understanding had
+dawned on him, pity and a vision of what it meant to live through the
+eternal Now at Murder Point. He may have been asking himself, "For the
+lack of one small untruth, shall I thrust this man into Hell?" At any
+rate, when he answered he spoke gently. "No," he said, "she wore a
+woman's dress; be sure of it, your girl-friend is safe up there."
+
+Granger looked at him steadily, wondering why he should have lied;
+than he took his hand and pressed it in the English manner, "I believe
+you," he said. Yet, at the back of his mind a voice was persistently
+questioning, "Do I believe him? But can I believe that?"
+
+He was interrupted in his thoughts by Strangeways saying, "It's a pity
+that that poor brute should suffer; he's certain to die."
+
+The corporal went near, levelled his revolver and shot the leader
+between the eyes. The bullet did its work; the dog shivered, and
+tottered, rolled over on its side, tried to rise again, then stretched
+itself out wearily as if for sleep at the end of a hard day's travel.
+
+"You can do that for a mere husky," said Granger bitterly; "but you
+refuse to do it for a man."
+
+"The husky had a harsh time of it in this world and has no other
+life."
+
+"If that's so, he's to be congratulated; but there was the more reason
+why he should have been allowed to live his one life out. We wretched
+men are never done with life; if I were sure that there was only one
+existence and no reproaches in a future world, I could be brave to the
+end. It's this repetition of mortality, which men call immortality,
+that staggers my intellect, making me afraid--afraid lest there is no
+death."
+
+Strangeways shrugged his shoulders and scowled. He did not like the
+subject--it caused him discomfort; there was so much left for him in
+life. He planned, when he had captured Spurling and seen him safely
+hanged, to buy himself out of the Mounted Police, return to England,
+and there live pleasantly at his club in London and as squire on his
+estate. He would marry, he told himself; and though not the girl whom
+he had most desired, for he believed her to be dead, yet, like a
+sensible man, some other girl, who would be his friend, and bear his
+children, and make him happy. If once he could get out of Keewatin,
+having performed his duty honourably, he would do all that--when
+Spurling had been captured alive or dead.
+
+Therefore he broke in on Granger roughly, inquiring, "Where are those
+huskies which you are going to lend me?"
+
+"They are Spurling's huskies which he left behind when I lent him
+mine."
+
+"How long ago was that?--If they're Spurling's, they must be pretty
+well played out."
+
+"They are. They've rested for thirty hours more or less; but I don't
+think you'll manage to catch him up with them."
+
+"Perhaps not, but I'll try; he can't be more than three hours ahead."
+
+"Three hours with a fresh team is as good as three days."
+
+"You forget the difference between the two men."
+
+"No, I don't, for the one has the memory of his crime."
+
+"It's the memory of his crime that'll wear him out, and that same
+memory that'll give me strength."
+
+"Why? What makes you hate him so? Supposing he did kill a woman, it
+may have been an accident. She may even have felt grateful for the
+bullet, as I should have done just now had you shot me dead. It's
+horrible to kill anyone, but then the poor devil's fleeing for his
+life and he's suffering a thousand times more pain than he
+inflicted."
+
+"Is he? Does he suffer the pain of the man who follows behind?
+Supposing a certain man had loved that woman and had lost her, and had
+planned all his life on the off-chance of meeting her again, dreaming
+of her day and night, and then had suddenly learnt that she was
+brutally dead by Spurling's hand on some God-forsaken Yukon River,
+where the ground was hard like iron so that no grave could be dug by
+the murderer, and her body froze to marble and lay exposed all winter
+through the long dark days, with the bullet wound red in her forehead,
+and her grey face looking up toward the frosty sky, till the spring
+came and the water washed her body under and threw it up in a creek
+near Forty-Mile, where a year later it was discovered mutilated and
+defiled, do you think that her lover would be glad of that? Do you
+think that he would pity the black-guard who could do such a
+scoundrelly deed as that?"
+
+Strangeways was speaking wildly, his voice was trembling and his face
+was haggard and lined; he was crying like a child. "The man who could
+do a deed like that," he shouted, menacing the stars with his clenched
+hand, "the man who could do a deed like that is so corrupt that even
+God would search for good in him in vain. It's the duty of every clean
+man to hound him off the earth. While we allow him to live, we each
+one share his taint. I'll pray God every day of my life that Spurling
+may be damned throughout the ages--eternally and pitilessly damned."
+
+When Granger could make his voice heard, "You don't mean that she was
+Mordaunt?" he cried. All this talk about a woman who had been lost and
+loved paralleled his own case--he took it as applied to himself.
+
+Strangeways recovered himself with an effort, "No, no," he said
+huskily. "Mordaunt, you have told me, was a man. I was only supposing
+all that."
+
+"But Mordaunt was not a man, but a woman in man's clothing."
+
+Strangeways closed his lips tightly together, refusing to take notice,
+pretending that he had not heard. Granger spoke again. "Mordaunt was
+not a man," he said.
+
+"In that case," answered Strangeways, "you know what the man suffers
+who is following behind. I will tell you no more than that."
+
+"You've told me enough and I will help you; only pledge me once more
+on your sacred word that this body was found in a woman's dress."
+
+Strangeways hesitated; then his eyes caught again the bleakness of the
+land and his imagination pictured the awful loneliness of life up
+there. Looking full on Granger he said, "On my most sacred word as a
+brother-gentleman, the body that was found was clothed in a woman's
+dress."
+
+"Then, thank God, she was not Mordaunt!" said Granger; "but because he
+knew her to be a woman at the time when he killed her, I will help you
+none the less."
+
+Having called together Spurling's huskies, they found them to be too
+weak for travel, with the exception of the leader, therefore they
+harnessed in the corporal's remaining four dogs, putting the
+yellow-faced stranger at their head. No sooner had they turned their
+backs and gone inside the store to bring out the necessary provisions,
+than the four old dogs, jealous of their new leader, hurled themselves
+upon him, burying their fangs in his shaggy hair, intent on tearing
+him to death--an old-timer husky can stand a good deal of that. He
+strained on the traces, exposing to them only his hindquarters,
+running well ahead, and keeping his throat safe. Not until the two men
+had clubbed them nearly senseless did they subside into sullen
+quietness; and then only so long as they were watched. Once a back was
+turned, the four hind dogs piled on to their leader and the fight
+recommenced.
+
+"You won't go far with them," said Granger. He did not notice the look
+of reawakened suspicion which flickered in Strangeways' eyes. "You
+won't go far with them; the moment you camp and that yellow-faced
+beast gets his chance, he'll chew your four dogs to pieces. That's
+what he's there for, it's my belief--he's playing Spurling's game.
+He'll take you fifty or a hundred miles from Murder Point, and there
+leave you stranded."
+
+"What would you advise?" This was spoken in a quiet voice.
+
+"I would advise you to wait here till the summer has come, and then to
+proceed by water."
+
+"But on snow I can follow his trail, whereas travel by water leaves no
+traces."
+
+"What does that matter? Instead of following him, let him return to
+you, as he did to-night. You've driven him up a blind alley on this
+Last Chance River; he can only go to the blank wall of the Bay, and
+then come back."
+
+"He can reach the House of the Crooked Creek."
+
+"And if he does, what of that? He'll be touching the blank wall then.
+They won't want him. The first question that they'll ask him will be,
+'And what have you come here for?' If he can't give a satisfactory
+account of himself, they'll place him under arrest. When you get news
+of that, you can go up there and fetch him."
+
+"And if he doesn't get so far as that?"
+
+"You can set out by canoe and drive him back, and back, till you come
+to the Bay, and he can go no further."
+
+"He might hide, and I might pass him on the way--what then?"
+
+"In that case he'd double back and come past Murder Point, trying to
+get out."
+
+"In the meanwhile I should be a hundred, two hundred miles to the
+northwards, travelling towards the Bay on my fool's errand, and who
+would be here to capture him?"
+
+"Why, I should."
+
+"Precisely."
+
+Granger started; the way in which that last word had been spoken had
+made Strangeways' meaning manifest. He blushed like a girl at the
+shame of it. "Surely you don't still distrust me? You don't think me
+such a sneak that, having got you out of the way, I'd let him slip by
+and out?"
+
+"It looks like it."
+
+"But, man, don't you realise that our interests are the same?"
+
+"Since when?"
+
+"Since you told me of a woman who was done to death on a Yukon river,
+and lay unburied all winter till the thaw came, and her body was
+washed down to a creek near Forty-Mile, where it lay through the
+summer naked, gazed upon, uncovered, and defiled."
+
+"I fancy you knew all that when you helped Spurling to escape."
+
+"Yes, but I didn't know that it was a woman, and I didn't know her
+name."
+
+"And you don't know her name now."
+
+"I do; it was Jervis Mordaunt who wore a man's disguise."
+
+"I told you that she wore a woman's dress."
+
+"I know. I know."
+
+"Then do you mean to tell me that I lied?"
+
+"Perhaps, but not to accuse you. You said it out of kindness, and that
+was partly true which you said. You meant that the body was naked when
+it was found."
+
+"If you dare to speak of her like that again, I'll choke you, and run
+the risk of getting hanged myself. The land has debased you, as the
+Yukon debased your friend. I can read you; you're still half-minded to
+play his game, and that's why you want to turn me back."
+
+"Yes, I want to turn you back. Spurling's a hard-pressed man and he's
+dangerous. You can judge of what he is capable by what has just
+happened. He's cunning and, in his way, he's brave; he wouldn't
+scruple to take your life. Your best policy is to wait--either here or
+at God's Voice, as you think best. The ice will soon be unsafe to
+travel; already a mile from here, where the river flows rapidly round
+from the south-west, the part on the inside bend is rotten. I had to
+guide Spurling round that. At first, before I saw you and knew who you
+were, I was tempted not to warn you, to let you take your own chance
+and go on by yourself, and, perhaps, get drowned; but now, after I
+have seen you and after what you have told me, I can't do that."
+
+"So you were tempted to let me drown myself, and now you are
+repentant?"
+
+Granger bowed his head.
+
+"Then I tell you that if the ice were as rotten as your soul or
+Spurling's, I would still follow him, though I had to follow him to
+Hell. If I've got to die, I'll die game--and you shan't turn me back."
+
+Granger ran out after him, calling him to stay, offering to guide him
+round the danger spot in his trail. But suspicion and untruthfulness
+had done their work. Only once did he turn his head, when at the crack
+of the whip the yellow-faced leader leapt forward in his traces. Then
+he answered him and cried, "He killed the woman I loved, and he shall
+pay the price though I follow him to Hell."
+
+So far as is known, these were the last words which Strangeways ever
+said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE LAST OF STRANGEWAYS
+
+
+Granger returned to his shack and, closing the door, sat down beside
+the stove in his accustomed place. He commenced to fill his pipe
+slowly, stretching out his legs as if he were preparing for a long
+night of late hours and thoughtfulness. But he could not rest, his
+whole sensitiveness was listening and alert; the muscles of his body
+twitched, as if rebuking him for the delay which he imposed on them.
+He was expecting to hear a cry; whose cry, and called forth by what
+agony, he did not dare to surmise, only he must get there before it
+was too late. Somewhere between his shack and the Forbidden River he
+must get before the agony began. He rose up, and putting on his capote
+and snowshoes hurriedly, went out following Strangeways' trail. He had
+no time to realise the folly of his action--this leaving of his store
+unguarded and setting forth without an outfit at a season of the year
+when, perhaps, within a week the ice would break. He did not consider
+how far he might have to follow before he could hope to come up with
+Strangeways; nor what Strangeways would think of and do with him if,
+turning on a sudden his head, he should see the man who had lied to
+him coming swiftly up behind. He would probably shoot him; but Granger
+in his frenzy to save Strangeways' life did not think of that. His
+brain was throbbing with this one thought, that if he did not catch
+him up before he reached the Forbidden River, he would have seen the
+last of him alive which any man would ever see in this world, unless
+that man were Spurling.
+
+So now there were three men spread out across the ice, two of whom
+followed in the other's steps. The first man was racing to preserve
+his own life, the second was pursuing to take it, and the third was
+following with all his strength that he might save the pursuer's life
+from danger. Of these three the last man alone had no fear of death.
+The other two were so eager to live, and one of them took such delight
+in life! Yet, Strangeways was rushing to his destruction as fast as
+that evil yellow-faced beast, tugging at the traces with might and
+main, could take him--to where beneath the ice, or in some forest
+ambush, lay crouched the hidden death. And if he should die, whose
+fault would that be? Granger was man enough to answer, "The fault
+would be mine. I told him untruth till he could not believe me when I
+spoke the truth which would save his life."
+
+Now that he was left solitary again, he resumed that old habit of
+lonely men of arguing with himself. Between each hurrying stride, he
+panted out within his brain his unspoken words, his thoughts gasping
+one behind the other as if his very mind was out of breath. Why had
+Spurling come back? Why hadn't he killed all ten huskies outright, and
+so prevented Strangeways from pursuing farther until the break-up of
+the ice? He would have gained a month by that. His deed bore about it
+signs of the ineffectual cunning of the maniac; it had been only worth
+the doing if carried out bitterly to the end. Yet Spurling had not
+gone mad; he was too careful of his life and future happiness to
+permit himself to do that. Then he must have done it for a threat,
+hoping by the daring and grim humour of his brutality to strike terror
+into Strangeways and warn him back. Perhaps this was only one of many
+such experiences which had occurred all along the trail from Selkirk,
+and the pursuer had recognised both the motive and the challenge.
+Well, if you're compelled to play the game of life-taking, you may as
+well keep your temper, and set about it sportsmanly with a jest. Even
+in this horrid revelation of character there was some of the old
+Spurling left.
+
+Then his thoughts turned to Strangeways. He wondered, had he lied or
+told the truth when he asserted that the body was not Mordaunt's which
+was found at Forty-Mile? He hoped for the best, but he doubted. His
+manner had been against it, and so had Spurling's; they had both been
+keeping something back. Perhaps he had lied out of jealousy, because
+he could not endure to think that this girl, for whom he had been
+searching, who now was dead, had been loved by another man--and not a
+worthy man either, but one whom he despised.
+
+(Granger knew that he also would have felt like that. The mere denial
+of such a fact would have seemed somehow to reserve her more entirely
+for himself.)
+
+He had not been able to bear the thought that, now that she was beyond
+reach of all men's search, her memory should be shared with him by
+another man with an equal quality of affection--it had seemed to him
+like her hand stretched out from the grave to strip him of the few
+mementoes of her which he had. For these reasons he might even have
+lied truthfully, being self-persuaded that this Jervis Mordaunt was a
+different girl.
+
+Granger heartily hoped that his suspicions might be mistaken, but
+. . . Whatever happened he must come up with him, and ask him that
+question once again. Maybe last time he had not spoken plainly;
+Strangeways had not grasped what he meant. He could not remember how
+his question had been phrased, but this time it should be worded with
+such brutal frankness that there could be no chance of error. He would
+lay hold of him strongly, and clasp him about the knees so that he
+could not escape. He would never release his hold till his doubts had
+been set at rest. He would say to him quite clearly, "I loved a girl
+in the Klondike who called herself Jervis Mordaunt; she passed for a
+man, and was clothed in a Yukon placer-miner's dress. She did not know
+that I loved her; so you need not grieve if this murdered girl whom
+you loved, and the one whom I call Mordaunt, were one and the same. I
+fled from the Shallows where we worked together, partly in order that
+she might not know that. Now will you tell me, once and for all, was
+this girl, whom Spurling murdered, called Mordaunt? If you love God,
+tell me the truth and speak out. I can bear the truth, but I cannot
+endure this suspense."
+
+With the careful precision of a mind uncertain of its own sanity, he
+repeated and re-balanced his phrases, distrusting his own exactness,
+fearful lest he had not chosen such words as would make his meaning
+plain. Ah, but by his gestures, if language failed him, he would cause
+him to understand. For such news, even though it should be bad news,
+he would pledge his honour to help Strangeways in his search for
+Spurling. He would even volunteer to go single-handed and capture him
+himself--bring him down to Murder Point by guile, where Strangeways
+would be waiting to take him. The best and worst which he himself
+could derive from such a promise would be only that he should meet
+with death--but he should have thought of that offer earlier, and made
+it while Strangeways was with him.
+
+At that word _death_ the purpose of his present errand flared vividly
+in his mind, and he hurried his pace.
+
+Looking back across his shoulder through the darkness, for the moon
+was under cloud, he could just make out where his store pinnacled the
+mound at the Point; he had left the door open in the haste of his
+departure and, over the threshold slantwise across the snow, the fire
+from the stove threw an angry glare. It was only a mile from the Point
+to the bend, yet he seemed to have been journeying for hours. The
+surface of the river was difficult to travel because the snow which
+had fallen was wet; it shrank away from the feet at every stride. For
+this season of the year in Keewatin the night was mild; there was a
+damp rawness, but scarcely any frost in the air. If the ice had been
+rotten in the morning at the bend, it would be doubly treacherous now.
+Ah, but he had warned Strangeways! Surely he would be sufficiently
+cautious to half-believe him at least in that. When he came to where
+the river turned northwards, he would forsake the short-cut of the old
+trail and swing out into the middle stream, or work safely round along
+the bank. If he couldn't scent danger for himself, his huskies would
+choose their own path and save him, unless--unless, feeling the
+smoothness of the old trail beneath the snow, they should lazily
+choose that, or unless that leader of Spurling's should wilfully lead
+them astray; but surely the four hind-dogs would have sense not to
+follow him, and would hang back.
+
+He kept his eyes on the darkness before him, but to the northeast all
+was shadowy; he could discern nothing. Yes, there was something moving
+over there. He judged that he had already traversed three-quarters of
+that interminable mile; surely he would be able to catch up with him
+now. The recent blizzard had wiped out the old trail, but he could
+still feel it firm beneath the snow; he was following in Strangeways'
+tracks--Strangeways' which had been Spurling's. Then he came to a
+point where the staler tracks, which were Spurling's, had branched out
+into mid-stream to round the bend; but he saw to his horror that
+Strangeways' had kept on to the left by the winter trail, toward the
+spot of which he had warned him--he had even suspected that that final
+warning was a trap.
+
+Ah, there he was straight ahead of him; he could see him distinctly
+now. The moon, rising clear of cloud, made his figure plain. He called
+to him, and it seemed that he half-turned his head. He was keeping
+perilously near in to the bend. He called to him again, and signed to
+him with his arms to drive out. Then once more a cloud passed before
+the moon, making the land seem dead.
+
+He advanced cautiously, moving slowly, testing the strength of the ice
+at each fresh step before trusting it with his weight. Underneath he
+could hear the lapping of the current as it rushed rapidly round the
+bend, and could feel the trembling of the crust beneath his feet, as a
+man does the vibration of an Atlantic liner when the engines are
+working at full pressure, and every plank and bolt begins to shake and
+speak. When he had come to where Strangeways had been standing, he
+stood still and listened. He could hear no sound of travel, no
+cursing a man's voice, urging his dogs forward, or cracking of a whip.
+Then he felt the ice sagging from under him, and the cold touch of
+water creeping round his moccasins. From a rift in the cloud, a
+segment of the moon looked out. Before and behind him lay the frozen
+expanse of river, with its piled-up banks on either hand, and its
+heavy blanketing of snow, smooth and level, making its passage seem
+safe. Far over to the right stretched the trail of Spurling, showing
+ugly and black against the white, where his steps and the steps of his
+dogs had punctured the surface. Just before him, three yards distant,
+the ice had broken open, leaving a gaping hole over whose jagged edges
+the water climbed, and whimpered, and fell back, like a fretful child
+in its cot, which has wakened too early and is trying to clamber out.
+
+As Granger watched, heedless of his own safety, a hand pushed out
+above the current, the hooked fingers of which searched gropingly for
+something to which they might make fast. Granger, throwing himself
+flat in the snow, so as to distribute his weight, crawled towards it.
+The hand rose higher, and then the arm, followed at last by the head
+and eyes of Strangeways, but not the mouth. He had caught hold of a
+point of ice and was trying to pull himself up by that; but something
+(was it the swiftness of the current?) was dragging his body away from
+under him so that the water was still above his nose and mouth.
+Granger wormed his way to within arm-stretch and clasped his hand; but
+the moment he commenced to pull, the weight became terrific--more than
+the weight of one man--and he himself began to slide slowly forward
+till his head and shoulders were above the water. Something was
+tugging at Strangeways from below the river, so that his body jerked
+and quivered like a fisherman's line when a well-hooked salmon is
+endeavouring to make a rush at the other end.
+
+Granger was leaning far out now, the surface was curving from under
+him and his chest had left the ice. Then he realised what had
+happened: the loaded sledge had sunk to the bottom of the river-bed,
+and was holding down the four rear-dogs by their traces; but the
+leader, by struggling, had fought his way to within a few inches of
+the outer air, and, clinging on to Strangeways' throat and breast, was
+fiercely striving to climb up him with his teeth to where breathing
+might be found, in somewhat the same manner as Archbishop Salviati did
+in Florence to Francesco Pazzi, when the Gonfalonier hurled them both
+out of the Palazzo window, each with a rope about his neck.
+
+(Strange what men will think of at a crisis! Granger was grimly
+amused, and half-disgusted with himself. How absurd that of all things
+at such a time he should have remembered that!)
+
+The weight of the four rear-dogs and the loaded sledge were gradually
+dragging the leader down, and, with him, Strangeways. He held on
+desperately; now and then, as he made a fresh effort, his yellow snout
+would appear above the water or the top of his yellow head--except for
+that, he might not have been there. But Granger was intent on
+Strangeways; staring into his eyes, which were distant the length of
+his arm out-stretched, he was appalled at the consternation they
+reflected, and the evident terror of the end. If he could only get at
+his knife, he might be able to effect something; but his knife was
+beneath his capote, in his belt, and both his hands were occupied,
+the one with supporting the drowning man, the other with preventing
+himself from slipping further.
+
+He wanted to speak to Strangeways, but he could not think of any words
+which were not so trivial as to sound blasphemous on such an occasion.
+The man was growing weaker and heavier to hold; his eyes were losing
+their vision, and the water rose in bubbles from his mouth. There was
+only one last chance, that if he could support him long enough for the
+husky at his throat to release his grip and die first, he might be
+able to drag him out.
+
+Though all this had been the work of only a few seconds, his arm was
+becoming numb and intolerably painful. Whatever it might cost him, he
+promised himself that he would not let go till hope was at an end. He
+was slipping forward again; he would soon overbalance. But what did
+that matter to one who did not fear death? After all, an honourable
+out-going is the best El Dorado which any man can hope to find as
+reward for his long life's search. If he were to die for and with
+Strangeways, he would at least prove to him that he was not entirely
+worthless.
+
+Then, before it was too late, he found his words. "Be brave," he
+shouted hoarsely, "be brave! It is only death."
+
+It would have seemed a preposterous supposition yesterday that the
+private trader at Murder Point should ever be in a position to bid the
+veriest scum among cowards to be brave. As he spoke, the intelligence
+came back to Strangeways' eyes, the fear went out from them and the
+features, losing their agony, straightened into an expression which
+was almost grave. His hand became small in Granger's palm, as though
+it were offering to slip away.
+
+Some deep instinct stirred in Granger; he suddenly loved this man for
+the self-denial which that act betrayed. If there was to be a denial
+of self, however, he was emphatic that his should be the sacrifice.
+Was it this thought of sacrifice which brought religion to his
+mind--some haunting, quick remembrance of those wise words about
+"dying for one's friend"?
+
+Quite irrationally and without connection with anything which had
+previously occurred, leaning yet further out at his own immediate
+peril, shifting his grip to Strangeways' wrist that he might hold him
+more firmly, he whispered, "Jesus of Galilee! Jesus Christ!"
+
+The face of the drowning man took on an awful serenity, a look of
+holiness, as if at sight of something which stood behind Granger,
+which he had only just discerned. He even smiled. Suddenly, with the
+determination of one who had concluded and conquered an old
+temptation, he wrenched away his hand. Granger made one last effort to
+reach him, but the tugging of the beast below the surface, or its dead
+weight, had drifted him out of arm-stretch. He sank lower. The water
+rose, almost leisurely it seemed as if now certain of the one thing it
+had desired, higher and higher up his face till it had reached his
+eyes, quenched them, and nothing was left but a few bubbles which
+floated to the surface and broke, sparkling in the moonlight. Granger
+did not stir; as he had been paralysed, he lay there rigid with the
+black waters washing about his face and hands. Then very slowly, as
+though reluctant not to die, he drew himself back. When he had reached
+safety, rising up, he gazed around; the land looked more desolate
+than ever. The first words which he said were spoken sacredly, with
+bated breath. "And that man told me," he muttered, "that he was afraid
+of death. . . . To prefer to die at such a time, rather than risk my
+life, was the act of a man who was very brave." And next he said, "I
+wonder what were his last words when he crashed through the ice? I
+expect he said, 'Damn.' Well, that was as good as any other word to
+say; after all, all swearing, taken in a certain sense, is a form of
+prayer--a bluff assertion of belief in the divine."
+
+Granger turned slowly about, and commenced to make his way back to the
+Point. At first he spoke aloud to himself as a thought occurred. "I
+distrusted that yellow beast of Spurling's from the first." "Now at
+any rate Spurling is safe." "I haven't yet discovered whether Mordaunt
+is dead,"--and so on. Then he ceased to speak with his lips, and his
+thoughts were uttered in the silence of his brain. They had all to do
+with Strangeways.
+
+He wondered what vision had been his, causing him to smile as he sank.
+Did he think of that girl, and that he was going to meet her? Or of
+the old home in England? Or of his school-days? Or was it the Thames
+he thought about--of Oxford with its many towers, and the cry of the
+coach along the tow-path as the eight swings homeward up-stream, in
+the grey of a winter afternoon, to the regular click of the rowlocks
+as the men pluck their blades from the water, feather and come forward
+for the next stroke, making ready to drive back their slides as one
+man with their legs? He was certain that whatever happened, and
+however he should go out of life, did God spare him a moment's
+consciousness, it would be the vision of Oxford with its domes and
+spires, its austere and romantic quiet, its echoing cloisters and
+passages, its rivers with their sedges of silver and of grey, which
+would float before his dying eyes,--or would he think of Christ? Had
+Christ been the vision which this man had seen?
+
+Strange thoughts for Keewatin! But death is always strange.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE BREAK-UP OF THE ICE
+
+
+Nearly a month had gone by since the night on which Strangeways died.
+Not that time mattered much to Granger, for, like the immortals, men
+in Keewatin have dispensed with time: they have accepted as true the
+lesson which philosophers have been striving to teach the world ever
+since the human intellect first commenced to philosophise--that there
+are no such ontological facts as Time and Space. Among the men of this
+vast northern territory the outward expression of religion is rare;
+they do not often speak, and then only of such interests as are
+superficial to their lives. Yet here, in their fine neglect of the two
+sternest of self-imposed, human limitations, the religious instinct is
+manifest. As it would be sacrilege to count God's breaths, were that
+possible, so to them it seems a kind of blasphemy to number the
+recurrence of their own small perceptions when the Divine Perceived
+seems so entirely unconscious of their very existence. Hence it
+happens that one does not often hear a traveller speak of having
+journeyed so many days or miles; his division is more casual, and
+embraces only his own immediate actions--he has travelled so many
+"sleeps," nothing more.
+
+As a rule, Indians are utterly deficient in the time-sense and can
+give no intelligent account of their age. Their calendar is enshrined,
+if they have one, in symbols which they use as decorations, painted
+on the inside of their finest skins. They make their reckoning of the
+years from some event which was once important to themselves, or to
+their tribe. Thus, stars falling from the top to the bottom of a robe
+represent the year of 1833, and an etching of an Indian with a broken
+leg and a horn on his head stands for the year in which Hay-waujina,
+One Horn, had his leg "killed." Back of that which is comparatively
+immediate to their own experience, they have ceased to count or to be
+inquisitive.
+
+    "Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass
+     Their pleasures in a long immortal dream."
+
+So with both the joys and sorrows of these Northland men; hurry is not
+necessary where time is unrecognised, and turbulence of emotion,
+whether of grief or gladness, is felt to be out of place in a
+_dream-being_, whose sole reality is its unreality. Their personal
+unimportance to the Universe, and remoteness from the Market-place of
+Life allow them to dawdle. Their experiences have no sharp edges, no
+abrupt precipices, no divisive gulfs, no defined beginnings and
+endings. The book of their sojourn in this world has neither chapters
+nor headings; the page runs on without hindrance from tragedy to
+comedy, comedy to farce, farce to melodrama, and thence to tragedy
+again--always it returns to tragedy. They stride round the Circle of
+the Emotions without halting, merging from joy into sorrow without
+preface, till one day the feet grow wearier and lag, the eyes grow
+clear and, almost without knowing it, as did Strangeways, their dream
+going from them, they awake--motionlessly pass out of life, and enter
+into _What_?
+
+If smoothness of passage and apparent endlessness be the two main
+qualities of the divine existence, then the lives of men in Keewatin
+are both divine and real; only we, of the outside world, would call
+this same smoothness dulness, and its endlessness its most torturing
+agony.
+
+The past month had dragged by with Granger as would a century with
+normal men, except that in the entire span of those hundred years
+there had been no summer. In them he had lived through and remembered
+every emotion which had ever come to him. His brain was confused with
+remembering, fevered with anguish of regret for things lost, which
+would never come again. He had nearly succumbed to that most unmanly
+of all spiritual assailants, the coward of Self-Pity--would have
+succumbed, had not Self-Scorn rendered him aid.
+
+From sunrise to sunset the winter had slowly thawed: the trees had
+uncovered their greens and browns, thrusting themselves forth from
+beneath the rain-washed greyness of the melting snow; the river,
+reluctantly at first, had cracked and swayed, and become engraved by
+miniature streams which ate their way, as acid on metal, across its
+surface. Strange messages those narrow streams of water wrote; strange
+they seemed at least to Granger as he watched them day by day.
+Sometimes they seemed to be writing words, and sometimes drawing
+faces. The words he could not always decipher; when he did they were
+mostly proper names, STRANGEWAYS, SPURLING, MORDAUNT, EL DORADO. The
+faces were more easy to recognise, and three of them corresponded to
+the first three names. There was one morning when he awoke, having
+dreamed of the horrible revenge which he would take, and going to the
+window was appalled to see a new face scrawled upon the ice--his own,
+yet not his own; the evil likeness to the self which had come to him
+in the Klondike. He was puzzled, and set to work to discover the
+reason for these signs. Then a verse which he had once learnt as a
+child came back to him, "Jesus stooped down and wrote with his finger
+on the ground, _as though he heard them not_. And _they which heard
+it_, being convicted by _their own_ conscience, went out one by one,
+beginning at the eldest, even unto the last; and Jesus was left alone,
+_and the woman_."
+
+So he knew that it was God's hand which had etched that warning
+likeness overnight, which his own conscience had discerned, accusing
+him. Also, in gazing upon that drawing he heard a voice, which was his
+own voice, used as a medium for another mind, saying, "Now that thou
+hast seen what thou art like, go out, that I may be left alone _and
+Spurling_." So Granger had agreed with God that day that he would
+cease from his dreams of human vengeance, and leave Him alone with
+Spurling. He did not dare to tell God all his thoughts, but he felt
+certain that, had Spurling's opinions been consulted, he would have
+preferred to be left alone with John Granger. It was terrible enough
+to have to dwell between God's footsteps, as all men must who live in
+Keewatin, when His eyes were averted, and He Himself walked by
+seemingly unconscious of your presence; but to have to live there when
+He had noticed your presence, and His face was lifted up, while His
+gaze was bent upon you, with no hope of escape, a fugitive from human
+justice, alone in an empty land with your own conscience and Him as
+your accuser, that was to protract the shamefaced confusion of the
+Last Judgment through every day of your life. Granger felt that in
+making that compact he had done his worst by Druce Spurling.
+
+In the middle hours of the night which followed this agreement, which
+he chose to think of as his compromise with Deity, he was awakened by
+a thunderous sound, and jumping from his bunk saw that the river had
+broken up and the ice was going out, as though God, having finished
+His argument which He had written there, were rubbing out His words.
+Flinging wide the door, he ran down the mound to the bank, shouting
+like a boy. As he went he had a panoramic vision of all the other men,
+both white and red, along the six hundred miles of river which
+stretched from the great lake to the Hudson Bay, who had been awakened
+as he had been, and now, or sometime that night, would be doing what
+he was doing, rushing half-clad beneath the stars down to the
+river-bank calling on the loneliness to rejoice--the loneliness, which
+throughout the frozen months had listened so faithfully to all that
+they had had to say, blasphemous or otherwise, and had made no reply.
+But this night both silence and loneliness were violated, and cried
+aloud with rage protestingly; whereat the river only clapped its hands
+and squeezed its passage, and huddled between its ruined
+winter-barriers ever northward to the freedom of the Bay.
+
+This was the one night in all the year when revolt was permitted, and
+the Bastile of Keewatin fell. Fell! Yes, soon the summer would raise
+it up again in a newer form, only a little less intolerable; and
+afterwards the winter, that master-builder, would return as a king
+from his exile. But no one thought of such catastrophe to-night. For
+the moment it seemed that the reign of tyranny was ended and the
+millennium had begun--chaos, which men mistake for millennium.
+
+Granger stood above the bank repeating to himself over and over, "The
+ice is going out! The ice is going out!" as if it were a fact
+incredible. Every moment the air vibrated with a roar, and the earth
+was shaken as some new horseman of the ice was overthrown and hurried
+by in flight, only to halt presently, ranged side by side with some of
+his fellows, to make yet another stand. Certainly it was a battle
+which was being fought, and one which must be lost.
+
+As far as sound could travel, from the west and from the north, he
+could hear the cannonade, and what seemed like the clatter of hoofs,
+and the clash of thrown-away swords. It was possible to imagine
+anything when Nature was making a change so titanic. Now the water was
+the black horse of Revelation, with a sable rider on his back who
+carried "a balance in his hand,"--and he was in pursuit. And the ice
+was the pale horse, and he that sat upon him, his name was Death, and
+Hades followed with him,--and he was in flight. And now, when some
+great floe jammed in its passage round the Point, and the ice piled
+up, it became for Granger a magician's silver palace in Aragon, which
+a dark-mailed knight of Christendom had travelled leagues to demolish.
+Outside it shone resplendent and crystal in the starlight; but within
+it was full of uncleanness, and by day it would vanish.
+
+He amused himself with these fancies, and followed them to their
+furthest length. He could see the faces of the beleaguered, now evil
+with terror, peering out from the casements, and the stern old
+enchanter in the turret, over whose ledges flowed down his snow-white
+beard. He could hear the hoarse-throated clamour of the knight as he
+led his company about the walls, and rammed in the castle's gateway,
+shouting, "For Christ! For Christ!" The structure trembled and the
+turret commenced to wave in the air, as it had been a banner. The
+sorcerer looked out, his eyes were filled with dismay--he could not
+withstand that name of 'Christ'; he plunged from the height, spreading
+abroad his arms, and was lost in the blackness of the underground. The
+dark host swept over the palace still shouting, "For Christ! For
+Christ!" In the twinkling of an eye, both the evil one and the
+avenging host were gone--all was resolved into turbid water and
+submerged, groaning ice.
+
+So he watched the break-up of the ice, and the travelling of the river
+which, slipping by at his feet, going forth to wander the world, left
+him stationary. Perhaps some drops of this Last Chance River would
+some day be washed up in a wave on the tropic shores of Ceylon, or,
+having spent a winter in the Arctic, would be carried down in a berg
+and, having melted, flow on round Cape Horn to the Pacific till they
+came to Polynesia, where they would be parted by the swimming hands of
+dusky, slender girls. He grew jealous at the thought, and bending down
+baled out some of the water in his palms, and threw it on the ground,
+saying angrily, "You at least shall stay." Then he laughed at his
+folly and was comforted by thinking, "When my body is dead, it also
+will journey forth. I must be patient like the river, and wait. In
+God's good time I also shall wander round the world."
+
+"But shall I know? Shall I be conscious of that?" the spirit of
+discontent inquired.
+
+Granger shook his head irritably, as if by so doing he could throw off
+these troublesome imaginations. Since the death of Strangeways, he had
+not recovered his poise of soul. Ah, and Strangeways! Was Strangeways
+conscious of his body's release, and the permission which death had
+given him to wander forth? How odd to think that that body, which had
+been born of a woman in England and tended by her hands, which had
+strolled through English lanes and over Oxford meadows, gesticulating
+and talking, doing good and evil, which even in its life had brought
+the man who inhabited it so many miles from home, now that the soul
+had departed from it, should be hurrying away alone to hide itself in
+Arctic fastnesses! Did Strangeways know that? Was he conscious of this
+new adventure? Well, if God was so anxious to take care of Spurling,
+He could be trusted to look after Strangeways--if anything of him
+survived.
+
+The melting of the ice had chilled the air. The coldness of his yet
+living body awoke him to a realisation of the petty suffering of that
+small part of his universe which was explored and known. Taking one
+last look at the ruin which the one night's thaw had worked, the
+pinnacles, and beauty, and whiteness which it had destroyed,
+"Courage!" he said, "for this is life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+A MESSAGE FROM THE DEAD
+
+
+The sun was shining down; the spring rains had ceased; within less
+than a month winter had vanished, and summer had swept through
+Keewatin with a burst of gladness. The land was riotously green;
+through the heart of it wandered the river, newly released, a streak
+of azure, or of gilded splendour where smitten by the sun. Although
+its waters were running freely, many memories of the frozen quiet
+still remained in the shape of ice piled up along its banks, sometimes
+to the height of fifteen feet, and of snow in the more shady hollows
+of the forest, which glimmered distantly between leaves and branches
+hinting at secret woodland lakes. Even the most backward among the
+trees had commenced to unfold their buds. All day long, and through
+the major portion of the night, the frogs continued to whistle in the
+marshes and along the river's edges. Flock after flock of duck
+arrived, flashing their wings against the sky, dropping from under a
+cloud suddenly, and coming to rest in the water with a shower of
+spray, where they rode at ease side by side, like painted, anchored
+merchantmen returned in safety from the earth's end. Now the wild
+swan, teal, or goose would go by with a whirr of wings, crying
+hoarsely. To make the world seem yet more wide an occasional gull
+would heave in sight, drifting without effort in silent flight
+majestically. In the forest Granger was conscious of a commotion at
+the cause of which he could only guess. Love was at work in the
+shadows, or what among the dumb creation passes for love. There was a
+continual stirring of leaves, the rustle of branches forced aside, the
+scattering of birds, those spies and betrayers of the four-footed
+animal, and the grievous low wail of the wolf. Sometimes a fish would
+leap in the river, flash silvery and dripping in the sunlight, on its
+bridal journey from the ocean. Was it an act of gallantry, he
+wondered, which some deep-sea female witnessed from beneath the ripple
+of the stream, or was it a terrified effort to escape from love. He
+knew what that best of all passions could mean to the forest animal,
+and how cruel it might become. Often in the fall of the year he had
+watched a doe, seen her dash down the river bank, stand quivering,
+leap in and swim, made fearless of man because she knew that her
+lover, the stag, was not far behind.
+
+This frenzy of passion set him thinking, and made him long for the
+return of Peggy Ericsen. He knew that his love for her was not of the
+highest, was little more than physical, not much nobler than forest
+love; but what was a man to do, and how guide his conduct when all the
+world was a-mating? On occasions he had a clearer vision, and realised
+with a sense of sudden shame to how low a level he had sunk. Then he
+would strive to throw off this attraction for a half-breed girl by
+recalling the faces of all the other women whom he had admired and
+loved. Yet this also was dangerous, for it caused him to remember
+Mordaunt, thoughts of whom roused up anger within him against
+Spurling. He had agreed to leave him to God, and could not go back on
+his word; therefore he must forget Mordaunt and, if his mind must be
+haunted by womankind, think only of Peggy. Peggy! Well, she was not a
+bad little sort. Pretty? Yes. But between her and himself there could
+be no community of mind. He knew that for hundreds of years it had
+been the custom of traders and white trappers to take to themselves a
+squaw from a tribe of friendly Indians, sometimes for the sake of
+commercial advantages, sometimes for defence, sometimes for domestic
+convenience, rarely for love. But there his education, which would
+have served him well in an older land, stood in his way, as it had so
+often done, making him over-delicate.
+
+He could find it in his heart to wish himself more ignorant and less
+refined. That glamour of intellectual gentility, which England sets
+such store by, had made him unfit for the outdoor brutalities of
+northern life. In his catastrophe he knew that he was not single,
+though there was small consolation in that; all through Canada he had
+encountered younger sons, drawing-room bred young gentlemen, who
+worked in lumber camps, on railroads, and in mines by day, and spelt
+out their Horace from ragged texts by brushwood fires, beneath the
+stars, or in verminous shacks by night. Their power to construe a dead
+language served to differentiate them from their associates, and,
+rather foolishly if heroically, to bolster up their pride.
+
+But, to return to Peggy, what a pity it was that she had insisted on
+the marriage ceremony! Yet, he respected her for that. _But_, and
+there was always a but in Granger's reasonings, suppose he should get
+his chance to return to England one day! And this would certainly
+happen to him on his mother's death. And suppose, when he had
+tethered himself to this half-breed wife, he should get word that
+Mordaunt was still alive! Granger was always at a loss when the moment
+for decision presented itself; he was too moderate, too far-sighted
+and philosophic to act immediately. It takes an abrupt, coarse-grained
+man, or a prophet, to handle a crisis efficiently; your man who is
+only endowed just beyond the average sees too far--and not far enough.
+The insolent infringement of personality which he had suffered as man
+and child from his mother's unwise interference had caused him to
+become a chronic hesitator. As usual, in this case as in all others,
+he determined to let matters slide, to give circumstance an unfettered
+opportunity to evolve its own event. He was content to remain the
+spectator of his own career, allowing Chance to be the only doer of
+the deeds which went to make up the record of his life. And what would
+Chance do next? The Man with the Dead Soul might return at any hour
+from his winter's hunt, bringing with him his daughter, in which case
+most surely his book of life would commence to write out its latest
+chapter of disgrace.
+
+Beorn had cached a canoe at the mouth of the Forbidden River, and
+therefore would reach the Point up-stream from the northward. Granger
+found excitement in the thought that any minute, looking out from his
+window, he might discover the approach of his future wife. The more he
+allowed his fancy to dwell upon her, the more pleasant her image
+became for him. After all, there is always something of romance, at
+first at any rate, in marrying out of your blood heritage. Pizarro
+must have felt that when he took to himself Inez Huayllas Nusta, the
+Inca princess. The havoc of affection which was being enacted
+secretly beneath the shadow of the forest trees urged him on, crying,
+"Take your pleasure while it is yours, winter will return. Short views
+of life are best." Having listened to that advice for several days, he
+allowed himself to be persuaded. It seemed to him, when he remembered
+how they had parted, that it would be a gallant and reconciling act to
+set forth to meet her. Moreover, though the mind that was in him stood
+aside from the project in disdain, the body cried, "Forward! Forward!"
+in chorus with the song of the wild-wood.
+
+Early one morning he carried down his canoe to the water's edge,
+loaded it with a week's provisions, padlocked his store and set out.
+As the prow drove forward down-stream, exultation entered into him. He
+was playing at saying good-bye to his long exile; miles ahead lay the
+Hudson Bay, and beyond that England. If his boat were not so frail and
+his arms were stronger, by pressing on and onward he could escape.
+These were scarcely the thoughts with which a man should set out to
+meet his bride. Desires to meet and avoid her alternated even now,
+when with each fresh thrust of the paddle he approached her nearer
+presence. Yet, even to his way of thinking, there was something epic
+in the situation--that this girl of an alien tradition and a savage
+race, with her copper skin, and blue-black hair, and timid eyes,
+should be threading her passage up her native river, through the early
+summer, toward her western lover who was hastening down the self-same
+primeval highroad to meet her. Oh, he would be very happy with Peggy!
+Thus imagining himself on through the labyrinth of passionate fancy,
+he floated down stream, shrouded in the morning mist. He had to go
+slowly, for he could not see far ahead, and travel by water was still
+treacherous by reason of belated floes of ice. Over to the eastward
+the sun winked down on him with a dissipated bloodshot eye, knowingly,
+with the cruel misanthropic humour of a tired man of the world who,
+regarding idealism as a jest, had guessed at the purpose of his errand
+and was eager to declare his own shrewd cleverness.
+
+And if the sun is a cynic, who can blame him? He alone of created
+things has an intimate knowledge of all live things' love affairs,
+from when Eve shook back her hair and lifted up her lips, to the last
+girl kissed in Japan. The canoe drifting out of a scarf of mist
+brought Granger in sight of the bend, where Strangeways had been
+drowned. He plunged his paddle deeper in the water, thrusting it
+forward to stay the progress of the prow, and glanced from side to
+side, then straight ahead. He had caught the smell of burning. On the
+northern side of the bend, curling above the trees, he could detect
+the rise of smoke. Someone had lit a fire and was camping there. But
+who? Was it Beorn and Peggy? No, they would not camp so near their
+destination; they would have pushed on to the store for rest. Nor
+could it be men from the Crooked Creek coming up to God's Voice; the
+season was as yet too early for them to be expected. Then, was it
+Spurling?
+
+Paddling out into the middle stream, he stole beneath the farther
+bank, and, rounding the bend, came in sight of two men, the one seated
+upright before the fire cooking his bannocks, the other stretched out
+twenty paces distant at the edge of the underbrush, completely covered
+with a robe, motionless as if he slept. The man who was awake looked
+up, shaded his eyes, then rising to his feet came down to the water's
+edge and waved his hand.
+
+Granger recognised in him his friend Père Antoine, the gaunt old
+Jesuit of Keewatin. No one could remember, not even the Indians, at
+what time he had first come into the district; he seemed to have been
+there always and was of a great age. Yet, despite his many years, he
+could travel miracles of journeys in the name of Mary's son. It was
+said of him that he was always to be seen mounting the sky-line in
+times of crisis and temptation; that he knew by instinct where men
+were in spiritual peril, as the caribou scents water; that he had
+often broken out of the forest unexpectedly in time to prevent murder.
+There were Indians to be found who would circumstantially assert that
+they had met with Père Antoine, five hundred miles distant from the
+spot where he had last been seen, walking in the wilderness radiantly,
+wearing the countenance of Jesus Christ.
+
+Granger recalled these legends as he gazed toward the camp; he watched
+the figure of the sleeping man--and he thought of Spurling. Was this
+Spurling? He tried to make out the man's identity by his figure's
+outline, but the robes which were piled above him forbade that. Yet
+within himself he was sure that his guess was correct. What was more
+likely than that Antoine should have met the fugitive wandering up the
+Forbidden River, perhaps sick and starving, should have taken his
+confession and compassionately have brought him back? Probably it was
+Antoine's purpose that they two should be reconciled. He might even
+have converted Spurling and have brought back God into his life, so
+that now he was willing to return to Winnipeg to give himself up, and
+to take his chance of death.
+
+Having run his canoe aground between the bank-ice, he stepped out and
+grasped the Jesuit's hand.
+
+"God has arrived before you this time, Père Antoine," he said, jerking
+his head in the direction of the sleeping man; "he has already done
+your work. I have promised Him that I will do no harm to your
+companion, so you have arrived too late."
+
+"If it was God who arrived," he said, "I am content."
+
+He spoke significantly, hinting at a further knowledge of which he
+supposed Granger to be possessed.
+
+"If it was not God, then who else?"
+
+"Ah, who else?"
+
+Granger, in common with most white men of the district, had fallen
+into the Indian superstition that Père Antoine was omniscient; it came
+to him as a shock that he might be unaware of how God had written on
+the ice. Usually in talking with the priest he took short-cuts in his
+methods of communication, leaving many things understood but
+unmentioned, as a man is wont to do when conversing with himself.
+
+"There is no doubt that it was God," he said; "He did not want me to
+murder this man. He wished that I should leave him alone, to be judged
+in the forest by Himself. Therefore, if you have brought him here with
+you to make us friends, I will not do that; but I will promise you, as
+I have promised God, that I will not be his enemy."
+
+Antoine tapped him on the arm gently, looking him full in the face
+with his grave, penetrating eyes: "And did not God Himself arrive too
+late?" he asked.
+
+Granger flushed hotly, for he thought that he detected an under-tone
+of accusation in the way in which those words were uttered. "Tell me,
+is he dead?" he asked abruptly.
+
+"He is dead."
+
+"Is it . . . is that his body over there?"
+
+"You should know best."
+
+Involuntarily Granger sank his voice, now that he knew that that
+sleeping man was dead. He pressed closer to the priest and commenced
+to whisper, now that he knew that no noise of his, however loud, could
+disturb the rest of this man who would never wake. Sometimes, when in
+the hurry of his speech his voice had been by accident a little
+raised, he would cease speaking, lift up his head, and peer furtively
+from side to side, then over to where the dead man lay, to make
+certain that he had not stirred,--all this lest someone in that great
+silence should have heard what he had said. Thus does the presence of
+the dead accuse living men, as if by our mere retention of life we did
+them injury. Wheresoever we encounter them, whether in the hired pride
+of the vulgar city hearse, or in the pitiful disarray of bleached
+bones and tattered raiment strewn on a mountainside, they make even
+those of us who are remotest from blame feel guilty men.
+
+"But, Père Antoine, I did not kill him," Granger was saying. "I was
+gravely tempted, but God wrote upon the ice and stayed my hand. This
+man was once my friend, and is now again--now that he is dead. Let me
+uncover and look upon his face."
+
+But the priest withheld him. "Not yet--not yet," he said. "Let us
+first talk together awhile, that I may hear what has happened, and get
+to understand."
+
+So there in the quiet of the early morning, with nothing to break the
+stillness save the crackling of the fire, and the flowing of the
+river, and the occasional flight of a bird, Granger told the priest
+all his story, from his first dream of El Dorado to the thoughts of
+escape and of Peggy Ericsen which he had had, as drifting down-stream,
+he had caught the smell of burning and come in sight of the bend. It
+was a true confession; nothing to his own discredit was left out.
+
+When he came to an end the mist had lifted, and the sun rode high in
+the heavens disentangled of cloud. All the time that he had been
+speaking the priest had sat motionless, with his head bent forward
+listening, his knees drawn up and his arms about them. Now that the
+tale was over, he slowly turned his head; and then it was for the
+first time that Granger knew what the Indians meant when they said
+that they had met with Père Antoine in the wilderness, walking
+radiantly, wearing the countenance of Jesus Christ. There was such a
+brightness about him that he could not bear his gaze, but trembling
+with a kind of fearful joy fell forward on his face, covering his eyes
+with his hands. And still the priest said nothing, not trusting
+himself to speak, perhaps, so great was his compassion.
+
+But it was not long before Granger was conscious of a hand, hard and
+horny and ungentle, as far as outward circumstance could make it so,
+which rested on his head. At last he spoke. "I think I understand," he
+said, and then, after a pause, "but you will never help yourself or
+the world by merely being sad. No man ever has."
+
+When Granger answered nothing nor lifted up his head, he spoke again.
+"Does that seem a strange judgment to pass on you here in Keewatin?
+Does it sound too much like the speech of a city man? Nevertheless, it
+is because of your flight from sadness that you have met with all your
+dangers. All your life you have spent in striving to escape from
+things which are sad. Why did you dream of El Dorado when you were in
+London? Because, as you yourself have told me, exquisiteness of dress
+did not reassure you of another's happiness; you were always
+remembering that a decent coat may sometimes cover cancer. You are one
+of those who suffer more because of the sores of Lazarus than Lazarus
+himself. That is well and Christlike, if you suffer gladly--which you
+do not. So you left London and travelled half across the world to
+Yukon, only to find a greater wretchedness; for your misery growing
+vicious pursued you, and goaded you on to crime. Once more to escape
+you left Yukon and came to Winnipeg, and came up here, and still you
+are sad. Will I tell you why? Always, always you have depended on
+yourself for escape and rest. That is useless, for your sadness does
+not belong to any city, or any land; it is within yourself. Wherever
+you have travelled you have carried it with you. You must look for
+help from outside yourself."
+
+Again he paused, but Granger did not stir. Then he repeated, speaking
+yet more gently, "I am an old man and have lived in Keewatin the
+length of most men's lives, yet I have not always lived up here. I was
+not always happy, and I say to you, you must look for help from
+outside yourself."
+
+Then Granger answered him, keeping his head still bowed.
+
+"Where, where must I look for help?"
+
+"Lift up your head."
+
+He obeyed, and the first sight he saw was the face of Père Antoine
+bent above him. Again he was struck with its likeness to the
+traditional face of Christ--but the face was that of a Jesus who had
+grown grey in suffering and had been often crucified, who was very
+ancient and had not yet attained his death. Then he thought he knew
+what le Père had meant by saying that he must look for help from
+outside himself. He turned his eyes away and gazed into the sunshine,
+and on the greenness of the awakened country. Somehow it all looked
+very happy and changed from what it had been before they two had met.
+He vaguely wondered whether already he might not be now experiencing
+that help. But, as had always happened to him after tasting of a
+momentary joy, in turning his head he found a new grief awaiting him,
+for there, twenty paces distant, stretched out at the edge of the
+underbrush, covered with a robe, he caught sight of that recumbent
+figure, lying motionless as if it slept. He shuddered, and seizing the
+priest by the arm, speaking hoarsely with suppressed excitement,
+exclaimed, "Where did he come from? But where did you find him?"
+
+"I found him stretched out on the bank-ice, awaiting me as I paddled
+up-stream toward the bend."
+
+"Then he was coming back. God must have met him down there on the
+Forbidden River and have spoken with him face to face; he could not
+endure His voice, so he fled. Oh, to come back at such a season, when
+the river was in flood, he must have been terribly afraid. He must
+have clambered his way up-stream, all those hundred miles, running by
+the bank. Père Antoine, you know many things, what kind of words were
+those, do you suppose, that God spoke to Spurling?"
+
+"The kind of words which God always speaks to men; He told him the
+truth about himself."
+
+"The truth about himself? There are few who could endure to hear
+that."
+
+"Yes, He would accuse him with a question, I think."
+
+"What makes you say that?"
+
+"Because that is the way in which God usually speaks to men. He asked
+Adam a question, and Adam hid himself; he asked Cain a question, and
+Cain became a vagabond in the earth."
+
+They sat in silence awhile, and then Granger said, "And if God were to
+speak to me, what question would He ask?"
+
+"I think he would say, 'John Granger, by how much are you better than
+Spurling, whom you condemn?'"
+
+"You are right; yes, I think He would say that. Even I have asked
+myself that question before to-day."
+
+"You did not ask yourself; it was God's voice."
+
+"And I could give no answer to what He said. Père Antoine, before we
+met, I had often wondered what I would say to Spurling should we meet
+again. I had planned all manner of kindly phrases to make him again my
+friend; but I had thought of him as coming to me prosperous, with the
+approval of the world. When he came to me in poverty, asking help, in
+peril of his life for a sin which had been almost mine, I turned him
+away. He had chosen me out from among all men between Winnipeg and the
+Klondike, as the only one to whom he could safely go for help; and I
+turned him away. I see it clearly now; God sent to me this man whom I
+had wished to murder, when he had performed my crime, that, by
+endangering my life for his, I might cleanse myself. When all men had
+failed him, he and God expected that I, at least, would understand.
+But for Mordaunt, I might have had to flee as he fled, changed by the
+raising of a gun and hasty pulling of a trigger into a Judas to all
+that is best; I might have had to support within me his utter
+solitariness and agony of mind, and have been compelled to see myself
+as debased throughout and forever by a single, momentary act. How he
+must have suffered! I shall fear to die now; till now I have been
+afraid only of life."
+
+"Why will you fear to die?"
+
+"Because I shall meet with Spurling, and then I shall hear God's
+question and His accusing voice."
+
+The priest laid a hand upon his shoulder gently. "Ah, my child, but
+you forget," he said; "in the country where Spurling has gone he will
+have learnt how to understand."
+
+That thought was new to Granger, that of the two faults his own was
+the greater and that forgiveness belonged to Spurling. He sat
+motionless for a long time arguing it out; he wanted to be exactly
+just to both Spurling and himself. The fire died down and Père Antoine
+threw on more brushwood; the sun grew tall in the heavens and a rain
+cloud gathered in the west; the floe-ice caught in its passage round
+the bend, gasped and whined and, tearing itself free again, vanished
+down river out of sight. The arithmetic of the problem stood thus:
+Spurling's sin had been the result of a sudden violence, his own of a
+conscious and premeditated uncharitableness. Which sin was morally the
+worse, to shoot a fellow creature in a fit of passionate desperation,
+or to turn your back upon a bygone benefactor who comes to you in
+distress, comes to you when his heart is breaking, because he can
+trust himself with no one else? "My sin is the greater," Granger told
+himself, "I am more wrongful than wronged against"; his thoughts going
+back to what le Père had said, he added, "I am Cain, and yet I judged
+Spurling as if I had been God Himself."
+
+He was roused from his meditation by a dull thudding sound which had
+commenced behind his back; turning his head, he saw that Père Antoine
+was already digging a grave. Rising without a word, he began to lend a
+hand. They had not gone far when they found that the ground was hard
+as granite, that it had not yet thawed out; then they commenced to
+look for stones to pile upon the body so that, since the grave would
+be shallow, they might raise a mound above it to prevent the wolves
+from getting the body out.
+
+By the time they had completed their preparations the rain was falling
+in large and heavy drops, and the storm was blowing in great gusts
+through the forest, causing the young leaves to shudder and whisper
+together, and to turn their backs to the wind. The priest and the
+trader stood upright from their work and gazed at one another. Already
+the narrow hole, which they had scooped out, was filling with water;
+there was no time to lose; yet neither seemed inclined to hurry. At
+last Père Antoine said, "So you are sure that you did not do it?"
+
+"I cannot be sure of that."
+
+"Ah, but you did not do it in the way I mean? You did not kill him
+with the strength of your hands?"
+
+They went together to the edge of the underbrush where the dead man's
+body lay, and carried it, without disturbing the coverings, to the
+side of the grave; there they set it down.
+
+"I cannot bear that he should lie in that dampness," Granger broke
+out; "I remember when we were in London, how he used to hate the wet.
+Coldness he could put up with or the hottest sunshine, but he could
+not endure the damp. He said it made him feel as though the world was
+crying, like a dreary woman because her youngest child was dead. We
+can't drop him into that puddle and leave him there."
+
+He commenced to strip off his clothes, and to fold them along the
+floor of the grave. When he had apparently made all ready, he stooped
+down again and smoothed out a ruck, lest its discomfort should irk the
+dead.
+
+"Now," he said, "let me see his face for the last time, for he was my
+friend."
+
+Le Père bent down, and drew the coverings back to the waist, while
+Granger leant over him in his eagerness. The body, having lain upon
+the ice, had been well preserved, no feature had been disturbed; but
+it was not the body of a man who was newly dead, nor was it the face
+of Spurling. So absorbed had Granger been by thoughts of the comrade
+whom he had treated harshly, and by the mysterious meaning of the
+writing which he had seen upon the ice, that the likelier solution of
+the problem of this man's identity had not entered into his head, that
+the body might be that of Strangeways, thrown up by the back-rush of
+the current around the bend.
+
+"Strangeways," he muttered, "it is Strangeways." And with those words
+his charity towards Spurling began to ebb.
+
+Père Antoine, when he heard it, realising that these were the remains
+of an officer of justice, for whom, when he did not return, search
+would be made, and not of an escaped murderer with a price upon his
+head, at news of whose death Authority would be glad, went down on his
+hands and knees and began to examine the clothing of the dead for
+proofs of his identity, which could be sent in to headquarters for the
+establishing of his death. He foresaw that there was need for care;
+when the matter came to be investigated, it would be discovered that
+Granger had been Spurling's partner in the Klondike; questions would
+certainly be asked of Robert Pilgrim, as Hudson Bay factor and head
+man of the district, concerning Granger's conduct in Keewatin, and no
+good word could be looked for from that quarter. That which would tell
+most heavily against him would be this fact, that two men, separated
+by a few hours, were known to have passed God's Voice en route for the
+independent store of Garnier, Parwin, and Wrath, the first a hunted
+criminal, the second an officer of justice--the criminal had escaped
+and the officer was dead. Presumably both pursued and pursuer had
+arrived at Murder Point, for the body of Strangeways, the follower,
+had been found a mile down-river below the Point. Then where was
+Spurling? And how had he managed to escape, if he had not been helped?
+Who could have helped him save Granger? And why was Strangeways dead?
+
+These were some of the many questions which avenging justice would be
+sure to ask, and, however skilfully they might be answered, the priest
+knew well that it would be difficult to prevent suspicion from
+attaching to a hated independent trader, especially when it became
+known that he had once been the fugitive's friend. Why, he himself had
+suspected Granger at first!
+
+His present purpose was, if possible, to gather such proofs from the
+dead man's clothing as would exclude the doubt of foul play, and
+establish as a fact Granger's assertion that the corporal had arrived
+at his death by the accident of drowning.
+
+In the meanwhile, he was not meeting with much success in his search,
+for the right arm of the dead man was pressed so rigidly across his
+breast that it could not be moved without breaking; the hand was
+concealed and the fingers tangled in the folds of his dress, as if
+even in the last moments of life he had been conscious that he kept a
+secret hidden there. Only with violence could it be forced aside, and
+to this the priest was averse; he commenced to cut away the clothing,
+above downwards from the neck, below upwards from the belt. The cloth
+ripped easily, having become rotten with the wet, but the trimmings of
+fur were tough and obstinate to separate. When he had slit the capote
+and under-garments above and below the arm in two big flaps, he rolled
+them back, laying bare the breast, where he discovered a silver chain
+which went about the neck, the pendant to which, wrapped in the
+portion of the dress that had covered it, was clutched in the icy
+hand. He now cut away the stuff from around the hand, and, with a
+severity which seemed both profane and cruel, bent back the fingers
+one by one, compelling them to release their hold, so that the bones
+were heard to crack.
+
+"What are you doing?" cried Granger, angrily, being roused by the
+sound from an unsatisfactory examination of the mixed feelings which
+had arisen within him on discovering that Spurling, whom he had just
+been regretting, was not dead. "Why must we torture him? Why can't we
+leave him alone, and lay him decently in his grave?"
+
+"Perhaps in order that we may prevent you from being hanged."
+
+"From being hanged! You mistake me for Spurling, Père Antoine; your
+memory must be failing. What have I done to deserve such courtesy at
+the hands of Fate? Why should men want to hang me?"
+
+"For the murder of Strangeways."
+
+Granger stood back, and drew himself erect, as if by asserting his
+physical cleanness and manhood he could refute the accusation. He
+lifted up his head and gazed with a fixed stare on the landscape,
+seeing nothing. Yes, it was true, they could make that accusation;
+there was sufficient evidence for suspecting him and, with the aid of
+a few lies and inaccurate statements on the part of his
+enemies--Robert Pilgrim, for instance, and Indians whom he had
+offended--sufficient evidence might be got together to bring him to
+the gallows. A fitting ending that for the son of the ambitious mother
+who had stinted herself and planned for his success, and a most
+appropriate sequel to the example of reckless bravery set by the last
+two generations of his father's house!
+
+Dimly, slowly, as he stood there in the northern icy drizzle, with his
+eyes on the muddy river hurrying toward its freedom between jagged
+banks, he came very wretchedly to realise that there was only one way
+in which he could save himself, a way, albeit, which both his loyalty
+and honour forbade, by becoming ardent in the pursuit and effecting
+the capture of Spurling, that so he might prove his innocence. An
+emotion of shame and self-disgust throbbed through him that it should
+have been possible for him, even for a moment, to entertain such a
+coward's thought as that. He shook himself free from temptation and
+looked about. What was Père Antoine doing? What had he meant by saying
+that he was perhaps preventing him from being hanged? Did he still
+believe him to be guilty, as he had evidently done at first?
+
+Père Antoine was intent upon his undertaking; when asked, he only
+shook his head, saying, "If I believed you guilty, why should I
+endeavour to find the signs which will prove you innocent? Would I do
+that, do you think, if I believed you to be a guilty man?"
+
+Granger was softened by those words; they meant a great deal to him at
+such a time, spoken as they were curtly by one who was so eager to
+rehabilitate his character before all the world that he had no moments
+to waste in argument. They were far more convincing to him of the true
+opinion which le Père held of him than an hour consumed in apology,
+which would have been an hour spent in idleness. He came and knelt
+down by the side of the priest, and gazed on the results of his work.
+He saw the cold white face of Strangeways with the eyes set wide,
+staring upwards at the clouds. Their gaze did not seem to concentrate
+as in life, but like that of a well-painted portrait, while the eyes
+themselves remained fixed, wandered everywhere. Yet, when he settled
+his attention upon them, they seemed to look at him alone as if, since
+the lips were silent, they were trying to speak those words which the
+body had come to utter; if he turned his head away for a moment and
+then looked back, they seemed themselves to have changed their
+direction and to be staring again incuriously out on space, having
+abandoned hope of delivering their message. And he saw the naked
+throat and neck, and the marks where the teeth of the yellow-faced
+husky had clashed and met; last of all he saw the silver chain and the
+pendant attached, which Père Antoine had at that moment succeeded in
+freeing from the cold clenched hand.
+
+"What have you there?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know yet. Lift up the head, so that we can slip the chain
+over and find out."
+
+Granger did as he was bidden; but, as he stooped to his task, he was
+horribly conscious that the dead man's eyes were intently fixed upon
+him, as if they knew and lived on, though every other part of the
+motionless body was dead and ignorant.
+
+"Well, here it is. It's a locket."
+
+Granger started up from the ground trembling. "Père Antoine, do you
+think we ought to look at it?" he said.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Look at the eyes of that dead man."
+
+"They seem to me to be saying 'yes.'"
+
+Granger looked again, went near, bent down and looked carefully; then
+he turned his head. "You are right," he said; "I also think they are
+saying 'yes.'"
+
+The priest put the locket in his hand. "It is for you to open it," he
+said.
+
+It was of gold and studded with turquoise, a woman's trinket and
+old-fashioned, the chasing being worn flat in places; the silver chain
+was common and strong, and had evidently not at first belonged to it,
+being of modern manufacture--probably a comparatively recent
+purchase. Granger looked it over critically, but could get no hint of
+its contents from the outside. On the front was engraved a monogram J.
+M., and on the back a coat-of-arms. The lines of the monogram were
+distinct and sharp to the touch, they must have been cut many years
+after the locket itself was made, but the coat-of-arms seemed
+contemporary with the rest of the chasing. He tried to open it, but
+the dampness had caused it to stick, so that he broke his nails upon
+the fastening. He took out his knife and attempted to lever its edges
+apart with the blade. At last, growing impatient, he set it on its
+hinges upon a rock and commenced to hammer it with a stone. At the
+third blow the fastening gave, and the sides fell apart. He could see
+that it contained a miniature, and, on the other side, a lock of hair;
+but the glasses which shut them in were mist-covered. He rubbed them
+clean on the lining of his coat and looked again.
+
+The portrait was that of a young girl, fresh and innocent, about
+eighteen years of age; her hair, worn loose, all blown about, fell
+upon her neck and shoulders in long curls; her eyes were blue and
+intensely bright; her face was animated, with a certain dash of
+generous spirit and healthy defiance in it, which were chiefly denoted
+by the full firm lips and arching brows--and the face was the face of
+Mordaunt. For the first time, he saw the woman whom he had loved, in
+her rightful woman's guise. He had often longed that he might do that;
+it had made him feel that he shared so small a portion of her life
+that he should know her only by her man's name and remember her only
+in her Yukon placer-miner's dress. He would have stooped to kiss her
+lips at that time, had it not been for the presence of the dead, who
+had also loved her and from whom he had stolen his treasure. Would his
+body be able to rest in the grave when thus robbed of the symbol of
+the passion which had caused its blood to pulsate most fiercely in its
+life?
+
+Then he fell to thinking other thoughts--of how strangely this
+knowledge had come to him, from all across the world, by the hand of a
+rejected lover who was dead. Had this been the secret which the
+corporal had waited to tell him, thrown up on the ice, lying silent
+and deserted throughout that month at the bend; had he been waiting
+only to say, "I hold the knowledge which you most desire in my
+clenched right hand. Here is her woman's likeness. I require it no
+longer, now that I am dead?" No, surely he had not delayed for that.
+Then suddenly he realised that this must mean that the woman herself
+was dead. He remembered distinctly those last words which Strangeways
+had spoken, even as though he were now repeating them again aloud, "I
+tell you if the ice were as rotten as your soul or Spurling's, I would
+still follow him, though I had to follow him to Hell." And his last
+utterance had been a reiteration of that promise, "He killed the woman
+I loved, and he shall pay the price though I follow him to Hell."
+
+This was the fulfilment of that promise; though he himself was dead,
+he had delayed his body near Murder Point that, with his pale and
+silent lips and the portrait which hung about his neck, he might urge
+his rival on in their common cause of vengeance. "I will pray God
+every day of my life that Spurling may be damned throughout the
+ages--eternally and pitilessly damned," he had said, and now that the
+days of his life were over his body had tarried behind to continue
+that errand, so far as was possible, into the days of his death. When
+they had parted that night, a month ago outside the shack, he had told
+a lie; he had denied that the woman was Mordaunt who had been
+murdered, and had tried to prove his words by asserting that the body
+which was found in the creek near Forty-Mile had worn a woman's dress.
+Now he had come back to silently refute his own statement, and to
+declare the truth which would stir up anger and give him an inheritor
+of his revenge.
+
+Here, then, was a new reason why he should become ardent in the
+pursuit and effect the capture of Spurling, that by so doing he would
+be behaving honourably by a man who was dead. He saw in it at present,
+with his cynic's eye for self-scorn and self-depreciation, only an
+added excuse and more subtle temptation for the saving of himself.
+"No, I cannot do it," he said. And yet, somewhere at the back of his
+brain, the monotonous and oracular voice of a wise self-knowledge kept
+answering, "But you will do it, when you have had leisure to be
+lonely, and have tortured yourself with memories of her."
+
+It seemed to Granger as though Strangeways himself were the speaker of
+those words; but when he turned round hotly, prepared for argument, he
+found that the eyes had become glazed and vacant, and that at last the
+body was truly dead. It had no need to live longer--it had delivered
+its message.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE LOVE OF WOMAN
+
+
+It was past noon before they had completed Strangeways' burial at the
+bend. When they had finished, the skies had cleared themselves of
+storm and cloud, and the sun shone out again. The air was full of
+earth-fragrance, and the landscape was cool and fresh. Nothing of
+disorder remained, no sign that a man was dead, save only a mound of
+piled-up stones and sod, surmounted by a little cross of branches
+bound together with twisted grass.
+
+Père Antoine had searched the body with scant results, for he had
+found no more than the warrant for Spurling's detection and arrest,
+and the fragments of two torn and well-nigh obliterated letters, at
+which latter he had only glanced up to the present. Nor had he seen
+the contents of the locket as yet, for when he had asked Granger what
+was its secret, he had received as answer, "Oh, nothing, only a young
+girl's face." So he had been foiled in his endeavour to gather
+materials for the establishing of Granger's innocence, should that be
+assailed, and had discovered nothing which might be of use in his
+defence. All he could contribute was his own personal evidence that
+the appearance of the body, as he had seen it, bore out Granger's
+account in every detail as to the manner in which Strangeways'
+catastrophe had occurred, and that his deportment, when he had
+charged him with murder, had proved conclusively to himself that there
+was no ground for such an accusation.
+
+When they had returned to the store and had had supper together,
+Granger sat for a long while with the locket open before him, gazing
+intently on the portrait. Suddenly he looked up. "Have you seen
+Beorn?" he asked. "Do you know whether he is on his way back?"
+
+"I have not seen him."
+
+"Antoine, you must stay here with me until he returns."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I was on my way to meet Peggy when you met and stopped me; I want you
+to marry us."
+
+"But why now and at once?"
+
+"Because if we're not married she won't live with me,--and I must do
+something to break down my loneliness by getting a new interest into
+my life. If I don't, I shall be always thinking of what has happened,
+and shall go mad,--in which case it will be the worse for Spurling. I
+don't want to kill him--at least, not until he has had his chance to
+explain himself. I'm sure now that it was Mordaunt whom he murdered,
+but I'm still uncertain as to whether he knew that she was a woman, at
+the time when he killed her--he may not know even yet. If he did it
+mistaking her for a man, I might be able to forgive him; anyhow, I can
+say so now, while you are with me. What I should do and think if I
+were left here miserably alone, I dare not tell. Yet, if what
+Strangeways said to me is true, that her body was found at Forty-Mile
+in a woman's dress, which would mean that Spurling killed her,
+well-knowing that she was a girl, why then I would go in search of
+him, and tell him what I thought about him, and shoot him carefully,
+and be glad when he was dead."
+
+"But you have promised God to leave him alone with Himself."
+
+"And shall I be the first man who has gone back on his prayers and
+promises? There's nothing to be gained by talking about it; fate must
+work itself out. But if you want to understand what Strangeways felt,
+and what I am still feeling, then look at that."
+
+He handed him the locket. Père Antoine took it and bent above it. At
+last he said, "Why, she's only a girl . . . and he killed _her_!"
+
+"Yes, and he killed her when her back was turned. Now do you
+understand?"
+
+"May God help you!" was all that Antoine said. Granger went over to
+where he sat and, from above his shoulder, gazed down upon the
+portrait. The face had in it so little that was tragic that it seemed
+impossible to realise that its owner should have encountered such a
+death. When the smile upon the painted lips seemed so fresh and
+imperishable, it seemed incredible that the lips themselves should be
+now silent and underground.
+
+"I wonder where she lived and what sort of a girlhood she had,"
+Granger said.
+
+"I have here two letters which I found upon Strangeways; perhaps they
+may tell us something about her."
+
+Père Antoine produced the letters from an oilskin pouch. They were in
+a pointed feminine hand, and the ink was faded. Granger lit the lamp,
+for the twilight without was deepening into darkness; spreading out
+the crumpled sheets on his knees before him, he read their contents
+aloud. Across the top, left-hand corner of the uppermost page was
+scrawled in a rude, boyish writing, "_The first letter she ever wrote
+me_"; the letter itself had been evidently penned by a young girl's
+hand. It bore the address of a school in London, and ran as follows:--
+
+     DEAR ERIC.
+
+     I am very miserable hear and sometimes wonder why I was
+     ever brought into the world. Your Papa was very kind to
+     me once, but why has he scent me away from you? You did
+     not want me to be scent, and so I can tell you all
+     about myself. I am very home-sick hear. I say
+     home-sick, though I have no home; I have always been a
+     stranger in your Papa's house. I suppose I am reely
+     home-sick for you. I think it is because you and I are
+     seperated that I am sorry. The girls hear are not
+     always kind; they say that I look as though I had been
+     crying, and then of course I do cry when they say that.
+     But if my eyes are red, I don't care. I want you badly
+     and I'm writting to tell you that. Don't forget to feed
+     my rabbits.
+
+                    Your loving little friend,
+                                             J. M.
+
+The second was marked in the same way, but in a manlier hand, "_Her
+last letter to me_."
+
+     DEAREST ERIC.
+
+     I am so sorry that I am the cause of all this trouble,
+     and that I cannot love you in the way that you and your
+     father so much desire. I would do anything to make you
+     happy save that--play the coward, and say that I love
+     you as a woman should whom you were going to marry,
+     when I do not. I have always been used to think of you
+     as a brother, which is natural, seeing that from our
+     earliest childhood we have grown up together. I thought
+     that you would be content with that; no other kind of
+     affection for you has ever entered into my heart or
+     head.
+
+     Your father was very angry with me last night after you
+     went out. He said that I, by my conduct, had led you on
+     to _expect_; believe me, I never meant to do that. It
+     never occurred to me that there was any need to be
+     careful in your presence. The truth is, I have always
+     been an interloper in your home; you will remember how,
+     long years since, when first I went to boarding-school,
+     I told you that . . . (four lines were here
+     undecipherable, being faded and rubbed out). When I
+     look back, I see that in all my life you have been my
+     only friend--which makes me the more unhappy that this
+     has happened. Mind, I don't mean to accuse your family
+     of unkindness; I only say that I, perhaps naturally,
+     was never one of them. If I thought that you would be
+     willing, knowing how I feel toward you, to make me your
+     wife, for the sake of your peace I might consent even
+     to that. But you are not such a man. (Three lines were
+     here obliterated.) Let there be no bitterness between
+     us by reason of harsh words which others have spoken;
+     what has happened must make a difference, but I want to
+     remain still your friend. This recent occurrence seems
+     to make it necessary that one of us should go
+     away--there will never be any quiet in your father's
+     house while we both live there. Don't be alarmed or
+     surprised if you get word shortly that I have vanished.
+
+                    Yours as ever,
+                                 J. M.
+
+To this letter was added a note in Strangeways' hand at the bottom of
+the page, "_She was not to blame; it was I who left_."
+
+"We have not learnt very much about her from those two letters, have
+we?" said Père Antoine. "They are ordinary, and leave many questions,
+which we wanted to ask, unanswered."
+
+"Yes, they do little more than confirm Strangeways' own statements,
+and yet. . . ."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"They tell us that her true initials were J. M., the same as those of
+her assumed name, and the same as those of the monogram on the locket;
+and they tell us of her great loneliness."
+
+"But I can't see how a knowledge of that one fact--her great
+loneliness--will help us; it does not reconstruct for us the details
+of her life so that we can imagine her to ourselves, nor does it
+contribute anything towards your defence."
+
+"Bother my defence. I don't much care if I am hanged; that would at
+least be a final solution, so far as I am concerned, to this problem
+of living. What troubles me at present is, how is this woman feeling
+about my marriage with a half-breed girl? Now these letters help me;
+they make me certain that whatever I may be compelled to do at any
+future time by reason of my isolation, she will not be hard upon me,
+but will understand. This marriage with Peggy, for instance, looks
+like a betrayal of her. And though she is dead, I should hate to
+grieve her in the other world."
+
+Granger paused, and then he added fiercely, "And I'm glad of that last
+letter for another reason, because it states so clearly that she never
+loved the other man."
+
+"That can make no difference now."
+
+"But it can," said Granger, rising to his feet, and speaking in a
+strained whisper, with clenched hands, "I tell you it can. If I
+thought that she had ever really cared for him, I would shoot myself
+here and now, that I might be beside her to get between him and her.
+The thought that he was there with her all alone in the vastness, free
+to do and to say just whatever he pleased, and that I was shut out,
+would drive me crazy. Do you think that, if I supposed that he had got
+his arms around her over there, I could ever rest--if I thought that
+she would allow him? One little pull of a trigger, the report of a
+revolver, which I probably shouldn't hear and in any case shouldn't
+care about, and the journey would be accomplished and I could be
+bending over her. It sounds very tempting. But I'm prepared to live
+out my life like a man, now that I know that she understands. If she
+hadn't known what loneliness meant, she might misjudge my motives in
+taking up with Peggy, and might, out of revenge, instead of waiting
+for me, herself take up with Strangeways before my arrival there."
+
+Père Antoine watched him gravely for some seconds after he had
+finished speaking; then he said, "I don't think that Heaven is quite
+like that; but none of us can be certain, perhaps your views are as
+correct as those of anyone else. When I was a young man, before I came
+to Keewatin, I should have been angry with any man who had said to
+me a thing like that--but we come to hold strange opinions in this
+land where all things, judged by our former standards of sanity,
+even God Himself, seem mad. At that time I longed to be dogmatic
+and definite in all my beliefs on religion, and this life, and the
+after-world--that was why I became a Jesuit, that I might exchange
+despair for certainty. Now, priest though I am, like you I see one
+gigantic interrogation mark written over sky and earth--and because of
+it I am grateful. I have learnt that the whole attraction of religion
+for the human mind, and the entire majesty of God depend on His
+mystery and silence, and the things which He does not care to tell. If
+all our questions were answered, we might lose our God-sense. If we
+knew everything, we should cease to be curious and to strive. Of one
+thing only are we certain, that Jesus lived and died, and that though
+we live in the uttermost parts of the earth, it is our duty to be like
+Him."
+
+"And Spurling--if Spurling dwells near us in the uttermost parts of
+the earth?"
+
+"He also is God's child."
+
+"It is easy for you to talk, Père Antoine; you are an old man, and,
+being a priest, have never loved a woman yourself."
+
+The stern, grey features of the Jesuit relaxed; he hesitated, then he
+said, "My child, don't be too sure of that. Perhaps I may be
+attempting to live this life well only in order that I may make sure
+of meeting and being worthy of one such woman in the after-world. If
+that were so, it would be great shame to me, for I ought to be
+striving to live this life well solely for the love of Christ."
+
+He fell silent, sitting with his head bent forward, his gnarled hands
+folded on his knees before him. A far-away look had come into his
+eyes, a fixed expression of calmness, as though they slept with the
+lids parted. Granger watched the hands, mutilated and ruined, with
+three fingers missing from the right, and two from the left; and yet,
+despite their brokenness, he thought how beautiful they were. There
+was scarcely a part of the priest's body that had not been at some
+time shattered with service. It had never occurred to Granger that
+Père Antoine, like most other men in the district, had a past which
+did not belong to Keewatin--memories of a happier time to which he
+might sometimes look back with the painfulness of regret. Antoine had
+been there so long that there was no man who remembered the day when
+first he arrived. He seemed as natural to the landscape as the Last
+Chance River itself. And now suddenly, in an electric moment of
+sympathy, his past had revealed itself.
+
+Granger watched and waited, hoping that presently he would explain. It
+occurred to him as a discovery that he had no knowledge of the
+priest's real name or of his family. At his nationality he could only
+guess, supposing him to be a Frenchman or a French-Canadian. How
+incurious he had been! And, in this case, lack of curiosity had meant
+lack of kindness; he blamed himself. He, like all Keewatin, was ready
+in time of crisis to draw upon the old man's strength, but beyond that
+he had never shown him real friendship--he had never been conscious of
+any desire to hear about the man himself. And now he had learned that
+this man also had a tragedy, and, like himself, had loved a woman who
+was now long since dead. He wanted to ask him questions, that so he
+might make up for omitted kindnesses; but he was restrained when he
+looked upon the grey dreamy countenance, for it was evident that le
+Père was wandering in the idealised meadows of a bygone
+pleasantness--a country which was known only to himself. So Granger
+returned his eyes to the portrait which he had taken from the dead
+man's hand, and, gazing upon it, tried his best to fill in the blanks
+in his little knowledge of the woman he had loved.
+
+He constructed for himself a picture of an ivied manor-house, terraced
+and with an old-world garden lying round about it, where her childhood
+had been spent and where she had grown to girlhood. He told himself
+that there must have been a river somewhere near, and he imagined her
+as stretched upon its banks in the summer shadows. And he thought of
+the schoolhouse in London, and the little heart-weary child who had
+penned that letter there. He re-read it, and then once again re-read
+it, suffering the same agony of longing for things irrecoverable which
+this small creature had suffered years ago, who was now beyond all
+knowledge of pain. What a mystery it was that across that expanse of
+space and years her letter should have drifted down to him, from
+London to Keewatin, carried over the last few yards of its journey in
+the breast of a man who was already dead. It made him feel less of an
+exile that a miracle like that could happen--it was almost as though
+she herself had appealed to him from the hidden world. It made him ask
+himself that question, which so many had asked before him, "_And are
+we really ever dead_?"
+
+Père Antoine stirred, rose up and walked over to the window, where he
+stood in the shadow, outside the circle of the lamp's rays, with his
+back turned toward the younger man. There was something which he
+wanted to say, but which he found difficult to express. Granger
+guessed that, and so he said, "Antoine, you are thinking of _her_
+to-night. She must have lived very long ago. Was she anything like the
+portrait of this young girl?"
+
+There was silence. Then, still gazing away from him, his long lean
+figure blocking out the moonlight, the priest returned, "All white
+women seem alike to one who has lived long in Keewatin. Yet that face
+did seem very like to hers; but it is many years ago now, and I may
+not remember her well. She died; and she was everything that was of
+worth to me in this world. I begin to fear that she is all that I
+count of highest value in the next."
+
+"But why fear? I should not fear that."
+
+"Because, being a missionary, with me it should be otherwise. I became
+a Jesuit through distrust of myself. I knew, when she had been taken
+from me, that because of my despair, if I did not bind myself strongly
+to that which was highest, I should sink to that which was worst. And
+I knew that if I sank to that which was worst, she would be lost to me
+throughout all eternity. So, in order that God might give her to me
+again in a future world, I strove to bribe Him; I asked that I might
+be sent to this hardest of all fields of missionary labour, hoping
+that thus I might acquire merit. Since then a new doubt has come to
+haunt me, has been with me half a century; the fear lest the life
+which I have led may count for nothing, may be regarded as only
+sinfulness, because I have done God's work for her sake rather than
+for the sake of His Christ, and that therefore as a punishment to me
+she may still be withheld. Ah, I have fought against her memory,
+trying to cling only to God! That has been useless. So I have gone on
+doing my best for my fellow-men, hoping that He may overlook the
+motive, and judging only by the work, may give me my reward in the
+end,--may allow me to be with her."
+
+"Antoine, I am a sinful man and one who is little qualified to judge
+of God's purposes, but I think that He will grant you your request.
+But if you, with all your goodness, are banished from her whom you
+loved most on earth, how can I hope for success?"
+
+Then the Jesuit turned round and faced him. "It was because I feared
+for your success that I mentioned my own trouble," he said. "You are
+planning to do a thing which is right in marrying this half-breed
+girl--you owe it to her and to God, inasmuch as you have lived with
+her. But you will be doing her a greater wrong than if you were to
+leave her unmarried, if, when you have made her your wife, you think
+only of the dead white woman. When the turmoil of living is over, you
+want to meet and be worthy of the woman who wrote those letters, you
+tell me; your best chance of success in that desire is in trying to
+forget her in this world, by giving all your affection to the woman
+who is your wife, and trusting to God's goodness to give you the
+rewards which He knows that you covet after death. Don't make my
+mistake--it means torture in this life, and, perhaps, disappointment
+in the next. Be true to the choice which you have made, and leave the
+rest to God's mercy. I have not been strong enough to do all that I
+advise, for, though I love Christ, I am shamed into owning, old man
+though I am, that I more often do His work in the hope of re-meeting
+with a woman who is dead than out of loyalty to Christ Himself."
+
+"Père Antoine, you do not judge kindly of your own actions as Christ
+would judge of them; you Catholics, in making Christ God, forget that
+He also was a lonely man. I think it is not as a God, but as a peasant
+that He will judge us, having knowledge of what we have suffered--if
+He judges us at all. It is more likely that He will just be sorry for
+us, that we ever thought that He would judge us."
+
+"Whether I judge kindly or not, will you try to take my advice? I have
+told you a secret to-night which never, since I came to Keewatin, have
+I told to any man. And I have told you that I may save you. Believe
+me, if you cannot love your daily companions for their own sake in
+this world, whoever and wherever they are, you will fail to find love
+for your own sake in the next--and to love well, whatever you love you
+must love for itself, and not for any future and mercenary end."
+
+Granger moved restlessly, but remained silent; then he sat still and
+thought. Père Antoine also said nothing, for he knew that the man
+before him was reasoning his way toward a decision upon which all his
+happiness must depend.
+
+But to Granger the problem appeared quite otherwise; it seemed to him
+that he was being asked to abandon another pleasantness for the sake
+of Peggy, a half-breed girl, for whom he had been prepared already to
+sacrifice his career. To be sure, his career was not of much value at
+present, and didn't seem a large thing to sacrifice; but then, when it
+comes to giving anything away, even the most thorough-paced pessimist
+is capable of turning optimist about its worth.
+
+Since he had become certain of Mordaunt's death, he had vaguely
+planned out for himself a course of spiritual debauchery, though he
+would not have applied to it such a word. He had expected to marry
+Peggy Ericsen, and to live with the memory of the woman for whom he
+had really cared. His wife was to have been the servant of his comfort
+and desires, and the dead woman the companion of his mind and daily
+round. So he hoped, by keeping Mordaunt near him in his thoughts, to
+qualify himself for attaining her after death, and to atone for his
+apostasy in marrying a different woman while yet on earth. Throughout
+all his reasoning ran a streak of madness, of which he himself was
+totally unaware. And now, when he had completed arrangements to his
+own satisfaction, here came this Jesuit telling him that such a course
+of action savoured of adultery, and would probably end in the eternal
+separation of Mordaunt from himself.
+
+Presently he heard a sound of moving. He looked up. Antoine was
+standing before him, on the outer edge of the light which was thrown
+by the lamp, appearing huge and prophetic against the background of
+dwarfed shadows which crawled over wall and ceiling, crowding behind
+him. His awe for the office of the man returned to him, blotting out
+the equality which the past few hours of confession had brought about.
+Once more he recalled how it was said that le Père had been seen
+walking in the wilderness, wearing the countenance of Jesus Christ. He
+looked like that now. Granger, made conscious of his own premeditated
+wrong-doing, shrank back before him. Yet the words which Père Antoine
+uttered were very simple: "I am an old man, and I knew what I was
+saying," was all he said.
+
+Granger rose to his feet. "I'm going out," he said. "I'll return in a
+little while and give you my decision."
+
+He passed out from the close stale air of the shack into the
+starlight; he could be nearer God there. A low, leisurely wind was
+journeying over the forest, crooning softly to itself as it went.
+Dominant over all other sounds, as was ever the case at Murder Point,
+the wash of the ongoing river was to be heard--even in winter, when
+every other live thing had ceased to stir, it was not silent. But now,
+in the early summer of the northern year, it laughed uproariously and
+clapped its hands against the banks in its passage, as if the water
+were calling to the land, "Good-bye, old fellow; you won't see me
+again for many a century. It was the end of the ice age when last we
+parted." To Granger the shouting of the river was for all the world
+like that of a troop-ship departing for a distant country. "Farewell,
+farewell," it cried. The sound of its going made him weary with a
+sense of world-wideness; if he was left behind to-day, when once he
+had joined himself to a daughter of that country, he would be forever
+left behind. But he had come outside not to reargue his way over the
+old ground, but to decide. To do that he must be alone, quite
+solitary; and there, just outside the shack, he was all too conscious
+of Père Antoine's eyes.
+
+Slowly he commenced to descend the Point toward the river-bank. As he
+went, a new desire sprang up within him--to speak with Strangeways; if
+possible to make a compact and extort some approving sign from that
+dead man. Stepping into the canoe, he pushed off lightly and set out
+for the bend. The nearer he drew, the sterner his face became; he was
+thinking of what he should say, and one has to be careful in what he
+says in speaking with a man who is dead. Soon he came in sight of the
+flimsy little cross which they had raised, and saw the stones which
+they had piled above the body, shining white and grey in the
+moonlight; then with a twist of the paddle his canoe shot in toward
+the bank and the prow grated on the ice. Granger stepped out and
+beached his craft above the water's edge. With slow deliberate steps
+he went forward till he stood above the grave. There, with his hands
+clasped behind him and his head bowed, he waited for a few minutes
+listening, half expecting that something would happen. When nothing
+stirred, he went upon his knees, as if he prayed, placing his lips so
+near to the grave that sometimes they touched the stones and mould;
+and so he began to speak to the man imprisoned beneath the ground.
+
+"Strangeways," he said, "you know everything about me now, and you
+ought to understand. I want to act fairly by you. I didn't do that in
+your lifetime; if I had, you might not now be dead. I ought to have
+warned you about the ice at first, and I ought to have told you the
+truth about Spurling; then you might have believed me. But I did try
+my best to save you in the end. Père Antoine says that I may get
+hanged for your death; but I don't mind that so very much, if I can
+only act fairly by you now."
+
+He paused to hear whether there was any sound of movement underground;
+when he heard none, he knew that the dead man was listening and
+waiting eagerly for what would come next. Crouching still nearer, so
+that he might narrow the space between them, "Strangeways, are you
+listening?" he said. "We both loved her, and neither of us won her in
+this world; but because you are dead, you are nearer to her now than I
+am. I want you to promise me to do nothing till I have come."
+
+And still when he halted, waiting for his answer, nothing stirred.
+Presently he spoke again. "I have a reason for asking which, if you
+remember anything of what you suffered in this life, you should
+understand. To save myself from madness, I must have a companion, and
+so I am going to marry a woman of this country. In order that I may
+live well with her, and even in order to marry her, I must pledge my
+word to forget Mordaunt while I am in this world. Now do you
+understand? I cannot pledge my word until you have promised me that
+you will do nothing until I am also dead." He fell forward over the
+grave and lay there silent. His brain had become numb; he could
+fashion no more words--perhaps in the interval which elapsed he
+slept. Then it seemed to him that the chambers within his brain were
+lighted up, so that pressing his face against the crannies and between
+the stones he could look right down, and see distinctly the narrow bed
+of the grave whereon the body of Strangeways rested. The eyes of the
+body were open and the lips were working, trying to say something. By
+watching the lips he discovered that they kept on repeating, over and
+over, one word; then he read that that word was _revenge_. "I cannot,
+I cannot," he whispered. "I have promised God that I will not; and,
+moreover, to take revenge on Spurling would be to remember her."
+
+Was it that he moved as he slept, or did the thing which he thought he
+saw actually occur! Some stones slipped from off the mound and, to his
+eyes looking down into the grave, it seemed that Strangeways' hand
+began to grope frantically after the locket which had been about his
+neck, and that, finding it missing, his face became angry and he
+strove to rise, causing the stones to fall and the ground to tremble.
+
+Granger jumped up, and stood there shaking with his hands clenched and
+his head thrown back, prepared.
+
+"Will you answer me?" he cried in despair. "Don't you know how I
+suffer? If you consent to what I have asked of you, give me a sign? If
+nothing happens, I shall know that you are cruel and do not care."
+
+When he had waited in vain some seconds, he lost his nerve and his
+courage. Kneeling beside the grave he commenced to weep, smoothing the
+stones with his hands coaxingly like a child, and whispering, "Give me
+a sign. Give me a sign. Give me a sign."
+
+Suddenly he paused in his pleading. The rustling of water against a
+travelling prow, and sound of paddles thrust in, forced back, and
+withdrawn, struck upon his ears. He threw himself full length along
+the ground; he did not want to be discovered there. Stealing up-stream
+from the northward, creeping close in to the opposite bank to avoid
+the current, came a canoe, sitting deep in the water, heavily laden
+with furs; the stern-paddle was held by a tall and thickly bearded
+man, and in the prow, even at that distance and in that shadowy light,
+it was possible to make out that the second figure was that of a girl.
+Granger recognised them immediately, and knew that the Man with the
+Dead Soul and his daughter had returned. He also noticed that Eyelids
+was not there. They did not see him, but quickly vanished round the
+bend.
+
+When all was silent and lonely again, Granger arose. "It is a sign,"
+he said. Standing above the grave, before departing he spoke once more
+with the man who lay buried there. "Strangeways, you may rest quiet
+now," he said. "Though I cannot revenge her as you have desired, we
+can both, in our separate ways, be true to her."
+
+He delayed a moment to have what he had said confirmed; but this time
+no token either of dissent or approval was vouchsafed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+HE REVIEWS HIS MARRIAGE, AND IS PUT TO THE TEST
+
+
+It was the first week in June; for a fortnight John Granger had been a
+married man. He was now removed a sufficiently just distance from his
+bachelor-hood to be able to estimate the value of the change which
+this new step had wrought in his career.
+
+Its true worth to him had been that it had converted him from a
+Londoner in Keewatin into a man of the Northland. This might mean,
+though it need not, that he had retrograded to a lower type; at all
+events it meant that he was robbed of his excuse for considering
+himself an exile, bearing himself rebelliously toward his environment,
+and being unhappy. By joining himself to Peggy by the rites of the
+Roman Church, he had made an irrevocable choice, had slammed the door
+of opportunity and return to civilisation in his own face, and had
+adopted as his country a land where no one has any use for money or
+for time, and where nothing could ever again be of very much
+importance. He had not realised all that a fortnight ago when, at the
+bidding of the Jesuit, he had made this girl his wife; but since he
+had lived in her company he had come to realise. Mercifully there is
+no situation, however bad, which may not develop the peculiar virtue
+whereby it can be endured. He had learnt his virtue by observing
+Peggy, an Indian virtue at that--stolidity. In a great lonely
+territory, where men say good-bye to one another for twelve months at
+a stretch, and sometimes forever, they arrive at a philosophy of life
+which consists in waiting very patiently and unambitiously for the
+next thing which the good God may send. To attain this sort of
+quietness a man must be quite hopeless, for so long as he hopes he is
+liable to disappointment. Also he must live each day as though it were
+his first, for to remember things past is to court regret. He must
+permit himself to know none of the extremes of emotion, either of joy
+or of sadness; to this end he must consider himself as a non-partisan
+in life, a careless spectator before whose eyes the groping shadows
+pass. The traffic of words is a labour, and a more frequent cause of
+misunderstanding than of interpretation--therefore it is wiser, if
+peace be desired, to keep always silent. Where a gesture will do the
+work of a word, let a gesture suffice.
+
+All this Granger had learnt during the fortnight which he had lived
+with his wife; in watching her, he had studied to forego his former
+turbulence of mind as a thing most foolish, and had determined to sink
+down into the dull acceptance of a destiny against which it was
+profitless to contend--a kind of resigned contentment. If he was to be
+hanged to-morrow for Strangeways' death, that was no reason why he
+should disturb himself to-day; if that was to happen, it would come to
+pass in any case,--nothing that he might do or say could prevent it.
+The momentary pain of dying is usually much less intense than the
+hours of cowardly suffering which men bring upon themselves by
+prevising the anguish of their last departure, so he told himself. So
+to-day he sat outside his store in the sunshine and smoked his pipe,
+the freest and silentest man in all Keewatin, and, he would have had
+himself believe, the most stably contented.
+
+That night, when he had left Père Antoine and had gone to consult the
+dead man at the bend, had been the turning-point in his frenzy. It
+seemed to him, as he looked back, to have happened long ago when he
+was little more than a child, at a time before his enlightenment, when
+he had supposed very foolishly that he was of importance to God and to
+his fellow-men. Now he had come to know that he was of no importance
+even to himself. He blew out a cloud of smoke and watched it vanish in
+the air; in other days he would have smiled, but it was not worth the
+effort now. The relation of that whiff of tobacco-smoke to the
+unplumbed space, throughout which it would be dispersed, was about the
+same as that of his present existence to the rest of the world.
+
+When, having said good-bye to Strangeways, he had followed the Man
+with the Dead Soul back to the store, he had made up his mind to the
+inevitable, and had been prepared to greet Peggy with a certain
+display of joy. Before ever he could put his thought into action, his
+intention had been repelled. As he had drawn nearer to the crazy
+wooden pier which ran out from Murder Point, he had seen the shadowy
+shapes of the trapper and his daughter, bending down, unloading their
+canoe, moving slowly hither and thither through the night. As he had
+come up, he had hailed them. To his call Beorn had made no reply, had
+only turned his head and nodded, while Peggy, stooping over a pile of
+furs, had thrown him the customary salutation of the Cree Indian to
+the white man, used both on arrival and departure, "Watchee"--which is
+a corruption of "What cheer." No other words of greeting had passed
+between them, and he, when he had landed, had set to work at once to
+help them with their unlading. When that was finished and the furs had
+been carried up to the store, they had raised their tent, kindled
+their fire, brewed their black tea, cooked their bacon, and gone to
+rest. Granger had so far intruded on their reserve as to ask them to
+spend the night in his store, but his invitation had been ungraciously
+refused with a shake of the head.
+
+Next day Père Antoine had married them, after which he had departed,
+promising, however, to return before the summer was out. Granger had
+said nothing more to him either concerning Spurling or the death of
+Strangeways, except to insist that the warrant for the arrest,
+together with the letters and locket which had been found, should be
+left with himself; nevertheless, he had been well aware that these
+things were largely responsible for the hurry of the priest's
+departure. At first he had not been surprised at the silence of Peggy,
+for he had grown accustomed to the shy modesty of women who are
+Indian-bred. The women of Keewatin accept it as their fate that they
+are born to be subservient to men--to be their burden-bearers. But at
+the end of a few days, when her demeanour had shown no sign of change,
+he had become a little curious. In the early part of the year the
+white blood that was in her had been more manifest, and because of it
+she had been proud. When she had insisted that he should marry her, if
+he would live with her, the reason she had given him for her demand
+had been _because her blood was white_. Since then she had journeyed
+into the winter-wilderness with the menfolk of her family, like any
+other Indian or half-breed girl, and in the primeval solitariness of
+the land the red blood of her mother had asserted itself; the hand of
+her native deity had been laid upon her mouth, staying her flow of
+words, the shyness of the forest-gods had entered into her eyes, and
+the Lord God of Women had stooped her shoulders, causing her to carry
+her head less bravely, binding the hereditary burden of the red woman
+upon her back. She had unlearned in those few months all the conceits
+of self-respect which she had been taught in the school at Winnipeg,
+and had reverted to the ancient type from which she was sprung,--the
+river Indian. Granger, as he watched her, guessed all this, for had
+not he himself been parted from his old traditions?--and he had not
+known Keewatin till he was a grown man. Well, these people had lived
+there longer than he had! They should know what was best suited to
+their circumstance, he told himself; and so, without questioning or
+combatting their social methods, he resigned himself to accept their
+modes of life.
+
+It was a strange wedding that he had had--very different from the kind
+he had planned for himself in the heat of his passion, when he was a
+younger man. And this was a strange woman whom he must call his
+wife--one who worked for him tirelessly with her head and hands, but
+who appeared to crave for none of his affection, and with whom he
+could have not a moment's conversation; the exchange of a few
+monosyllables and signs in the course of a day seemed to be the most
+that he might expect. Yet, because of her meekness and faithfulness,
+and her ready willingness to serve, he was conscious of a growing
+protective quality of love for her. If he could prevent himself from
+adopting her reticence, he promised himself that he would gather her
+whole heart into his own by and by.
+
+He did not as yet realise that the mere fact that he could feel thus
+towards her, when no speech had passed between them, was an indication
+that she was communicating herself in a more vigorous and sincerer
+language than that of words. This difference between them, that he
+expected her to use her lips to explain her personality, and that she,
+far from imagining that she was silent, believed herself to be in her
+deeds most eloquent, was one of the few traits remaining to him of the
+street-born man.
+
+As an example of their reservedness was the fact that, though Eyelids,
+Peggy's brother, had set out on the winter hunt and had not returned,
+no explanation of his delay had been forthcoming, nor had Granger
+summoned up the energy to inquire for himself. On their first arrival
+he had felt distinctly curious as to his whereabouts. Had he come
+across traces of Spurling and gone in pursuit of him? Had he heard
+from some stray Indian that Spurling was an outlaw, with a price upon
+his head? Had Beorn, having found that his cache at the Forbidden
+River had been broken into, dispatched his son to follow up the thief
+and exact revenge? Or was Spurling dead, and had Eyelids killed him,
+for which reason he was afraid to come back?
+
+For the first few days after his marriage these questions and answers
+had been continually running through his head; but since he had learnt
+the lesson that nothing was of much importance, he had almost ceased
+to care. Why should he trouble to inquire? If he did, he might get no
+reply; and if he was answered, the probability was that his only gain
+would be something fresh to worry about. The unreturning of Eyelids
+was one small detail of the total unreality, the dream which he had
+once taken so seriously, which in former times he had called life; and
+of that dream the arrival and flight of Spurling were the nightmare.
+No one of all these happenings had ever been--they were unactual: and
+the chances were that even he himself was no reality.
+
+Beorn Ericsen, the Man with the Dead Soul as he was called, was a
+fitting tutor to a pupil of this philosophy. Compared with him, his
+daughter was a whirlwind of words; the lesson of silence, which she
+taught by her behaviour, she had first learnt from her father on the
+winter trail--in the presence of his stern taciturnity she appeared a
+garrulous amateur.
+
+Whence he had originally come, no one had ever persuaded him to tell.
+On his first arrival in the district, which was reported to have taken
+place nearly forty years ago, for the first two years he was said to
+have conducted himself more or less like a normal man. At that time he
+must have been near mid-life, for he was now well past seventy to
+judge by his appearance. Even then, on his first coming, something had
+happened, which he did not care to talk about, which made him glad of
+the dreary seclusion of Keewatin. It had been generally supposed that
+he was badly wanted by Justice, for having shot his man in a border
+hold-up, or for deeds of violence in some kindred escapade.
+
+At any rate, he had set about his living in Keewatin in earnest, as
+though he had determined to stay there. Having attached himself to the
+Hudson Bay Company, he soon proved himself to be an expert trapper,
+and a man who, for his reckless courage, was to be valued. Promotion
+seemed certain for him and, despite the fact that he had joined the
+Company late in life, the likelihood of his attaining a factorship in
+the end was not improbable. It was then, after he had won the
+confidence of his employers, that he had taken that journey to the
+North, through an unexplored country, from which he had come back
+dazed and dreary-eyed, so that it seemed as though he must have met
+with some dire calamity in the winter desolation, one from which few
+men would have escaped alive, which had robbed him of his reason. When
+they had asked him where he had journeyed, "Far, far," was all he
+would reply. And when, hoping to satisfy their curiosity by a less
+direct method, they had questioned him, "What did you see up there?"
+"Blackness--it was dark," was the most that he would answer them.
+
+Because of these answers there were some who supposed that, emulating
+Thomas Simpson, he had penetrated into the Arctic Circle and had gazed
+upon the frozen quiet of an undiscovered ocean. He had wrested from
+God the secret which He was anxious to withhold, they said, and God in
+vengeance had condemned him to be always silent. But the Indians
+explained his condition more readily, speaking in whispers about him
+around camp-fires among themselves. The last place at which he had
+been seen by anyone on that journey was at the mouth of the Forbidden
+River, along whose banks it was commonly believed stretched the
+villages and homes of manitous, and souls of the departed. The Crees
+asserted that this was not the first man who, to their knowledge, had
+wandered up that river and had thus returned. Some few of their
+boldest hunters had from time to time set out and, roving further
+afield than their brethren, had likewise trespassed all unaware within
+the confines of the spirit-land. So they said that Beorn had been to
+the Land of Shadows, and that, by reason of his surpassing strength,
+he had contrived to escape; but that he had left his soul behind him
+there, and it was only his body which had come back.
+
+From that day he had been known as _The Man with the Dead Soul_.
+Gradually, as the years went by, the deathly vacancy had gone out of
+his eyes, but he had remained a man separated from living men. He
+rarely spoke, but from the first his peculiarities had made no
+difference to his expertness as a trapper--he was more skilful, white
+man though he was, than many of the Crees themselves. All the strength
+which should have been spent upon his soul seemed to have gone to
+preserving the perfection of his body. For a man of his years, he was
+surprisingly vigorous and erect--no labour could tire him. This, said
+the Indians, was the usual sign of bodies which lived on when their
+souls were dead. He was much feared, and his influence in the district
+was great; in gaining him as a partisan, Granger had achieved a
+triumph over Robert Pilgrim, and had improved his status among the
+native trappers more than could have been possible by any other single
+act.
+
+Beorn was reverenced as a kind of minor deity; no wish of his, however
+silently expressed, was ever denied by an Indian. When he had chosen
+Peggy's mother to be his wife, it had been done merely by the raising
+of his hand. Straightway the girl's father had driven her
+panic-stricken forth from his camp, compelling her to go to this
+strange bridegroom, lest a curse should fall upon his tribe. To her,
+if absence of cruelty is kindness, he had been uniformly kind. Love is
+not necessary to an Indian marriage, so she had not been too unhappy.
+At Peggy's birth, having first borne him a son, she had died. The
+little girl had been brought up and cared for by the silent man; the
+shy tenderness she expressed for him went far to prove that she, at
+least, had discovered something more vital within him than could be
+expected to reside in the body of a man whose soul was dead. His
+sending of her to the school in Winnipeg had shown that he was not so
+forgetful as he seemed to be of the outside world which he had left.
+This last act had come as a great surprise to all who knew him; but
+they had contrived to retain their old opinion of him by asserting
+that this was the doing of Père Antoine.
+
+Only on rare occasions had Beorn let any of his secrets out; when he
+got drunk he recovered his power of speech, or, as the Indians said,
+for a little space his soul returned. This had happened less and less
+frequently of recent years. It was well remembered by old-timers at
+God's Voice how once, in the early morning in Bachelors' Hall, at the
+end of a night's carousal, when the trappers and traders from the
+distant outposts had made their yearly pilgrimage to the fort bringing
+in their twelve months' catch of furs, Beorn, under the influence of
+rum, had risen uninvited, and, to the consternation of his intoxicated
+companions, had trolled forth a verse from a fighting mining ballad.
+As well might the statue of Lord Nelson climb down from its monument
+in Trafalgar Square and, with the voice of a living man, commence to
+address a London crowd. The verse which he sang ran as follows; to the
+few who were aware, it solved the mystery of an important portion of
+his hidden early history:
+
+    "The Ophir on the Comstock
+      Was rich as bread and honey;
+    The Gould and Curry, farther south,
+      Was raking out the money;
+    The Savage and the others
+      Had machinery all complete,
+    When in came the Groshes
+      And nipped all our feet."
+
+When he had completed the verse, he had slowly gazed round and caught
+the look of amaze which had dawned in the countenances of his drunken
+associates. He had come to himself and grown sober. Suddenly an
+expression of intense fear and hatred had shot into his eyes; without
+saying another word, he had turned his back on the company and gone
+out into the early morning, floated his canoe, and fled as one who was
+pursued for his life. That verse had explained many of Beorn's
+eccentricities to one of those who had heard it, and he had told the
+rest. Its singing had meant that, sometime in the early sixties, Beorn
+had taken part in the gold-rush to the Comstock, and had worked and
+prospected in the Nevada mines.
+
+This was his solitary glaring indiscretion in all the course of his
+forty years spent in Keewatin. Though he had had many opportunities
+since then to repeat the event when under the influence of liquor, he
+had allowed nothing more of any importance to escape his lips. He had
+never spent much time at God's Voice, only turning up at the end of
+his hunt to dispose of his catch of furs, after which he would vanish
+into the wilderness again. He avoided on every occasion and was
+restless in the company of men. Very rarely was he encountered on his
+hunting-trips by any of the Indians or trappers. When once he had set
+out, he was not seen again until he returned of his own choice. The
+few times that he had been met, he was far to the northward, about
+the point where the Last Chance and Forbidden Rivers join, whence they
+flow on together till they tumble their crowded waters into the
+freedom of the Hudson Bay. Because it was always in this locality that
+he had been met, a rumour got abroad that, when his body was not
+dwelling among living men, it journeyed up the Forbidden River, to
+reunite with his exiled soul in the habitations of the dead.
+
+Granger had listened to all these reports from time to time, but he
+had paid small heed to them; he was certain in his own mind that,
+should he live solitarily in Keewatin for forty years, as Beorn had
+done, a similar web of legend would be woven about himself. The man's
+conduct was to him self-explanatory; in his early manhood he had
+committed some passionate wrong, and had fled into the wilderness to
+escape the penalty, only to find that the executioner was there before
+him--the Silence, and that the enduring of loneliness was a more cruel
+punishment than any that an earthly judge could have measured out. The
+boat was one and the same which carried Beorn, Spurling, and himself.
+He promised himself that, by and by, as in the case of Peggy, he would
+break through Beorn's silence, get to know the man, plunge deep down
+till he held his heart in his hand.
+
+So he sat outside his store in the June sunlight, oblivious of himself
+and the passage of Time, lifted high above the strife, and
+impartially, like an ancient deity, reviewed the lives of men.
+
+On the boarded floor of the shack he could hear the moccasined feet of
+Peggy moving busily to and fro, as she prepared the meal. They had
+netted some white-fish over night, so their larder was freshly
+supplied. On the edge of the pier, which ran out from the Point,
+Beorn sat, mending one of his traps. Along the top of the roof perched
+a row of whisky-jacks, most impertinent of birds, who, when a man has
+carried his food almost to his mouth, will flash down, light on his
+hand, and, before he knows that they have arrived, filch away the
+morsel. Somewhere across the river a whippoorwill kept on uttering its
+plaintive cry, as it were Beorn's lost soul come back, pleading
+insistently for permission to take up its residence in his body once
+again. And over against the farther bank a brood of yellow ducklings
+swam in and out among the rushes, hidden behind which their mother
+watched and waited. The noon came on apace, the shadows shortened, and
+everything grew silent; over forest and river a restful stillness
+settled down. If the Last Chance would always look like that it would
+be almost habitable. Had it been placed in any country where there
+were men, it would be considered beautiful just now. Ah, well, after
+he had been married a few years, he would have his children running
+hither and thither, laughing and chattering, about the Point; then it
+would be in his own choice to make of his environment what he liked.
+Gazing whimsically forward to such a time he could conceive that, were
+he given the opportunity to return to civilisation, by some curious
+turn of the wheel of fortune, he might prefer to stay; that such an
+opportunity might be possible, it would first be necessary that he
+should have been acquitted from all suspicion concerning the death of
+Strangeways.
+
+It was easy to be optimistic on such a day; there was a cleanness of
+youth about the appearance of this newly awakened world which reacted
+on the watcher's mind.
+
+Peggy had come out from the shack and was seated on the threshold;
+even she was conscious of a certain elation, for she was humming to
+herself one of those endless, tuneless, barbaric Indian airs which
+only take on the pretence of music when they are assisted by the
+stamping of many feet, and the clapping of many hands. When Granger
+turned his head in her direction, she lowered her eyes, and her
+singing ceased. He had not meant that she should do that; he was
+merely wondering whether she was really a pretty girl and whether, if
+he were to take her back with him to England, she would be seen as
+beautiful by London eyes. London eyes! What had they ever seen that
+was essentially beautiful and free? They could judge of the latest
+fashion in hats, and of the proper size of the laced-in waist; but
+what had they ever seen of the naked, sinuous grace of the human body
+as God made it and had meant that it should be seen? Of nakedness and
+simplicity, and all things genuine, the civilised man had been taught
+to be ashamed. No, no, to-day, in the sunshine, he felt sure that he
+would not return to the insincerity, artificiality, and the
+blinkered-eyes of the town, were he given his choice. He wanted to
+breathe cleanness, and to see God's hand at work, and to be _a man_;
+in London, or any other city, individuality and all these things would
+be denied. He could be very happy now, he believed; now that he was
+not lonely any longer, because he had a wife. He wished that he could
+find a language in which to tell her these things. But he feared to
+speak; he knew that as yet, just returned from the winter-trail, she
+would not understand.
+
+While he had been thinking, she had slowly raised her eyes; she was
+not looking at him, but northeast, down-river, toward the bend.
+Turning suddenly, he caught the direction of her gaze. Glancing down
+to the pier, he discovered that Beorn's eyes were also turned that
+way. What were they waiting for? What were they anticipating? Was it
+the return of Eyelids that made them so expectant? During the past
+fourteen days he had often caught them thus waiting and gazing, as
+though stoically prepared for news of whatever kind. He suspected that
+they had some secret which they were not willing to share with
+him--this would account to an extent for Peggy's reticence. But what
+secrets of importance could they have, dwelling as they did on the
+Last Chance? Probably Eyelids' delay was only a matter of traps and
+furs which had been cached. Then, as he watched Peggy, he saw a look
+partly of fear, partly of bewilderment, spread over her face. She
+glanced down to her father; he was still gazing in the same direction,
+towards the bend, and she, seeing him rise to his feet and wave his
+hand, following his example, also rose up and waved. Granger was on
+his feet immediately, that so he might see more clearly; turning his
+eyes down-river, he watched steadfastly in the direction in which the
+father and daughter gazed. He saw nothing that was not customary; it
+seemed to him that he must have looked too late.
+
+"What is it, Peggy?" he broke out.
+
+She swung round slowly, giving herself time to make her face
+expressionless; it was evident that she had forgotten his presence in
+her excitement.
+
+"Nothing," she said, and turning about, passed into the darkness of
+the house.
+
+Granger did not like it. When there are only three of you, one of whom
+is your wife, to whom you have been married only a fortnight, it is
+not pleasant to be the one left out. He had thought at first that they
+might be on the lookout for York boats, which might soon be expected
+to pass by on their way from the House of the Crooked Creek to God's
+Voice. But one does not wave his hand to a York boat which is not yet
+in sight. It seemed certain to him now that Eyelids was in the
+vicinity, signalling to them secret information, which they were eager
+to keep from himself. Had they stumbled across the grave of
+Strangeways, and wondered what it meant? A grave more or less in
+Keewatin does not usually trouble a living man; nevertheless, he ought
+to have told them about it and have explained about Spurling. He would
+tell them his secret presently, and get them to tell him theirs in
+exchange. In the meanwhile, he would watch the bend.
+
+There was no sound of footsteps in the shack. Turning his head very
+slowly, so that it could hardly be seen to turn, he could perceive the
+shadow of Peggy out of the tail of his eye from where he sat; she was
+standing behind the window, a little way back from the panes so that
+he might not discover her, and she was also watching. If this system
+of spying were to go on for long, there would soon be an end to his
+dreams of freedom and marital peace at Murder Point. Already he was
+inclined to revise his opinion as to what he would do, were he given
+the opportunity for escape to a becitied and more populous land. The
+more he thought about it, the more certain he became that he would
+choose to escape. A half-breed girl who was almost pure Indian in her
+manners--and Peggy seemed that to him now--could never be a fitting
+companion for an educated white man. He'd been something more than a
+fool to marry her. The entire business was a farce, from start to
+finish; and then he remembered that nearly every farce ends in
+someone's tragedy.
+
+He was interrupted in his bitterness by a shout from up-river. While
+they had been all engaged in watching the northeast, a swift canoe,
+carrying two men, had stolen in from the west. It was approaching the
+pier; before he had time to get down, its occupants had landed and
+were shaking hands with Beorn effusively, emitting low, hoarse cries
+of "Watchee. Watchee."
+
+As he descended the mound, he scanned their travelling outfit, that he
+might guess their errand. They carried no cargo, nor was their canoe
+the broad-built, slate-coloured conveyance of the Hudson Bay Company;
+it was birch-bark, constructed for speed, and carried in the bow a
+miniature sail. They must be the bearers of a letter, or of important
+verbal tidings.
+
+He shook hands with them in silence, nor did he ask them at once to
+deliver to him their message, well knowing from unhappy experience
+that to attempt to hurry an Indian is to cause him to delay. Instead,
+he set about doing them favours, that so they might be the more
+willing to oblige him. He led the way up to his store and, displaying
+to them his wares, told them to choose themselves each a present.
+There were gaudy shawls, beflowered muslin dress-lengths, rifles,
+watches, clocks, suits of clothing and city head-gear, probably
+misfits or the refuse of a bankrupt's stock which Wrath had bought
+cheap, all of them long since out of date; there were even battered
+dolls and children's toys lying about mixed up with canned goods and
+groceries--a miscellaneous array. Arranged along one wall were all the
+implements of the trapper's trade and the articles of common use,
+such as kettles, pans, enamel cups and plates, coils of rope, etc.
+With the inborn thriftlessness of the Indian, at the articles of
+essential worth they only glanced, after which they turned aside from
+them. Not until an hour had passed did one of the men make up his mind
+to take a top-hat for his present, broad-brimmed and dusty, from off
+which most of the silk was worn--a relic, perhaps, of the outside
+respectability with which one of the Winnipeg partners had been wont
+to clothe himself years since, when he went to church and still had
+hopes that one day he might live to see himself an honest man. But the
+second visitor could find nothing that met with his approval; now that
+his companion was owner of the top-hat, he felt that of all things,
+sacks of flour, rifles, sails, knives, that was the one and only
+present which he would have chosen. Granger was losing patience,
+though he did not dare to show it. There were so many tidings which
+that letter, if letter it was, might contain--news concerning
+Spurling, Strangeways, his mother, Mordaunt. To cut his suspense short
+by a few minutes he was willing to pay almost any price. Still the
+Indian procrastinated and seemed to be more and more inclined to
+become obstinate and offended. Transgressing the usual rule of a
+trading-store, he had seated himself on a pile of nets and was
+striking a match to light his pipe.
+
+Granger gazed round his stock in desperation, endeavouring to discover
+something, whatever its value, which would be acceptable.
+
+A sudden inspiration came to him. Reaching up to a shelf, he took down
+an oblong box, about nine inches in length, adjusted several parts of
+it on the inside, wound it up with a key which was in the back, and
+set it on the counter. A whirring, coughing noise was heard, as though
+a creature hidden inside was clearing its throat to prevent itself
+from choking; after a few seconds of this, a voice, so thin and
+whispering that it seemed impossible that it should ever have come
+from a person who owned a chest, commenced to sing with an atrocious
+perversion of the vowels,
+
+    "Sife in the h'arms of Jesus,
+      Sife on 'is gentle breast,
+    There by 'is love o'ershadowed
+      Sweetly my soul shall rest."
+
+He cut it short at the end of one verse, for he could endure no more
+of that--the tears were in his eyes. Ugly as the dialect was in itself
+and often as it had revolted him in former days, there was something
+hauntingly pathetic about it when combined with religion, and sung in
+Keewatin by that weakling voice; the London voice, shut up in the
+mildewed box, was an exile like himself. When he was a child, he had
+heard his mother sing those words, and that was at a time when he
+believed in the faith which they expressed. For him there was now no
+overshadowing God--only a careless, and perhaps unconscious, tyrant.
+
+But he had accomplished his purpose, for the Indian was won over and
+beaming with pleasure. Gramo-phones had not been long introduced into
+the district as articles of trade; as yet only the chiefs and most
+successful trappers could purchase them. To own one was equivalent to
+keeping a butler in civilisation. Seeing the greed in the man's eyes,
+he told him that he could have it so soon as he had declared his
+business and delivered his message.
+
+This promise caused the oracle to work. Diving his hand beneath his
+shirt, the Indian drew forth a pouch which was slung about his neck,
+and, opening it, produced from it a letter. Then snatching up his
+play-thing, he and his companion, proud in his top-hat, went outside
+to build their fire, and to make their camp, leaving the trader to
+himself.
+
+Granger rose up and made fast the door behind them, so that he might
+be undisturbed. Now that he held within his hand the solution to the
+problem of their visit, he was willing to postpone the fuller
+knowledge lest it should make him sad. Sitting himself down on the
+edge of the counter he drew forth his pipe and filled it slowly; and
+when that was done, still more slowly commenced searching for a match,
+found it at last and kindled the tobacco. He looked at the address; it
+was in Wrath's handwriting, but the envelope bore no stamp--it had
+evidently been sent up by him in haste over the entire six hundred and
+eighty miles by private carrier. That meant that the news was
+important, for such means of transit were expensive. Breaking the
+seal, he found a letter enclosed, which had been addressed to him in
+care of Wrath; it also was unstamped, but it bore in the left-hand
+corner the name of his mother's firm of London solicitors. About it
+was folded a note from Wrath himself, which read:
+
+     DEAR GRANGER,
+
+     The enclosed letter arrived here by yesterday's mail.
+     It was accompanied by a letter to myself from some
+     London lawyers, urging me to deliver it into your hands
+     in the quickest possible time, regardless of expense.
+     Carrying out my instructions, I am sending it up to
+     you by private messengers; heaven knows how long it
+     would take to get to you, were I to send it any other
+     way. Of course I shall dock the cost of its transit
+     from your salary, which means that if you don't have a
+     good year's trade, I sha'n't have much to pay you.
+
+                    Yours,
+                          CHARLES E. WRATH.
+
+His mother's lawyers! That meant that his mother had relented, and was
+anxious to have him home again. His heart leapt at the thought--and
+then he remembered that there were Peggy and the death of Strangeways
+as obstacles to his return.
+
+He undid the wrapping of the lawyer's letter and, as he read, the
+blood went from his face. It was to tell him, in formal language, that
+his mother was dead, and that, if he would fulfil certain conditions,
+he was to become heir to the property which she had left. The estate
+was valued at fifteen thousand pounds. The conditions were, that he
+was to return to England within four months from the writing of this
+letter, and take up his permanent residence there. If for any reason
+he should be unwilling or unable to agree to these terms, the money
+was to be divided among certain charities which his mother had named
+in her will. That was all. So the chance for which he had waited had
+come at last, and he was unable to take it--and his mother was dead!
+
+He sat very still and motionless. The flies drummed against the
+panes--they also were captives. Outside, across the river, the
+whippoorwill continued to cry, demanding entrance into Beorn's body
+because it was his soul. Peggy came to the door, tried to open it,
+rattled the latch and announced that the meal was ready: he took no
+notice of her, and presently she went away. For hours he sat like a
+man of stone, making no pretence at thinking; of one fact only was he
+aware, that with both hands, for the want of a little patience, he had
+thrown away all his chances of return. He was lost--lost--lost.
+
+As the hours dragged by the flies grew tired of trying to escape, and
+the whippoorwill of calling; the whole world fell silent. He wished
+that the darkness might come, so that he might hide himself; but in
+June time, on the Last Chance River, it is never utterly night. When
+the sun has sunk from the sky the sunset lingers, gradually working
+round toward the dawn; through the summer months, as if to make amends
+for the long dark winter days, it always leaves a little torch of
+promise burning somewhere along the horizon. The perpetual brightness
+of the world outside seemed to jeer him; it was as careless in its way
+as the winter had been of the solitariness of his soul.
+
+But at last the shadows lengthened in the store, and through the
+dusty, cobwebbed window he could see that the sky had grown indigo and
+grey. So his mother was dead, and he would never look on her again.
+They had not understood one another, and now, with whatever longing he
+might desire it, he could never explain. He had abandoned her for the
+sake of his father's quest, that he might seek out El Dorado--and this
+was the wage of his sacrifice, thirty, perhaps forty long years of
+life at Murder Point, shared in the company of a squaw, a hurried
+burial one day, and an unnoticed grave.
+
+He could not accept the conditions set forth in the lawyer's letter
+and return to London in the two months which remained--there were the
+Mounted Police to prevent him, and there was Peggy. He had chosen his
+own path in life, and he must follow it without complaint to the
+bitter end. He tried to think himself back into the opinion of the
+morning, when he had fancied that he preferred the Last Chance River
+to any other place. He could not think that now; he knew that it was
+no more than a consoling lie. Then he ceased to think and grew drowsy.
+
+He was aroused by the faint and far-away sound of singing. The dusk
+had gathered and it must be nearing midnight. He was stiff from
+sitting so long in a cramped position; he rose to his feet and rubbed
+his eyes. The window was ruddy with the shifting light of the Indians'
+camp-fire; occasionally, when the flame shot up, its brightness stole
+across the ceiling and illumined the walls of the store. He listened;
+the tune that was sung seemed to him familiar and puzzled him, for he
+was not fully awake. Drifting through the stillness of the northern
+twilight, at an hour when even the beasts of the forests held their
+breath because of God's nearness and His solemnity, there reached his
+ears the vulgar strutting tones of a music-hall singer's voice:
+
+    "As I walked through Leicester Square
+    With my most magnificent air,
+    You should hear the girls declare
+    'Why, he's a millionaire;'
+    And they turn around and sigh,
+    And they wink the other eye,
+    'He's the man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo.'"
+
+The coarse suggestiveness of the words, the cheap passions which they
+implied, the leer and pomposity with which they had been uttered by
+the comedian, the unhealthy, narrow-chested, pavement-bred audience
+by which the effort had been greeted with applause, the total
+uncleanness and unnaturalness of city-life, came vividly home to him.
+
+He did not stop to reason, or to trace his repugnance to its
+source--to his native hostility to the impurity and strengthlessness
+of multitudes of creatures who arrogantly boast that they are
+civilised--he was too angry for that. He was only conscious that a
+vain and impertinent echo of the town had, by his instrumentality,
+found its way into and vilified the secret refuge of God's austerity.
+Tearing back the bolts from the storehouse door and lifting the latch,
+he rushed out into the cool half-light.
+
+Half-way between himself and the pier he saw the Indians' camp-fire,
+with four figures squatting round, two of which were Peggy's and
+Beorn's. Running down the descent, he burst into their midst, seized
+the offending gramophone and crushed it down with his heel into the
+flames. His foot was scorched, but he did not care for that. When his
+work was accomplished, turning savagely upon his spectators he said,
+"I'll teach you to offend God's silence," and strode away, leaving
+them staring after him through the shadows, terrified and amazed.
+Suddenly he returned; there was a gentler look upon his face. Going up
+to where Peggy sat, he took her by the hand, and, without a word, led
+her out of the circle of firelight towards the shack.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE DEAD SOUL SPEAKS OUT
+
+
+The Man with the Dead Soul was drunk, heartily and shamelessly drunk;
+Granger, the contriver of his condition, sat facing him, impatiently
+waiting to see whether that was true which the Indians said, that,
+when drink had subdued his body, his soul returned for a little space.
+
+The nominal occasion of the carousal was the home-coming of Eyelids
+and, as Granger had subtly put it, "the celebration of his own
+entrance into the family of Ericsen." However, in a country from which
+there is no means of escape, save through the magic doors of
+imagination, and where men get so bored with themselves, and their
+environment, and one another, that they are willing to seek a
+temporary release by drinking such noxious drugs as pain-killer,
+essence of ginger, of peppermint, etc., for the sake of the alcohol
+which they contain, the only excuse necessary for intoxication is
+opportunity. Spirits of any kind are strictly forbidden in Keewatin,
+that the Indians may be protected from intemperance; nevertheless,
+despite all precautions of the Mounted Police, a certain quantity
+finds its way up in disguised forms, or smuggled in sacks of flour and
+bales of traders' merchandise.
+
+Granger, being well aware that the fool says with his lips what the
+wise man knows in his heart, had determined that both the menfolk of
+his adopted house should play the fool that night. Whatever Beorn and
+Eyelids might do or say, and however intoxicated they might become, he
+had planned for himself that he would keep quite sober, with his wits
+about him, that he might recall next day what they had done and said
+when thus taken off their guard. There were two problems which he was
+anxious to solve; the first, the reason for his brother-in-law's long
+delay; the second, what it was that they watched for with such
+eagerness, and waved to at the bend.
+
+The latter problem had become still more perplexing since Eyelids'
+return that morning, for in the afternoon, when they were sitting
+together outside the shack, he also had seen something down-river,
+and, following his father's and sister's example, had risen to his
+feet, commenced to wave, and, when it had disappeared, had inquired,
+"Who was that fellow?" Straightway Beorn had scowled him into silence,
+and Peggy, leaning over, had whispered some words in a Cree-dialect,
+which Granger did not understand; whereupon an expression of fear and
+wonder had come into Eyelids' face. When Granger, having taken him
+apart, had asked him for an explanation, he had only shaken his head
+stupidly, saying that he must have been mistaken, and that there was
+nothing there. This was manifestly false, for during all the remaining
+portion of the daylight his eyes had kept continually furtively
+returning down-river towards the bend.
+
+The fact that he also had seen something, did away with Granger's
+supposition that it was to her brother, lurking in the vicinity, that
+Peggy had signalled with her hand--and made him the more curious to
+know the real cause. Could it be Spurling, he wondered, who had made
+a compact with them and lay in hiding there? If that was so, then what
+had been the reason of Eyelids' delay,--for he had not stayed to
+collect any caches of furs, but had come back empty-handed, walking by
+the river-bank. He had watched to see whether anyone had put out from
+the store to leave provisions at the bend; but no one had been there,
+unless at a time when he slept. His passion to share the secret had
+become all-consuming, as curiosity must when it works in the mind of a
+lonely man. To this end he had shadowed Eyelids all that day, giving
+him no opportunity for private talk with his family, and, finally, had
+prepared this trap of a drinking-bout, hoping that someone might
+commit himself. As yet he had this to his advantage, that the
+half-breed, though he had witnessed the signals, was almost as
+ignorant as himself as to their real purport, and was therefore,
+probably, just as curious.
+
+They were sitting in a room, empty and comfortless, which was built on
+to the end of the oblong which comprised the store. Its walls were
+damp, and the news-papers, with which they had been covered, sagged
+down from the boards like monstrous goitres. It had one window, which
+looked riverwards, across whose panes, dust and cobweb smirched, a
+muslin curtain had been hung by a previous agent, who was reputed to
+have drunk himself to death. This was its only attempt at decoration,
+save for a faded photo of a girl attired in early Victorian dress,
+across the right-hand corner of which was scrawled, "Yours, with love,
+from Gertrude." She looked a good girl, and Granger felt sorry for her
+because, by the ordinary laws of nature, she had probably been dead
+for many years; and he also felt sorry for her because he was certain
+that the man who had placed her picture there had gone away and
+disappointed her in her love.
+
+Perhaps he had been the agent who, sitting there night after night,
+gazing upon her portrait, torturing himself with memories of the
+happiness which he had lost, had drunk himself to death. If that was
+so, she had had her revenge. Going closer, he saw that the
+photographer's name was recorded there, "Joseph Dean, New Bedford,
+Mass." So she had been a New Englander, and her lover, whoever he was,
+had probably started life as a sailor in the whaling fleet which at
+that time set out annually from New Bedford for the North. In Keewatin
+the memories of men for their neighbours, especially if they happen to
+be private traders, are very short.
+
+The room contained little furniture. There was a wooden shelf, knocked
+together out of packing-cases, which ran along one side of the wall
+and had probably done service as a bed. There was an upturned box, on
+which a man might seat himself; and a low three-legged stool which
+would serve as a table--that was all. In imitation of the no more
+lavish accommodation set apart for single men at the Hudson Bay
+Company's forts, the room was commonly known as Bachelors' Hall. The
+door was fast-shut; the curtain was half-drawn before the window,
+shutting out the long-tarrying June twilight; the three men had been
+there together for four hours, and as yet nothing of importance had
+transpired, and no word had been spoken.
+
+Eyelids, with his lashless lids (hence his sobriquet) half-closed,
+squatted on the floor, Indian fashion, directing his pipe to his mouth
+with uncertain hand. The other hand fumbled continually in his
+breast, as if he kept something hidden there. Granger wondered what it
+was.
+
+Beorn sprawled his great length of legs along the shelf, his back and
+head resting against the wall. His eyes were very bright, and a long
+and ugly scar, which extended from the right of his forehead to his
+lower jaw, and which Granger did not remember to have noticed before,
+showed swollen and red through the tangled mass of his grey beard. His
+pipe also was in his mouth, but his hand was still steady. Under the
+influence of drink a new intentness had come into his face, all his
+features seemed to be more keen and pointed. Every now and again he
+would remove his pipe, as if he were about to break into speech; then,
+either through laziness or from the tyranny of his habitual caution,
+he would replace it and, as it seemed to Granger, relapse into
+memories. He watched him closely, and he thought he saw the elation of
+old successes, and emotions of forgotten defeats, flit across his
+countenance. Granger himself was quite sober, having only pretended to
+drink; if he sat a trifle huddled on his box and lurched unsteadily,
+it was only that he might keep his companions unsuspicious.
+
+On the crazy little stool between them stood a candle from which the
+wax occasionally dripped, so that for a moment the flame would die
+down, causing the shadows to shorten. A jam-jar did service as a
+tumbler; there was one between the three of them, which meant that
+they had to drink quickly in order not to keep the next man waiting.
+Granger served out the whisky, and he served it neat--when men are
+intent on getting drunk they do not procrastinate by adding water.
+
+Eyelids was getting more and more peaceful and foolish, smiling first
+to himself and then slily to Granger, as though he had some very happy
+knowledge which he was burning to communicate. At last he pulled out
+his hand from his shirt, and there was something in it. Beorn, raised
+three feet from the floor on his shelf, could not see what his son was
+doing, nor did he care; he was reliving the past, when there was no
+Eyelids.
+
+But Granger watched; the fingers opened a trifle and revealed the
+shining of something yellow. Quick as thought, before the fingers
+could close over it again, he pretended to lose his balance, and,
+shooting out his foot as if to save himself, sent the yellow lump
+flying from the half-breed's palm. It shot into the air, fell with a
+thud, and rolled scintillating into the darkness across the boarded
+floor. Before he could be detained, Granger had sprung after it and
+held it in his hand. He faced round, ready to defend himself; but
+there was no necessity. Eyelids, having attempted to rise and having
+found that his legs would not carry him, had sunk back to his
+squatting position on the floor, where he was smiling foolishly and
+nodding his head as much as to say, "I've been telling you all
+evening, but you would not believe me; now I have proved my word!"
+
+Beorn was sitting upright on his shelf, looking at him keenly. As
+Granger approached, he held out his hand; Granger placed the yellow
+lump in it.
+
+"Gold," he cried, and his eyes flashed; "a river nugget!" Then
+weighing it carefully, "Three ounces," he said; "it's worth about
+forty dollars."
+
+"How do you know that?" asked Granger. "Was it river gold that you
+found on the Comstock? I thought that it was quartz."
+
+"It was quartz afterwards, but nuggets and dust first." Then,
+remembering himself, he asked suspiciously, "But what d'you know about
+it?"
+
+"I ought to know something," Granger replied, speaking thickly and
+shamming intoxication; "I ought to know something; I was one of the
+first men in on the Klondike gold-rush."
+
+"Damn it! So you were one of the Klondike men? Tell me about it."
+
+Granger had intended to spin him a yarn about great bonanzas in Yukon,
+which he had discovered. It was to have been a hard-luck tale of
+claims which had been stolen, and claims which had been jumped, and
+claims which had been given away for a few pounds of flour or slices
+of bacon in crises of starvation; but in the presence of the old man's
+eagerness, and with the shining nugget of temptation between them, he
+drifted unconsciously into straight talk and told him his own true
+story.
+
+At first, while he was feeling his way, he gave the history of Bobbie
+Henderson, and Siwash George, and Skookum Jim, the real discoverers of
+the Klondike; and of how Bobbie Henderson was done out of his share,
+so that he still remained a poor man and prospector when others, who
+had come into the Yukon years later, had worked their claims, grown
+wealthy, and departed. Then he recited the Iliad of the stampede from
+Forty-Mile, when the rumour had spread abroad that Siwash George had
+found two-dollars-fifty to the pan at the creek which he had named
+"Bonanza"; how drunken men were thrown into open boats, and men who
+refused to credit the report were bound hand and foot with ropes by
+their friends and compelled to go along, lest they should lose the
+chance of a lifetime; and how, where to-day Forty-Mile had been a
+noisy town, to-morrow it was silent and deserted, with none left save
+a few old men and sickly women to tell the story.
+
+To all of this Beorn listened with small attention, for he kept
+muttering to himself, "But how did he know that there was gold there?
+How did he discover it?" Granger wondered to whom he was referring--to
+his own son, to Siwash George, or to someone else; but he dared not
+ask him a leading question lest his suspicion should be aroused. He
+went on with his narration feverishly, forgetting in his excitement
+his resolution to keep sober, emptying the tumbler of whisky
+recklessly, turn and turn about with his companion, waiting and
+watching to see whether, in the Indian phrase, the dead soul would
+return. When he commenced to speak of himself, of his passage from
+Skaguay to Dawson, of the wealth which he found and lost at Drunkman's
+Shallows, and of his flight, Beorn became interested; his eyes blazed
+and every few seconds he would give him encouragement, ejaculating
+hoarsely, "Go on. Go on."
+
+So he carried his history to an end with a rush, for now he knew that
+the dead soul had come back. He finished with the sentence, "And then
+I went to Wrath, for I was nearly starving. 'For God's sake, man, give
+me some employment,' I said. 'I can't steal; they'd put me in gaol for
+that, and so I should disgrace my mother. And I can't cut throats for
+bread, for then I should get hanged. But, if I have to endure this
+agony much longer, I shall do both.' And his reply was to send me up
+here, to this ice-cold hell of snow and silence, to mind his store and
+watch the Last Chance River flowing on and on, until the day of my
+death. God curse the reptile and his charity."
+
+The Man with the Dead Soul turned his head aside and there was silence
+for a moment. Then, bending down and having assured himself that
+Eyelids was asleep. "I've known all that," he said; "but, unlike you,
+I did more 'an intend--I killed my man. I guess you an' I are o' one
+family now, so there's no harm in tellin'. I don't just remember who
+you are, nor how we happen to be here this night; but you placed that
+gold in my hand, so I reckon you're all right. You ain't a Mormon, are
+you?" he asked abruptly.
+
+Granger, taken aback by the question, smiled slowly and shook his
+head.
+
+"Well, then, I'd have you to know," Beorn continued, "that I was
+brought up in the Mormon faith. One o' the earliest memories I have is
+o' the massacre o' the Latter-Day Saints at Gallatin, when Governor
+Boggs issued his order that we should be exterminated an' driven out.
+I can still see the soldiery ridin' up an' down, pillagin' our city,
+insultin' our womenfolk, an' cuttin' down our men. I can just remember
+the misery o' the winter through which we fled, an' the tightness o'
+my mother's arms about me as we crossed the Mississippi, goin' into
+Illinois for safety. From my earliest childhood my mind has bin made
+accustomed to travellin's, an' privations, an' deeds o' blood. That's
+the sort o' man I am.
+
+"It was six years after the Gallatin affair, when our city o' Nauvoo
+had been founded, that the mob once more rose agin us an' murdered our
+prophets, an' placed our lives in danger. Again we fled, crossin' the
+Mississippi on the ice, till we gained a breathin' space at Council
+Bluffs. A year after that, under Brigham Young, we passed through the
+Rockies to the Great Salt Lake an' came to rest. All this persecootion
+caused our people to become a hard an' bitter race; but I'd have been
+true to 'em if it hadn't bin for my mother, an' the manner o' her
+death. How did she die? Don't ask me, for I can't tell you. She was a
+Swede, a kind o' white slave, who was kept with several other women by
+my father. She went out one day, an' never came back. I believe she'd
+got heartsick, an' was plannin' t' escape with a feller o' her own
+nationality, a newcomer. Anyhow, when I asked my father about her, he
+threatened me into silence. He was a priest o' the order o'
+Melchizedek, a powerful man among the prophets. From that hour I hated
+Mormonism, an' determined t' escape whenever my chance occurred. It
+came sooner 'an I expected.
+
+"The Californian gold-rush had robbed the Saints o' the seaboard to
+which they was hopin' to lay claim. They began to get nervous lest the
+southern territories, from Salt Lake to the Mexican frontier, might
+also be lost to 'em if they didn't do something so they organised the
+State of Deseret, an' sent out expeditions to take it up before it
+could fall into the Gentiles' hands. My father, I believe, had grown
+'fraid o' me, lest I should take his life; so he had me included in
+the first expedition, which consisted o' eighty men, an' was sent to
+garrison a Mormon station in Carson Valley, Nevada.
+
+"I've allaws had a nose for gold, an' we hadn't bin there a month
+before I'd discovered an' washed out a little dust from a neighbourin'
+gulch. I kept my secret to myself, an' when I'd gathered enough,
+bought provisions, stole a horse, an' ran away, escapin' over the
+Sierras into California, where I hoped that the Mormons, an'
+especially my father, would lose all trace o' me an' give me up for
+dead. For eight years I drifted along the coast from camp to camp,
+but didn't have much luck. I even went so far south as Mexico, where I
+laboured in the silver mines an' learned the Mexican method o'
+crushin' quartz with arrastras.
+
+"All this time I was haunted by the memory o' the gold which I'd
+washed out in Carson Valley; the more I thought about it, the more
+certain I was that untold riches lay buried there. However, I was
+fearful to return, lest I should fall into the clutches o' the
+priesthood o' Melchizedek or o' the spies o' Brigham Young. I was an
+apostate, an' my father was my enemy; I knew that, should I once be
+recovered by the Mormons, no mercy would be shown me. At last the news
+came that the struggle o' the Saints for possession o' Nevada had been
+given up, an' that messengers had bin sent out from Salt Lake biddin'
+all emigrants return. For eight years I'd bin unmolested; I thought
+that I'd bin forgotten, an' that it was safe to turn my steps
+eastward.
+
+"I travelled day an' night to get back to my first discovery; I was
+tortured wi' the thought that before I got there someone might have
+rediscovered it, an' have staked it out. I'd crossed the Sierras, an'
+was within a two-days' journey o' my destination, when I came to a
+lonely valley as the sun was settin', an' there I camped. The place
+looked God-forsaken; there was nothin' in sight but rocks, an' sand,
+an' sage-brush. I lit my fire, an' tethered my horse, an', being
+dog-tired, was soon asleep. Suddenly I woke up, an' was conscious o'
+footsteps goin' stealthily, away from me into the darkness. I jumped
+to my feet an' seized my gun; but my eyes were dazed with sleep an'
+firelight so that I could see nothin'. I ran out into the shadows,
+followin' the footsteps, but, before I could come up with 'em, their
+sound had changed to that o' a horse, gallopin' northward, growin'
+fainter and fainter.
+
+"I returned to my camp an' examined my baggage; nothin' was missin',
+not even the gold which I'd carried--all seemed safe. I sat up an'
+watched till daybreak, an', havin' snatched a hasty breakfast,
+commenced t' pack my animal. Then it was that I discovered, slipped
+beneath a strap o' my saddle, a sheet o' paper. Unfoldin' it, I saw
+that it was scrawled over in a rude an' almost unreadable hand. This
+was what it said, 'This demand of ours shall remain uncancelled, an'
+shall be to you as was the Ark o' God among the Philistines. Unless
+you return to your father's house an' to the people o' your father's
+faith, you shall be visited by the Lord o' Hosts wi' thunder an' wi'
+earthquakes, wi' floods, wi' pestilence, wi' famine, an' wi'
+bloodshed, until the day of your death, when your name shall not be
+known among men.'
+
+"I was seized with panic, for then I knew that the spies o' Mormon had
+traced me. But I wouldn't turn back, for I knew that the treasure for
+which I had waited, as Jacob waited for Rachel, lay straight ahead. So
+I rode forward, tremblin' as I went, carryin' my gun in my hand. At
+the end o' the second day I came t' Johntown, an' found that many
+things had changed since I had left. There were a dozen shanties in
+the town; these were occupied wi' gamblers, storekeepers, an'
+liquor-sellers, includin' two white women an' Sarah Winnemucca, the
+Piute princess. But the placer-miners had been at work, an' the
+gulches were dotted with the tents an' dugouts o' men who had
+discovered my secret for themselves. Thomas Paige Comstock was in the
+gang, the man who gave his name to the first great strike. They
+called 'im Old Pancake, 'cause he was too busy searchin' for gold to
+bake bread. Even at that time, as wi' spoon in hand he stirred the
+pancake batter, he kept his eyes on the crest o' some distant peak,
+an' was lost in dreams o' avarice.
+
+"I hadn't bin there long before I took up wi' a feller named Peter
+O'Riley, an' we became pards. We determined to try our luck in the
+Walker River Mountains, where some new placers had bin started; but we
+hadn't got the money, so we agreed t' work a claim in Six-Mile Canon
+till we'd taken out enough dust t' pay for an outfit. We dug a trench
+straight up the hillside, by Old Man Caldwell's Spring, through blue
+clay an' a yellowish kind o' gravel. But the spring wasted down the
+slope, so we stopped work on the trench an' commenced to sink a pit to
+collect the water an' make a reservoir. We hadn't sunk more 'an four
+feet when we struck a darker an' heavier soil, which sparkled as we
+shovelled it above ground. We washed out a panful, an' found that the
+bottom was fairly covered in gold. This was the top o' the famous
+Ophir, had we only known it. We jumped to our feet an' shouted, for it
+was the richest placer that had as yet bin found. We gave up our
+notion o' the Walker River, an' I began to laugh int' myself at the
+Mormon threat, that I should suffer from all the plagues o' Egypt, an'
+die an unknown man. We were rich--rich--rich.
+
+"Just as we were finishin' our day's work, Old Pancake rides up. He'd
+bin lookin' for a mustang that he'd lost, an' came gallopin' over the
+ridge, with his long legs brushin' the sage tops. We tried to hide our
+discovery, but his eyes were too sharp for that. He saw the gold from
+our last clean-up glistenin' in the bottom o' the pan, as the sunset
+lit on it. 'You've struck it, boys,' he cried.
+
+"Jumpin' from his horse, he went down into the pit t' examine for
+hisself. He stayed down there some time; when he come up his face was
+grave. He'd done a lot of thinkin' in a very short while. He sat down
+on the hillside, an' was silent for so long that we began to suspect
+there was somethin' up.
+
+"At last he said, 'Now, see here, boys, this spring was old man
+Caldwell's. I an' Manny Penrod bought his claim last winter, an' we
+sold a tenth to Old Virginia th' other day. If you two fellers'll let
+Manny an' myself in on equal shares, it's all right; if not, it's all
+wrong.'
+
+"We were a bit afraid o' Old Pancake; he'd bin longer in the district
+'an we had. We didn't think to doubt his word, though, as we
+afterwards discovered, every word that he spoke was false. Anyhow,
+after a lot 'o argiment, we agreed to let him an' Manny Penrod in on
+the terms which he'd suggested. That was the beginnin' o' the Johntown
+gold-rush, an' I, for the second time, was one o' the discoverers. At
+first we named the place Pleasant Hill Camp, an' I can tell you it was
+mighty pleasant to be takin' out a thousand dollars a day per man. But
+later, when a city commenced t' spring up, it was necessary t' find
+some other name. We quarrelled a good deal about what we'd call it;
+but one night, when Old Virginia was goin' home with the boys drunk,
+carryin' a bottle o' whisky in 'is hand, he stumbled as he reached his
+cabin, an' the bottle fell an' was broke. Risin' to his knees, with
+the neck o' the bottle held fast in 'is hand, he coughed out, 'I
+baptise this ground Virginia town.' An' so Virginia town, which was
+afterwards changed t' city, the handful o' shanties was named.
+
+"For all that my prospects were lookin' so rosy, I was really havin'
+bad luck. Day after day, I was throwin' away wagon-loads o' 'blue
+stuff,' as all th' other miners were doin', an' as those who had gone
+before us had done--we damned it, an' didn't know its value. A month
+after I'd sold out, a feller had some o' it assayed, an' it was found
+to be worth nearly seven thousand dollars in gold an' silver per ton.
+
+"I guess that curse o' the Mormons was more powerful 'an it seemed at
+first sight--it's followed me through life an' ruined all the men with
+whom I've come in touch. Old Virginia was thrown from his horse, an'
+killed while drunk. O'Riley sold out his share for forty thousand
+dollars, the bulk o' which he spent in wildcat speculations, so that,
+what wi' disappointment an' loss, he finished out his days in a
+madhouse. Penrod sold for eight thousand, an' soon spent everything he
+had. Old Pancake sold for eleven thousand, an' lost every dollar.
+Then, gettin' sick o' seein' other fellers grow rich out o' what had
+bin his, he wandered off prospecting an' blew out his brains wi' his
+own gun in the mountains o' Montana. A chap named Hansard, one o' our
+first millionaires, died a pauper an' was buried at the public
+expense. As for myself, you can see what I've become--the Man wi' the
+Dead Soul."
+
+He paused, and looked round at Granger. "_The Man wi' the Dead Soul_,"
+he repeated, "that's what I am. When I die, my name will not be known
+among men."
+
+"I don't suppose there's any of us'll be remembered long," said
+Granger. "There's a man out there on the bend; I was at Oxford with
+him. He was one of the finest oars that England ever had. The papers
+were full of him once. A sporting edition never came out but . . ."
+
+He was interrupted. "Pass the whisky," Beorn said; "if we're goin' to
+be forgot, it don't much matter what we do or have done; an' we may as
+well forget."
+
+He swallowed the spirit greedily at one quick gulp. "Where'd I got to?
+Oh, yes, I'd sold out my claim for money down, an' made a fool o'
+myself. You see I thought that my find was a gash-vein an' would soon
+peter out, an' that I was doin' somethin' mighty clever to sell at
+all. Instead o' which, I'd only skimmed the surface an' hadn't gone
+deep enough. The men who bought from us sank down till they came to
+the main lode, an' then there was the discovery o' what that 'blue
+stuff,' which we'd bin throwin' away, was really worth; from them two
+causes came the Washoe gold-rush. You never saw anythin' like that,
+not even in the Klondike. It was maddenin' for me to stand by an'
+watch these men, who'd come from a thousand miles east an' west, just
+t' handle the pickin's o' the wealth which I had once possessed an'
+hadn't had the sense to know about. They lived in tents, an' huts, an'
+holes in the hillsides, an' paid seventy-five cents for a pound o'
+flour, in the hopes that, when the summer 'ad come, they might get a
+chance to prospect.
+
+"Before winter 'ad gone, they was leadin' strings o' mules across the
+mountains, on blankets spread above the snow, that they might get
+provisions in an' prevent us from starvin'. An' I, the feller as
+they'd come to rob, had to sit still an' watch it all.
+
+"Before the roads were fit for travel, all the world was journeyin'
+towards us. There were Irishmen, pushin' wheelbarrows; an' Mexicans
+with burros; an' German miners, an' French, an' English, an' Swedes,
+ploddin' through the mud across the Sierras with their tools upon
+their backs; there were organ-grinders an' Jew pedlars, an' women
+dressed as men, all comin' to Virginia City to claim the gold which I
+'ad lost. I sat every day idly watchin' their approach, an' I hated
+them. I'd begun to believe in the Mormon's curse, an' to let things
+slide. There didn't seem to be much sense in stakin' out a new
+claim--if I made another fortune, I felt certain that I'd surely lose
+it all.
+
+"Along wi' the adventurers an' prospectors came desperadoes, who
+intended to make their fortune at the gun's point, by shootin'
+straight! There was the Tombstone Terror, an' the Bad Man from Bodie,
+an' Sam Brown, the greatest bully o' them all. One night a half-witted
+feller asked him how many men he'd chopped. 'Ninety-nine,' says Sam,
+'an' you're the hundredth.' He seizes him by the neck an' rips him to
+pieces wi' his bowie-knife. Then he lay down an' went to sleep on the
+billiard table, while the father gathered up what remained o' his son
+from the floor.
+
+"An' there was El Dorado Johnny, who, whenever he was goin' to shoot a
+man, bought a new suit o' clothes an' had a shave, an' got his hair
+cut an' his boots polished so that, in case there was any mistake, he
+might make a handsome corpse. These were some o' the men that I lived
+among, an', like God, I said nothin' to any of 'em, but watched an'
+was interested in 'em all.
+
+"I suppose I enjoyed myself, for I couldn't help laughin' quietly at
+their expense. 'What went ye out for to seek?' I would ask as, sittin'
+by the outskirts o' the town, I saw this army o' men an' women
+struggle in from the mountain trail. An' then I'd answer myself, 'We
+have come that we may dig out gold, that others may take it from us.
+We have come to exchange our health an' hope for disease an'
+disappointment. We have come to gain all the world, which we shall not
+gain--an' to lose our own souls.'
+
+"I tell you, it's mighty strange to think o' where all the gold, which
+those brave chaps o' the Old Virginia days dug out, has gone. Some o'
+it's been made into a necklace t' hang about a lady's throat; and some
+o' it's gone to Rome t' gild a cross; and some o' it's been made into
+a weddin' ring that a young girl might get married. I don't suppose
+the folk in the old lands ever think of how far the gold which they
+wear has travelled, nor how many have died in its gettin'. Some, which
+'as bin made into a watch and goes to the city every day, may have
+come from King Solomon's mines in ships o' Tarshish; an' the king may
+have worn it hisself in his temple, or have given it away to the
+dark-skinned girl that he wrote that song about.
+
+"When I thought o' these things in Old Virginia, it made me sort o'
+happy, so that I didn't mind what the Mormons 'ad said. Time seemed so
+endless, an' life so short, that I didn't seem called on to worry
+myself--only t' watch. If I found a new claim which panned out rich, I
+didn't work it myself; for I knew that, though I seemed lucky, I
+should end unlucky. An' I didn't tell anyone else about it; an' if
+they found it out for theirselves, I was angry. I'd found the Ophir,
+an' hadn't made anythin' out o' it--that was a big enough present for
+one man to make to his world.
+
+"So I just looked on, an' saw the fools rushin' in who expected to
+pile up fortunes. And I saw the camels comin' in an' out, carryin'
+salt to Virginia from the desert. They'd bin brought from Asia, an' I
+could see that they felt as I felt, an' despised the greed an' hurry
+o' what was goin' on. Later some of 'em got so disgusted that they
+escaped from their drivers--at that time they was bein' used in
+Arizona t' carry ore. I've often smiled when I've fancied the terror
+o' some lone prospector, should one o' them long-legged brutes poke up
+his nose above a ridge where gold had just been found, and sniff
+scornfully down on the feller. Some o' them camels may be still livin'
+an' doin' it at this very minute."
+
+Beorn opened his jaws wide and laughed. Granger had never heard him
+laugh before, and the sound was not pleasant. There was nothing of
+mirth about the man or in anything that he said--there was only
+disappointment and scorn. His bitterness became horrible when he
+pretended to be merry. "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh;
+the Lord shall have them in derision." It was like the thunderous
+scoffing of the Lord God of the Hebrews.
+
+The candle had gone out, and the eerie light of the northland dawn,
+drifting into the room through the little space of window that was
+uncovered, made him and his companion look old and comfortless. But he
+was anxious to hear the last of the story before the soul departed, so
+he said, "And how was it that you left the Comstock Mines and came
+into Keewatin?"
+
+"I told you that I'd done what you intended, that I killed a man. I
+did more 'an that, I killed many. You see, at that time there was no
+proper minin' law in America; so when men got t'quarrellin', they
+soon took t' fightin'. So long as the Comstock was only
+placer-minin', we knew what we were about, an' there was no
+trespassin', but when we took t' tunnelling', it wasn't long before we
+was borin' under one another's ledges. The Comstock veins, startin'
+near the surface, dipped toward the west, an' therefore the first
+great conflict came with the nearest line o' claims t' the westward.
+The ledges here were very rich an' almost perpendicular, an' so the
+slopin' shafts o' the Ophir, Mexican, etc., soon ran int' the vertical
+shafts on the 'middle lead.'
+
+"The earliest case t' be tried, which I remember, was that o' the
+Ophir against McCall. The court met in a stable, an' each side come
+armed. One witness was shot at several times as he was ridin'
+homeward, down a ravine at nightfall. Party spirit ran too high, an'
+the danger o' bringin' in a unanimous verdict was too great for any
+jury t' risk their lives by comin' to an agreement. There was no
+justice; so there was nothin' left but to fight it out, the same as
+when nations go to war. An' what were they goin' to fight about? A
+metal which was only val'able because o' its rarity--which had no
+value in itself, an' couldn't help men t' godliness; one which you
+couldn't make an engine out o', nor a plough, nor even a sword,
+because it was too soft. But in order to possess it, they was goin' to
+take each other's lives. I, an' every other man in that town, had
+thrown away or were throwin' away our souls for a thing which was
+truly worthless.
+
+"One night as I slept, I heard a voice callin' to me an' sayin', 'I
+will make a man more precious than gold; even a man than the golden
+wedge o' Ophir. Therefore I will shake the heavens, an' the earth
+shall remove out o' her place, in th' wrath o' the Lord o' Hosts, an'
+in the day o' his fierce anger.' I heard that voice callin' to me not
+once, but several times; an' when I woke up, an' walked through the
+town, an' saw the men o' the Ophir preparin' to shoot down the men o'
+the McCall, I could still hear the voice repeating, 'Even a man than
+the golden wedge o' Ophir.'
+
+"I went back to my shanty, an' found my Bible, an' read it many days,
+never stirrin' out. I remember there was one passage that seemed to
+accuse myself, an' to explain my own failure--'If I have made gold my
+hope, or have said to the fine gold, "Thou art my confidence"; if I
+rejoiced because my wealth was great, an' because mine hand had gotten
+much; if I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walkin' in
+brightness, an' my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath
+kissed my hand: this also were an iniquity to be punished by the
+judge, for I should have denied the God that is above.'
+
+"I'd done all that. When I'd looked at the sun, I'd seen gold; when
+I'd looked at the moon, I'd thought of silver; an' when I'd found both
+the silver an' the gold in the Ophir, by Old Man Caldwell's Spring, my
+mouth had kissed my own hand--an' not God's. An' what I'd done, every
+one else was doin' in Virginia City; an' the Lord o' Hosts was angry,
+an' that was why men were killin' one another. So, when I'd sat still
+an' figured it all out, I said, 'God spoke to me because I'm the one
+man on the Comstock who, when he's found gold, tries to bury it; an'
+He spoke to me because He wants me to join with Him, an' help Him to
+shake the heavens.' So out I walked, day after day, an' watched things
+growin' from bad to worse; an' when I'd seen all I wanted, I come
+home an' read my Bible--I knew that when God had need o' me He would
+send His messenger.
+
+"One night a miner come to my cabin, an' he said, 'Are you ready to
+fight for the Fair-Haired Annie?'
+
+"'I'm ready,' I said, 'but what's it all about?'
+
+"'From a drift, a hundred feet down,' said he, 'that we're workin' on
+at present, we can hear the picks o' the Bloody Thunder drawin' nearer
+an' nearer; they'll break through to-morrer into one o' our ledges.'
+
+"'What then?' I asked.
+
+"'We're goin' to have a band o' men waitin' for 'em in the dark on our
+side o' the ledge, an' everyone o' those men is goin' to be armed. The
+moment that the picks o' the Bloody Thunder drive through an' the wall
+goes down, the men o' the Fair-Haired Annie are goin' to fire.'
+
+"'All right,' I said. 'I'm wi' you. I'll be there.'
+
+"So next day I, an' twenty other men, were lowered down the shaft; an'
+before we saw daylight again, the Fair-Haired Annie an' the Bloody
+Thunder had gone to war. That was the first o' the underground fights
+which took place on the Comstock. I picked my men, and paid 'em ten
+dollars a day, an' called my gang 'The Avengers o' the Lord.' No one
+'cept myself knew what that meant, but they learnt t' fear us, for we
+fought to the death. Often when I was waitin' in the dark, listenin'
+to the sound o' the rival miners comin' nearer, I would repeat to
+myself the words, 'I will make a man more precious 'an gold; even a
+man than the golden wedge o' Ophir.' An' when a poor chap lay dyin', I
+would say to him those words."
+
+"So you were sorry for the men you killed?"
+
+"Oh, I was sorry, though that did small good to 'em. When the Lord's
+bent on destroyin', He don't take much account o' persons. When the
+first born o' Egypt were slain, He killed the evil wi' the
+good--served 'em all alike. But it's heart-breakin' work to be made an
+avenger o' the Lord."
+
+"But I don't understand. What was there to avenge?"
+
+"What was there to avenge? Why, the sinfulness o' those men, who was
+diggin' out the power an' temptation to sin from the place where God
+had hidden it. He meant that it should stay there forever; but now
+it'll be handed down from generation to generation, as is King
+Solomon's gold, temptin' our sons' sons to lose their souls as ours
+were lost."
+
+"And when all the fighting was done, did the soldiers get after you?"
+asked Granger. But Beorn's eyes were closing, and the soul was
+departing as day returned. Already the sun was leaping above the
+horizon, and the sigh of the waking forest was heard. Granger seized
+him by the arm and shook him--he had learnt only the least part of
+that which he desired to know. "Was it for that crime that you fled,
+till you came at last to Keewatin for safety?" he shouted. "Quick,
+Beorn, tell me. Why did you go to the Forbidden River?"
+
+The eyes did not open; but, as if the soul were answering him with a
+last warning as it passed out of the door of the body, the lips
+stirred, "Ay, man, it's terrible--the things men give for gold."
+
+The face had become so ashy pale that Granger bent above it, painfully
+listening for the intake of the breath, to assure himself that Beorn
+was not dead. His clamour had aroused Eyelids; looking down towards
+him, he saw that his eyes were wide and motionless, gazing towards
+the window with an expression of drunken terror.
+
+"What's the matter?" he asked sharply.
+
+The half-breed did not reply, but crouched and pointed with his hand.
+
+Granger, turning his head and following the direction indicated,
+looked towards the triangle of uncovered window-pane, and there saw
+the face of a man, gazing hungrily in upon him--yet, not upon him, but
+upon the nugget which lay sparkling by Beorn's side upon the shelf. It
+was a face that seemed dimly familiar, but thinner and more haggard.
+At first it seemed to be his own face--the face of that _self_ from
+which he had fled. Then he recognized, and knew that Spurling had
+returned.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+SPURLING MAKES A REQUEST
+
+
+There had been a time when Granger had desired to kill Spurling, and,
+though latterly he had not consciously wished that he were dead, yet
+he resented his reappearance; his presence broke in as a
+storm-influence on the stoical quiet which he had attained. This man
+stood for so many things which had been sinful and passionate in the
+past--things which it had cost him so much even to attempt to forget;
+things which he had promised himself that he would forget for Peggy's
+sake. And now, because he had chosen to return, it seemed necessary
+that he should call to mind the entire tragedy by asking the question,
+"When you shot that woman in the Klondike, did you know that she was
+not a man? And was she clothed in a woman's dress?"
+
+Even though he kept silence, any hour Spurling himself might reopen
+the subject by inquiring after Strangeways, as to whether he had
+pursued farther, as to how he had fared, as to where he was at
+present. Granger was by no means certain that he did not already know
+that the corporal was dead. He shrank from the discomfort of playing
+the accuser again; he shrank still more from making the ugly
+confession that he himself was likely to be suspected of having
+committed a kindred crime,--a confession which would tend to degrade
+him to the level of this man whom he affected to despise. So, from
+day to day, he postponed his questions and, in the meanwhile, watched
+Spurling narrowly.
+
+His conduct had been very curious since that morning of his arrival,
+when he had announced himself by playing the spy, through the window
+of Bachelors' Hall, on the inhabitants of the Point. How long he had
+been there, and how much he had heard of what the Man with the Dead
+Soul had had to say, kneeling outside in the semi-darkness with his
+ear pressed against the pane, Granger had no means of discovering. But
+from the first it was clear to him that Spurling and Eyelids were
+possessed of a common knowledge, which made them enemies. Perhaps they
+had met before near the Forbidden River, and this had been the cause
+of Eyelids' delay.
+
+Under ordinary circumstances, the mystery would soon have been swept
+aside by the putting of a single interrogation; but men on the Last
+Chance River get out of the habit of asking leading questions; in
+their parsimony over words, they prefer to watch and to wait the
+reading of the minds of their fellows, and the secreting of their own
+motives, is almost their only pastime. So Granger watched and waited.
+
+In Spurling, so soon as he had been fed and cared for, he was quick to
+discover a change. He had become manlier and braver--more like his old
+self. He carried himself with a kind of timid pride, as though he knew
+himself to be of a greater value than he was likely to be reckoned at
+by others; almost as though he were confident that he was possessed of
+a claim to merit which, once stated, could not fail to be recognised.
+At the same time, there was a distressful hesitancy in his manner, not
+unnatural under the circumstances, of a man not sure of his
+acceptability. He seemed forever on the point of declaring himself,
+and forever thinking better of his decision--postponing his
+declaration to a later time. His bearing was an irritating combination
+of false humility and suppressed self-assertion.
+
+Beorn, when he had recovered from his debauch, was as silent,
+absorbed, and uncompanionable as ever. He appeared to have retained no
+memory of what he had said, and to be quite unconscious of Spurling's
+arrival--he had become again in all things the Man with the Dead Soul.
+
+But with Peggy and Eyelids it was different. Half-breeds as they were,
+and, by reason of their Indian blood, instinctive disguisers of
+emotion, their aversion for Spurling was plain. Sometimes, when his
+back was turned and they thought that they were unobserved, they would
+glance swiftly up at one another, and an expression would come into
+their eyes, a small pin-point of angry fire, which betokened danger
+for the man they hated. Very strangely to Granger, since Spurling's
+arrival, they had manifested a great fondness for being in his own
+company; one or other of them was never far from his side. Though he
+turned upon them angrily, telling them that he wished to be by
+himself, they continually disobeyed and, next minute, like faithful
+dogs, with apologetic faces, were to be found watching near by. What
+was the motive of their conduct? Did they think that he was in danger,
+and required protecting?
+
+But there was a graver happening which he had noticed. With Spurling's
+return, he had thought that now certainly he had solved the mystery of
+the signalling to the bend. On the first day, however, he had found
+himself mistaken. Sitting in the doorway of his store, he had watched
+the undesired one go down to the pier, push off in a canoe, and paddle
+down-river for a bathe. Quarter of a mile from the bend, he had seen
+him back-water, rise to his knees, gaze straight ahead in a startled
+manner, and then, turning quickly about, come racing back like one
+pursued for his life. Looking round, he had seen that Peggy and
+Eyelids were also witnessing these tactics, with expressions which
+betrayed their consternation. As he watched, they had raised their
+hands and waved. When Spurling had landed, he had been waiting for him
+at the pier-head. "What was it that you saw over there?" he asked
+sternly.
+
+Spurling, being panic-stricken, had at first found difficulty in
+recovering his voice. Then, "Where? What do you mean?" he had panted.
+
+Granger, in silence, had pointed northeasterly towards the bend.
+
+With a nervous laugh, though his face was bloodless, Spurling had
+replied, "Nothing. I saw nothing. I just thought that it looked a bit
+lonesome, . . . so I turned back."
+
+Gazing at him attentively, and seeing how he trembled, Granger knew
+that he had not answered truly. With a shrug of his shoulders,
+twisting round on his heel, he had said sneeringly, "On the Last
+Chance River we don't run away from loneliness as though the hangman
+were behind us. If we did, we should be running all the time."
+
+He had not stayed to see the effect of his words, but long afterwards,
+when he looked down to the water's edge, Spurling was still sitting
+there, with his head between his hands and his body shaking.
+
+Early one evening, some days later, he came to him and said, "Mr.
+Granger," and it sounded oddly from those lips--in the old days, even
+in the beginning of their acquaintance, they had never mistered one
+another, "Mr. Granger, is there anywhere we can go to be quiet? I have
+something very private which I want to say."
+
+"O yes, there's the whole of Keewatin."
+
+"But isn't there some place where we shan't be overheard?"
+
+"We can paddle down to the bend. There's only one man who can hear us
+there--and he's in his grave."
+
+"Not there. Not there," Spurling had cried, trembling with fear and
+excitement.
+
+"Well, then, if you're so particular, you can speak with me here."
+
+Spurling looked round to where, at a short distance, Eyelids was
+diligently idling above a broken net. "Somewhere where we can't be
+overheard," he reiterated. At that moment Eyelids turned his head.
+
+This continual spying on all that he did, the reason for which he
+could not comprehend, was getting on Granger's nerves; he felt that it
+would be a relief to be alone, even though it meant being alone with
+the man whom he had most cause to hate. However, somehow he pitied him
+just now; perhaps because of the manner of his address, which had
+brought into sharp contrast their present relations with those of
+other days.
+
+"There's the island up-river to the westward, where I keep my dogs in
+summer-time; if that will suit your purpose."
+
+Spurling showed his pleasure at the suggestion, and, hurrying his
+steps, led the way down to the river-bank. Getting into a canoe, they
+set out towards the west. They had not gone half a mile before they
+caught the sound of paddle-strokes behind them. Turning about, they
+saw that Eyelids was following. He attempted to loiter, and threw in a
+line as if his only intention were to fish. Granger flushed with
+anger. Without a word, he commenced to paddle back till they drew
+nearly level with the intruder, who pretended to be so engaged in his
+pastime as not to notice their approach. Then he cried in a voice that
+was choking with rage, "Get back to the Point, you half-breed spy. If
+you dare to follow me again, I'll turn you out to-morrow, and you can
+take your trade elsewhere." Nor would he proceed farther on his
+journey till he had watched his brother-in-law get safe to land; then,
+with a twist of the paddle, he brought his own craft round, and
+continued towards the sunset. Two miles up-river, in the
+middle-stream, stood a rocky island; as yet it was only a dull grey
+speck in a pathway of red.
+
+They pushed on in silence up the straight, dark grove of mysterious
+forest. Water-birds were calling in the rushes; at one point, as they
+passed, a great bull caribou lifted up his head from drinking, and
+regarded them with a look of curiosity, totally void of fear; a heron
+drifted slowly over the tree-tops, and disappeared. To Granger, with
+even this short distance placed between himself and his customary
+associates, there came a sense of release, and with it an instinct for
+kindness. As they neared the shore of the island, the huskies
+commenced to howl; soon they could see them bunched together on the
+shore awaiting their arrival. A dog in the north, even though he has
+been imported, is never heard to bark. To hear them at first, a
+stranger might suppose that a woman was wearily weeping herself to
+death in the forest, because of a grief which was inconsolable. The
+wail of the huskies, reaching him at intervals across the expanse of
+water, seemed the voice of his own desolation, coming out to meet him.
+
+The whole world was empty, and he began to feel the need of
+friendship. He let his eyes linger on the head and shoulders of the
+man in front of him, and remembered with what eagerness long ago, when
+awaiting his arrival at some appointed rendezvous, he had striven to
+catch sight of him approaching, towering above the littler people of
+the London crowd. And now, instead of brief and chance-snatched
+moments, they were allowed to pass whole days together; yet, because
+of what had happened, they could find no pleasure in one another.
+Pleasure! The only sensation which he derived from Spurling's company
+was one of intense annoyance. And there had been a time when, if
+anyone had dared to tell him that that could ever happen, he would
+have denied it with an oath.
+
+Could it be that the fault was his own, and that he had misjudged this
+man? He recalled how, when he had discovered Strangeways' body at the
+bend, and had thought it Spurling's, he had bitterly accused himself
+of all manner of unkindness. He smiled grimly at the remembrance--it
+was human nature to do that. He could quite well imagine that at some
+future time, when Spurling was truly dead, he might blame himself
+afresh, with an equal bitterness and an equal sincerity. It would be
+easy to judge charitably of him then, for he would be beyond power of
+working any further mischief to the living. It is fear, not cruelty,
+which lies at the root of all uncharitableness. If apprehension were
+removed from our lives, it would be possible for the weakest man to
+live well. It was the fact that, trusting in God, he took no thought
+for the morrow, which enabled Jesus to become Christ.
+
+Gliding round the island, they came to a sandy cove, which faced the
+sunset. There they landed. Lifting the canoe a dozen paces up the
+shore and placing it in the scrub, where it might be out of sight,
+they struck into the brushwood by a narrow trail, which at once
+commenced to climb. After three minutes of travelling, they came out
+on to a tall bare rock, to one side of which grew a solitary pine.
+From there they could command a view of the river on every side.
+
+Granger settled himself down, with his back toward his companion,
+propping himself against the pine-trunk, with his face towards the
+fading light. The huskies gathered hungrily round in a semicircle,
+squatting on their haunches, wondering whether the coming of these men
+meant that they were going to be fed. The frogs croaked in the river;
+the mosquitoes trumpetted about their heads; save for these sounds,
+and the continual low murmur of the river, there was absolute quiet.
+In this environment, his eyes upon the faery domes and fiery spires of
+the western sky, into the inmost mystery of which the Last Chance
+River led, that torturing and old desire, which had always made it
+impossible for him to enjoy the moment in its flight, again possessed
+his mind: he had known it from a child, the ambition to follow,
+follow, follow, in the hope that somewhere, perhaps behind the setting
+sun, he might arrive at the land of perfectness for which he craved.
+
+His thoughts were disturbed somewhat brutally by a voice behind.
+"Still careless of your life! I see you hav'n't brought your gun with
+you. How did you know that it wasn't 'Die,' that I wanted to say?"
+
+He turned lazily round, and was surprised at the altered expression
+which had come into Spurling's face. It was frank and self-reliant,
+and, oddly enough, had a look that was almost tender.
+
+"What made you say that?" Granger inquired.
+
+Spurling drew nearer. "Well, a fellow had to say something to break
+the ice," he replied; "so I thought I might as well give you your
+chance of taking the worst impression of me." He paused; then he asked
+in a low voice, "You were thinking of London and the old times?"
+
+Granger nodded his head.
+
+"I've often done that; I can understand. It was torture to me in the
+Yukon, and it was madness to me over there," pointing with his hand to
+the northward, where the Forbidden River lay. "What would you say," he
+added, "if I were to tell you that it could all come back again?"
+
+Granger's reply was quiet and calculated, so that it seemed to be
+quite within the bounds of courteous conversation. "I think I should
+tell you that you lied," he said.
+
+"But if I should give you proof that not only the old things were
+possible, but that El Dorado might come true, and that within a year
+we could seek it out together, as we have always planned to do?"
+
+For answer Granger jerked out his foot, and sent a gaunt grey husky
+flying, which had come within his range. It was one of those which
+Spurling had left behind over two months ago at Murder Point, when he
+had exchanged teams with Granger in his endeavour to escape
+Strangeways. Spurling, when he saw it, recognised the meaning which
+Granger's action implied. It was as if he had said, "So the old things
+are possible, are they, you villain? What about that man whom you say
+that you killed, whose body was washed up near Forty-Mile?" He opened
+his lips to explain, and then fell silent. It was impossible to excuse
+himself in the presence of those wolfish beasts, who had been
+witnesses to all the degradation of mind and body which had overtaken
+him in that terrible escape. No man could estimate the penalty which
+he had had to pay for his moment's folly, except one who had endured
+it. When he allowed his memory to dwell upon it, that frenzied rush
+across half a continent seemed to have occupied all his life. The
+thought of it made him afraid.
+
+"Good God! And my mother meant me for a minister!" he exclaimed,
+burying his face in his hands.
+
+Granger looked up suspiciously, but he said nothing.
+
+"No, I never told you that," he continued fiercely, "and I suppose you
+don't believe me now. Seems somehow odd to you, I daresay, that Druce
+Spurling should ever have thought himself worthy to talk to men about
+their souls and Christ. You'd have thought it a good joke if I'd told
+you even when you knew me at my best. _When you knew me!_ Bah! You
+never knew me; you were always a harsh judge when it came to setting a
+value on things which you didn't understand."
+
+When Granger still kept silent and gave no sign of interest, Spurling
+broke out afresh: "Damnation! I tell you you never knew anything about
+me. You were always too selfish to take the trouble to get into other
+folks' insides; yet you went about complaining that people were
+unsympathetic. Here's the difference between us; I may be a scoundrel,
+but whatever I've done I've played the man and never blamed anyone
+else for my crimes, while you--! You were always a weak dreamer,
+depending on others for your strength. You were discontented, but you
+never raised your littlest finger in an attempt to make men better.
+All you could think of was yourself, and your own ambition to escape.
+So though, perhaps, I've sunk to a lower level than you have ever
+touched, I want you to know there was once a time when I did reach up
+to a nobler and a better."
+
+Gradually, as he had spoken, there had grown into his voice a
+concentrated fury. He was giving utterance to an old grievance over
+which he had brooded for many years; as happens frequently in such
+cases, only a portion of his complaint could be proved by facts, the
+remainder being an overgrowth of embittered imagination.
+
+His eyes sought out the face of the man whom he accused, but it told
+him nothing; he sat there silent, with his head thrown back a little,
+unemotional as the distant stretch of cold grey river up which he
+gazed.
+
+The sun had vanished, and the prolonged dusk of the northland was
+stealing from out the forest. At length Granger answered him: "It may
+be true, and if so, what follows?"
+
+"Oh, nothing: only I thought I'd tell you this so that one man might
+not think too badly of me, if before long I should be called upon to
+die. I must have looked a horrid beast when I came to you last April."
+
+Whether consciously or not, Granger nodded his head, as much as to
+say, "You did. Most certainly you did."
+
+His companion broke into a harsh laugh. "The Reverend Druce Spurling!
+How d'you like the sound of it? That's what I might have been to-day,
+and a fat lot you care about it."
+
+To Granger, as he listened, there had come the painful knowledge,
+bearing out the accusation that he had never cared for the inward
+things of men, that this was the first scrap of confession which
+Spurling had ever let fall in his presence. Why, up to that moment he
+had not heard a word about his mother, and had certainly never
+credited him with a pronounced religious instinct.
+
+Yes, perhaps that statement, which had sounded so exaggerated at
+first, was true; and he was a hard and selfish man. Up to now he'd
+excused himself on the score of his superior sensitiveness and
+ideality. Probably it was this same error which Père Antoine, in
+gentler manner, had tried to point out, when he said, "You will never
+help yourself, or the world, by merely being sad. No man ever has. It
+is because of your flight from sadness that you have met with all your
+dangers. All your life you have spent in striving to escape from
+things which are sad." His thoughts travelled back to those earlier
+days, when he'd poured out his troubles to Spurling, and told him all
+about himself; and always with the assurance that he would be
+understood and would gain sympathy. John Granger as he had been then,
+now seemed like a complaining child to himself. He was certain that,
+were he to be met by that old self to-day, he would have no patience
+with him. But Spurling had had patience.
+
+So, when all was said and done, he must consider himself a pretty
+worthless fellow; and, after all, Spurling, despite his blood-stained
+hands, was probably the better man.
+
+"Why Spurling failed to become a parson"--a strange topic for thought
+and conversation this, on the Last Chance River at nightfall!
+
+But Spurling was speaking again, timidly and half to himself. "Suppose
+God should brand a mark on our foreheads for every crime which we have
+perpetrated, I wonder what kind of beasts we should appear to one
+another then?"
+
+Turning his head, in order that his face might not be seen, Granger
+replied, "Much the same kind of beasts, I suspect, as we appear to one
+another now." Then, speaking more hurriedly, "It wasn't to talk of
+these things, and to ask me that question, that you required me to
+come with you to some place where we might be by ourselves. Tell me,
+what is it that you want me to do for you? You were good to me once,
+and I'm willing to help you in any way that is honourable, and that
+isn't too dangerous."
+
+Spurling laughed shortly, and said, "It isn't your help that I'm
+asking; it's you that I'm trying to help. Here, look at that." He
+passed something to him. "I didn't act squarely by you in the
+Klondike, and I want to make up for it now. When we made that strike
+in Drunkman's Shallows, the success of it turned my head; even then,
+if you'd not been so impatient, I think I should have come to myself
+and have behaved decently. You put my back up with your suspicions,
+and by seeming to claim a part of my wealth as though it were yours by
+right. But I'm anxious to forget that now."
+
+In the meanwhile, Granger had been examining the thing which had been
+placed in his hands. It was wrapped up carefully in several rags,
+which were knotted and tedious to untie. When he had stript them off,
+he found that they contained a nugget, somewhat bigger than the one
+which Eyelids had shown him, but of the same rounded formation, as
+though it had been taken from a river-bed. "Where did you get it?" he
+asked excitedly.
+
+"Where the half-breed got his--from the Forbidden River. Does El
+Dorado seem more possible to you now?"
+
+But Granger was thinking, and he did not answer the question. Suddenly
+the dream of his life had become recoverable. He had forgotten Peggy,
+and Murder Point, and even Spurling himself. Once more in imagination
+he was sailing up the Great Amana, following in his father's track.
+Once more he saw, as in Raleigh's day, the deer come down to the
+water's side, as if they were used to the keeper's call; and he
+watched anxiously ahead lest, in the rounding of the latest bend, the
+shining city should meet his sight and the salt expanse of Parima,
+from whose shores its towers are said to rise. In his eyes was the
+vision of the island near Puna, which Lopez wrote about, with its
+silver herb-gardens, and its flowers of gold, and its trees of gold
+and of silver; and in his ears was the tinkling music, which the
+sea-wind was wont to make as it swept through the metal forest,
+causing its branches to clang and its leaves to shake. He was far away
+from Keewatin now, making the phantom journey to the land of his
+desire.
+
+"Does El Dorado seem more possible to you now?"
+
+He turned to Spurling a face which had grown thin with earnestness,
+"Druce, tell me quickly," he said, "how long will it take us to get
+there?"
+
+"To get to El Dorado? The answer to that you should know best. But to
+get to the place on the Forbidden River where this gold was found? Oh,
+about five days."
+
+"Let us go there at once, then, before Beorn finds us out."
+
+"Ah, Beorn! The old trapper who put that half-breed on my track!"
+
+"Did he do that? Tell me about it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+MANITOUS AND SHADES OF THE DEPARTED
+
+
+"After I had left you, I journeyed three days to the northward, till I
+came to the mouth of the Forbidden River. There I found the cache
+which you spoke to me about; but I did not break into it at that time,
+as I was still well provided with food and ammunition. Because you had
+told me that the Forbidden River was unexplored and never visited,
+being haunted by Manitous and shades of the dead, I turned into it and
+travelled up it--I thought that I should find safety there.
+
+"On the second day, just as evening was falling, I saw the flare of a
+camp-fire, about two miles ahead. You'll remember that my nerves were
+badly shaken when I came to you at Murder Point; and they hadn't been
+much improved by those five days of flight through the winter
+loneliness. When I saw that light blaze up in the distance, I began to
+be afraid--and it wasn't the fear of men that I was thinking about. I
+waited until it was utterly night and then, leaving my dogs behind,
+stole stealthily forward to prospect. As I drew nearer, I saw that a
+hut of boughs had been erected, and that a man was sitting, with his
+rifle on his knees, before the fire. He was very old and tall. But I
+had no opportunity to get a closer view of him, for, at that moment,
+he must have heard me; he put his head on one side to listen, and
+rose to his feet. Without the waste of any time, he fired in my
+direction. Luckily I had thrown myself flat along the snow, for the
+bullet whizzed over my head. He advanced towards me a little way, and
+then, thinking that he had been mistaken, went back to his fire,
+grumbling to himself, and sat down. The cold ate into my bones, yet I
+dared not stir until I was certain that he had gone to sleep.
+Presently he arose, looked suspiciously around, piled more wood on his
+fire, and went into his hut.
+
+"I hurried back to where I had left my dogs, harnessed them in and,
+leaving the river-bank, travelled into the bush for a distance of
+about two miles; there I tied them up, and then returned to the river
+by myself, coming out at a point somewhat nearer to the old man's hut.
+I lay down behind a clump of trees and waited. Before day had come, I
+could hear that he was astir; but he seemed to be almighty busy for a
+Keewatin trapper, who was only changing camp. About midday he had made
+his preparations, and, stamping out his fire, set out down-stream, in
+the direction of the Last Chance River. I knew that in half-an-hour he
+must come across my trail, and have his suspicions of the previous
+night confirmed. Sure enough, after he had passed my place of hiding
+and had got below me about three hundred yards, he struck my tracks.
+He pulled up sharply, and wheeled round, as if he could feel that my
+eyes were watching him; he threw up his head like an old bull caribou
+scenting danger.
+
+"I had left two trails leading from that point, the one towards his
+hut and back again, the other into the bush to where my dogs were
+tethered. If he was determined to follow up the latter and to trace me
+to my hiding, I was ready for him, and would have the advantage of
+knowing his whereabouts, whilst he was ignorant of mine. He must have
+been going through some such argument himself, for presently he
+whipped up his dogs and, with one last glance across his shoulder,
+continued on his journey. When he had vanished, and I had made certain
+that he did not intend to return, I went forward to inspect his
+abandoned camp.
+
+"Inside the hut I found that the floor was of earth and below the
+snow-level, making evident the fact that it had been erected before
+the winter had commenced. When I examined the walls, which were
+constructed of boughs and mud, I came to the conclusion that they had
+been standing for many years, but had been renewed from time to time.
+All this made it clear to me that you had been mistaken in saying that
+the Forbidden River had never been travelled. The next thing to
+discover was what had brought the old man up there. The earth of the
+floor was not packed together, but looked loose and rough, as though
+it had been newly dug. This gave me my first clue to the secret. When
+I walked above it, it did not sound solid, so I commenced to scrape
+away the earth. Six inches down I came to branches of trees spread
+crosswise, as though to form a roof to a cellar. Pulling these aside,
+after another hour of labour, I looked down into a pit which had been
+hollowed out. It was getting dark now, so I lit a fire.
+
+"I climbed into the pit, by some rudely fashioned stairs which had
+been shaped in the side of the wall, and soon found myself on level
+footing. Groping about down there, I could feel that the sides were
+tunnelled, and had been roughly timbered with the stems of trees.
+Going above ground, I fetched a torch and then saw all that I had
+commenced to suspect--and a good deal more.
+
+"Piled up in one corner was an outfit of miner's implements, pans,
+axes, spades, picks, etc., and close beside them was a sack of
+moose-hide. Whipping out my knife, I cut through the thongs by which
+the sack was tied; it lurched over, letting fall a dozen ounces or so
+of gold dust. On searching round, I found in another corner a second
+sack containing nuggets. When I went about the walls, and pushed my
+way into some of the tunnels, I was made certain that I was in one of
+the richest placer-mines that I had ever set eyes on. Then I went up
+to consider what all this meant.
+
+"Here was I, a man fleeing for his life, and here was this old man, a
+pioneer in an unexplored region, who, for some reason of his own, was
+keeping secret the knowledge of his bonanza, yet taking the gold out
+all the while. Couldn't I, by making the world a present of his
+knowledge, buy back my life? Soon I recognised that that was folly;
+the world would accept the present, but it would also demand my life.
+There was nothing for it but to act by stealth. If I could once get
+out of Keewatin with all these riches, I would be able to purchase my
+escape; especially if I should remain in hiding for a year or so,
+until the search had been abandoned, and I had been given up for dead.
+Then I could sneak out and get to South America, where I was not
+known, and commence life afresh. The thought of South America brought
+El Dorado to my mind, and then I remembered you, two hundred miles'
+distant at Murder Point. 'Why shouldn't I tell Granger?' I said. 'Then
+we could both escape, and go in search of El Dorado together, as we
+have always planned.'"
+
+He paused and looked at his companion to see what effect his words had
+had. Granger was sitting with his head bent forward, his knees drawn
+up and his arms about them, all attention, with a strange look of
+hunger in his eyes. "Well, for God's sake don't keep me waiting,
+Druce. Go on," he said.
+
+It was the second time that Granger had called him "Druce" in less
+than two hours; he was now certain of his ground.
+
+"If you are willing to help me, I think we can do as we have always
+planned. What do you think about it?"
+
+"I'm willing to the death. But after you'd discovered the mine, what
+did you do then? Did the old man come back?"
+
+"The next few days I kept a careful lookout, in case I should be
+surprised. When nothing happened, I commenced to prospect for myself.
+I could not do much as the ground was frozen; but I thawed out some of
+the dirt, and gathered a few nuggets of pretty fair size. Then the
+river broke up, and I thought that I was safe for at least a time. But
+soon my provisions began to run low, so that it became necessary for
+me to turn back to the Last Chance River to break open the cache. I
+postponed the journey as long as I dared, and at last set out, with
+only enough flour and bacon to keep me going for two days. It was hard
+travelling, for my dogs were of no use to me, the snow being too moist
+for the passage of a sled. I had to work my way along by the
+river-bank, through melting drifts and tangled scrub. I dared not
+light a fire when I camped at night, lest it should be seen by the old
+man, and he should steal up and kill me while I slept.
+
+"I thought I began to see why he had gone away so meekly, though he
+knew that a stranger had found him out and was likely to stumble on
+his treasure: so long as I was in hiding, I had had him at a
+disadvantage; but now, having gone away quietly without resistance, he
+was able to await me under cover at the Forbidden River's mouth, and I
+would be the one who would run most risk when we came to an encounter.
+He had known that sooner or later I should run short of grub, and be
+forced to return to the Last Chance, and to pass by his ambush; all
+that he had to do was to await me, for there is but one way out.
+
+"It took me three days to make the journey and when, as night was
+falling, I came in sight of the spit of land which divides the two
+rivers, on which the cache had been made, I had exhausted my supply of
+rations. I was faint with hunger and perished with cold; but I dared
+do nothing to provide for myself until I had made certain that I was
+not spied upon.
+
+"The river-mouth looked deserted enough; on either bank it was bare of
+trees--a bald and bleak expanse of withered scrub, affording little
+cover. It would be difficult for any man to approach me, without being
+seen before he had come within gun-range. I followed along the
+left-hand bank, which I had been travelling, till I reached the point
+where the Last Chance and Forbidden Rivers join. Gazing up and down
+the Last Chance, the same scene of desolation met my eyes; there was
+no flash of camp-fire or sign of rising smoke. In the north, from
+which quarter the wind was blowing, I could detect no smell of
+burning. I began to think that I was safe, and determined to make
+short work of breaking into the cache and getting back to the hut
+again. Then I awoke to a fact which I had overlooked in my anxiety to
+avoid a surprise attack, that the cache was on the right-hand bank and
+that I was on the left.
+
+"The river was flowing rapidly, carrying down tree-trunks and grinding
+blocks of ice, so that it seemed impassable. Every now and then the
+hurrying mass would jam and pile up, forming a pathway above the
+current, but not for so long a time as would allow me to climb across.
+
+"I'd been going on half-rations for several days in order to make my
+food eke out and, consequently, was miserably nourished. A death by
+drowning is preferable any day to the slower tortures of starvation; I
+made up my mind to cross the river at once, at whatever cost. I began
+to forget my fear of the hidden enemy in my eagerness to satisfy my
+hunger.
+
+"Retracing my steps, I walked up-stream, searching for a tree-trunk
+which would be of sufficient weight to carry me. I planned to launch
+out a quarter of a mile above the point which I wished to make on the
+other side, and to trust to the current, and what little steering I
+could manage, to get me across. I lost much time in my search, for the
+larger logs which had been driven ashore had got wedged, and required
+more than one man's strength to refloat them.
+
+"When I found a trunk of sufficient size, the wind had dropped and a
+mist was settling down, which made it difficult for me to see anything
+that was not immediately before my eyes. A haunting sensation of
+insecurity began to pervade my mind. I hardly know how to describe it;
+it was not dread of a physical death, but fear lest my soul might get
+lost. Though I was now about to imperil my life, for the preservation
+of which, during the last half year, I had made every effort of which
+a human being is capable, that seemed to me as nothing when compared
+with this new danger. If a man dies, he may live again; but if his
+soul is snatched from him, what is there left that can survive? This
+was the menace of which I was aware--a menace of spiritual death, to
+the cause of which I was drawing nearer through the mist. My whole
+desire now was to procure the provisions for which I had made the
+journey, and to escape.
+
+"I got astride the trunk, steadying myself with a long birch-pole
+which I had cut, and pushed off. The water was icy cold, causing my
+legs to ache painfully, as if they were being torn from my body by
+heavy weights. Soon the log was caught in the central current and
+began to race. Like maddened horses, foaming at my side, before, and
+behind, the drift-ice rushed. In the misty greyness of the night,
+these floating ruins of the winter's silence assumed curious and
+terrifying shapes. Sometimes they appeared to be polar bears, having
+human hands and faces; sometimes they seemed to be huskies, with the
+eyes and ears of men; but more often they were creatures utterly
+corrupt, who, swimming beside me, acclaimed me as their equal and as
+one of themselves.
+
+"I remembered the reason which you had stated why the Forbidden River
+is never travelled--and I knew the power of fear as never before. I
+could not see where I was going; no land was in sight. I could
+perceive nothing but mocking befouled faces, and they were on every
+side. With my steering pole I pushed continually towards the right,
+dreading every moment that I would lose my balance, or would be swept
+out into the Last Chance far below the cache. These thoughts made me
+desperate, and I renewed the struggle with something that was more
+than physical strength; I knew that, should I die at that time, I
+would become one of those damned grey faces.
+
+"The crossing could not have occupied more than a few minutes, but
+they seemed like ages. I felt as though, for so long as I could
+remember, I had been sitting astride a log, hurrying through a mist on
+a rushing river.
+
+"Presently I heard the grating of ice against ice and the cannoning of
+logs, and I knew that I was nearing the other side. There was a sudden
+shock; the tree which I rode swung round, and I found myself
+scrambling wildly up the bank out of the reach of the hands which were
+thrust out after me. I rose to my feet and ran, tripping and falling
+continually as my snowshoes plunged deep in the melting crust. Each
+time I fell, it seemed to me that I had not tripped, but had been
+struck down from behind by the river-creatures which pursued me. Then
+the sound of the water grew more faint, the mist closed in upon me,
+and I sank exhausted. I had no idea of my position as regards the
+cache, nor would I have any means of finding out until morning should
+come and the fog should rise. But I knew that it would be fatal to sit
+still in my sodden clothes, on the drenching snow, without a fire,
+till daylight; so I got upon my feet and commenced to tread slowly
+about.
+
+"Presently behind the mist I could hear something moving, which was
+following and keeping pace with me stride by stride. Its footsteps did
+not seem to be those of a man, but more frequent and lighter. I was
+in that state of mind when suspense is the worst part of danger; I did
+not care particularly how much I had to suffer if only I might know
+completely what death and by whose hands I was to die. Drawing my
+revolver, I made a plunge forward in the direction from which the
+sound had come. I saw nothing; but, when I stopped and listened, I
+could hear the footsteps going round about me at just the same
+distance away. I determined to pursue them; at any rate such an
+occupation would keep me in motion and prevent me from perishing from
+cold and dampness. But it's difficult to hunt the thing by which you
+are hunted. Towards daybreak a slight breeze got up which, coming in
+little gusts, cleared alleys in the heavy atmosphere as it forced a
+passage. The footsteps had ceased by this time, but I could hear the
+creature's panting breath; for some reason it had ceased to follow. I
+waited until I heard the breeze coming and then made a rush in the
+direction from which the breathing came. There, straight before me,
+sitting on its haunches, I saw the shadow of what appeared to be a
+gigantic timber-wolf; the only part of it which I could discern
+plainly was its eyes, which, to my terrified imagination, blazed out
+dazzling and huge through the gloom like carriage lamps.
+
+"And another thing I noticed, that it was sitting beside the cache for
+which I was searching. Then the breeze died down, the mist closed in
+again, and I could detect nothing of the creature's presence but the
+sound of its breath.
+
+"With my revolver in my right hand and my knife in my left, I crept
+slowly forward. Just ahead of me I could see something stirring, and
+I fired. There was a scramble of hurrying feet, and then silence.
+
+"When I came to the cache, it was deserted. I should have delayed till
+daylight, but my hunger was so great that I could not wait. Breaking
+it open, I sat down to gorge myself on the first thing that came
+handy--some raw fish which had been buried there. Something moved
+behind me; before I had time to turn properly round, it had leapt on
+my back. I could not draw my revolver, there was no time; my only
+weapon was my knife. I saw the great face and eyes peering over my
+left shoulder and made a downward stab, gashing open a deep wound from
+the ear to the lower fangs. With a cry that was almost human, the
+beast jumped back and vanished.
+
+"When day had come, I took as much of the provisions as I could carry,
+and made good my escape. I was surprised at the old man's absence, and
+fearful lest at any moment he might turn up. I did not cross the river
+at the mouth, but worked my way along the right-hand bank, intending
+to cross higher up and nearer the hut, where it was more narrow. At
+noon I made a halt and snatched a little sleep, for I had purposed to
+travel through the night. Some hours after darkness had fallen, I
+began to be haunted with the old sense that something was following.
+At first I heard no sound, for I was travelling over open ground.
+Presently I had to enter a thicket, and there I was made certain; for
+I could distinctly hear the snapping of branches, as if bent and
+forced aside by the passage of some forest animal. I pushed rapidly
+ahead, for it was not the safest place in which to be attacked. As I
+glanced across my shoulder and from side to side, I continually
+caught glimpses of a thing which was grey.
+
+"Sometimes I was certain that I saw a face peering out at me from
+above the brake; but whether it was that of the old man or of the
+timber-wolf, I could not tell--strangely enough, their faces seemed to
+me to be one and the same. When the day came, I felt that I was free
+again, and making camp I slept. The same thing happened next night,
+and the night after that, for it took me more than three days to make
+the homeward journey. But each night, as I moved farther away from the
+Forbidden River's mouth, the creature which followed had to traverse a
+longer and longer trail to come up with me, as I approached nearer to
+my destination.
+
+"After I had crossed the river and reached the hut, he rarely came;
+and then only when the dusk had fallen early because of clouds or
+rain. Yet there were times, just before the dawn, when I fancied that
+I could see him watching me from the bank."
+
+"But what has this got to do with the half-breed?" Granger broke in
+impatiently.
+
+"That's what I'd like to know myself. But I don't know, so I'm simply
+giving you facts as they happened. The horror of that wolf's face,
+which I confused with my memory of the old man's, made a deep
+impression on me; I suppose that's why I've said so much about it.
+
+"However mistaken you may have been about the Forbidden River never
+having been travelled, you were correct enough when you told me that
+it was haunted. . . . And it isn't pleasant to be living a five-days'
+journey from the nearest white man, in a place where the beasts look
+like lost souls and have the eyes of the damned."
+
+Granger shrugged his shoulders, "And the half-breed?" he inquired.
+
+"The half-breed turned up five weeks after my return from the cache.
+I'd been out cutting cord-wood and, when I came back, he was sitting
+at the door of the hut. How long he'd been there, I could not tell; I
+had been absent for perhaps two hours. I tried to find out how he'd
+come, but he pretended not to understand; so, as I know no Cree, our
+conversation wasn't very lengthy. At first, however, in spite of the
+danger of his discovering who I was and what I was doing there, I was
+pleased to see him, for I was getting moody and low-spirited with
+living by myself. I tried to be content with supposing that he was a
+trapper, who had strayed out of his district and had lighted on me by
+accident.
+
+"We sat by the fire outside the hut and smoked together, smiling and
+exchanging signs every now and then, to show that we were friendly.
+But I watched him closely, and soon perceived that he was far more
+knowing than he was willing to admit; I began to believe that he had
+visited me with a purpose. I hadn't allowed him inside the hut for
+fear he should see the pit, which was uncovered, and should guess the
+secret or get suspicious; but I noticed that, whenever he thought that
+I was not watching, his eyes would slowly turn in that direction. I
+determined to put him to the test. Though it was as yet quite early, I
+built up the fire for the night and signed to him that I was sleepy.
+He nodded his head and went on smoking; so I lay down and feigned to
+close my eyes. I must have fallen asleep, for when I woke the blaze
+had died down to a mound of charcoal and glowing ash, with here and
+there a little spurt of flame. When I looked stealthily round, I
+discovered that my companion was missing, but by listening I could
+hear a sound of moving within the hut. Just then I saw his figure
+coming out, so I lay down as though I had never wakened. He stood in
+the doorway smiling to himself, holding something which sparkled in
+his hand. Then he returned to the fire and sat down quite near to me,
+so that he could watch my face.
+
+"I suppose I must have betrayed myself for, without any warning, he
+flung himself upon me, slipping a noose about my neck as I attempted
+to rise, which he drew tight, so that I was nearly strangled. Standing
+behind me, jerking at the noose, he commanded me to hold up my hands.
+I was too choked and dazed for struggle, so did as he bade me. When he
+had bound me hand and foot, and gagged me, he threw me inside the hut
+and, without a word of explanation, departed down-stream on his
+journey.
+
+"I tried to burst the thongs, but they were too stout either to loosen
+or to break. I wormed my way out on to the river-bank and tried to
+chafe them against a rock, but only succeeded in bruising my flesh.
+The sun came out and shone down upon me till my thirst grew agonising.
+It seemed to me that at last I had run to the end of my tether. Then a
+thought occurred to me; wriggling toward the fire, I found that it
+still smouldered. By pushing and scraping with my bound hands and
+feet, I managed to get some leaves and twigs together, which soon
+sprang into a blaze. I waited until it had died down into a narrow
+flame, over which I held my hands till the thongs were charred; then,
+with a quick twist of the wrists, which caused my scorched flesh to
+flake off in shreds, I wrenched my hands apart. This is all true that
+I am telling you; you can see for yourself. Already you must have
+noticed those marks." He held out his wrists for Granger's inspection;
+they were horribly mutilated.
+
+"And after that, when you got better, did the half-breed leave you
+undisturbed or did he come back?"
+
+"I did not see either the half-breed or the old man again until that
+early morning when I gazed in through the window at Murder Point . . .
+and, do you know, that scar on the old man's face is in the same place
+as the wound which I gave the timber-wolf?"
+
+Granger laughed nervously. "And what d'you make of that?"
+
+"I hardly dare to say; but, somehow, that beast seemed to me to be
+more than a wolf--it looked like a dead soul."
+
+"A dead what? You've said that once before to-night."
+
+Spurting stared at him, amazed at his agitation. "A dead soul," he
+repeated; "a soul which has gone out from a man, and left his body
+still alive."
+
+"Do you know what name the Indians have given to that old man?" asked
+Granger in an awe-struck voice.
+
+"How should I know? I think you called him Beorn."
+
+"Yes, but his other name is the _Man with the Dead Soul_."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+IN HIDING ON HUSKIES' ISLAND
+
+
+They stared at one another in silence, striving not to realise the
+meaning of those words; yet their meaning was unavoidable.
+
+Both knew the legend of the _loup-garou_, the grim tradition of the
+peasants of Quebec which the _coureurs des bois_ have carried with
+them into every part of Canada. Often in the Klondike, when seated
+round the stove on a winter's night, they had heard it retold by
+French-Canadians, in low excited whispers, with swift and frightened
+turnings of the head. They had laughed at it in the daylight: yet at
+night, when the tale was in the telling, it had seemed very real to
+them. Then there had come that Christmas-Eve, when Jacques La France
+had been found dead in his shack, with a hole in his neck, just
+outside of Dawson City. Little Baptiste had owned with tears to the
+crime, and had excused himself saying that he had been compelled to
+the shooting because Jacques was his dearest friend, and Jacques had
+become a _loup-garou_ through not attending the Easter Sacrament for
+seven years; as everybody knew, only by the inflicting of a bloody
+wound on his beast's body could his soul be saved from hell.
+
+The jury who had tried him had been composed mostly of
+French-Canadians. When it had been proved to them that wolf tracks had
+been found before the dead man's threshold, they had acquitted
+Baptiste, and had apologised for his arrest, in defiance of the
+judge's disapproval.
+
+    *    *    *    *    *
+
+Two and a half years at Murder Point had made Granger undogmatic on
+problems of metempsychosis, and of the extent to which the barriers
+which hedge in Man's spiritual life may be pushed back.
+
+It seemed not unlikely to him that there were men whose souls,
+consciously or unconsciously, either by reason of their crimes or for
+the better accomplishment of an evil desire, could go out from their
+bodies while they slept, and be changed into the forms of beasts of
+prey between sunset and dawn-rise. At all events, this was a
+phenomenon which could not be disproved, and there were many who
+believed it true.
+
+So he recalled unjudgingly the story of Jacques, also he remembered an
+instance still nearer home--that of the Hudson Bay factor, who had
+prayed to God that he might gaze with his living eyes upon his
+disembodied soul.
+
+It was not the possibility of the fact which he doubted, but
+Spurling's motive in telling him such a tale.
+
+Might he not have shown him the gold only in order to regain his
+friendship, and then have lied to him in order to restrain him from
+investigating, and, perhaps, with the purpose of sowing distrust in
+his mind concerning Beorn and Eyelids? Whatever had been his purpose,
+_there_ was the gold; Granger was determined, in spite of the risk, to
+see the Forbidden River for himself. Spurling was speaking, "And his
+eyebrows meet," he said.
+
+Granger knew to what he was referring, for, all the world over, where
+this belief is current, it is supposed that the werewolf may be
+detected in his human guise by the meeting of his eyebrows, which
+appear like wings, as if his soul were prepared for flight.
+
+He was about to reply, when his hand, straying about his throat,
+chanced upon the silver chain by which the locket of Mordaunt was
+suspended, which he had stolen from the body of Strangeways. It was
+like a warning voice, recalling the past, which urged him to distrust
+this man. Spurling must have seen the change, for he leant over
+towards him appealingly, as if he were about to entreat him to be
+patient. With a gesture of annoyance Granger rose to his feet and
+commenced to walk away; but he halted sharply and drew into the
+shadow, signing to Spurling to keep quiet. From very far away, borne
+on the stillness of the night, they could hear the rhythmic beat of
+several paddle-blades.
+
+Crawling upon his hands and knees, Spurling joined him. "What is it?"
+he asked. "Is it Eyelids again?" Granger pointed up-river. "They're
+coming from the west," he whispered, "and there are at least four men
+by the sound of the blades."
+
+"What men come from the west at this season? Surely, they should be
+travelling in the opposite direction, going towards God's Voice?"
+
+"They should be, and it is for that reason that I fear for your
+safety."
+
+Nothing more was said, but Spurling guessed what was implied--that
+this might be a fresh messenger of justice, coming down the Last
+Chance River to rob him of his life.
+
+Very stealthily, taking advantage of every shadow, they crept down the
+hillside through the underbrush, till they came to the cove where
+they had landed. Twenty paces from the water's edge they hid
+themselves, at a point from which they could command a view of the
+travellers' approach.
+
+Nearer and nearer the monotonous swirling of the water, beaten by the
+paddles, came; the darkness ahead of the island shifted and took
+shape; they could distinctly hear the sound of men's voices, engaged
+in low-pitched and angry conversation. A large canoe, carrying six
+men, which flew the red flag of the Hudson Bay Company, shot out from
+the shadows. Now they could make out some of the words which were
+being spoken by two of the travellers.
+
+"And you say that you believe he's innocent! Well then I tell you that
+he's a damned scoundrel. If he didn't actually kill him, it wasn't for
+lack of the desire; you may bet your sweet life on that. In any case,
+he's a demoralising influence in the district, and it's best for all
+parties that he should be put out of the way."
+
+A second voice interrupted at this point; it seemed to be arguing and
+trying to conciliate, but its tones were so low and spoken so rapidly
+that it was only possible to gather its general intention. The first
+voice spoke again.
+
+"I don't care about the other man; there's no sense in looking for
+him. He's probably dead by now. But the fellows I can't stand are
+these blamed private traders; they're always up to some dirty work.
+When I get my chance of putting one of them out of business, I don't
+hesitate. To hell with all private traders, I say."
+
+The canoe had now drawn level with the cove, so that Granger was able
+to recognise its occupants. In the stern sat the Indian steersman,
+with a rifle ready to his hand. Next to him sat a large red-bearded
+man, broad in the shoulders, massive in the jowl, almost brutal in his
+evidence of strength; even in that dusky light one could feel that his
+face was clenched in a scowl, and that his eyes were piercingly gray
+and cruel. Facing him, with his back towards the prow, sat Père
+Antoine, a little bent forward, gesticulating with his hands, his
+whole attitude that of one who is trying to explain and persuade.
+After him came the remaining three Indian and half-breed paddle-men,
+sharp-featured and unemotional, stooping vigorously to their work.
+
+"And what do you propose doing?" asked Père Antoine.
+
+"Why, what I've already told you a dozen times--treat him like a mad
+dog. I shall arrest him at once, and take him back with me as prisoner
+to God's Voice. When once I've got him there, I shall make him confess
+and get together sufficient evidence to have him hanged. This whole
+affair has been a scandal, and I'm going to put a stop to it. I shall
+make an example of this man. Why, soon it won't be safe to travel
+anywhere, unless you go protected. He must have had a nice lot of
+ruffians for his friends, if this fellow Spurling was a specimen. And
+now they've taken to paying him visits. . . ."
+
+The canoe bore the speaker out of earshot, leaving the listeners with
+the sentence uncompleted.
+
+Granger was aroused from some very uncomfortable imaginings by
+Spurling, who, touching him on the elbow, exclaimed in surprise, "Why,
+it isn't me; it's you they're after!"
+
+Then, when he received no answer, he asked, "What is it that you have
+done?"
+
+It was Cain accusing Judas with a vengeance.
+
+"Done! I've done nothing," Granger exclaimed, pushing him aside;
+"Robert Pilgrim is mistaken."
+
+"That's what we all say, until we are forced to own up."
+
+But Granger was not listening to what Spurling said; he was tortured
+with the truth of one sentence which he had heard that night. "If he
+didn't actually kill him, it wasn't for lack of the desire." How had
+Robert Pilgrim guessed that? As he himself had confessed to
+Strangeways, he had been tempted at first to let him go on his way
+unwarned, and take his chances of falling through the ice. Eventually
+he had cautioned him, but so late and in such a manner that his words
+had only had the effect of skilfully forwarding his earlier base
+intention. _If he had not actually killed him, it was not for lack of
+the desire._ And by how much was he superior to this man, crouching at
+his side, whom he had so often condemned and had again condemned that
+night?
+
+Spurling answered that question for him. Rising to his feet and
+stretching his cramped arms and legs, he remarked, "Well, of course,
+if you won't take me into your confidence, there's nothing more to be
+said. If you don't want to tell me, I won't trouble you by asking
+again; but it seems to me that we're both in the one boat now."
+
+This new sense of equality with his companion, though it was only an
+equality in crime, had suddenly brought about a change for the better
+in Spurling. He carried himself freely, in the old defiant manner, and
+had lost his attitude of cringing subservience. At first Granger had
+it in his heart to hate him for the change, knowing, as he did, that
+it arose from an unhesitating acceptance of this chance-heard,
+unproved assertion of his own kindred degradation. But soon the hatred
+gave way to another emotion, which, perhaps, had its genesis in a
+memory of those earlier days, when this man had been willing to stand
+between him and the world. In gazing upon him, looking so big and
+powerful, he was comforted with a sense that his misery was shared. A
+latter-day writer has wisely recorded, "I have observed that the mere
+knowing that other people have been tried as we have been tried is a
+consolation to us, and that we are relieved by the assurance that our
+sufferings are not special and peculiar. In the worst of maladies, the
+healing effect which is produced by the visit of a friend who can
+simply say, 'I have endured all that,' is most marked."
+
+And it was this consolation which Granger now began to experience in
+Spurling's presence.
+
+Though the separate circumstances which lay behind their common
+accusation were utterly different, the one man being innocent of the
+infamy wherewith he was charged and the other guilty, their danger was
+the same.
+
+Without telling him anything of Strangeways' death or entering into
+any explanation of the reasons for which he was suspected, Granger
+determined to face, without dispute, the premier fact in the
+case--that he was hunted for his life as was Spurling--and to plan for
+the future with him, as though he were his fellow-criminal in result
+as well as in intent.
+
+They returned to their former station, on the rock beneath the
+solitary pine, from which they could command a view of the approach to
+the island on every side, and there lay themselves down, so that
+their presence might not be observed. Then Granger spoke, "Well, and
+what is to be done?" he said.
+
+Spurling's answer was brief and to the point. "Hide here till the way
+is clear; then seek out the Forbidden River, and afterwards escape."
+
+"But Eyelids knows where we are, and he may betray us?"
+
+"Yes, but he does not know, unless you have told him, that I am a man
+with a price upon his head; and it is me, not you, whom he hates."
+
+"And we have no food."
+
+"If the worst comes to the worst, we have the huskies; and it seems to
+me that the priest was your friend--and then there is your wife."
+
+Even in his present predicament Granger could not restrain a smile,
+for it had not occurred to him to rely on Peggy for help--_his wife_.
+
+"Yes," he replied grimly, "there is my wife."
+
+But before the night was over he had occasion to regret his sneer.
+They had agreed to keep watch, turn and turn about, two hours at a
+stretch. Spurling was on guard, when Granger was aroused by the
+furious yelping of the huskies on the shore which was nearest to the
+river-bank.
+
+Peering cautiously over the edge of the rock, they could see that
+something was swimming down the current, making for the island, but
+whether man or animal they could not yet discern. As it came nearer
+they saw that it was a head, upon which was balanced a burden, which
+the swimmer supported with one hand. Running down to where the huskies
+were gathered, they cuffed them into silence, and there waited. The
+laboured breathing grew louder and louder; presently a face was
+lifted clear of the water, which Granger recognised. Turning to
+Spurling, as he stepped into the river to help the swimmer out, he
+whispered, "It's Peggy."
+
+He caught her in his arms, and, taking her bundle from her, drew her
+safe to land. She was naked and shivered in the cold night air--a
+slender statue of bronze. Her hair hung dripping about her shoulders,
+and her eyes were bright with excitement. Granger thought, as he gazed
+on her, that he had never realised how beautiful she was. Freed from
+her conventional European garments, there was a grace of rebellion
+about her which brought her into harmony with the forest environment,
+which was also unconfined.
+
+But she had come to the island on a serious errand, and with no
+thought of being admired. Drawing her husband to one side, she told
+him that he would find a revolver and food, sufficient for three days,
+in the bundle which she had brought, and advised him to lie quietly on
+the island until Robert Pilgrim should have gone away. She told him
+that Père Antoine was his friend, and was doing his best to save him.
+When Granger asked her how she had known where he was, she replied
+that Eyelids had told her, but that she had made him promise to tell
+no one else, so that even Antoine was in ignorance of his whereabouts.
+She had given them to understand that he had set out for God's Voice a
+week ago, and had simulated surprise and grave concern that he had not
+arrived before the factor's departure; but she added, "They know that
+I am lying."
+
+When Granger referred to the murder with which he was charged, and
+began hurriedly to explain why he had not told her about it, she
+became strangely perturbed, and cut him short, saying that she must
+get back to the store before her absence was observed. It was quite
+evident to him that she had not for a moment doubted but that he was
+guilty; it was also evident that so small a misdemeanour as killing a
+man was not reckoned in her code of morals as being very blameworthy.
+He felt hurt at her lack of faith in his integrity; but afterwards,
+when he came to think things over, was amazed at her unswerving
+loyalty in spite of that deficiency.
+
+He watched her plunge into the river on her return journey, swim
+across, run lightly up the bank to where her clothes were lying, and
+disappear in the gloom of the forest.
+
+"If I could only learn to care for her," he thought, "even here, in
+Keewatin, I might have something left to live for." And then, in the
+solemnity which precedes the sunrise, made conscious of the emptiness
+which her departure had left, he added, "And I do begin to care."
+
+It was noticeable that in all that she had said, she had made no
+reference to Spurling. For the next three days they lay in hiding, no
+one coming near them, either friend or enemy. To occupy the time, and
+forget their anxiety, as though they were not men who dwelt beneath
+the shadow of death, they talked of their old quest, making plans for
+the future, and mapping out with their fingers in the dust new routes,
+by the following of which El Dorado might be attained. And it was thus
+that they strove to escape the pain of the realness of their
+present--by entering into a faery land, sufficiently remote from life
+to remain unthreatened.
+
+It was in this land of the imagination that they had first met, and
+formed their friendship. Revisiting it in one another's company, the
+hideousness of what had happened was, for the time being, blotted out;
+they renewed their former intimacy and passion. With the mention of
+familiar names, kind associations of bygone pleasures were aroused,
+and the old affection sprang to life. They shrank from any allusion to
+such things as had befallen them since their London days. Yet
+continually, in the midst of the most eager conversation, one or other
+of them would glance up, and cast his eyes along the river to the
+eastward, remembering Murder Point. It was in the early dawn of the
+fourth day, when, gazing toward the store, Granger descried two red
+squares of sail flapping against the sunrise. It was his lookout, and
+Spurling was asleep. He aroused him, bending over him and crying, "The
+York boats are coming from Crooked Creek; we shall be rid of Robert
+Pilgrim now." When Spurling was thoroughly awake and had seen the
+sails for himself, he asked him to explain. Then Granger told him how,
+in the summer of every year, the outposts of the Hudson Bay Company
+send in their winter's catch of furs to the head fort of their
+district, which in this case was God's Voice, where the skins are
+baled and graded, and dispatched to the London headquarters--which,
+being the most important duty of a factor's year, meant that Robert
+Pilgrim would have to return in order to superintend.
+
+All through the long June day they waited, hoping to see their enemy's
+departure; but the sails had been lowered and nothing was now visible
+of the York boats save their tall bare masts jutting above the
+river-banks. At times they would see groups of voyageurs, walking
+distantly among the trees, perhaps assisting the factor in one last
+lazy search for the fugitive. As the heat of the afternoon increased,
+even these disappeared. But, when evening was come, they saw, to their
+great joy, that the sails were hoisted again; and presently, borne to
+them over the brooding stillness, they heard the cries of the rowers
+and the thud of the heavy oars in the wooden rowlocks. Those sounds
+meant freedom to them; they trembled in their excitement.
+
+Peering out from between the bushes, they watched the approach of the
+two black galleys, each with its eight oarsmen and cargo of piled-up
+bales, like pirate craft returning with their spoils. The flashing of
+the gawdy scarves of the men, the motion of their bodies as they stood
+up for the stroke, flung their weight upon the enormous oars, and sat
+down at the finish, only to rise up again with monotonous shouts of
+encouragement, the banging of the sail against the mast, the rippling
+of the water as the prow pressed forward--all these spoke of life to
+the watchers, of endeavour, and bravery, and travel, causing their
+blood to redouble its pace and their hope to arise. There was still
+one doubt which troubled them, lest, in spite of the need of his
+presence at the fort, the enmity of Robert Pilgrim should have
+persuaded him to stay. But that was soon laid to rest, when in the
+bows of the leading York boat they saw his canoe, and later, as the
+sail swung round, caught a glimpse of the red-bearded man himself,
+seated in the stern. Antoine was by his side. As the boat passed by,
+they strained their ears to catch any scrap of conversation which
+might be of use to them in making their escape. But the noise of the
+voyageurs and of the wind in the sail was deafening, moreover the boat
+was making good headway, so that they only overheard one phrase:
+
+"You've brought me on a fool's errand. You say the man is dead, and
+you've shown me his grave, and yet. . . ." It was Pilgrim who was
+speaking; but before he had finished his sentence, his voice was
+drowned in the shouting of the men and the splashing of the blades.
+
+Granger, having watched them out of sight, turned to Spurling with a
+sigh of relief. "Thank God, they've gone," he said.
+
+Then he noticed that his companion was deadly pale. "What's the matter
+now," he asked; "are you so badly cut up at parting with such dear
+friends?"
+
+"Did you hear what he said?" gasped Spurling, pushing his face nearer,
+and staring Granger squarely between the eyes. "Did you hear what he
+said? 'You say the man is dead, and you've shown me his grave, and
+yet. . . .' And yet what? Can you guess how that sentence was going to
+end?"
+
+Granger was bewildered by his ferocious earnestness. He could not
+imagine its purpose, or what had caused it. "Why, of course I heard
+what he said," he replied. "I suppose Antoine's been trying to
+persuade the factor that I am dead, and he's loath to believe it."
+
+"If that is what he meant all the better for us, but I doubt it."
+
+But why he doubted it Granger could not get him to confess; so,
+turning his mind to other thoughts, like a sensible man, he set about
+launching the canoe, preparatory to the return to Murder Point. The
+last sight they saw as they paddled away, was the four gray huskies,
+which Spurling had brought with him on his first arrival, seated on
+their haunches in a row by the water's edge, raising their dismal
+voices to the sky. "Looks as though those damned beasts were doing
+their best to call Pilgrim back," said Spurling.
+
+On the way to the Point they talked matters over, and determined that,
+since they had no time to waste, they would stop at the store only so
+long as was necessary for the getting together of an outfit, and would
+depart for the Forbidden River that night. Eyelids and Beorn were to
+be left in charge at Murder Point, which would serve to flatter at
+least one of them, and would keep them occupied. If they should demand
+an explanation for this sudden going away, the answer was obvious,
+that Granger did not choose to be arrested by the factor of God's
+Voice. There was only one embarrassment which stood in their way,
+which was that in Granger's absence the boat would probably arrive
+from Garnier, Parwin and Wrath, bringing articles of trade in exchange
+for his year's collection of furs, letters of instructions from the
+partners for the future conduct of their interests, and expecting to
+carry back to Winnipeg his annual statement of accounts. He made up
+his mind to meet this difficulty by ordering Peggy to tell the
+partners that he was dead. Such a report, he calculated, were it
+believed and properly circulated, would help him greatly in his escape
+from Keewatin, when he had gathered his gold on the Forbidden River
+and was ready to go out. This course of action had been suggested to
+him by the unfinished sentence of Robert Pilgrim, which they had
+overheard.
+
+As they drew near the Point, they were struck with the profoundness of
+its quiet. They themselves had experienced so great a change in their
+four days of absence, so much of emotional strife and perturbation,
+that they were somehow surprised to find it unaltered. Beorn, as
+usual, was sitting on the pier-head, smoking his pipe; he did not look
+up or recognise them. Eyelids, on the other side of the river, was
+setting his evening nets: he nodded to Granger from across the water,
+smiled and went on with his work. On entering the shack, they
+discovered Peggy busily engaged over the evening meal, as though they
+had forwarned her as to when they would arrive. Her face betrayed
+neither annoyance nor pleasure--she might never have visited Huskies'
+Island. In the presence of so much that was commonplace, Spurling's
+fantastic account of what had happened to him on the Forbidden River
+seemed absurd and outrageous.
+
+It took them two hours to prepare their outfit and carry it down to
+the canoe; they were in no hurry to set out, for so long as they were
+on the Last Chance they intended to travel only by night.
+
+No one seemed to notice their doings, and even they themselves,
+becoming infected with the quiet of their surroundings, gradually
+ceased from conversing, and, except for an occasional necessary
+question, did their work in silence. At last, when it had grown as
+dark as it ever is in June time in Keewatin, signalling to one another
+with their eyes, they agreed that it was time to set out. Spurling
+having stepped down to the pier, Granger looked round for Peggy. He
+found her sitting in the grass a few paces behind him; she had come
+there so gently that he had been unaware of her nearness. Taking his
+place beside her, he commenced to speak to her the words which he had
+planned to say. She listened attentively, making no sign which would
+betray her state of mind. "Do you understand?" he asked her; and she
+for answer bowed her head.
+
+Thinking that she was indifferent as to what became of him, he rose to
+his feet, saying in a hard voice, "Good-bye. I must be going. Thank
+you for what you did for me on the island!" He had turned his back and
+descended the mound a few paces, when he felt her clinging to his
+hand, pressing it against her cheek, and he knew that she was crying.
+
+"Why, what's the matter?" he asked, bending down to her.
+
+"Don't go, don't go," she whispered.
+
+"Why not, Peggy? I've not been of much use to you. I don't think
+you'll miss me."
+
+"I hate that man," she panted.
+
+"But why?"
+
+"Because he's taking you away from me; and, though you may return from
+this journey, there will come a day when you will not return and I
+shall be left alone."
+
+Granger was surprised at her display of passion--she had seemed to him
+so cold. He had come to think of her as only a squaw-wife: but it was
+the white woman in her who had spoken those words. He tried to comfort
+her, denying her doubts and talking to her as though she had been a
+frightened child. But throughout all that he said she kept on
+whispering, "He is taking you away from me. One day he will see to it
+that you do not return."
+
+And had Granger stopped to think, he would have known that what she
+said was true; for, when once his dream of El Dorado had become
+capable of accomplishment, she would be to him as nothing. He heard
+Spurling calling him by name. Lifting her to her feet, he kissed her
+upon the mouth, and, amazed at his own kindness, as though he had done
+something shameful, ran down the mound, stepped into the canoe, and
+launched out.
+
+Bending forward to Spurling, who was sitting in the bows, "It's El
+Dorado or death this time," he whispered. Spurling did not answer him,
+but he saw him crouch his shoulders as if to avoid a lash, and heard
+his mutter, like the echo of his own voice, "_Or death_."
+
+The canoe was travelling heavily, for Spurling had stopped paddling.
+Granger was about to expostulate with him when, watching him more
+attentively, he discovered that his eyes were fixed upon the bend. As
+they drew nearer, and were passing by, his body trembled and he buried
+his face in his hands. Not until the bend was behind him did he take
+up his paddle--and then he flung himself into the work with frenzy, as
+one who fled.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE FORBIDDEN RIVER
+
+
+"If we are to get back before the winter closes in upon us we must
+start to-night."
+
+Spurling looked up from the pan of dirt which he was washing. "You've
+said that ten times a day in the last two weeks if you've said it
+once," he snapped.
+
+"Yes, but I mean it this time. We've got all the gold that we can
+carry. If you won't come with me, I shall take the canoe and start
+back by myself."
+
+"Oh, you will, will you? And d'you think that I don't see through your
+game?" Then noticing how Granger's hand had gone instinctively to his
+hip-pocket, he added, "And if it comes to fighting, I go armed
+myself."
+
+In a flash both men had whipped out their revolvers, but Spurling was
+the fraction of a second late; Granger had him covered.
+
+"So you're going to murder me, after all," Spurling continued
+sneeringly. "You've postponed it a long time; it was at Drunkman's
+Shallows that you were going to do it first. Your excuse then was that
+you weren't John Granger, but your baser self. You were always a good
+hand at excuses. And pray who are you now?"
+
+"Throw away that revolver," shouted Granger, in a voice that was thick
+with anger.
+
+Spurling tossed it a couple of yards away.
+
+"No, that won't do. Throw it into the river. Don't rise to your feet;
+crawl to it on your hands and knees."
+
+Spurling looked at him surlily to see whether he dared disobey, then
+did as he was commanded. There was a flash of silver as the weapon
+spun through the air, a commotion of spray, as though a fish had
+risen, and a distant and more distant shining as it sank down and
+settled on the river-bed.
+
+"That's right. Now let me tell you, Druce Spurling, that you're a fool
+for your pains. If either you or I are to be alive this time next
+year, however we may feel towards one another at present, we've got to
+act as though we were friends. There'll be time enough for quarrelling
+when we've seen the last of Murder Point, and have passed out over the
+winter trail with our gold, and know that we are safe. Why, you fool,
+we've been here nearly four months and we've already got more gold
+than we can take with us; it's October, and the river may close up
+almost any day."
+
+Spurling began to mutter something about how, if it weren't for
+Granger, _he'd_ be able to get out all right.
+
+"What's that you're saying?" Granger interrupted him. "I've heard that
+tale ever since we set out and I'm sick of hearing it. You fancy that
+the Mounted Police think that you are dead, and have ceased to search
+for you, and that I'm the man they're after now. You say that I'm
+known in the district, and that you are unknown, except by that
+half-breed who caught sight of you as you went by God's Voice;
+therefore you argue that I am a danger, a hindrance to you. You'd like
+to get rid of me, so that you may get out with the gold, in safety, by
+yourself. It's the same old trick that you tried to play me in the
+Klondike; you want to reach El Dorado without me. You swine! Do you
+know why it is that the Mounted Police are after me? It's because I
+took pity on you, remembering old times, and tried to prevent your
+being hanged--that's why. And you make it an excuse for deserting me.
+I've not told you that before, and I can see that you don't believe me
+now. Well, I'm not going to give you the details which would prove
+it--I'm not asking for gratitude from such a cur as you've turned out.
+All I'm going to say is this: from the first of your coming up here
+I've tried to play fair by you; I've done more than that, I've come
+near giving you my life--giving, mind you, not letting you take it as
+you've been inclined to do many times. And I'm willing to play fair
+until the end--until we get outside and are safe; then we can each go
+on our separate ways, if we so decide. I know where I'm going--to El
+Dorado. I daresay you're going to try to get there too, but that is
+none of my concern. I'm concerned with the present. That canoe is
+mine, and what's left of the grub is mine. The gold we share between
+us. If you don't want to come with me I'll take the canoe and other
+things which belong to me, and my share of the dust and nuggets, and
+you can stay here. But if you come with me, you've got to be
+honourable and behave like a man--not a husky. I give you two minutes
+to make your choice."
+
+"There isn't any choice to be made," growled Spurling; "you offer me
+your company or starvation. I choose your company, much as I detest
+it. And I'd like to know who you are to speak to me like this? And
+what there is to lose your temper about? If you'd explained what you'd
+wanted, I'd have come quietly; but I'd rather cut my throat at once
+and be done with it than be ordered about by a man like you--a fellow
+married to a squaw-wife."
+
+Granger's face went white and his lips trembled; his finger closed
+upon the trigger, then with an effort he controlled himself. "I think
+I've heard enough from you on that point," he said; "suppose we drop
+this discussion and get the canoe ready?"
+
+He turned upon his heel and walked into the hut, followed more slowly
+by Spurling.
+
+This was by no means their first falling out in the past four months;
+from the night that they left Murder Point things had been going from
+bad to worse. Given two men who set out into the forest together,
+bound by the strongest ties of friendship, who travel in one another's
+footsteps and sleep side by side for days and nights at a stretch,
+without seeing any other face but one another's and their own
+reflected visage, with nothing to break the silence but their own
+voices, and the cries of the wilderness, which have become
+irritatingly monotonous because of their sameness and frequent
+reiteration, and it is a thing to be marvelled at if they do not come
+back enemies. But when they set out each with his own hidden secret,
+each with his own private suspicion of his companion, with a gnawing
+enmity between them which has been changed into a show of friendship
+only by force of circumstance, when the object of their journey is a
+possession over which they have quarrelled before and parted company,
+concerning which they are already secretly jealous, then the final
+relationship of those two men can be forecast without any fear of
+error.
+
+Before they had reached the Forbidden River they had ceased to
+converse. By the time that they had landed at the hut, their nerves
+were jangled. Before they had been working there many days they had
+thought their way over all their old grievances, and, like petulant
+children, were on the lookout for any new cause of offence. The cause
+had come when Spurling, tired with rocking the cradle, his face and
+hands swollen by the sun and mosquito-bitten, had said, "I don't see
+why we should take all this trouble. I'm going to quit work."
+
+Granger was attending to the flume which they had constructed. "You're
+going to do no such thing," he had said.
+
+"Yes, I am; you're not my master and I shan't ask your permission.
+There's as much gold as we shall require in those two sacks which the
+Man with the Dead Soul washed out. If you've got such a scrupulous
+conscience, you can dig out your share; but I'm not going to help
+you."
+
+"So you've turned thief now, in addition to your other profession,"
+was the retort which Granger had thrown back.
+
+Out of such small foolishnesses had arisen quarrel after quarrel, so
+that it had become only necessary for Spurling to make a statement for
+Granger to contradict him, or for Granger to express a desire for
+Spurling to thwart its accomplishment. Day by day they would toil
+together, digging out the muck, emptying it into the sluice-boxes or
+testing it in the pan, without exchanging a word; then some trifling
+difficulty would arise, for which, perhaps, neither of them was
+responsible, and they would seize the opportunity to goad one another
+on to murder with the evil of what they said. On one point only were
+they agreed--the gathering of the most wealth in the shortest time;
+for wealth meant to them escape and the preserving of their lives. To
+this end they feverishly laboured both day and night, reserving no
+special hours for sleep and rest. Yet, even in their escape, as has
+been seen, they did not necessarily include one another; so far as
+Spurling was concerned, when once the gold had been acquired, it was
+"each man for himself." There was no loyalty between them; they were
+kept together only by a common avarice, and by fear of the wideness of
+the Northland.
+
+Yet there were times when Granger would waken to a sense of something
+that was better. By the end of August they had washed out all the dust
+and nuggets that they could possibly carry, and it was then that he
+had recognised that greed, regardless of consequence, had become the
+master-passion of both their lives. The words which the Dead Soul had
+spoken to him would come back, "I will make a man more precious than
+fine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir"--and he would
+look at Spurling and, bending down above the water, he would regard
+himself. Going over to Spurling he would say, laying his hand upon his
+shoulder, "Druce, in spite of the harsh things which we have spoken,
+we must still be friends, and seek out El Dorado together."
+
+After such a reconciliation they would talk together of their plans
+and the various ways in which they would amend their lives; but
+gradually they came to know that, while they lived, their hatred never
+could be dead, and, defiant of whatsoever resolutions they might make,
+would surely reassert itself. It was the spirit of the North which
+spoke through them, and not they themselves--the spirit of silence,
+striving to utter itself, and of enmity to all the world.
+
+They carried out their treasure from the hut and placed it in the
+canoe. It was done up in all kinds of packets, in flour-sacks, empty
+tobacco-tins, torn strips of blanket which they had sewn together, and
+abandoned clothing tied up at the arms and legs. Before they had
+placed it all in, together with what remained to them of their outfit,
+the little craft sat so low in the water that it was evident that it
+would be swamped if there was added to its burden the weight of two
+men. They were compelled to sit down and consider how much of their
+outfit could be abandoned. Even then, when they had rejected all the
+provisions, save those which were necessary for a five days' journey,
+and their blankets and their rifles, the canoe was still unsafe.
+
+At Spurling's suggestion they limited themselves to half rations and
+took off all their clothing except their trousers and shirts; and
+still it was too heavy. Very reluctantly they set to work to take out
+some of the gold, commencing with the smaller amounts. When they had
+finished, they had thrown out all their last month's work, and still
+the canoe was by no means steady.
+
+Spurling, with the foresight and thrift of a man who has a long life
+before him, went into the hut and, bringing out a spade, commenced to
+dig. When he had made a hole of sufficient width and depth, he buried
+the abandoned nuggets and gold dust.
+
+Granger watched him to the end. Then, with a touch of bitterness in
+his tones, he asked, "And what's that for?"
+
+"In case I should ever be able to come back," said Spurling, "and so
+that no one else may find it."
+
+"Don't you worry yourself, you'll be in El Dorado before that time,
+or else hanged. In either case, a trifle like that won't matter."
+
+He scowled; Granger's flippancies on the subject of death, especially
+death with a rope about his neck, always made him feel unhappy. He
+tried to take his place in the stern, but Granger would not trust him
+there; he signed to him to take the forward paddle, where he would
+have no opportunity of making a surprise attack. They pushed off and
+quickly lost sight of the hut, the discovery of which had meant so
+much to them. Now that they had procured their wealth and abandoned
+their diggings, all their eagerness was for escape.
+
+The sunset lay behind them, and before, like a black-mailed host,
+preparing to dispute their passage, the shadows of night were
+gathered. During the past month the forest leaves had turned from
+green, and gray, into copper, yellow, and flaming red. The branches of
+the tallest of the underbrush were already bare and, clustered
+together beneath the tree-trunks, created the effect of scarves of
+mist which shifted from silver to lavender. The floor of the forest
+was of gold, where the fallen foliage had scattered; but, where the
+scrub-oak grew, it was golden splashed with blood. The dominant tone
+of the landscape was of gold and blood; through the heart of which ran
+the river, changing by infinitesimal, overlapping shadings from yellow
+into red, from red into night-colour, from night-colour into
+nothingness. Down this roadway passed the trespassers, with the thing
+which they had stolen weighing down their canoe to the point of
+danger; murder was in their hearts, and grey fear ran before them.
+Instinctively they bowed their heads, suspicious of one another,
+peering ahead into the distance for an enemy who awaited them, and
+from side to side or behind for one who followed.
+
+During their stay at the hut, nothing had come near to disturb
+them--nothing in human guise. But from the first they had been aware
+of the timber-wolf, which Spurling had seen on his first visit and had
+described to Granger. It had not shown itself in the daytime and had
+rarely been seen in its entirety at night; but they had known that it
+was near them by the rustling of the bushes, and had at times caught a
+glimpse of its shadow, or of its eyes looking out at them from under
+cover.
+
+Even when they had not heard it, they had come across its footprints.
+Towards the dawn, had one of them risen early and strayed far from
+camp, he had sometimes seen it cross his path ahead, or had heard it
+tracking him. So nervous had they become, that they had never stirred
+far from one another; while one had slept, the other had kept watch.
+Perhaps this dread of a constant menacer, and the more terrible fear
+of being left alone in its presence, had prevented bloodshed when
+their more furious quarrels were at their height. Of a mere wolf, no
+man who is armed need have terror; their discomfort arose from the
+suspicion that this creature, which watched and lay in wait for them,
+was more than an animal.
+
+There had been a night when it was Spurling's turn to keep guard, and
+he had slept. Granger had wakened with a nervous sense of peril.
+Through the open door of the hut he had seen the silver of the
+moonlight in the tree-tops across the river and had seen the outline
+of his companion stretched along the ground. As he watched, he had
+seen a shadow fall across the threshold, followed by a head. It was
+grey in colour, the ears were laid back, and the fangs were bared as
+if with hunger. But it was the eyes which had absorbed his attention.
+They were angry and reproachful; he had seen them before--they were
+the eyes of a man whose soul is dead. They recalled to him that night
+when Beorn had declared himself. That he recognised them, as he
+admitted to himself when daylight was come, may have been only fancy;
+but the impression which he had while he gazed on them was very real.
+Moreover, he saw distinctly the scar of the wound which Spurling had
+inflicted in his fight at the cache. Then the head had been withdrawn,
+and the hut had been darkened by a huge form which stood across the
+doorway. He had heard Spurling turn over on his side, rouse up and cry
+out.
+
+The form had crouched and sprung, and the light shone in again. There
+was a sound of scuffling outside, followed by a thud. Leaping to his
+feet, dazed and bewildered, he had run out in time to see a
+timber-wolf of monstrous size, with Spurling's arm in its mouth,
+dragging him away into the forest. Careless of his own safety, he had
+gone after the animal, belabouring its head with the stock of his
+rifle, for he was afraid to shoot, lest he should wound his companion.
+It had dropped its prey and fled, bounding off into the dusk between
+the tree-trunks, leaving Spurling a little mauled but not much
+injured. This experience had served to prove to them that, however
+much they hated, they were still indispensable to each other's safety,
+and must hold together.
+
+Granger, for his own peace of mind, had sought to find an explanation
+for this happening. If the beast was indeed Beorn's soul, then why
+was it exiled there, on the Forbidden River? Had Beorn killed the
+miners, in his underground fights on the Comstock, not out of
+righteous indignation, as he had stated, but only for the pleasure of
+destroying life and out of envious, disappointed avarice? Had he
+mocked God consciously in making Him responsible for those crimes, and
+in attributing to Him their inspiration? If these things were so, then
+this might have been his fitting punishment, that, when by his own
+wickedness he had made himself an outcast from the company of mankind,
+and had been compelled to banish himself, for the sake of his own
+preservation, to a land where nothing was of much value, money least
+of all, there he had discovered the gold in the profitless search of
+which he had made himself vile. The power over gladness, which it
+would have represented to another man, had been of no use to him now,
+for he had not dared to take it out of the district to where it would
+acquire its artificial worth; yet he had not dared to remain on the
+Forbidden River: for there was no food there. So his body and soul had
+parted company; his body going south to God's Voice, while his soul
+stayed near to the thing after which it had lusted, for which it had
+exchanged its happiness, to guard it, that it might not become the
+possession of a freer man and bring him the gladness which to a
+murderer is denied.
+
+This had seemed to Granger to be the only explanation which fitted in
+with all the facts. In accepting it, he had found room for the
+suspicion that he also had laid waste his life not for the sake of
+romance, not for his dream's sake, but for the sake of greed alone.
+Having made gold his hope, having said to the fine gold, "Thou art my
+confidence," he had committed an iniquity to be punished by the judge.
+
+Had he suffered all that punishment as yet, or was there worse to
+follow? Would the worst that he could expect be death? Once, when he
+was poor, he had only feared life; but now, with his treasure beneath
+his feet, with the canoe gliding southward on the journey out, there
+was added this new terror--the fear of death. He desired most
+passionately to live now.
+
+Darkness had fallen and the air was growing colder. Presently, flake
+by flake, the first snow of winter drifted down. The two men said
+nothing, but they paddled faster, for the chill struck into their
+chests through their shirts, making them repent the folly which had
+led them to abandon their clothing that more gold might be carried.
+Every now and again, Spurling broke out into a fit of coughing and, as
+he shivered, the canoe trembled. As for Granger his hands were heavy,
+his arms ached, and his fingers were numb; he dimly wondered at his
+own perseverance that he still continued to ply his paddle. As the
+cold spread through him, his senses took to sleeping. He was aroused
+by a sudden jerk and a shout from Spurling, "Curse you. Back water.
+Turn her head out into the river."
+
+Looking up, he saw that they had struck the bank and come near
+capsizing. And he saw more than that; scarcely two yards away a pair
+of glowing eyes shone out at him.
+
+"For the sake of God, make haste," cried Spurling; "the brute's about
+to pounce."
+
+With a twist of the paddle he swung the canoe's head round, and with
+the help of Spurling drove her out. They were none too early, for,
+just behind them, where a moment since the canoe had been hanging,
+they heard a splash.
+
+For the rest of the night they kept watch over themselves lest they
+slept. Till the dawn broke, whenever they turned their eyes toward the
+bank, they could discern the grey streak of the timber-wolf, dodging
+in and out between the tree-trunks, keeping pace with them. So long as
+they were on the Forbidden River they journeyed both day and night,
+allowing themselves scant time for rest. If they had been eager to get
+there, they were still more anxious to get away. When in the middle of
+the third night they swung out into the Last Chance, they stopped and
+looked back. The moon was shining; sitting squarely on its haunches
+they could see the timber-wolf, which had run out on the spit of land
+to the water's edge, gazing after them malignantly.
+
+Breaking the long silence, Spurling said, "Thank God, he can come no
+further."
+
+"But his body awaits us at Murder Point," Granger replied.
+
+"I can deal with men's bodies," Spurling said. Then they moved onward,
+pressing up against the current.
+
+At the first hint of daylight they landed and hid themselves, lest, in
+that deserted land, their presence should be detected. The precaution
+proved wise, for about noon a party of belated voyageurs passed
+northward en route for the Crooked Creek. They were singing, keeping
+time with their paddles; their careless gladness made the hunted men,
+for all their gold, feel envious.
+
+They dared not kindle a fire, and at last, that they might save the
+little warmth they had, were compelled to lie down together, breast to
+breast, clasping one another closely as though they were friends. At
+sunset they again set out. All night long to Granger the sky seemed
+filled with uncouth legendary animals, which trooped across the
+horizon file on file. Sometimes they were Beorn's camels, sometimes
+they were timber-wolves or brindled huskies with yellow faces, but
+more often they were creatures of evil passions, for which there are
+no names. To avoid looking at them, he would keep his eyes in the
+canoe or would stare at Spurling's back. But the sight of his
+companion's monotonous movements, compelling him to go on working when
+his arms ached and his body seemed broken, caused such mad fury to
+arise within him that he feared for his own actions, and was glad to
+return his eyes to the clouds. At dawn, as though a golden door had
+been opened, the creatures passed in and disappeared, and he saw them
+no more till sunset.
+
+For himself, he would gladly have lain down, and died, had not
+Spurling with the same indomitable courage which he had displayed on
+the Dawson trail, roused him up and compelled him with his brutal
+jibes to play the man. By the end of the first day on the Last Chance
+their food gave out, and since leaving the hut all their meals had
+been scanty; then they would willingly have given a third of the gold
+which they carried in exchange for a hatful of the flour which, in
+their greed for nuggets, they had left behind on the Forbidden River's
+banks. If a bird flew over their heads, they dared not fire a gun lest
+its report should be heard, so great was their fear of possible
+arrest.
+
+As their weakness increased, the downward rush of the current seemed
+to gather strength; there were times when their progress was almost
+imperceptible. Sufficient snow had already fallen to cloak the land in
+whiteness, and they were very conscious that every day the
+temperature, was sinking lower. In the middle of the seventh night of
+their journey they felt something grate against their prow, and they
+knew that the river was freezing over. They had only five more miles
+to traverse; they were too exhausted and stiff with cold to attempt to
+reach their destination by walking along the bank, even if they had
+been willing to abandon their treasure; so there was nothing for it
+but to make one last effort. So nerveless were they with fatigue that,
+when they went by the bend, Spurling forgot to be afraid of the thing
+which he had seen there; he had not the strength to remember. They
+reached the pier when the dawn was breaking, so faint that they could
+not rise and crawl out. They would have drifted back over the way
+which they had travelled, had not the ice closed in and held them.
+
+Two hours after their arrival, Eyelids looked out from the window at
+Murder Point and, seeing them, came to their rescue and lifted them
+into the shack.
+
+They had arrived none too early, for that day the river froze over,
+the snow fell in earnest, and the Keewatin winter settled down.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE BETRAYAL
+
+
+Granger had been sick and delirious for several days as a result of
+exposure and starvation. Day and night Peggy had nursed him with
+unwearying attention; one would have supposed that he had been always
+kind to her, and that she was greatly in his debt. Since his brain had
+cleared she had said little to him; but, when she touched him, he
+could feel the thrill of passion that travelled through her hands. Her
+face told him nothing; it was only when suddenly she raised up her
+eyes that he saw the longing which they could not hide. Because her
+eyes betrayed her, she rarely looked at him. He would gladly have
+spoken with her frankly, but her reserve deterred him, and, moreover,
+a great anxiety weighed upon his mind--he did not know how many of his
+secrets and hidden intentions he had let out in his ravings. The
+altered bearing of his companions made him aware that they had each
+learnt something fresh about himself, one another, and the manner in
+which he regarded them. The Man with the Dead Soul was alone
+unchanged.
+
+So he sat among them on his couch of furs as morosely as Beorn
+himself, striving to grope his way back into the darkness from which
+his mind had issued, torturing himself to remember how much his lips
+had admitted during the time when his vigilance was relaxed. He could
+only recall the shadows of his words and acts; the real things, which
+lurked behind the shadows, continually evaded capture. Yet it seemed
+to him that he must have laid bare all his life, confessing to Eyelids
+and his sister his every affection and his every treachery, whether
+accomplished or intended.
+
+Then, if he had done that, he had told Peggy to her face how he was
+purposing to desert her! It was this suspicion which kept him silent;
+he waited for her to reveal herself. But she refused to help him; in
+her looks there was no condemnation, and in her treatment of him
+nothing but gentleness. Surely there should have been contempt, if she
+had known _all_ about him!
+
+Two pictures stood out so sharply from the background chaos of his
+impressions, that he believed them to be veritable memories. The one
+was of Peggy kneeling at his side, taking him in her arms, as though
+he were a child, and laying his head upon her breast, and of himself
+mistaking her for his mother or Mordaunt, and speaking to her all
+manner of tenderness. The other was of his perpetual terror lest
+Spurling had gone southward without him, having stolen his share of
+the treasure; and of one night when Peggy to quiet him had roused up
+Eyelids, who had brought in Spurling--and Spurling's hands were bound.
+
+When he had come to himself, his first action had been to look round
+for Spurling--and he was not there. Two days had now passed, and there
+was still no sign of him. As his strength returned, the fear of his
+delirium gained ground upon him--lest Spurling had escaped. Brooding
+over the past with a sick man's fancy, he discovered a new cause for
+agitation--_if Spurling had departed, he would never know the truth
+about Mordaunt_. For the recovery of the gold he scarcely cared now;
+the apparent actualness of Mordaunt's presence, bending over him in
+his delirium, had recalled her vividly to his memory, awakening the
+passion which he had striven to crush down, so that now it seemed
+all-important to him that he should ask Spurling that one question,
+"Was the body that was found near Forty-Mile clothed in a woman's
+dress?"
+
+The return of a certain season, which the mind has associated with a
+special experience, will often arouse and poignantly concentrate an
+old emotion, which has been almost forgotten throughout the other
+months of the year. The arrival of Spurling, and the agony which he
+had suffered when he had begun to suspect that the woman whom he loved
+was dead, had happened when the snow was on the ground; perhaps it was
+the sight of the frozen river and the white landscape which now caused
+him to remember so furiously the vengeance which he had planned,
+should Mordaunt prove to be the woman whom Spurling had murdered. So,
+for the time being, the seeking of El Dorado and preserving of his own
+life seemed paltry objects when compared with the asking of that
+question, and the exacting, if need be, of the necessary revenge.
+
+On the third day after the recovery of his senses he could endure his
+suspicions no longer. Peggy had gone out for a little while; Eyelids
+was busy in the store; only the Man with the Dead Soul was left with
+him in the shack. Seizing his opportunity, he got up and dressed. He
+was so weak that at first he could scarcely stand. Tottering toward
+the door, he already had his hand upon the latch when Beorn arose and
+followed him. Though Granger had asked him no question, "I will show
+you," he said.
+
+Outside they met Peggy returning; but her father waved her sternly
+aside, and, putting his arms about Granger to support him, guided him
+to the back of Bachelors' Hall. A stoutly built cabin was there, which
+stood by itself and was windowless, the door of which was iron-bound
+and padlocked; it was used as a cell in which Indians and half-breeds
+were kept, should they grow refractory. Producing the key, he opened
+the door; as they entered they were greeted with a volley of curses.
+
+In the farthest corner lay a man, crouched on a bed of mouldy furs.
+The cell was not often used, and was covered with decaying
+fungus-growth from the dampness of the past summer. When Granger tried
+to speak to him, his voice was drowned by the sort of noise that a dog
+makes when it comes out from its kennel; then he saw that Spurling was
+chained low down to the floor by his hands and feet, so that he could
+not stand upright. With an hysteric cry of gladness he ran forward,
+and was only saved from Spurling's teeth, as he bent back his head, by
+Beorn, who pushed him to one side so heavily that he fell to the
+ground. Then Eyelids came in, and picked him up and carried him back
+to the shack.
+
+For the next few days he had plenty of leisure to reflect. He wondered
+whether Beorn's treatment of Spurling, and the fact that he had shown
+him to him on the earliest occasion, was meant as a threat to himself;
+or had the disclosures which he had made in his delirium given him the
+impression that he also was entirely Spurling's enemy. The bearing of
+Eyelids and of Peggy led him to believe that the latter supposition
+was correct. His natural instinct was to free the man at once,--but
+he thought better of it; Spurling would be at least kept out of
+mischief there till he himself was well.
+
+Now that his mind was at ease, he commenced to mend rapidly; when two
+more days had passed, he was up and able to get about without much
+help. On visiting the trading-store he found that his canoe was lying
+there, just as he had brought it back; nothing of its contents had
+been removed or unpacked. He sat down beside it, and tried to
+formulate his plans.
+
+So far, in spite of his illness, everything had happened for the best.
+Spurling was safe until he should require him. The gold was now in his
+absolute possession. Very shortly Eyelids and Beorn would set out on
+their winter's hunt, leaving him, save for Peggy, free to act
+unobserved. But he had made a discovery, the knowledge of which
+disturbed him--that a part, at least, of the reason for Peggy's
+reticence and new gentleness was that before long she would be a
+mother. That fact made him feel differently towards her; he could not
+now desert her, for it would mean abandoning his child.
+
+When he pictured to himself what the Northland might do for a child
+who was fatherless, especially if it were a girl, he knew that,
+whatever plans he made, they must include his half-breed wife.
+Moreover, her approaching maternity appealed to the chivalry in his
+nature, making him ashamed that he had ever thought to leave her.
+Until his child was born, at whatever risk to himself, he must
+postpone his departure and lie in hiding at Murder Point. And after
+that? He must take her into his confidence, as he should have done
+long ago, as if she were all white. He would have to leave her behind
+at first, but would make arrangements for her to follow after him when
+the road was clear.
+
+Having arrived at this point, his train of reasoning was broken off by
+the appearance of Eyelids, who came to ask for two outfits, and to
+inform him that he and Beorn had determined to set out on the winter
+trail that night. The rest of the day was spent in preparations, and
+the getting together of their teams of huskies.
+
+Just before they left, a visit was paid to Spurling in the cabin, and
+the key was handed over to Granger. While there, Granger referred to
+the matter which he had been wanting to mention all day. Turning to
+Eyelids, as though it were of little importance, he said, "Before you
+return, as I daresay you've noticed, something will have happened. I
+want you to promise me to come back for Christmas Eve, so that we may
+celebrate the event." Then, throwing aside his disguise of
+indifference, he spoke more earnestly, "I want you and Beorn to
+promise me that."
+
+Spurling looked sharply up from his corner; being ignorant of the
+matter which Granger hinted at, he watched to see if the words
+contained a reference to himself. Peggy turned her head away and began
+to steal softly out. But her brother stayed her, and throwing his arm
+about her shoulder, said, "I promise you; we shall return." And Beorn
+gave him his hand as a sign of his assent.
+
+They closed and locked the door on the prisoner, and the father and
+son set out.
+
+A sudden instinct for carefulness had prompted him to make that
+request. At the last moment he had thought that he noticed on Beorn's
+part a certain uneasiness in handing over to him the custody of
+Spurling. He was afraid that the distrust might grow upon him, causing
+him to return unexpectedly, perhaps just at the time when he and
+Spurling were starting on their southward journey. It was to prevent
+such an interference with his plans that he had named a definite time
+for their next meeting, for, by so doing, he had given Beorn to
+understand that he intended to remain at Murder Point throughout
+December. The hinting at the birth of his child had added to his
+request a show of naturalness, and had at the same time let them know
+that he was aware of his wife's condition--a difficult knowledge to
+communicate to people who spoke rarely, and then only of trivial
+affairs. As yet he had not decided as to when he would set out, for he
+hesitated between the manfully fulfilling of his new responsibility
+and the callously accomplishing of his old purpose; if he should
+choose the latter, he had provided for Peggy so that she would not be
+left too long by herself, by the promise which he had exacted from her
+brother and father to return for Christmas Eve.
+
+For the first time he was left truly alone with her. Standing side by
+side, they watched the trappers descend the Point to the pier, where
+their dogs lay waiting them. The whips cracked and the teams
+straightened out.
+
+For a few strides they moved toward the opposite bank and then, to
+Granger's amazement, wheeled to the left, and commenced travelling
+up-river to the west. The loaded sleds swung lightly over the ice and,
+as he listened, the shouting of the drivers and the yelping of the
+huskies grew fainter, till they were no more heard. He was made
+terribly afraid by the direction they had taken, for he knew that
+Beorn's trapping grounds had always lain to the northwards, and never
+around God's Voice; they were still less likely to do so now, since he
+had quarrelled with the factor. Then why had he gone to the west?
+
+He turned to the girl at his side to question her, "Did you know that
+they were going there?" he said. She did not answer him; he saw that
+her eyes were intently fixed upon the bend. Her lips moved, and her
+hands made the sign of the cross upon her breast as if she were
+praying. Without replying, she entered the shack.
+
+He did not follow her, for his feelings were changed with anger. He
+felt that, whether knowingly or unknowingly, they had betrayed him
+through their secretiveness. While he had been absent they must have
+heard that Spurling was a man with a price upon his head. They might
+even have learnt it from Pilgrim at the time of his June visit, but
+had not laid hands upon him because he had appeared to be his friend.
+But now since their return, in his delirium he had probably uttered
+words concerning Spurling which had left them with the impression that
+he desired his death--and had given them their excuse for gratifying
+their own covetousness and revenge for the Forbidden River trespass.
+
+Even what he had said to them about returning for Christmas Eve might
+have been taken as having a double meaning, referring not only to the
+birth of the child, but also to the thousand-dollar reward to be
+gained by the arrest. Spoken as it was, in the prison-cabin, that was
+most likely how it had been taken. Since they had accepted him as
+their confederate, it seemed evident that they did not know that the
+arrest of Spurling might entail his own hanging. If all that he had
+conjectured was true, he had now no option but to release Spurling and
+to make good his escape with him at once; for from Murder Point to
+God's Voice was no more than seventy miles. At once! But he would not
+be strong enough to travel for some days yet, and Spurling could not
+be in very excellent condition for such a journey--to be thrown into
+an out-house and left there for a fortnight, with back bent double and
+arms and legs bound, is not the best kind of training.
+
+Before doing anything rash he would talk to Peggy, and find out how
+much she knew about it. Following her into the shack, he made fast the
+door and threw himself on the pile of furs which had been his couch.
+The lamp was not lighted, but the stove was red-hot and scattered an
+angry glare. He called to her; she came to him timidly from the far
+end of the room and sat down beside him. He commenced abruptly by
+telling her that the man who was chained out there in the cabin was a
+murderer. Did she know that? She nodded. How did she know that? She
+shuddered, and pointed with her hand out of the window in the
+direction of the bend.
+
+He did not gather what she meant, but for the present he let it pass.
+
+And did she know that there were a thousand dollars offered for
+Spurling's capture? She shrugged her shoulders, and again gave her
+assent. Then, raising himself on his elbow, he asked her plainly, "Is
+that what Eyelids has gone to get?"
+
+She smiled down at him as though she were owning to something worthy;
+"I hope so," she said.
+
+"Why do you hope so," he asked in a hard voice; "because of the
+money?"
+
+She drew back from him as though he had affronted her. "No, not for
+that," she said, speaking slowly.
+
+"Then why?"
+
+"Because he is trying to take you away from me."
+
+"And you think that when the Mounted Police have hanged him that it
+will be all right, and I shall stay here?"
+
+She did not answer him, but he knew that she was thinking of her
+child. "Whether Spurling escapes or is taken," he said, "will make no
+difference to my doings. I cannot stay; they are hunting for me,
+because they think I also am a murderer."
+
+She turned sharply round. "But we are doing this to save you; we
+thought that you agreed and understood. When you have given them this
+man, they will pardon you, and you will be allowed to stay."
+
+"Who told you that? Was it Antoine?"
+
+"Robert Pilgrim."
+
+He laughed in her face. "Bah! Robert Pilgrim!" he exclaimed. "He told
+you that, and you believed him! Why, you little fool, he doesn't care
+a curse what happens to Spurling, whether he's caught or gets away;
+it's me that he's anxious to put to death. But he couldn't have told
+you that when we were in hiding on Huskies' Island, or you'd have
+betrayed us then."
+
+"He sent word to us by a messenger while you were away. But, if I had
+known, I shouldn't have betrayed you then, for this man seemed to be
+at that time your friend."
+
+"Then why have you done so now?"
+
+"Because he has become your enemy and you hate him; and because there
+is no other way of saving you for my child and for myself. He is
+trying to take you away from me." She spoke in a fierce strained
+whisper, kneeling, with her hands spread out before her, and her head
+thrown back.
+
+"You haven't saved me," he said, rising to his feet angrily; "all
+you've done is to place the rope about my neck."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE HAND IN THE DOORWAY
+
+
+He picked up a lantern and, having lighted it, left the shack. Going
+round the out-building of the store, he made his way through the snow
+to the cabin where Spurling was imprisoned. As he placed the key in
+the padlock, he could hear the rattle of the chains of the man inside.
+Having opened the door, he halted on the threshold, afraid and ashamed
+to enter. There was dead silence. Lifting the lantern above his head,
+he could make out the figure of Spurling, crouched like a beast on
+knees and hands, with eyes which watched him doubtfully.
+
+"They have gone," he said.
+
+Spurling did not answer, but followed his every movement.
+
+"They have gone," he repeated; "but they have not gone to the
+Forbidden River--they have gone in the direction of God's Voice."
+
+Then Spurling spoke. "Thank God," he said, "for they'll hang you as
+well."
+
+Granger placed the lantern on the floor and sat himself down.
+"Spurling," he said, "we both of us have some old scores to pay off;
+at the present moment, I happen to have the upper hand. But this is
+not the time to settle them. For instance, you have never told me the
+name of the woman whom you shot in the Klondike."
+
+Spurling broke in furiously, saying, "I have told you already, that
+it was not a woman I murdered, but a man."
+
+Granger waved him aside with his hand. "I'm not asking you her name,"
+he said. "We've not got the time to quarrel, for there is still a
+chance of our saving ourselves. It'll take Beorn and Eyelids at least
+four days to reach God's Voice and come back. But I don't think
+they'll touch at God's Voice at all; they'll skirt it and go farther
+south. They won't trust Robert Pilgrim, lest he should claim a part of
+the reward. If I know Eyelids, it's the thousand dollars he's after,
+and he wants it all for himself. Their purpose is to go on until they
+meet the winter patrol, so that they may be able to give direct
+information to the Mounted Police themselves. Now before they do that,
+a good deal of time may be lost, for the winter patrol has hardly
+started as yet, and it may go in a new direction so that they'll miss
+it at first. With the best of luck, they'll have to travel three
+hundred miles, a ten days' journey, before they fall in with it. While
+they're searching for it, we shall be able to slip by them and get
+out. If you'll promise to stand by me I'll release you. If you won't,
+I shall leave you here and go on myself. But I warn you fairly, no
+man, unless he leaves the gold behind him, can make that journey by
+himself with any hope of surviving. Our last chance, whether we want
+to reach El Dorado or merely to save our lives, is to stick together
+and persuade ourselves that we are friends."
+
+"I'll stand by you," Spurling said; "I'm no more anxious to die by the
+rope or starvation than you are yourself. But what are we to do with
+the half-breed woman--your wife? To leave her behind us, free to go
+where she chooses, would be suicide."
+
+Granger eyed him angrily, for he did not like the sinister whisper in
+which he had asked that question. He might just as well have said,
+"Shall I shoot her while you go outside and scrape out her grave?" But
+to have paid attention to it just then would have brought them to high
+words at the outset; so he said, "We can't take her with us, for she
+is soon to have a child. But I think, when I have explained things to
+her, she'll give us her promise to keep our secret, and we shall be
+able to trust her word."
+
+"Humph! You think that? Well, knock off these chains."
+
+Granger brought the lantern nearer and was stooping to his work, when
+Spurling stopped him, laying his hand upon his shoulder. "Hist! What's
+that?" he said. Granger listened. He could distinctly hear the crunch
+of footsteps on the snow, moving stealthily away from the cabin.
+Running to the door, he caught sight of a woman's skirt, disappearing
+round the corner of the store, and recognised the shadow which was
+flung behind as Peggy's. She must have heard all that they had said.
+
+Spurling waited till his chains were off and he was able to stand
+upright, a free man. Then he asked significantly, "And now what are
+you going to do with her?"
+
+"That is my business," Granger retorted hotly.
+
+"But I think that it is also mine."
+
+He knew that it would be unwise to argue the point, so he led the way
+to Bachelors' Hall, Spurling limping stiffly behind. So cramped had he
+become with the cold, and the position in which he had been chained
+during his confinement, that he could hardly move a step without
+groaning. Until he should recover, despite his own weakness, Granger
+knew that he was physically the stronger and still had the upper hand.
+For Peggy's sake he intended to make the best use of his time; he
+began to have fears for her as to what might happen were she left to
+the mercy of Spurling's choice.
+
+"What are we coming here for?" growled Spurling, as they stopped at
+the door of the hall; "why can't we go to the shack? I'm desperately
+cold and there's a fire there."
+
+"I'll light you a fire," said Granger, placing his hands on his
+shoulders and thrusting him inside.
+
+"You're mighty anxious that I shouldn't get near your wife," said
+Spurling; "she must be very valuable."
+
+Granger went off and soon returned with fuel. The stove was damp and
+rusty, and did not draw well at first, so that all the room was filled
+with smoke. Spurling had stumbled over to the shelf and lay there
+complaining. When the wood had caught and was burning brightly,
+Granger fetched him something to eat and then went out to speak with
+Peggy, leaving him alone, promising to return again to spend the
+night.
+
+When he had entered the shack, it appeared to be empty. He called
+Peggy's name, but she did not reply. Listening intently, he heard the
+sound of sobbing which she was endeavouring to stifle. Going over to
+the berth he found her lying there, with face turned to the wall.
+Sitting down beside her, he placed his arms about her, and tried to
+make her turn his way, but she refused to be comforted.
+
+"Peggy," he said, "you heard what we were saying in the cabin? You
+remember how I said that I was able to trust your word. I want you to
+promise me that you will not tell anyone that we have left, and that
+you will not try to follow until I send to tell you that all is safe,
+so that you can come to me."
+
+"You will never send," she said.
+
+"Why do you say that?"
+
+"Because that man will quarrel with you and kill you on the way out."
+
+"That's nonsense; you must listen to what I have planned. This summer
+we found gold on the Forbidden River."
+
+"I know that."
+
+"Who told you?"
+
+"Eyelids."
+
+"Why did he tell you?"
+
+"He found it himself in the spring, when father sent him up there
+after Spurling; and he was angry when he knew that you had gone there,
+because he wanted it for himself."
+
+"Did he stop here all summer?"
+
+"Yes, but father went away. I think he must have followed you. He got
+back four days before your return."
+
+"Humph! I suspected that, for I saw something that was very like him
+there. . . . And do you still think that they have gone to tell the
+Mounted Police only in order that Spurling may be arrested?"
+
+"I don't know; but that's what they said. I chose to believe them
+because that was the only way in which I could keep you for myself."
+
+"Well, then, listen. No matter what Eyelids and Beorn may intend, if
+the Mounted Police once get hold of me the result will be that I shall
+get hanged. The one way in which you can keep me for yourself is to
+help me to escape. I can't take you with me as you are at present; you
+know that. And I can't strike the trail alone; I must have someone to
+help me take the gold out. There's no one but Spurling. Besides, I've
+promised to stick by him; he saved my life once, and I'm paying back
+the debt. When once I've reached Winnipeg, I'll be able to purchase
+friends who will hide me, if need be; but I hope to get there ahead of
+the news of my escape, before the police have my description and are
+on the lookout. I shall strike for the south, and, when the hunt is
+over and I'm given up for dead, I'll send you word where you can join
+me."
+
+"You never will do that."
+
+"And why not?"
+
+"Because you will be dead."
+
+Granger was losing patience. Whatever reasoning he used, he could not
+move her beyond that one assertion.
+
+"Won't you help me to take the one chance of life that I think I
+have?" he said. "It can't make much difference to you if Spurling does
+kill me on the trail; if I stay here, I shall die a few weeks later,
+more disgracefully."
+
+She stood up and led him over to the window, through which the moon
+was shining, so that he could see her face. She placed her arms about
+his neck, as if she were a white woman. "I will tell you the truth
+now," she said; "I have been keeping something back that I might save
+you from yourself. Since you joined with this man and helped him take
+the gold from the Forbidden River, Eyelids and my father have both
+become your enemies. The factor did send his message that your life
+would be spared if Spurling was given up, but I think he was speaking
+falsely. I have tried to keep you near me because I alone, if need be,
+can stand between you and them. If you set out with Spurling, he will
+kill you; and if you stay here, you will be arrested. But if you will
+come with me into the forest, we can join some Indians of my mother's
+tribe, and they will hide us where you never can be found."
+
+Granger watched her while she was speaking, wondering whether he was
+hearing the very truth this time. "And, if I do as you ask me, what
+will happen to Spurling?" he said.
+
+She drew him nearer to herself. "I hate that man," she whispered; "let
+him die as he deserves."
+
+"And why didn't you tell me everything at first?"
+
+"Because you are not strong enough to make the journey yet; and I
+wanted to keep you resting here, till you had no other choice of
+saving yourself but by following me into the forest. While my father
+was present, I did not dare to tell you--_for his soul is dead_."
+
+Granger took his eyes from off her face; she tempted him--he had been
+so long unused to kindness. He gazed out of the window, far away
+across the frozen forest, and heard the dream of his boyhood calling
+to him to seek the city out of sight. His choice lay between this
+woman and El Dorado, in whose search he had wasted all his life. He
+did not deceive himself, whatever he might say aloud; his hesitancy
+did not arise out of unwillingness to desert Spurling, but from
+unwillingness to abandon the quest while a fragment of hope remained.
+With that stolen gold, if he could slip by the winter patrol and carry
+it out to Winnipeg, he would be able to strike for the south and sail
+up the Great Amana, past the rocks with the forgotten handwriting,
+till he came to the lake of Parima, on whose shores the city is said
+to stand.
+
+She saw that his will was wavering and that his choice was going
+against her. Seizing his hands in her own and pressing them to her
+breast, "I am only a poor half-breed girl," she cried, "but I am soon
+to be the mother of your child; and our child will be nearly all white
+like yourself. You can't think what my life was before you came to me;
+for, though my body is half Indian, my mind has become a white woman's
+since I went to school in Winnipeg. I am so white that I would die for
+you to-morrow, if I could give you life by doing that. I could not
+tell you this before, while my father and brother were present;
+somehow, with their silence they stifled my words, and made me silent.
+But don't judge me by the past months, believe me now."
+
+"Peggy," he said, "what should we do in the forest, if we went there
+and joined your mother's tribe? We should starve, and grow sullen; and
+you would be treated as a squaw, and our child would grow up an
+Indian."
+
+"But I should not mind that if only we were together."
+
+"But we shall be together if my plan works out and I manage to escape.
+Then there's Spurling; however much I hate him, I cannot break my
+promise to him and leave him to die."
+
+She dropped his hands and drew away from him. "You are going to meet
+the white woman," she said; "you had planned to desert me whatever
+happened."
+
+"Who told you that?"
+
+"Your lips told me, when you were sick and they moved of themselves."
+
+"But I promise you now that, when I am safe, I will send you word so
+that you can find me. If I ever did think of deserting you, it was
+before I knew that we were going to have a child."
+
+"You will not send for me," she said; "but I promise that I will do
+nothing to you that will hinder you from going out."
+
+"But what will you do when I am gone, and you yourself will be needing
+help?"
+
+"I shall go, like any other squaw, to the Indian women of my tribe."
+
+There was nothing more to be said; she had given him what he had
+asked. Bidding her good-night, he left the shack.
+
+On returning to the Hall, he found Spurling very restless. "What have
+you been doing all this time?" he asked. "I'd got a good mind to come
+in search of you. I thought you must have struck the trail with your
+squaw, leaving me behind."
+
+Granger pretended not to notice his ill-nature, but told him what he
+had arranged. They talked matters over and determined to make a start
+on the following night. Neither of them were in proper condition to
+travel, but they knew that they had no time to waste. Before they lay
+down to sleep, Spurling altered his position, spreading his furs
+between the stove and the entrance, with his head so near the
+threshold that the door could not be opened wide enough to permit of
+anyone passing out without his being wakened; Granger smiled grimly,
+wondering how long it would take them to quarrel at that rate, when
+one of them thought it necessary to take such precautions. Spurling
+was soon snoring, but Granger could get no rest. The night was
+bitterly cold, and the fire needed constant replenishing. It seemed to
+him that no sooner had he piled on more wood, and wrapped himself in
+his blankets, and laid himself down, than he would feel the
+temperature lowering, and a chill passing over his body like an icy
+hand, beginning at his feet and working up to his head. Shivering and
+with teeth chattering, he would raise himself up on his elbow, only to
+see that the wood was again burnt through and that the fire was going
+out.
+
+At last he determined to give up the attempt to sleep. Pulling a box
+near the stove and using it as a back-rest, he gathered his blankets
+tightly round him and lit his pipe.
+
+Across his shoulders, through the window behind him, fell a shaft of
+moonlight; in front of him, dazzling his eyes, was the redness of the
+glowing charcoal, and the yellow of the jumping flames; within
+hand-stretch to the right lay Spurling, with his feet toward the fire
+and his head within six inches of the threshold. In the great
+stillness which was outside, nothing was to be heard save the rustling
+of the snow as it bound tighter, and the occasional low booming of the
+trees as the frost, acting on the sap, bent their branches.
+
+With his accustomed passion for fairness, he commenced to examine his
+dealings with Peggy and to try to regard his actions from her
+view-point. In his recent conversation with her she had revealed
+qualities the existence of which he had not suspected; he had not
+reckoned her at her true worth. He began to be uncertain even now as
+to whether he was doing right in leaving her. Perhaps she, for all her
+ignorance, was wiser than himself. But of one thing she had made him
+certain, that of all creatures which walked, and talked, and ate, and
+drank, upon the earth, she alone stood by him in his crisis for an
+unselfish reason, and loved him for himself. He knew now, though he
+had not realised it until that night, that he loved her in return,
+half-breed though she was, and could not do without her. He was
+willing to own to himself that, in his treatment of her, he had not
+always been just and, because of her race, at times had been
+despising. He'd been more or less of a fool, and had refused a good
+deal of available happiness.
+
+He looked towards the door; if it had not been for the unpleasantness
+of awaking Spurling, he would have gone at once to the shack and said
+to her, "I don't mind who you are, I love you better than any white
+girl, and would prefer you from amongst them all, were I again given
+my choice." Before he set out, he would like to have her believe that
+he was going, at least partly, for her sake.
+
+The smoke from the burning wood made his eyes grow heavy; he began to
+drowse. He dreamt that he had taken Peggy's advice and had gone with
+her into the forest, having joined himself to the people of her tribe.
+It must have happened years ago, for their child was a sturdy boy who
+ran beside them. She was leading the way through a dark wood, holding
+him by the hand. He asked her where she was going, and for answer she
+laid her finger on his lips and only smiled. On and on they went, and
+then, far away in the distance, he began to see a little light. It
+grew brighter and more dazzling as they approached, so that he had to
+close his eyes. Presently she halted and told him to look. He was
+standing on the edge of a precipice, in the side of which steps had
+been hewn out, and far below was a silver lake which he knew to be
+Parima; and far away was a gleaming of domes and spires which he
+recognised. He was about to speak to thank her, when he tottered and
+his feet sank from under him. As he fell, he stared up at her; the
+last thing he saw was the expression of agony that was in her eyes.
+
+He awoke with a start, but his instinct warned him not to stir. The
+shaft of moonlight had been blotted out, and he knew that someone,
+standing outside, behind him, was gazing in through the window. It was
+not Spurling, for he lay breathing heavily, fast asleep, over to his
+right. As he crouched there motionless, he ran through the list of all
+possible assailants in his mind. It might be Beorn or Eyelids. It
+might be Robert Pilgrim. It might even be the Mounted Police, arrived
+before their time. It might be only a renegade trapper of the Hudson
+Bay Company, who had come by night, that he might not be discovered,
+to see if the private trader would offer a higher price for his catch
+of furs. Then the darkness was removed, and the light shone in again.
+Quickly turning his head, he looked toward the window, and saw nothing
+there. Very quietly he rose to his feet, tiptoed to the window and
+looked out. At first he could see no one; then he saw the outer edge
+of a figure, pressed close to the wall of the house, standing upright
+beside the door-jamb. He crept back from the panes, so that he should
+not obscure the little light he had. Moving over to the right, he
+halted mid-way between the window and Spurling.
+
+He could hear the muffled breathing of the person outside and could
+almost feel the pressure of his body against the wall on the other
+side. In the few seconds' respite, while nothing happened, he glanced
+round, taking in the situation and trying to forecast the probable
+sequence of action. Since Spurling had lain down, he had altered his
+position, so that now his body stretched across the entrance, with his
+head in the corner where the two walls met, forming an acute angle
+with the threshold so that, though he prevented the door from opening
+more than two or three inches, directly it was opened his person would
+be visible, and exposed to attack.
+
+Gently the latch was raised and, by slow degrees, the door began to
+swing inwards. The slit which it made let in a narrow ray of
+moonlight, which, leaving Spurling's face in shadow, fell slanting
+across his neck. If he had not moved in his sleep, his head would have
+been farther out from the wall, and the light, striking on his eyes
+would have aroused him; as it was, he was undisturbed. Alert with the
+horror of it, Granger watched to see what would follow next. The
+person on the other side, peering through the opening, had been warned
+by the same sight of the exposed bare neck, and, desisting from
+pushing the door wider, was deliberating.
+
+When a short interval had elapsed, he saw a hand thrust through the
+crack; it gripped a trapper's hunting knife, with the blade pointing
+downwards, and was poised about to strike. Granger was unarmed
+himself; there was but one thing that could be done to save his
+comrade's life. Flinging all his weight upon the door, he closed it,
+imprisoning the assailant's hand above the wrist joint. The knife
+clattered to the floor, where it stuck out quivering, grazing
+Spurling's cheek as it fell. The hand tried to wrench itself free, the
+fingers opening and closing convulsively, but there was no sound from
+outside.
+
+Spurling awoke with a cry, and clapping his hand to his face found it
+wet with blood. He rose to his feet with his fists clenched, and the
+look of a wild beast at bay in his eyes. His lips were working with
+nervousness and desire to fight. "What is it?" he whispered. "Have
+they come to take us?"
+
+Granger signed to him to stand back and keep quiet. Then he followed
+the direction of Granger's eyes, and he also saw the hand. Bending
+down, with his back against the door, Granger examined it. It was
+brown and slim--far too small for a man's hand, and far too dusky to
+belong to a person who was white. The light, stealing in through the
+aperture, showed it plainly and fell along its length; the fingers had
+ceased to writhe and were extended, as if the thing had died.
+
+While Granger had been looking, Spurling also had seen and had
+surmised. Coming swiftly forward, he stooped to pick up the knife.
+Granger read his purpose and, as he leant forward to pluck it from the
+boards, kicked him heavily in the chest, so that he lost his balance
+and fell sprawling on his back. Before he could recover himself, he
+had opened the door and released the hand. Possessing himself of the
+knife, he set his back against the door again to prevent Spurling from
+following. There was a little cry of gladness, and the sound of
+footsteps rustling the snow as they hurried away.
+
+For the remainder of the long night, he stood guard over the man whom
+he had rescued. When the dawn broke and he visited the shack, he found
+that Peggy had vanished.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+SPURLING TAKES FRIGHT
+
+
+If Spurling had suspected Granger before, he was doubly suspicious of
+him now. Wherever he went, his heavy treacherous eyes followed and
+spied upon him. In one thing only were they united--in their desire to
+see the last of Murder Point. For the accomplishment of this end, they
+laboured feverishly in sullen silence. On visiting the dog-pen, they
+found that of the eleven huskies which had been there, three were
+missing; of the eight which remained, four were the animals left over
+from the grey team belonging to Spurling, and these were the best.
+This meant that they would be able to harness but four dogs apiece to
+a sled, and would have to leave some of their wealth behind, limiting
+each outfit together with the gold to not more than three hundred
+pounds. On examining his clothing, Granger found that his favourite
+capote was not there; he conjectured that Peggy had taken that also in
+her hurry.
+
+They went to the store and selected their provisions with care, taking
+no flour or canned goods, but tallow and fat bacon, because this food
+is least bulky and affords most nourishment. For the same reason,
+instead of the usual allowance for a husky of two raw white fish a
+day, they took lumps of grease frozen solid. Of the gold they took
+mostly dust, because it packed closer than nuggets. This they divided
+into equal shares and poured into moose-hide sacks, which they lashed
+to the bottom of their sleds, with their outfit above.
+
+They clothed themselves warmly for the journey, for already there were
+forty degrees of frost, and this was but November. They put on three
+flannel shirts apiece and one of duffel, and over them a beaded shirt
+of leather. They swathed their feet in duffel, covering them with high
+moccasins, and encased their legs in several wrappings of duffel
+leggins. Their caps were of fur, the hair of which reached down over
+their foreheads, ears, and necks, giving them protection. Over all
+they flung capotes, which extended to their knees and were caught in
+at the waist with a scarlet sash.
+
+Having fed the huskies, Granger returned to the shack, to run through
+his belongings and destroy whatever he did not wish to be found. He
+turned to Spurling, saying, "You'd better lie down now and get a
+little rest."
+
+Spurling blinked at him, and swallowed once or twice, hesitating. Then
+he said, "It's a pleasant meeting that they'll have, with two of us
+absent."
+
+Granger was sorting out old letters, dated years back--things which
+brought memories. He did not pay any attention; perhaps he had not
+heard.
+
+"It's a pleasant meeting that they'll have, I say, with two of us
+absent," Spurling repeated.
+
+"What meeting? I don't understand."
+
+"Why, the meeting you promised them on Christmas Eve--the one you were
+so pressing about."
+
+Granger raised up his head and looked at him. "Don't you be so certain
+of that," he said; "we may not be absent--we may be caught by Eyelids
+and brought back."
+
+Spurling cursed him under his breath.
+
+Granger went on sorting out his papers, burning them or putting them
+aside. Some were from his mother; one was from his father, faded with
+age; and some were from girls whose very names had passed from his
+remembrance. Presently he stopped, and turning round again, with a
+different look in his eyes, handed a page to his companion, saying,
+"Read that."
+
+Spurling laughed harshly and took it. It was in his own handwriting.
+"None of your softness," he said. "I've got long past sentiment."
+
+Granger watched him as he scanned its contents, and saw his face grow
+solemn. It had been written seven years back, before they had left
+England, when both their sympathies were fresher, before their souls
+had grown tarnished. It read: "John, I've just seen the unemployed,
+about four battalions of 'em or from two to three thousand
+men--unemployed, half-clothed, half-fed, and half-men. God! that such
+a sight could be in this world, and here in London; our London,
+wealthy London, the city of luxury and at our own doors. Four
+battalions of men in real want; not a want such as you and I know when
+we run short of our damned tobacco, but a want when the belly is sick
+and empty and has no prospect of being filled--a want of necessities.
+Four battalions of men in want, and how many children and women does
+that represent? God's hooligans, God's scamps, and God's wrecks! '_His
+wrecks_,' how can I write such words. How pitiable are their physical
+conditions, their privation and distress of body! But what of their
+souls, the starvation of their minds? Why, I doubt if they could
+subscribe a respectable soul among the whole four battalions.
+
+"Males who might have been men and of some use in the world, if only
+a finger had shown them the road instead of shoving 'em down into
+wrecks and damnation.
+
+"I can write no more. I must go out and walk about."
+
+Spurling gulped down a sob, and without comment crunched the sheet up
+in his hand, and flung it towards the stove; but it fell short and
+rolled to where Granger was standing. He stooped, picked it up and
+smoothed it out. "I'll put it in my pocket," he said, "to remember
+what we were; we may need the reminder on our journey."
+
+"Damn your softness," Spurling broke out. "I want to forget the past,
+and to live like the beast I am. How could I shoot down even an Indian
+to defend myself, if I were to remember things like that! It's gold
+that's changed me; and now that I've got it I intend, at all costs, to
+win out."
+
+"Yes, it's gold that's changed us," Granger said.
+
+Presently he paused again. "I had intended to keep that to threaten
+you with, but you can have it now," he said.
+
+Spurling rose up from the floor, and coming over to the table took the
+paper from him. It was the warrant for his arrest. His hand shook as
+he read it.
+
+"Granger, how did you get that?" he asked in a low voice. "Was it from
+Strangeways?"
+
+On the spur of the moment, to avoid the direct answering of the
+question and that he might learn the exact truth about something else,
+he drew forth the locket from his breast.
+
+"What's that?" asked Spurling. "Another reminder?"
+
+"Come and look for yourself."
+
+"I don't want to remember, I tell you."
+
+"But this has something to do with the answer to your question."
+
+Spurling came behind and looked over his shoulder carelessly, not
+expecting to see anything which was of much concern. Then he started,
+so violently that the portrait fell from Granger's hand. "My God, it
+_was_ a woman!" he moaned. "A woman! A woman!"
+
+Granger turned upon him, willing to be angry; but he saw that he had
+no need of further revenge. The man's body seemed to have shrunk into
+itself, and to have grown smaller. His lower jaw hung down, giving a
+purposeless expression to the face and mouth. The eyes were vacant and
+stared out on space, focussing nothing. Whatever anger he had had was
+turned to pity as he regarded him. So Spurling had not known that
+Mordaunt was a woman! And the body which was found at Forty-Mile had
+not been clothed in a woman's dress! How Strangeways must be laughing
+out there, alone in the coldness, three feet beneath the snow at the
+bend!
+
+Yet, for all his pity, Granger could not bring himself to touch the
+man--he looked too absorbed in his tragedy. Out of decency he turned
+his back upon him, hurrying his task to an end. Already he had been
+too long about it; they had no time to linger. Peggy's absence might
+have many purposes; when she returned, she might not come
+unaccompanied. Before he made a start, after his night of watching he
+would require rest.
+
+Spurling had drawn away from him and was huddled in a corner,
+whispering to himself. He must say and do something to brace him up,
+and show to him that in his eyes he was still a man. If he didn't
+recover quickly, they would have to postpone their journey. He was a
+fool to have shown him that.
+
+The last of the papers had been burned; he tied the few which he had
+preserved into a little bundle, and thrust them in his breast. Going
+over to Spurling, he laid his hand on his shoulder and said, "Druce,
+old fellow, I'm very tired. I want to take an hour's sleep before we
+set out. You'd best watch and see that nothing happens. In two hours
+it'll be sunset; wake me before then."
+
+He raised up his haggard face and nodded, but he did not look at him
+squarely. Granger, having made up the fire, laid himself down.
+
+When he awoke, he found that the room was in darkness; it must have
+been night for several hours. It was the coldness which had aroused
+him, for the fire had gone out.
+
+He supposed that Spurling must be sleeping, so he called to him,
+"Spurling, Spurling, are you there?"
+
+There was no answer. He listened for his breathing, but could hear
+nothing. Getting upon his feet as swiftly as the stiffness of his
+muscles would allow, he groped his way over to the corner where he had
+last seen him. He was not there. Then he lit the lamp, and saw that
+the room was empty.
+
+His first thought was that, in his despair, he had gone outside and
+shot himself. Recalling his uncanny horror of the bend, he fancied
+that he could trace madness in all his recent actions; but then he
+remembered that his fear of the bend had been shared. He became
+possessed of a new and more personal dread. What if in giving him the
+warrant and showing him the portrait, he had told him too much--more
+than his courage and honesty could bear? He rushed to the door of the
+shack, and out to where the sleds and huskies had been left. One of
+the sleds was gone; his own outfit lay scattered on the snow and the
+gold had been taken. But he made a yet worse discovery, for of the
+eight huskies, only two remained; Spurling's four gray dogs and the
+two best of his own team were missing. He looked wildly round on the
+great emptiness. The night pressed down on the earth, as though to
+imprison it; the forest closed in on the river, menacing and silent;
+and the river ran on, a level, untravelled roadway, from the west. He
+shouted, and cursed, and called down God's vengeance on Spurling.
+Then, for a moment he was quiet, and heard his own voice coming back
+to him as an echo from the bend. His voice had tried to escape and was
+returning to him because it could find no way out.
+
+Crazily turning his face down-river, he shouted, "Hey, Strangeways,
+may God damn Spurling."
+
+Muffled, as if the dead man were answering him from underground, the
+cry came back, "Hey, Strangeways, may God damn Spurling."
+
+He covered his face with his hands and sat down in the snow laughing.
+It was all a cruel jest. "Oh, the hypocrite! The hypocrite!" he
+shrieked. "He came here hunted and I helped him with my life. He has
+taken everything, and given me death."
+
+Through his head ran maddeningly the scraps of the conversation he had
+had with Peggy: "I'll strike for the south, and, when the hunt is
+over, I'll send you word where you can join me." "You never will do
+that." "And why not?" "Because you will be dead."
+
+On all his thought, as if she were sitting at his side, her voice
+broke in persistently, drearily and low-pitched reiterating, "Because
+you will be dead. Because you will be dead."
+
+A hard look came into his eyes; he ceased from his laughing and
+whispering. Turning to the quarter behind his back from which he had
+seemed to hear her speaking last, he said quietly, "But I shan't be
+dead."
+
+Then he rose up and entered the shack.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE MURDER IN THE SKY
+
+
+However lightly he travels and however hard the snow may have packed,
+a man who has only two huskies and is handicapped by a body just
+recovered from sickness does not make much speed in winter travelling.
+
+Through the long hours of the dreary November night Granger, with
+hard, set face, had pushed on up the Last Chance River, towards God's
+Voice, following in Spurling's tracks. It was the gold that he
+desired. And if he recaptured it, what then? He was not capable of
+carrying it out to Winnipeg by himself. He knew that his pursuit was
+madness; he had nothing to gain by it but revenge. He was hardly
+likely to gain even that, for the man in front of him had three dogs
+to his one, fuller rations, and a start of several hours; he could
+only hope to overtake him by the happening of some accident.
+
+Yet he knew that he would overtake him, for he felt, beyond reach of
+argument, that Spurling was fated to die by his hand. Both of them had
+striven to avoid it; once he himself had fled that he might not commit
+the crime, and Spurling was now trying to escape that it might not
+come about. No matter what they did, it must happen. Though God should
+"advance a terrible right arm," and pluck them apart, and fling them
+to the opposite extremes of the world, they would surely travel and
+travel, perhaps involuntarily, till they came again together. It would
+have been far better if he had not been interfered with at the
+Shallows and had been permitted to accomplish his enmity there--so,
+more than three years of futile suffering might have been spared and
+Mordaunt would be still alive.
+
+He was hardly conscious of any anger; his was the unreasoned
+relentless instinct of the pursuing hound. He was savage justice and
+the law of self-preservation personified. He was the will of destiny
+decreeing that Spurling should not reach El Dorado alive.
+
+The dogs struggled on uncomplainingly; this was their first trip of
+the season and they were still comparatively fresh, though the man was
+tired. To the eastward the crescent of a faint old moon hung low in
+the sky. As Granger ran, he turned his head and, watching it, was
+thankful to see that at last the tardy dawn had begun to spread. Over
+the withered stretch of woodland to his right the Aurora swept between
+the stars, like an extinguishing angel, who caused them to flicker
+and, as he beat his wings about them, one by one to go out.
+
+It was a morning of bitter coldness. As the breath left his nostrils,
+he could almost see it congeal and fall to the ground, a filmy sheet
+of ice. The heads of the huskies were clouded with smoke, so that they
+seemed to be on fire as they panted forward dragging on the traces.
+
+The tracks, which he was following, now branched off to the left, and,
+mounting the river-bank, entered into a little hollow at the edge of
+the forest. Here, about the base of a tree, the snow had been recently
+trampled and a fire smouldered. It was Spurling's first camp.
+Granger, having unharnessed and fed his huskies, taking his axe from
+his girdle, cut down a sapling fir and roused the dying embers to a
+blaze. The flames shot up, and, climbing the bark of the tree,
+crackled among the branches overhead. Unpacking his tallow he melted
+it in a cup. Before it was all drunk, the surface was frozen solid.
+Then, lest his muscles should stiffen, he set out again.
+
+The air was full of minute particles of snow, like frozen dew, which
+caused the whole atmosphere, as far as eye could reach, to sparkle in
+the sunshine. The sky was greenish grey and without a cloud. The
+stillness of the world was magical; in the miles of landscape which
+were visible, nothing stirred. The snapping of a twig sounded like the
+crashing ruin of a forest giant. The gliding of the sled across the
+snow, and the padding footsteps of the huskies, thundered down the
+tunnel of the river through the pines like the galloping of heavy
+artillery over gravel. When, at rare intervals, the river cracked,
+perhaps four or five miles away, it reverberated through the
+tree-tops, causing their burden of snow to tremble and glisten, like
+the report of neighbouring cannon. Every whisper was exaggerated to a
+shout, so that the ears were deafened and longed for quiet--quiet
+which, unlike silence, consisted of a multitude of small sounds
+singing, almost inaudibly, together.
+
+Shortly after noon the light faded, and the blinding whiteness was
+converted into iron grey. Over to the westward the sun was hidden, and
+the horizon became threatening with a leaden bank of cloud. The
+temperature sank lower and the twilight was obliterated; night rushed
+down.
+
+The dogs were now thoroughly worn out; only by continual lashing
+could he keep them to their work. The roughness of the ice had mangled
+their feet; they marked out the trail which they traversed with
+crimson dots of blood. He had hoped to reach Spurling's next
+camping-place before making another halt; but his rate of travelling
+had grown slower, and already the advantage of Spurling's four
+additional huskies was beginning to tell. At last his dogs lay down in
+their traces and refused to budge. He knew that he could force them to
+go no further.
+
+Using the sled as a shovel, he dug out a hollow, throwing up a
+circular mount to protect him from the wind, should it arise.
+Searching along the river-bank, he collected wood for a fire,
+sufficient to last him till morning. He set up his sled on end, like a
+tombstone, for a head rest, and lay himself down with his feet toward
+the blaze. The dogs gathered round him shivering, lying one on either
+side, striving to share the warmth of his body. He beat them off at
+first, but they always crept back; so at last, becoming languidly
+sorry for them, he let them stop there.
+
+He was terribly tired; his bones felt like bars of red-hot iron
+scorching their way through his flesh. The hardness of the ice beneath
+the snow surface had racked his body in every joint. Every now and
+then he would get up and throw some wood on the fire, and lie down
+again, pulling his blanket over his head, folding his arms tightly
+across his chest, and gathering his knees up close to his body to
+conserve whatever heat he had. Though his body slept, never for a
+second did his brain lose consciousness of the cold and of the sense
+of travel. Always he seemed to be pressing on, doggedly, wearily, with
+the forest rushing past him on either hand. Spurling was in sight;
+sometimes he would halt, and jeeringly beckon to him. When he had come
+within speaking distance of him, he would start off again, leaving a
+narrow track of gold behind, for one of the sacks had burst.
+
+Gradually the most fatal feeling that any man can experience in
+northland travel stole upon him--_he felt that he did not care_. If
+the fire went out, what matter? He would not get up to relight it. If
+Spurling were standing at his side, he would not disturb himself to
+look at him. If Mordaunt were to come to him, well, he might perhaps
+turn round to look at her.
+
+He began to dream of her as he had seen her in the locket. They were
+both back in the old homeland. He was talking with her in an English
+garden and a thrush was singing overhead. How long it was since he had
+listened to the song of any bird! Why, he had almost forgotten that
+there was such an ecstasy in the world. So exalted was he, that he
+paid more attention to the thrush's song than to the words which
+Mordaunt said. Then she grew angry and shook him; but he sat there
+motionless, looking up into the branches of the tree, away from her,
+watching the sun through the greenness of the leaves, and the
+quivering throat of the bird. She rose up and left him in indignation;
+then darkness fell. He tried to follow her, but had no power to move
+himself. He tried to cry out, but his tongue was joined to the roof of
+his mouth. Making a great effort, he came to himself.
+
+When he pushed up his arms to throw off his covering, they seemed to
+be lifting a weight of surpassing heaviness. He sat upright and tried
+to open his eyes; he was blind--he could see nothing. He groped to
+feel his eyeballs with his hands; but his fingers were frozen--they
+could feel nothing. He rose to his feet in panic and stood there
+swaying, as though he had been set upon a dizzy pedestal which had
+grown to be part of himself, so that he could not move, but could only
+bend.
+
+"I must keep quiet," he told himself; "I must keep quiet. If I get
+frightened, I shall wander away to my death."
+
+When he tried to step forward his feet clapped together like solid
+blocks of ice. Very distantly, it seemed to him, he could make out a
+little glow of red and feel a breath of warmness. Going down on his
+hands and knees, he crawled towards it. It was coming to meet him;
+they had met. He lay down beside the redness and his panic left him.
+
+Then he became conscious that it was hurting him and he commenced to
+hate it. In struggling to get away from it, he found that he could
+move more freely. Sensation had come into his hands; raising them he
+felt his eyes. His great terror was not of death, but that he should
+be forever sightless. He ran his fingers across his eyes and found
+that they were covered with flesh--that his eyelids were frozen
+together. With his two hands he forced them apart, and gazed about
+him. Wherever he looked there was endless space with nothing to deter
+him, stretching away on every side. The moon, in her last quarter, was
+barely visible--a mere shadow of silver in the sky; so indistinct was
+his vision, that it seemed to him as though he were looking at the
+image of the firmament reflected in water, rather than at the stars
+themselves. Yet, in the certain renewal of his sight, there came to
+him a gladness which he had not known for many a day.
+
+When he turned toward the fire, he perceived the cause of his mishap:
+he had overslept himself and it was nearly out. By the way in which it
+was scattered abroad and the smouldering of the fur which was about
+his throat and arms, he guessed that in his blindness and instinctive
+desire for warmth, he had thrown himself upon its ashes. Having
+gathered what remained of it together, he flung on more fuel and set
+to work to chafe his extremities, restoring circulation. He was too
+chilled to think of attempting sleep again that night: so, when his
+limbs were sufficiently thawed out, he renewed his journey.
+
+The atmosphere was wonderfully clear, but there was in the air a sense
+of evil and foreboding. Even the dogs seemed to be aware of it, for as
+they ran, turning their heads from side to side to see which way the
+whip was coming that they might dodge it, there was a look of
+foreknowledge and terror in their eyes which warned Granger.
+
+As the dawn was spreading, he was startled by a long-drawn sigh, which
+travelled from horizon to horizon and died out. The dogs heard it, and
+sitting down abruptly in their tracks nearly overturned the sled.
+Gazing away to the northward, he saw a shadowy cloud arise, whirl and
+drift languidly over the tree-tops and fall back again out of sight.
+He lashed at the huskies, and with difficulty set them going. But the
+sled drew heavily, as though it were being dragged through sand, for
+the snow was gritty as the seashore: so intense was the cold that all
+slipperiness had gone out of it. He fastened a line to the load and
+went on ahead, breaking the trail and hauling with all his strength.
+
+Before long the sigh was heard again; but this time it came nearer,
+and columns of white smoke rose up and danced in the river-bed. Then
+he knew that he was in for a _poudre_ day--the day which of all others
+the winter voyageur holds in most dread. While such weather lasts,
+even the hardiest traveller will refuse to leave his fire; for he
+knows that before long every land-mark will be blotted out, that his
+very dogs will refuse to obey him, and that to-morrow, when the wind
+has dropped and the snow has settled, the chances are that the sun
+will find him with a quiet face turned upward to the sky, immobile and
+statuesque as if carved from Parian marble.
+
+Leaving Spurling's trail, he ascended the bank and worked along by the
+forest's edge, that so he might gain shelter. With every fresh puff of
+breath from the north, the coiling snakes of snow grew larger,
+writhing across the tree-tops and pouring tumultuously into the
+river-bed, where they rioted and fought till the day grew dark and it
+was difficult to see the next step. Respiration became painful, but
+Granger was determined not to halt, for this was one of the accidents
+which would help him to come up with Spurling. Feeling his way from
+tree to tree, he struggled on. His head became dizzy with the effort.
+His body, for all its coldness, broke out into a chilly sweat. He was
+invaded by a terrible inertia, so that he was half-minded to lie down
+and go to sleep; but the thought that Spurling had halted somewhere,
+perhaps only twenty miles ahead, and was losing time, drew him on.
+Presently his dogs sat down again, lifting their voices above the
+storm in a dismal wailing.
+
+He cut their traces and went forward, dragging the sled himself. They
+followed him a few paces behind, slinking through the darkness with
+their heads down and their tails between their legs. They reminded him
+of the timber-wolf on the Forbidden River; there were times when,
+catching a partial glimpse of them, he could have sworn that they had
+been joined by a third.
+
+By midday the wind died down, the atmosphere began to clear and the
+snow to settle. Returning to the river he sought in vain for
+Spurling's tracks; either he had passed him in the blackness or they
+had been obliterated. He would know the truth in the next six hours
+for, if he were still ahead, he would come to his abandoned camp.
+
+Towards sunset he halted and lit a fire; he intended to travel through
+the night and was in need of rest. He had fed his huskies and was
+stooping above the flames, cooking himself some bacon, when he raised
+his eyes to the west. For a minute he crouched, gazing with the
+fascination of horror at what he saw taking place apparently not more
+than fifty yards away, but with such clearness that it might not have
+been more than ten paces. Where ten seconds before there had been
+nothing in view but the straight length of river and the snow-capped
+forest, dripping with icicles, there was now, hanging above the trees
+face-downwards, anchored to the sky by crimson threads, the inverted
+image of a portage, leading up from the right-hand bank of a river,
+hedged in on either side with a row of crosses which marked graves of
+bygone voyageurs. Midway in the path was a little cabin, which had
+been set up for the shelter of bestormed travellers by employees of
+the Hudson Bay. Granger recognised the place; it was Dead Rat Portage,
+and must be at least fifteen miles from where he was now standing and
+ten from God's Voice.
+
+Out of the cabin, on his hands and knees, crawled a man. He was
+evidently badly frost-bitten, for he tried to drag himself upright by
+the door-post, but failed miserably, falling forward along the ground.
+As he lay there, he turned toward Granger a face which was
+expressionless as if it had been covered with a mask of waxen leprosy;
+it was frozen solid, as were his feet and hands. Granger knew, more by
+the clothes than the ghastly features, that the man was Spurling.
+
+He seemed now to have given up hope of standing erect, and began to
+move painfully on all fours across the snow to where a log of rotten
+wood was lying. Having reached it, he tried to raise it, but there was
+not the strength in his hands. He tried to fasten his teeth upon it,
+to drag it back with him; but his jaws seemed paralysed. Then he crept
+back to the cabin.
+
+Soon he came out again, and, having reached the log, commenced to
+light it with a match. At first it refused to ignite, but when he had
+pushed some broken twigs under it, it burst into flame. He bent over
+it hungrily, drawing so near that Granger expected to see his clothing
+catch fire.
+
+Then, as he watched, he saw a second figure. It was that of a man,
+dressed precisely as he himself was dressed, and his back was turned
+towards him so that he could not discern his face; he carried in his
+hand an axe. He moved stealthily on snowshoes, dodging from tree to
+tree, lest he should be discovered by the crouching man. His intention
+was so evidently evil, that Granger cried out a warning to save
+Spurling. Murder, when watched in this way, was so brutal that, though
+he himself had planned to do the deed, his whole moral nature
+revolted against it now. He cried again, but his warning was not
+heard. He wished that the man with the axe would turn his head, that
+he might see his face.
+
+A horrible, grotesque suspicion was growing up within him; he fancied
+that he knew the man--that he had seen him before in the Klondike,
+_that he was himself_. Spurling, quite unaware of his danger, was
+holding out his hands to the flames; it was not until the man was
+close behind him that be heard his footsteps and turned his head. His
+face was frozen; the frost had bound him hand and foot, making him
+defenceless, so that he could hardly stir; the only means of appeal he
+had was the expression in his eyes.
+
+Granger thought that he saw that expression--the cornered soul
+gesticulating, shrieking for mercy from the living eyes in the
+half-dead face. When the murderer raised his axe, he saw the soul's
+pitiful cowardice and how it shrank. The axe came crashing down. There
+was no need to strike twice; he fell limply backward, throwing his
+arms out wide--and there was an end of El Dorado and of all his dreams
+of avarice.
+
+The murderer, as if suddenly afraid of his own handiwork, without
+turning his head, hurried on across the portage through the forest,
+and was quickly lost to sight.
+
+Scenting the blood, the four gray huskies, one by one, came out from
+the cabin, where they seemed to have been asleep, and the others
+followed them. They came slowly over to where their tyrant was lying,
+and sniffed his body. They did it cautiously, for as yet they had not
+lost their fear of him; he might awake and belabour them for
+disturbing his last long rest.
+
+In falling his legs had shot from under him into the fire, scattering
+the embers, so he lay full length, with the red gash in his forehead,
+his arms spread out like a cross, and his face, in the inverted image,
+turned earthwards, gazing down on Granger and the Last Chance River
+with startled, unseeing eyes.
+
+The mirage began to fade and float cloudwards, drifting up-river above
+the tree-tops higher and higher, till it vanished in the west.
+
+Of all that he had witnessed Granger had heard no sound--there lay the
+chief terror of it. Like the handwriting on the wall in Babylon, it
+had taken place in silence. The crime which he had so often
+contemplated, and planned, had been transacted before his eyes; the
+person who had done the deed had kept his back turned toward him, but
+in his attire was strangely like himself--and instead of being
+gratified he was filled with loathing and hatred for the slayer.
+
+In the person of another he had seen the vileness which he had been
+seeking for himself, and was horrified. He knew that, had he had his
+chance, he might have taken Spurling's life in just some such way as
+that--he had imagined how he would do it many times. And now that it
+was accomplished, he was sick with pity for the murdered man.
+
+To one thing he had instantly made up his mind, that, if this should
+prove to be more than a fancy of delirium--the miraged portrayal of a
+villainy which had actually occurred--he would track the assassin as
+he had tracked Spurling, till the last ounce of his strength failed
+him, that Spurling might be avenged. Perhaps, in the avenging he hoped
+to clear himself in his own sight of his imagined share in the crime.
+
+He felt as though the deed had been the result of his own projected
+hatred, and that he himself was the real murderer. When he remembered
+the appearance of the man whom he now followed, it seemed like going
+in pursuit of his own self.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE BLIZZARD
+
+
+Now that he was nearing God's Voice, it was necessary that he should
+travel more cautiously and keep a sharp lookout ahead. At any moment
+he might come in sight of a Company's trapper, either sitting beneath
+the trees by his camp-fire or racing down-river between the tall
+banks, following his sled. He might be recognised, and recognition
+would lead to his arrest. Whatever happened afterwards, he desired his
+freedom for yet a little while, so he went carefully. In the course of
+the night he passed by one wigwam; but the Indian was evidently away,
+for no dog rose up to herald his approach. If the squaw was there, she
+did not rouse; he got by unnoticed.
+
+Hoping against hope, he argued with himself, trying to believe that
+Spurling was alive. He told himself that this had been a vision sent
+to him from God to turn him aside from his crime. He had gazed upon
+himself as he would have become, and his soul had revolted at the
+sight.
+
+As he ran on, swearing at his huskies, urging them forward with the
+lash, he offered up to God many fervid thanks for the mercy which He
+had shown him, hoping that by these means, even though the calamity
+had happened, he might shame his Maker by his gratitude into putting
+back the hands of time, and so restoring the murdered man to life. At
+last by the constant reiteration of the thing which he desired, he
+began to take it for granted that his prayer was answered. Spurling
+was not dead; he was alive, and he was going to ask his forgiveness
+for the evil which he had thought against him.
+
+He put together the words which he would say to him when they met, and
+the gestures he would use to make his words convincing. He repeated
+them over many times that he might retain them in his memory. Then
+something would happen to take his attention away, one of the dogs
+would be shirking or the sled would have overturned, and, when he came
+back to the words which he had planned, he would be thrown into a
+frenzy, finding that they had slipped his mind.
+
+Though he was desperately in earnest over this game at which he
+played, he was aware all the while of its unreality--that it was but a
+game. His sanity warned him that what he had seen had truly happened,
+and that the man was dead. This was not the first occasion upon which
+he had seen a mirage when the snow was down and the land was white.
+There had been times before, when, at the moment of daybreak or
+sunset, he had witnessed strange freaks of inverted forest and river
+hovering in the sky. Once he had seen an Indian ten miles away,
+attacking a wolf which had been caught by the leg in a steel trap,
+belonging to another man. So distinctly had he seen his features and
+dress that, at a later day, when he had brought in his winter catch of
+furs to exchange, he had recognised him; and when he had offered him
+the wolf-skin, had accused him of the theft. Moreover, he knew that,
+whether the sight which he had witnessed was mirage or fancy, he did
+not deserve the leniency for which he prayed. He had had his chance
+and warning three times already: once in the Klondike; once after the
+arrival of Spurling, when God wrote upon the ice; and once at the
+bend, when in the company of Père Antoine he had mistaken the body of
+Strangeways for that of Spurling.
+
+Then there was the appearance of the murderer to be accounted for, and
+his motive in slaying. He had been smaller in stature than himself, as
+had been the creature at the Shallows, but he had had the same
+peculiarities of clothing and was very much alike. Yet he strove to
+drive down all his doubts and to believe the thing which he
+desired--that the phenomenon was the result of imagination, and that
+Spurling was not dead.
+
+He made small progress in his travelling, for his body was worn out by
+previous hardships. Sometimes he took over two hours to go three
+miles; it was long past midnight when Dead Rat Portage came in sight.
+
+At this point the river made a large curve to the southward and
+broadened out into rapids; the portage was eight hundred yards in
+length and saved voyageurs six miles, crossing the neck of land by a
+narrow trail and picking up the Last Chance River on the other side.
+In summer time the York boats were unloaded here, and dragged across
+on rollers, the freight being carried on men's backs. As he drew near,
+his hope sank; the place looked so gloomy and forbidding. There were
+stories told about it and of how it had won its name, which might well
+make any man afraid. An old fort, established by the French at the
+time when they disputed the possession of Keewatin with Prince
+Rupert's Company, had once stood there; it was said that some of the
+crosses which fringed the trail marked spots where its defenders lay
+buried. However, it was not the memory of the past, but the knowledge
+of what might now await him, which caused him to hesitate.
+
+On the river's bank, where the portage commenced, was a cleared space,
+from which a path led round the cabin and tunnelled into the forest.
+As he eased his sled out of the river-bed, he caught the smell of
+burning, and, when he had topped the bank, he saw the glow of an
+almost extinguished fire. The overhanging trees, casting their network
+of shadows across the snow, prevented him from distinguishing at that
+distance any object that lay beneath them. While he halted, half
+inclined to wait till daybreak before proceeding further with his
+investigation, he was startled by the sound of footsteps. They came
+toward him very cautiously and there were many of them. He saw the
+glint of eyes in the darkness, shining out and disappearing among the
+crosses. He tried to count them; as far as he could make out there
+were six pairs. Then he called them softly by name, and there came
+toward him Spurling's four grey huskies and the two of his own team,
+which had been taken.
+
+And still he clung desperately to his hope and would not allow himself
+to believe that in the shadow of the trees, a dozen yards from where
+he was standing, the man whom he had set out to kill was lying
+murdered. He whispered his name, not daring to speak louder. When no
+answer was returned, he rallied his retreating faith by saying, "He is
+sleeping. I must approach him gently. If he awakes and hears me, he
+may think I am his enemy and escape me."
+
+Leaving his dogs, he stole toward the sparks of fire. Although he
+still denied the mirage, telling himself that what he had seen was
+fancied, he directed his steps by that which he had witnessed in the
+sky.
+
+Drawing nearer, he made out the smouldering log; cowardice prompted
+him to procrastinate, he crept round behind it. The air was heavy with
+the smell of scorching leather. His eyes growing more accustomed to
+the shadow, he saw the figure of a man, lying on the snow with his
+arms stretched out in the shape of a cross and his moccasined feet
+protruding above the glowing ashes. The last vestige of hope left him;
+he knew that Spurling was dead. With certainty, his power of decision
+returned; he still had a purpose to live for--to avenge this death.
+
+Having pulled the body aside and heaped branches against the log, he
+rekindled the fire. In the light which it cast he could see the
+blurred trail of Spurling, where he had crawled to and from the cabin;
+also he could see the tracks which the slayer's snowshoes had left as
+he strode away through the forest following the portage. He stooped
+and examined them. By so doing he learnt a new fact--that the man who
+had done the deed was of Indian blood, for the toes of his footprints
+inclined to turn inwards, and in carrying his feet forward he had kept
+them closer together than does a white man; also he judged that he was
+lightly built, for the snow beneath his steps was not much crushed.
+
+So Beorn was not the culprit, nor was his phantom-self from the
+Klondike. He thought of Eyelids; but Eyelids was a tall man and his
+stride ought to have been longer. That which he had witnessed in the
+mirage led him to believe that the act had been premeditated, and
+therefore had some strong motive; either it had been done for the
+reward or for the sake of theft.
+
+He looked round for Spurling's sled and found it in the cabin; it was
+still loaded--the gold had not been touched. He was puzzled. If theft
+was not the object, why had the body been left? Without its production
+or some part of it that was recognisable, the thousand dollars would
+not be awarded. The best way to solve the mystery was to follow up the
+murderer; and, if he were to do that, there was no time to lose.
+
+Dragging the remains into the cabin, he made fast the door, that the
+wolves might not destroy them; he would care for them on his homeward
+journey--if he survived to come back. Harnessing the four grey huskies
+into his sled, since they were the freshest, he set out across the
+portage. Turning his head, as he entered the forest, he took one last
+look at the deserted camp. The fire, burning brightly, with no one to
+sit by it, added the final touch to the general aspect of melancholy.
+Wailing through the darkness the huskies wandered; and in the
+background, when the flames shot up, appeared the crosses, bending one
+toward another, which marked the sleeping-places of men who, years
+since, had lived and suffered, and obtained their rest.
+
+Beneath the trees, the gloom was so heavy that he could see nothing;
+but on coming out on to the banks of the river on the other side he
+again picked up the murderer's trail. It led up the Last Chance in a
+south-westerly direction towards God's Voice, which was only ten miles
+distant. He had begun to take it for granted that the man was a Hudson
+Bay employee, hurrying toward the fort to claim the reward, when the
+tracks, branching off to the left, climbed out of the river and
+plunged into a low-lying, thickly wooded wilderness, striking due
+south.
+
+In Keewatin the rivers are the only highways; to leave them even in
+summer time, if you have no guide and are not a man born in the
+district, is extremely dangerous; to do so in winter when, after every
+precaution has been taken, travel remains precarious, is to court
+almost certain death. For a moment Granger hesitated. He examined the
+prints of the snowshoes and saw that they were very recent. The man
+must have waited somewhere, and seen him coming. He must know now that
+he was being followed, and could not be far ahead. "Well, it's death
+whatever happens," thought Granger; "to go on to God's Voice is death;
+to return to Murder Point is death. I'd just as soon die by this man's
+hand, trying to avenge Spurling, as one cold morning in Winnipeg with
+a rope about my neck."
+
+The day rose late and cloudy. The sun did not show itself. The sky
+weighed down upon the tree-tops, as if too heavy to support itself.
+Presently large flakes of snow, the size of feathers, drifted through
+the air, making a gentle rustling as they fell. Granger pressed on
+more hurriedly, for he feared that, if he dropped too far behind, the
+snow would cover up all traces of the man, and so he would escape him.
+Sometimes he fancied that he could hear him going on ahead, for every
+now and then a twig would snap. In the heat of his pursuit he took no
+account of direction.
+
+About midday he halted; of late all sounds had grown rarer and the
+snow had thickened, causing even his own footprints to appear blurred
+a few seconds after they had been made. Of the trail which he
+followed he could see nothing himself, trusting to his huskies' sense
+of smell to lead him aright.
+
+Soon he grew strangely nervous, for he thought that he heard the
+crunch of snowshoes coming up behind. He persuaded himself that it was
+imagination, until his dogs, swinging round in a half-circle, began to
+travel back in a direction parallel to the route they had already
+traversed. He paused and listened again; behind him he could
+distinctly hear the sound of something stirring. Then he knew that he
+was no longer the pursuer.
+
+His blood froze in his veins, and he began to lose confidence. He
+realised that if the murderer knew the district and was moving in a
+circle purposely, he was doing so in order that he might lure him to
+his death. Abandoning all thought of pursuit, his sole endeavour
+became to regain the river-bed. He lashed his dogs, urging them
+forward to the limit of their strength; but he came to nothing that
+was familiar; and, when he paused for breath, he could always hear the
+snowshoes following.
+
+Then he awoke to the knowledge that he was lost. His first sensation
+was of blank bewilderment, producing in him an utter loss of memory.
+He strove to quiet himself, but his will-power refused to operate. Who
+he was, and why he was there, he could not remember; of two things
+only was he conscious, that he was pursued by something that was evil,
+and that he was lost.
+
+A state of chaos reigned within him, which was soon succeeded by an
+all-pervading terror. He must escape somehow to safety, to a place
+where there were men. He longed to dash on somewhere, on and on; but
+he was paralysed by his utter inability to think consecutively or to
+choose out any particular direction. He began to see horrible
+contorted shapes about him, and to imagine modes of death which were
+still more horrible. He might die of starvation, he might die of
+thirst, he might die of frost; but his worst fear was of something
+which he would never see, which would steal softly up, when he was too
+cold to turn his head, and strike him from behind. He circled round
+and round to avoid the blow; but he felt that, as he moved, the thing
+moved keeping pace with him, so that, for all his alertness, it was
+always behind his back.
+
+In a way in which he had never desired it before, he longed for human
+companionship--just to look once more upon a living face. And to all
+these fears and yearnings there was the undertow of an added
+horror--the terror lest he should become insane. He burst into a
+passion of weeping; as the tears fell they froze upon his face. The
+air was thick with snow which the rising wind drifted about, driving
+it into curious and fantastic shapes. Had he been more quiet, he would
+have known that his only wise plan was to lie down until the blizzard
+was past. It would bury him, but as a covering it would act as a
+blanket to keep him warm. The blizzard seemed to him to be hemming him
+in, building up about him a shifting wall through which the pursuer
+could attack him unseen.
+
+Always he was conscious of the pursuer's presence; always he could see
+the picture of Spurling's uplifted face and the pleading that was in
+his eyes as the assailant, with his back turned towards the onlooker,
+poised the axe above his head. That he might not share that fate he
+broke away into the greyness, tripping over snow ridges, falling into
+drifts, and bruising his body against the trunks of trees in the
+madness of his flight. His huskies added to his panic by following
+him.
+
+There were times when he ran so far ahead that he could neither see
+nor hear them; but, when he halted, panting, they would emerge and lay
+themselves down at his side. He hated them; they were sinister in his
+eyes. Had they not brought Spurling from Winnipeg, and had not their
+yellow-faced leader been the cause of Strangeways' death?
+
+The wind, rising higher, shrieked among the branches. He wandered on,
+neither knowing nor caring where he went, for he had lost all sense of
+locality or time. There were intervals during which he must have
+dreamed and slept, for he passed down an endless street of tall
+houses, built in the English fashion, and the blinds were up and it
+was nightfall. On the windows danced the light of fires, burning on
+the hearths inside; and sometimes he could see the faces of children
+looking out at him. He held up his blue hands at them, making signs
+that they should let him in that he might warm himself; but they shook
+their heads mischievously, and ran away and laughed.
+
+After one of these experiences, more real to him than the others, he
+came to himself. Surely that was the sound of music and dancing that
+came to him above the cry of the storm. He waited for a lull and
+listened, then followed the direction of the sound. As he drew nearer,
+he caught the thud of moccasined feet beating time upon a boarded
+floor, and snatches of the tune which the violin was playing.
+Something loomed up out of the darkness to meet him. He held out his
+hands to force it from him, and drove them against a door. Then he
+knew that he had arrived at God's Voice.
+
+He was half inclined to knock; at least they would not threaten him
+and drive him away this time as they had done in the previous winter.
+What was more likely to happen was that the man who opened to him,
+recognising him, would seize him by the throat, drag him inside and
+quickly slam the door. He would push him before him across the square
+till he came to the room where the trappers were dancing, where, in
+all probability, the factor was. And Robert Pilgrim when he saw him,
+wagging his red beard at him, would shout, "Ha, so you heard me
+whistle, and have come like a dog!"
+
+He drew himself upright and stepped back from the gateway. No, he
+could not endure that. Any death was preferable to the price that he
+would have to pay for such shelter.
+
+He worked his way along the wall till he stood beneath the window
+where the fort was assembled. It was a comfort to him to hear again
+the sound of voices. He listened to the fiddling and recognised it as
+that of Sandy McQuean, the half-breed son of a famous Orkney man. He
+had learnt his art from his father. They were all Scotch airs that he
+played. He could sing, when he chose, with a Highland accent, and had
+caught the knack of imbuing what he sang with an intolerable pathos.
+
+The stamping of feet had ceased, but the violinist wandered on.
+Presently a new melody began to emerge from the improvisations, and a
+man's voice rose above the storm. The words he sang were _The Flowers
+o' the Forest_:
+
+      "I've seen the smiling
+      Of fortune beguiling;
+    I've felt all its favours, and found its decay;
+      Sweet was its blessing,
+      Kind its caressing;
+    But now 'tis fled--fled far away."
+
+Granger shifted his feet uneasily as he listened, and half-turned to
+go.
+
+As he did so, he found that someone was standing close behind him. He
+did not see his face, but one glance was enough to warn him. He dodged
+and ran to the river. The man was following him again. He took the
+direction which was open to him, and set out down-stream, returning to
+the portage.
+
+The wind was dead against him, blinding his eyes and choking him with
+snow. He bowed his head and struggled on. He made a brave effort, but
+he knew that he was slowly freezing. His flesh was icy and his bones
+seemed heavy, weighing him down. The blood halted, and leapt forward,
+and halted in his veins and arteries, as though there were frequent
+stoppages past which it had to squeeze its way; he could hear it
+surging.
+
+Gradually his physical pain grew less and, as it did so, his mind
+attained an unwonted clearness. He had somewhat the same experience as
+is said to come to drowning men in their last moments of
+consciousness. He was able to review his life as a whole and justly,
+attributing to each separate action its proper importance, and share
+of praise or blame. He realised that his hiding from Robert Pilgrim on
+Huskies' Island, journey to the Forbidden River, and pursuit of
+Spurling, had been one long series of mistakes, each one tending to
+make him appear more guilty of Strangeways' death. He owned that all
+his life had been spent in avoiding his most obvious duties, and in
+setting himself hard tasks in exchange, which were impossible of
+accomplishment. His first duty had been towards his mother, and he had
+abandoned it nominally for the sake of a childish pledge, really for
+the glamour of El Dorado. His more recent duty had been to fulfil his
+obligations to his half-breed wife, especially now that she was about
+to bear him a child; he had forsaken her for his old dream's sake and
+for the sake of a revenge which he had persuaded himself was noble.
+
+Reviewing these facts, he promised himself that, if ever he were given
+again the power of choice, he would return to Murder Point and live
+for her. Another matter became clear in his mind; that, when
+Spurling's body was discovered, if the man who had done the deed did
+not own up, he would be accused of the murder--and it _would_ be
+murder, for it would be thought that he had killed him not in the
+cause of justice, but out of private spite. Morally he knew that he
+was the culprit and deserved to be hanged, for he had only avoided
+being guilty through the accident of having been forestalled in his
+crime.
+
+He stumbled and fell full length in a drift. He did not try to rise.
+He had no fear of dying; his only desire was to get warm now. He
+pressed nearer to the snow and closed his eyes, and gradually lost
+consciousness.
+
+He was awakened by someone rubbing his face vigorously. He resented
+the interference; he wanted the rest. Once he opened his eyes, and was
+blinded by a roaring fire. As the warmth spread through him and his
+circulation returned, his body became very painful, as though it were
+being pierced by millions of red-hot needles. The agony of it brought
+him to himself.
+
+A man was bending over him, whose face he could not see, for the hood
+was fastened before it, leaving only his eyes visible. By his dress he
+knew that he was his pursuer and Spurling's slayer. Again he was
+impressed with the fancy, not so much by his proportions which were
+smaller, but by his clothing, that he was very like himself. Languidly
+he awaited an opportunity to get another glimpse of his eyes; somehow
+they were familiar, he knew them. Then, because the man, murderer
+though he was, was saving his life, he turned away his head. He would
+not see anything which, in a weaker moment, might tempt him to give
+information in order that he might save himself.
+
+The man, seeing that he was recovered and safe to be left, without a
+word of explanation glided off into the darkness.
+
+Granger sat up and looked after him; he was puzzled by the memory of
+those eyes. He ran through all the list of his acquaintance, and could
+not place them. The blizzard had now subsided, and the stars shone
+overhead. He must have lain unconscious for some time before being
+found. All around him, and as far as eye could reach, the snow lay in
+short choppy waves, which took on the appearance of motion by reason
+of the shadows. As he watched, something lifted up its head above a
+ridge, and he saw that it was one of the huskies. Either his team had
+followed him, or the man had brought them with him. Rising to his
+feet, on the other side of the fire he saw his sled. He felt hungry,
+and going towards it was about to get out some provisions, when he
+found that that was unnecessary; in the ashes a can of black tea was
+brewing and some bacon had been left, also a bundle of wood sufficient
+to last him till morning. He spent the remainder of the night there,
+and at daybreak continued his journey to the portage.
+
+When he reached the cabin and pushed open the door, he found that it
+was occupied. An Indian, of the Sucker tribe, whom he had previously
+met, was sitting there. Looking round he saw that Spurling's body was
+in the same place and untouched, but that the load upon the sled had
+been rifled.
+
+When he had offered him some tobacco, the Indian, jerking his head in
+the direction of the body, asked, "You kill him?"
+
+Granger signed denial. The Indian looked doubtful. Then he said,
+pointing to the old tracks in the cabin which his snowshoes had left,
+"All the same, those your tracks."
+
+Granger was in no mood for arguing, so he nodded assent. The Indian
+was silent for a while. Presently he rose to his feet and harnessed in
+his team. As he passed out of the door, he said, "You bad man. All the
+same, you kill him."
+
+Granger followed him out and saw him crossing the portage towards
+God's Voice. He scraped a hole in the snow and buried Spurling.
+
+On turning his attention to the sled, he saw that the Indian had taken
+everything except the gold. He poured out the dust and nuggets above
+Spurling's grave; it was the thing which he had loved most in life, as
+some men love goodness and flowers. To both Spurling and himself it
+was worthless now; but it was the only offering which he had.
+
+Leaving the mound sparkling white and yellow in the sunshine, he
+struck the trail down the Last Chance River, returning to Murder
+Point.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE LAST CHANCE
+
+
+Since the middle of November he had been back at the Point: it was now
+the day before Christmas, and Peggy was still absent. During the last
+six weeks he had waited anxiously, always listening, even in his
+sleep, for her returning footstep. It was extraordinary to him to
+notice how, now that he had lost her, every other affection that he
+had ever known became dwarfed and of no acount in comparison with his
+love of her. He no longer thought of Mordaunt or of El Dorado; all his
+anxiety was for the half-breed wife, whom he had once despised. There
+was but one ambition, the fulfilment of which he greatly desired, and
+that was again to see her and to look upon his child. Somewhere
+outside, beneath the grey chaos of white forest and gloomy sky, in the
+wigwam of a trapper, tended by Indian women, she had faced her ordeal
+and had, perhaps, survived. If ever he was to see her it would be
+to-night, when her kinsmen had promised to return.
+
+At first, when he had left Dead Rat Portage, he had feared that he
+would be overtaken by the Mounted Police or Robert Pilgrim before ever
+he reached the Point. For six weeks he had remained there undisturbed
+and solitary.
+
+Watching from his window day by day, he had seen an occasional Indian
+pass, averting his face and, if he were a Catholic, crossing himself
+to avoid the overlooking of the evil eye. When such chance travellers
+approached the bend, he had noticed how they seemed to see something
+there, which he could not see, and climbing out of the river-trail,
+making a wide circuit, hurried their steps to get quickly by. Though
+he had spoken to no one for so long a time, he had not been
+lonely--watching for Peggy was a continual, if painful, source of
+excitement. And another matter had kept him fully occupied. Being an
+honest man, he knew that since the spring of the year he had not done
+well by his employers; therefore, since he thought it highly probable
+that, at any moment, he might be called away on a longer journey than
+any that he had yet undertaken, he had spent a large part of his
+leisure in making a report of the trade and contents of the store,
+which would be of service to his unlucky successor in the post of
+agent.
+
+His chief cause for disquiet had been the hidden personality of the
+man whom he had seen in the sky, and who had afterwards rescued him
+from the blizzard near God's Voice. The haunting recollection of those
+eyes, of which he had caught but a glimpse as the man bent over him
+and the fire beat up into his shrouded face, had tortured him,
+allowing him rest from thought neither day nor night. For weeks he had
+searched his memory for some forgotten record, which would account for
+their seeming familiarity. Where had he seen them before? Was it
+before he left England, or in the Klondike? Or had their owner once
+come to trade with him at the store?
+
+Ten days ago, when he was sitting half-dozing by the stove, thinking
+of nothing in particular, a face had drifted up from his subconscious
+memory, grouping its features about the eyes. He had staggered to his
+feet, horrified at the significance which this new knowledge, if true,
+gave to the motive of the crime. Bewildering details, which he had
+noticed in the man's appearance and had not been able to reconcile,
+now built themselves into the chain of evidence and were readily
+explained--there could be no mistake. He had bowed his head in his
+trembling hands, giving God broken thanks that he had been spared the
+final remorse which would have come to him had he been successful in
+his pursuit of Spurling's murderer. All that night he had prayed,
+aghast and terrified, that God would protect the assailant from
+detection.
+
+And perhaps God had heard him, for the morning found him strangely
+quiet; he thought that he had now discovered a way to go out of life a
+gentleman, though no one but himself and one other would know that his
+gallantry was not disgrace.
+
+The short December daylight wore away and night fell. He spread a meal
+for four people, with fare which was unusually ample. Having lit the
+lamp and built up a roaring fire in the stove, he sat down to await
+the arrival of his guests.
+
+To evade his excitement of anticipation, which was becoming painful,
+he drove his thoughts back to other Christmas Eves, and tried to
+imagine and share in the innocent happiness which the season was
+bringing to children, still illusioned and unwise, all the world over
+that night. He had almost succeeded in beguiling himself into the
+belief that he was again a child, when the huskies commenced to howl,
+giving warning of someone's approach.
+
+Listening acutely, he caught the distant shouting of dog-drivers,
+coming down-river, across the ice. He ran to the window and saw the
+forms of two men, stooping down unharnessing their teams at the Point.
+He recognised them, but did not go outside to make them welcome, since
+he had not yet learnt their purpose. The door opened, and Beorn and
+Eyelids entered.
+
+There was nothing altered in Beorn's appearance; but Eyelids looked
+haggard and fatigued with travel.
+
+He came towards Granger with a stealthy tread, yet so slowly that he
+seemed rather to be drawing back. "Where's Peggy?" were the first
+words he uttered. "She's gone away," Granger said. Then, seeing her
+brother's genuine concern, he commenced to explain a little of what
+had taken place in his absence. He was recounting his discovery of
+Spurling's flight, when his listener, taking it for granted that he
+already knew the rest, broke in impatiently, with "You damn fool!
+Why'd you kill him?"
+
+Granger smiled. He was amused at the half-breed's new air of
+domineering boldness and the change which it made in his countenance.
+"Oh, so you know that?" he inquired. Eyelids came over and shook him
+by the arm, as though he thought that he needed awakening.
+
+Speaking rapidly, tumbling over his words, sometimes relapsing into
+the Cree dialect, he commenced to give a hurried account of his own
+actions. There had been a thousand dollars offered for Spurling's
+capture, and he had gone to claim it. It was not covetousness
+altogether which had prompted him to do that; the reward was only an
+incident. His father was determined to be revenged for the trespass of
+the Forbidden River, and he had accompanied his father, hoping, by so
+doing, to save his brother-in-law's life--the handing over of
+Spurling to justice would have proved him innocent of complicity in
+Strangeway's death.
+
+They had had to go a long way south before they had met with the
+winter patrol and had been able to give their information. They had
+been coming back with Sergeant Shattuck to make the arrest, when they
+had fallen in with an Indian of the Sucker tribe. He had given them
+news that a month ago a man had been murdered at the Dead Rat Portage
+by the agent at the Point, where he believed they had quarrelled,
+though why and what about he could not guess.
+
+Arriving at God's Voice, they had learnt that gold had been found,
+scattered above the grave at the Dead Rat. And now the Mounted Police
+were coming, Eyelids said, to take Granger away to be hanged. He had
+heard Robert Pilgrim and the sergeant arranging it together, and had
+come on ahead to give him warning. He believed that the pursuers were
+not far behind. His quarrel had been with Spurling, not with Granger;
+he was emphatic about that. He would not have accompanied his father,
+had he not gathered from words which he had let fall in his delirium,
+that Granger hated Spurling as much as any of them. He had thought
+that he would understand their purpose in going southward, and would
+be willing to guard Spurling in order that he might be betrayed. And
+now he had come to make him an offer: there was yet time to escape; he
+would hide him so securely in the forest that he never would be
+tracked.
+
+Granger thought that he discovered in Eyelids' vehemence the
+blustering confusion of a repentant Judas.
+
+He shook his head, "No," he answered, "I intend to wait."
+
+Eyelids pressed him for a reason. "I must see Peggy," he replied: "she
+will certainly be here to-night. Even if she had already arrived and
+were willing to go with me, I should stay."
+
+For a man of Indian training, Eyelids used many words to persuade him.
+When he saw that he had failed, he relapsed into sullen silence. Beorn
+paid no attention, but stared grimly before him with his dead-soul
+eyes, as though he had heard nothing. Granger fancied that he must
+often have worn that same expression when, crouched beneath the
+auriferous ledges of the Fair-haired Annie, he had listened to the
+picks of his enemies drawing nearer, and had waited to deal out
+unhurried and impartial death to the men of the Bloody Thunder Mine.
+
+There was the sound of long striding steps ascending the mound; it was
+not the tread of Peggy. Without the formality of knocking, the latch
+was raised and Père Antoine towered in the doorway. His garments were
+frosted and glistened, so that he seemed to be clothed in a vaporous
+incandescence. His face was very stern and sad. He said nothing, but
+gazing full on Granger, he beckoned to him that he should come
+outside.
+
+Casting his capote about him and drawing on his mittens, he obeyed.
+Antoine led the way to the back of the store, till they stood on the
+edge of the clearing, where the forest began. The full moon shining
+down on the country made it appear legendary and ghostlike, a
+veritable Hollow land, such as the Indians believed in, entering into
+which a man might wander on forever, without home-coming, and never
+taste of death. Granger felt that he would scarcely experience
+surprise were he to witness, drifting on poised wings from an opening
+in the clouds, a flight of shadowy angels, voyaging to some newer
+planet where they should startle other shepherds, singing to them the
+tidings of the Christ.
+
+Antoine recalled him, saying, "I may not be doing right, for I cannot
+guess your motives, but I have come to tell you that I am willing to
+help you to escape."
+
+If he had come to him on any other errand than that of his own
+preservation, Granger knew, as he watched the pity struggling with the
+sternness in his face, that he would have followed him anywhere, to
+peril and to shame. But now, that was impossible.
+
+"Antoine," he replied, "I cannot. Spurling is dead."
+
+Le Père surveyed him curiously in silence. "But you--did you do it?"
+he said.
+
+"You know that I always meant to do it."
+
+"Then you are determined to die?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"For some one else?"
+
+"Pshaw! For me it is no sacrifice. You know that I would have killed
+him, had God given me the time."
+
+Antoine drew off his mitten, and held out to him his bare right hand.
+"You are a noble man," he said; "I will keep your secret."
+
+As they returned to the shack, Eyelids looked up at them inquiringly,
+as though he were about to ask them what preparations he should make
+for their journey. When he saw how, saying nothing, they sat
+themselves down to wait, he shrugged his shoulders desperately.
+Presently, with a false show of indifference, he set about playing the
+moccasin-game, which consists of placing buttons, bullets, and
+anything small which comes handy, into an empty moccasin, shaking
+them up together, and guessing the number which the shoe contains. It
+is a gambling game which, in earlier days, was wont to cause much
+bloodshed and ruin among the buffalo-runners of the plains.
+
+The hours went by and the night grew late. The meal which had been
+spread was still untasted. They did not converse; there seemed so
+little to say, and, moreover, their voices might prevent them from
+hearing the first warning of Peggy's approach. The roaring of the logs
+in the stove, and the monotonous clicking of the buttons and bullets
+one against the other as Eyelids shook them, and again as he emptied
+them upon the floor, like the ominous tapping of muffled hammers at
+work about a coffin, were the only sounds, and these, at last, by
+reason of their regularity, began to grow nerve-racking. Between the
+emptying of the moccasin, and the gathering up and re-shaking of the
+counters, Granger held his breath. It seemed to him that Eyelids was
+gambling with an invisible player, and that the stake which he stood
+to lose or win was his own life. It was inconceivable that any man
+should have sat playing all these hours at a game of hazard, risking
+nothing, having for antagonist himself.
+
+Relief came from without. From far across the river the forest-silence
+was shattered by a piercing cry. It reached him distantly at first,
+but, with each interval that elapsed, it grew nearer. It was like the
+tortured, desperate complaining of a soul in its final agony. Stealing
+to the window, he looked out, and saw upon the farther bank the
+outline of a timber-wolf. He looked at Beorn; he also had heard it,
+for he had pricked up his ears like a husky and was listening. Fearing
+that the suspense of these long and silent hours might cause him to
+behave unworthily, he clutched Antoine by the shoulder, and whispered,
+"For God's sake, say something. Tell us one of your tales."
+
+Then Le Père thought awhile, and afterwards, in a low sonorous voice,
+commenced to recount the story of the founding of the Huron
+Mission--one of the noblest histories in the world, of men who have
+died for men. As he progressed, Eyelids looked up from his
+moccasin-game and the little tappings, as of muffled hammers about a
+coffin, ceased for a spell.
+
+He told them of Isaac Jogues, the Jesuit; how he was the most timid of
+men, and how for his love of Christ he became brave.
+
+He told them of his capture, on the second day of August, 1642, by the
+Iroquois, and the patience with which his sufferings were endured. How
+when he was near dying of hunger and thirst, he used the drops of
+rain, which had gathered in an ear of corn which had been thrown him,
+to baptize two dying men. How when the Indians had grown weary of
+torturing him and had cast him out into the March bleakness, he spent
+his days in the forest praying, and carving the name of _Jesus_ on the
+tree-trunks with his lacerated hands.
+
+Then followed the account of his miraculous escape to France and the
+honours which were proffered him by Church and State, no one of which
+he would take, save only permission to return to Canada that, as he
+had lived, so he might die for men, and the Pope's special
+dispensation that he might say the Mass, from which he had been
+debarred by his mutilations.
+
+And he told them the story of Brébeuf and the vision which he had had
+in the winter of 1640, when sojourning among the Neutral Nation. How
+he beheld in the sky the apparition of a great cross, advancing
+towards him from the quarter where lay the Iroquois land. How he had
+spoken to his comrades about it, and they had questioned him, "What is
+it like? How large?" And he had answered them, saying, "It is large
+enough to crucify us all."
+
+Granger interrupted him, smiling grimly to himself and whispering,
+"Yes, and I have seen it in Keewatin--_large enough to crucify us
+all_."
+
+Antoine, overhearing his words, replied, "I know you have." After
+which they fell silent. For perhaps an hour they remained thus, and
+the flame of the lamp sank lower and lower as the oil became
+exhausted; no one rose to attend to it.
+
+A panting breath was heard outside. The door flew open and a man stood
+upon the threshold. "They are coming," he gasped in a rasping voice.
+"My God! they are coming."
+
+No one stirred. They did not recognise his tones and it was too dark
+to see his face. They were each one wondering who was this stranger,
+who could find in the death of anyone, save himself, a matter for
+distress.
+
+He closed the door; in so doing, they saw that he carried a bundle,
+like a deformity, strapped across his shoulders. They watched him in
+silence until, cowed by the coldness of their reception, he was
+turning to depart; then Antoine spoke up. "Come nearer the stove, my
+son," he said, "where you can warm yourself, and we can look upon your
+face."
+
+Slowly the man moved forward, casting a long shadow on the wall. And
+now to the four men gazing, the shadow which the stranger cast seemed
+to have become of more interest than his face--for there were two
+shadows, one of which followed ominously behind. While the first umbra
+was dim and blurred, the second was dense and well-defined; moreover
+it stood by itself, as if cast by an unseen presence, and was in every
+way different from that of the stranger. It seemed endowed with a
+separate personality; its actions were independent of those of the man
+and shadow which it followed. In watching it, they felt that there
+were six people in the room instead of five.
+
+Recognition came to them each one at about the same time; they rose to
+their feet fascinated, and stared like men gone mad. The thing stood
+upright, a little way out from the wall it seemed, its head turned
+towards them, as if conscious of their inspection--_and yet it was
+only a shadow_. And it was the shadow of a man over six feet in height
+and proportionately broad of chest, who carried his dog-whip
+left-handed. It was the shadow which Spurling would have cast, had he
+been alive. And Spurling had cursed Granger merely for suggesting
+that, despite their preparations for departure, they might all meet
+again at Murder Point on Christmas Eve.
+
+The stranger, being ignorant of what they saw, for whichever way he
+turned the pursuer stole behind him, and growing alarmed at their
+terrified expressions, withdrew from the circle of the lamp and
+firelight, willing to hide himself.
+
+Granger was the first to remove his gaze from the wall and to recover
+from his surprise. He approached the shrinking figure. "Peggy," he
+cried: and as she turned, he saw that her capote was the one which he
+had missed, and that the remainder of her man's dress was his own
+borrowed attire.
+
+She came towards him with her arms stretched out and, as she did so,
+his heart was strangely stirred within him by a little puling cry.
+
+"It was the only way to save you," she moaned; "and it has not saved
+you."
+
+"I know, I understand," he whispered. Then he loosed her arms from
+about his neck and unslung the baby from her shoulders. Fear for their
+common safety struggling with the mother's pride and tenderness, she
+followed him to the firelight and allowed him to kneel beside her.
+Their bodies pressing close together, they wondered at and touched
+with a strange reverence the little weakly creature sprawling in her
+lap. It commenced to wail, and she bared to it her breasts. To Antoine
+watching her, she seemed the Madonna of Keewatin, with her stifled
+love, naked passions, and heroic fight for life--and to-morrow would
+be Christmas night.
+
+In the presence of the child they had all forgotten the shadow,
+hovering there behind her, and the sorrow which it meant. Even
+Eyelids, the Judas of the tragedy, stole nearer and, extending his
+hands, touched shyly this frail body of newborn life, as if by so
+doing he could cleanse them. No one interfered with him; they were too
+glad. The Man with the Dead Soul looked on unmoved; his countenance
+was alone unchanged. He was listening intently.
+
+A wolf-call broke the stillness of the night. Going to the door, he
+stepped out, threw back his head and answered. It was the sign for
+which he had waited. Eyelids snatched up his gun and placed himself
+before Granger, prepared to defend him; but Granger took the gun from
+his hand. "No. Not that," he said.
+
+Turning about, he saw that Peggy had risen and, with his child in her
+arms, was hurrying toward the threshold. Guessing her purpose, he
+caught her by the waist and drew her back. He led her to that corner
+of the room which was darkest, and, making her sit down, bent above
+her speaking in a low quick voice. For two minutes nothing was heard
+but her sobbing, the hissing of his whispered messages, and the slow,
+deep-drawn breathing of Eyelids and Antoine. They both knew now that
+he was innocent since they had seen the shadow. The air was heavy with
+suspense. There was a crunching of snow which came nearer, ascending
+the mound toward the shack. There was the sound of several footsteps,
+as of men taking up positions about the house. The door burst open and
+Beorn entered, followed by a man who, Granger guessed from his bearing
+and dress, was Sergeant Shattuck. It was his last chance to redeem
+himself.
+
+He rose up, resting his hand on his wife's shoulder to keep her
+seated, and stood in front of her, hiding her from view, so that the
+sergeant should not see that tell-tale shadow behind her. Even while
+he held himself there in breathless silence, taking his first look at
+the man who had travelled all those miles only to carry him southward
+to his death, he smiled grimly, amused at the Homeric justice of
+it--that Spurling should have killed and been killed by a woman in
+disguise, and that on his head should rest the burden of the shame, he
+who throughout his life had never _done_, but had only _intended_.
+
+Then the sergeant spoke. "John Granger, are you there?"
+
+"I am."
+
+"I arrest you, John Granger, on the charge of being concerned in the
+death of Corporal Eric Strangeways, and of the wilful murder of one
+Druce Spurling, your accomplice in the latter crime, whom you, well
+knowing that he was a fugitive from justice, assisted to escape from
+the afore-mentioned Eric Strangeways."
+
+Peggy half rose to her feet, with a choking cry, and tried to speak;
+but Granger checked her.
+
+"I plead guilty," he said; "I am ready to come with you. I have only
+one request to make, that you take me away with you at once, setting
+out this night."
+
+The sergeant looked doubtful; he had made a long journey, and he and
+his dogs were tired. But hearing the sound of intolerable sobbing, he
+thought that he understood, and nodded his assent.
+
+They all stepped out, closing the door behind them, and left Granger
+alone with his wife. In five minutes the door opened and he joined
+them. His face was grey and tremulous, but his lips were steady and
+smiling. "Large enough to crucify us all," murmured Antoine when he
+saw him. Granger knew what he meant--that he was referring to Keewatin
+and to his sacrifice. He shook his head at him; he was not thinking of
+that. He was thinking of Spurling's shadow, made prisoner by its own
+hatred, chained behind the woman weeping in the shack, and of how he
+had cheated it of its pitiful revenge. But it was not yet too late for
+one of his companions, or even Peggy herself, to betray his secret. He
+would not feel that she was safe until Murder Point had been lost to
+sight. Stepping briskly over to Shattuck he inquired, "Any need of
+handcuffs to-night, Sergeant?"
+
+"Not if you pledge me your word," he replied: but he spoke
+absent-mindedly, taking no steps toward departure. Granger grew
+impatient; every moment thus wasted might lose him his chance of
+making a decent exit from life. He had sought for so many things which
+he had not found, that he was now frenziedly covetous of attaining
+this last success.
+
+"Sergeant, you remember your promise to me that . . ."
+
+Before he had finished his sentence, Shattuck broke in on him
+excitedly, exclaiming, "By God, but it's you that it's wanting. Look,
+over there, down-river to the northeast."
+
+Turning quickly about to the direction indicated, his eyes fell upon
+the bend. There, standing a short way out from the bank on the ice, so
+that he could see it clearly, was the figure of a man, _with the
+moonlight streaming through him_. Granger recognised him by his
+tallness and uprightness. He was waving to him, seeing which he waved
+back. As though he had been waiting for that permission, he began to
+move up-river with incredible swiftness towards the Point. Having come
+within hailing distance he halted, and putting his hands to his mouth
+shouted, "Be brave! Be brave! It is only death."
+
+Had Strangeways stepped out from his grave to taunt him with the
+futility of his own words, which had been spoken to comfort him in his
+distress? The apparition was growing vaguer. Just before it vanished,
+it cried again and waved its hand, "Jesus of Galilee! Jesus Christ!"
+
+The sound reached him faintly as a whisper. He thought that his own
+memory must have spoken till, turning round and scanning the other
+men's faces, he saw that they also had heard.
+
+"What was it that he said?" asked Eyelids.
+
+"Sounded as though he was swearing," Shattuck replied.
+
+But Granger and Antoine knew better; they knew that it was the dead
+lover giving his approval of this last act of the rival who was to die
+for his death.
+
+The sergeant required no further urging to hasten his departure.
+Descending to the river-bed, he harnessed in his huskies and set out
+up the Last Chance, taking with him the independent trader southwards,
+as he had so often desired,--but to be hanged.
+
+
+
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Murder Point, by Coningsby Dawson</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Murder Point</p>
+<p>       A Tale of Keewatin</p>
+<p>Author: Coningsby Dawson</p>
+<p>Release Date: July 13, 2009  [eBook #29400]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: UTF-8</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MURDER POINT***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>E-text prepared by David T. Jones and the<br />
+    Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team<br />
+    (<a href="http://www.pgdpcanada.net">http://www.pgdpcanada.net</a>)<br />
+    from digital material generously made available by<br />
+    Internet Archive/American Libraries<br />
+    (<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/americana">http://www.archive.org/details/americana</a>)<br />
+    and the Google Books Library Project<br />
+    (<a href="http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/library.html">http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/library.html</a>)</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table border="0" style="background-color: #ccccff;" cellpadding="10">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top">
+      Note:
+    </td>
+    <td>
+      Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive/American Libraries
+      (see <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/murderpointatal00dawsgoog">
+      http://www.archive.org/details/murderpointatal00dawsgoog</a>)
+      or
+      the Google Books Library Project
+      (see <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=x2omAAAAMAAJ&amp;oe=UTF-8">
+      http://books.google.com/books?id=x2omAAAAMAAJ&amp;oe=UTF-8</a>).
+	</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3>MURDER POINT</h3>
+<br /><br />
+
+<table width="60%" border="0" summary="box">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="tdc"><i>BY THE SAME AUTHOR</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>The House of the Weeping Woman</td>
+<td class="tdr"><span class="smcap">Hodder and Stoughton, London</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>The Worker and Other Poems</td>
+<td class="tdr"><span class="smcap">The Macmillan Co., New York</span></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<br /><br />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<h1>MURDER POINT</h1>
+
+<h2><i>A Tale of Keewatin</i></h2>
+
+<h5>BY</h5>
+
+<h3>CONINGSBY WILLIAM DAWSON</h3>
+<br /><br /><br />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>HODDER &amp; STOUGHTON<br />
+NEW YORK<br />
+GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY</h4>
+<br /><br />
+
+<h6>Copyright, 1910, by<br />
+<span class="smcap">George H. Doran Company</span></h6>
+<br /><br />
+
+<h6><i>The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A.</i></h6>
+<br /><br />
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+
+<table summary="toc" width="80%" border="0">
+<tr><td class="tdr">CHAPTER</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdr">PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">I.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_I"><span class="smcap">John Granger of Murder Point</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">II.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_II"><span class="smcap">The Unbidden Guest</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">13</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">III.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_III"><span class="smcap">The Devil in the Klondike</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">25</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">IV.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_IV"><span class="smcap">Spurling's Tale</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">42</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">V.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_V"><span class="smcap">Cities Out of Sight</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">53</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">VI.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_VI"><span class="smcap">The Pursuer Arrives</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">74</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">VII.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_VII"><span class="smcap">The Corporal Sets Out</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">86</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">VIII.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII"><span class="smcap">The Last of Strangeways</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">100</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">IX.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_IX"><span class="smcap">The Break-up of the Ice</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">112</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">X.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_X"><span class="smcap">A Message from the Dead</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">120</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">XI.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_XI"><span class="smcap">The Love of Woman</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">144</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">XII.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_XII"><span class="smcap">He Reviews His Marriage,
+and is Put to the Test</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">162</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">XIII.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII"><span class="smcap">The Dead Soul Speaks Out</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">186</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">XIV.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV"><span class="smcap">Spurling Makes a Request</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">210</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">XV.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_XV"><span class="smcap">Manitous and Shades of the Departed</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">225</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">XVI.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI"><span class="smcap">In Hiding on Huskies' Island</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">240</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">XVII.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII"><span class="smcap">The Forbidden River</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">257</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">XVIII.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII"><span class="smcap">The Betrayal</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">272</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">XIX.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX"><span class="smcap">The Hand in the Doorway</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">283</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">XX.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_XX"><span class="smcap">Spurling Takes Fright</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">297</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXI.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI"><span class="smcap">The Murder in the Sky</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">305</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXII.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII"><span class="smcap">The Blizzard</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">318</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXIII.</td>
+<td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII"><span class="smcap">The Last Chance</span></a></td>
+<td class="tdr">334</td></tr>
+</table>
+<br /><br />
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>MURDER POINT</h1>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>JOHN GRANGER OF MURDER POINT</h3>
+
+<p>John Granger, agent on the Last Chance River in the interests of
+Garnier, Parwin, and Wrath, independent traders in the territory of
+Keewatin, sat alone in his store at Murder Point. He sat upon an
+upturned box, with an empty pipe between his lips. In the middle of
+the room stood an iron stove which blazed red hot; through the single
+window, toward which he faced, the gold sun shone, made doubly
+resplendent in its shining by the reflected light cast up by the
+leagues of all-surrounding snow and ice.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking to himself, as is the habit of men who have lived many months
+alone in the aboriginal silence of the North, "Well, and what next?"
+he asked.</p>
+
+<p>He had been reviewing the uses to which he had put his thirty years of
+life, and was feeling far from satisfied. That a man of breeding, who
+had been given the advantages of a classical and university education,
+and was in addition an English barrister, should at the age of thirty
+be conducting an independent trader's store in a distant part of
+northern Canada did not seem right; Granger was conscious of the
+incongruity. During the past two years and a half he had obstinately
+refused to examine his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span> career, had fought against introspection, and
+had striven to forget.</p>
+
+<p>In this he had been wise, for Keewatin is not a good place wherein to
+<i>remember</i> and to balance the ledger of the soul; it is too remote
+from human habitation, too near to God&mdash;its vastness has robbed it of
+all standards, so that small misdemeanours may seem huge and
+disastrous as the sin of Cain. Madness lurks in its swampy creeks and
+wanders along the edges of its woodland seas, so that the border-line
+between natural and supernatural is very faintly marked.</p>
+
+<p>But to-day Granger had given way before the wave of emotional memories
+and had permitted his mind to recapitulate all the happiness which he
+had lost; and with this result, that like a child in a darkened house
+he feared to advance and stood still trembling, questioning the
+future, anticipating and dreading that which was next to come. It was
+the second week in April; the break-up of the winter had almost begun;
+the spring was striding up from the south and a cry of travel was in
+the air, both hopeful and melancholy. The world would soon be growing
+young again. Even in this desperate land the scars of the frost would
+soon be obliterated; but to his own life, he was painfully aware, the
+spring had vouchsafed no promise of return. Was it gone forever? he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>At the present moment he was remembering London and St. James's Park
+with its banks of daffodils and showers of white may-blossom, its
+groups of laughing children at play, its parade of black-coated
+horsemen, with here and there the scarlet flash of a Life-guard as he
+sped trotting by, and for bass accompaniment to this music of the Joy
+of Life the continual low thunder<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span> which in the Mall the prancing
+hoofs of countless carriage-horses strummed.</p>
+
+<p>Now it was Piccadilly in which he wandered, returning from the west
+with his back toward the setting sun; the street-lamps had just been
+kindled, and ahead of him, massed above the housetops, the blue-grey
+clouds of evening hung. He watched the faces of the people as they
+passed, some eager, some jaded, some pleasure-seeking, some smug, and
+he strove to conjecture their aim in life. At the Circus he paused
+awhile, breathing deep and filling out his lungs with fragrance of
+violets and narcissi, which flower-girls clamoured for him to
+purchase. He bought a bunch and smiled faintly, contrasting the
+beautiful significance of the name of the vendor's profession with the
+slatternly person to whom it was applied. Then onwards he went to
+Leicester Square where the dazzling lights of music-halls flared and
+quickened, and scarlet-lipped Folly smiled out upon him from street
+corners, and beckoned through the dusk. In the old days it had always
+been when he had attained this point in his advance that the pleasure
+of London had failed, leaving him with a cramped sensation, a frenzied
+desire for escape, and an overwhelming sense of the inherent
+rottenness of western civilisation. It was upon such occasions that he
+saw, or thought he saw, the inevitable tendency of European cities to
+emasculate and corrupt the rugged nobilities of mankind. A revolt
+against artificiality had followed. Immediately, there in the heart of
+the world's greatest city, there had grown up about him the mirage of
+the primeval forest, whose boughs are steeped in silence, borne up by
+tall bare trunks, which lured him on to explore and adventure through
+untried lands, where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span> quiet grows intense and intenser at each new
+step, till he should arrive at that ultimate contentment for which he
+blindly sought.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed at the memory, smiling bitterly at the manner in which that
+former self had been beguiled. As if to give emphasis to his jest he
+arose from his box, lounged over to the window, cleared its panes of
+mist with his hand, and gazed out upon the landscape of his choice. It
+stared back at him with immobile effrontery, with the glazed
+wide-parted eyes of the prostrate prize-fighter who, in his falling,
+has been stunned&mdash;eyes in which hatred is the only sign of life. He
+threw back his head and guffawed at the conceit, as though it had been
+conceived by a brain and given utterance to by a voice other than his
+own. Then he paused, drew himself erect, and his face went white; he
+had heard of solitary men in Keewatin who had commenced by laughing to
+themselves, and had ended by committing murder or suicide. Yet, as he
+stood in thought, he acknowledged the truth of the image; his
+existence on the Last Chance River was one long and wearisome struggle
+between himself and the intangible prize-fighter, whoever he might
+be,&mdash;Nature, the Elemental Spirit hostile to Creation, Keewatin, the
+Devil, call him what you like. Sometimes he had had the better of the
+combat, in which case days of peace had followed; but for the most
+part he stood at bay or crouched upon his knees, watching for his
+opportunity to rise; at his strongest he had only just sufficed to
+hold his invisible antagonist in check, battling for a victory which
+had been already awarded. He had long despaired of winning; the only
+question which now troubled him was "How long shall I be able to
+fight?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A certain story current in the district, concerning a Hudson Bay
+factor, flashed through his mind. At the beginning of the frost his
+fort had been stricken with smallpox; one by one his six white
+companions had died and the Indians had fled in terror, leaving him
+alone in the silence. In the unpeopled solitude of the long dark
+winter days and nights which had followed, he had grown strangely
+curious as to the welfare of his soul, and had petitioned God that it
+might be disembodied so that he might gaze upon it with his living
+eyes. After a week of continuous prayer, he had fastened on his
+snowshoes, and gone out upon the ice to seek God's sign. He had not
+travelled far before he had come to the mound where his six companions
+lay buried. There against the dusky sky-line he had seen a famished
+wolf standing over a scooped-out grave. So the factor had had his
+sign, and had looked upon his disembodied soul with his own eyes.</p>
+
+<p>When the ice broke up and the first canoe of half-breed voyageurs
+swept up to the fort, they had been met by a man who crawled upon
+hands and knees, and snarled like a husky or a coyote.</p>
+
+<p>Granger shrugged his shoulders and shuddered. He thanked his God that
+the spring was near by. Upon one thing he was determined, that
+whatever happened, though he should have to die&mdash;by his own hand, he
+would not grovel into Eternity upon his hands and knees as had that
+factor of the Hudson Bay.</p>
+
+<p>For relief from the turbulence of his thoughts he turned his attention
+to the frozen quiet of the world without. Not a feature in the
+landscape had changed throughout all the past five months. He had
+nothing new to learn about it: he had even committed to memory<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span> where
+each separate shadow would fall at each particular hour of the day.
+Straight out of the west the river ran so far as eye could reach,
+until it came to Murder Point. At close of day it seemed a molten
+pathway which led, without a waver, from Granger's store directly to
+the heart of the sun. Having arrived at the Point, the Last Chance
+River swept round to the northeast, and then to the north, until in
+many curves it poured its waters into the distant Hudson Bay. Its
+banks, in the open season, which lasted from May to October, were low
+and muddy; the country through which it flowed, known as the barren
+lands, was for the most part flat and densely wooded with a stunted
+growth of black spruce, jackpine, tamarack, poplar, willow, and birch.
+The river was the only highway: much of the forest which lay back from
+its banks was entirely unexplored on account of its swamps and the
+closeness of its underbrush. There were places within three miles of
+Murder Point where a white man had never travelled, and some where not
+even the Indians could penetrate. Partly for this reason the district
+was rich in game: the caribou, moose, lynx, bear, wolf, beaver,&mdash;
+wolverine, and all the smaller fur-bearing animals of the North
+abounded there. Seventy miles to the southwestward lay the nearest
+point of white habitation, where stood the Hudson Bay Company's Fort
+of God's Voice. Between Murder Point and the coast, for two hundred
+and fifty miles, there was no white settlement until the river's mouth
+was reached, where the Company's House of the Crooked Creek had been
+erected on the shores of the Bay. With his nearest neighbours, seventy
+miles distant at God's Voice, Granger had no intercourse, for he was
+regarded by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span> them as an outcast inasmuch as he was an independent
+trader. Once was the time when Prince Rupert's <i>Company of Adventurers
+of England trading in the Hudson's Bay</i> had held the monopoly of the
+fur trade over all this territory, from the Atlantic seaboard to the
+Pacific Coast; then to have been caught trapping or trading privately
+had meant almost certain death to the trespasser. Now that the powers
+of the Company had been curtailed, the only manner in which a Hudson
+Bay factor could show his displeasure toward the interloper was by
+ignoring his presence&mdash;a very real penalty in a land of loneliness,
+where, at the best, men can only hope to meet once or twice a
+year&mdash;and by rendering his existence as unbearable and silent as
+possible in every lawful and private way. In the art of ostracising,
+Robert Pilgrim, the factor at God's Voice, was a past master; during
+the two and a half years that Granger had been in Keewatin he had had
+direct communication with no one of the Company's white employees. On
+occasions certain of its Cree Indians and half-breed trappers had come
+to him stealthily, at dead of night, to see whether he would not offer
+them better terms for their season's catch of furs, or to inquire
+whether he would not give them liquor in exchange, the selling of
+which to an Indian in Keewatin is a punishable offence. These were
+usually loose characters who, being heavily in debt to the Company,
+were trying to postpone payment by selling to Granger on the sly; yet,
+even these men, when day had dawned, would pass him on the river
+without recognition, as if he were a stick or a block of ice. However,
+only by dealing with such renegades could he hope to pick up any
+profit for the proprietors of his store. His every gain was a loss to
+the factor,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span> and <i>vice versa</i>; therefore by Robert Pilgrim he was not
+greatly beloved.</p>
+
+<p>Pilgrim was a man of conservative principles, who looked back with
+longing to the days when a factor was supreme in his own domain,
+holding discretionary powers over all his people's lives, who, after
+the giving of a third warning to an independent trader found poaching
+in his district, could dispose of him more or less barbarously
+according to his choice. Now that every man, whatever his company, had
+an equal right to gather furs in the Canadian North, he considered
+that he and his employers were being robbed; wherefore he made it his
+business to see that no friendship existed between any of his
+subordinates and the man at Murder Point. Hence it happened that in
+summer when the canoes and York boats, and in winter when the
+dog-teams and runners from God's Voice, went up and down river by the
+free-trading store of Garnier, Parwin and Wrath, no head was turned,
+and no sign given that anyone was aware that a white man, yearning for
+a handshake and the sound of spoken words, was regarding them with
+sorrowful eyes from the wind-swept spit of land.</p>
+
+<p>Two years and a half ago, on his first arrival, Granger had laughed at
+the factor's petty persecution and had pretended not to mind. Since
+then, as his isolation had grown on him, his temper had changed, his
+pride had given way, until, in the January of the present year, he had
+journeyed down to the Company's fort, and had implored them to speak
+to him, if only to curse him, that his reason might be saved. The
+gates of the fort had been clanged in his face, and he had been
+silently threatened with a loaded rifle, till resurrected shame had
+driven him away.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He had since heard that Pilgrim had said on that occasion, "I knew
+that he would come and that this would happen sooner or later. I've
+been waiting for it; but he's held out longer than the last one."</p>
+
+<p>This remark explained to Granger how it was that, when he had arrived
+in Winnipeg, having just returned from the Klondike, and had applied
+to his acquaintance Wrath for employment, his request had been so
+readily granted. He had marvelled at the time that he, who had had
+next to no experience in Indian trading, should have met with
+immediate engagement, and have been given sole charge of an outpost.
+Now he knew the reason; he had been given his job because his
+employers could get no one else to take it. From the first day of his
+coming to Murder Point strange stories had reached his ears concerning
+the diverse and sudden ways in which its bygone agents had departed
+this life: some by committing murder against themselves; some by
+committing murder against others; some, having gone mad, by wandering
+off into the winter wilderness to die; others, who were reckoned sane,
+by attempting to make the six hundred and eighty mile journey back to
+civilisation alone across the snow and ice. These rumours he had not
+credited at first, supposing them to be fictions invented by Pilgrim
+for the purpose of shattering his confidence, and thus inducing him to
+leave at once. The last remark of the factor, however, inasmuch as it
+had been reported to him by an honest man, the Jesuit priest P&egrave;re
+Antoine, had proved to him that they were not all lies. When he had
+questioned P&egrave;re Antoine himself, the kindly old man had shaken his
+head, refusing to answer, and had departed on his way. This had
+happened shortly after the occurrence in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span> January; since then Granger
+had been less than ever happy in his mind.</p>
+
+<p>Luckily for him, about this time Beorn Ericsen, the Man with the Dead
+Soul, as he was named, the only white Company trapper in the district,
+had quarrelled with the factor over the price which had been offered
+him for a silver fox; in revenge he had betaken himself to Granger,
+bringing with him his half-breed daughter, Peggy, and his son,
+Eyelids. Their chance coming had saved his sanity; moreover it had
+furnished him with something to think about, besides himself, namely
+Peggy. His courtship of her had been short and informal, as is the way
+of white men when dealing with women of a darker shade: within a week
+he had taken her to himself. But Peggy had had ideas of her own upon
+the nebulous question of morals, ideas which she had gained in the two
+years during which she had attended a Catholic school in Winnipeg; she
+had refused to be regarded as a squaw, since the blood which flowed in
+her veins was fully half white, and, after staying with him for a
+fortnight, had taken herself off, joining her father on a hunting
+trip, giving Granger clearly to understand that she would not live
+with him again until P&egrave;re Antoine should have come that way and united
+them according to the rites of the Roman Church.</p>
+
+<p>As he stood by the window looking out across the frost-bound land
+which once, years since, in Leicester Square, he in his ignorance had
+so much desired, he re-pondered these events and, "Well, and what
+next?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>The touch of spring in the air, recalling him to England and the old
+days, had made him realise among other things what this marriage with
+a half-breed girl, sup<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>posing he consented, must entail. It would
+exile him forever. No matter howsoever well he might prosper, or rich
+he might become, or whatsoever stroke of good fortune might visit him,
+he could never return to his English mother and English friends,
+bringing with him a half-breed wife and children who had Indian blood.
+If he married her, he would become what Pilgrim had named him&mdash;an
+outcast. If he did not marry her, she would refuse to live with him,
+and he would be left lonely as before and would probably become
+insane. Since he was never likely to become either prosperous, or
+rich, or fortunate, would it not be better for him to provide for his
+immediate happiness, he asked, and let the future take care of itself?
+Even while he asked the question another woman intruded her face: she
+was slim, and fair, and delicately made, and was disguised in the male
+attire of a Yukon placer-miner. She seemed to be asking him to
+remember her.</p>
+
+<p>He shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, as if defying Fate: turning
+away from the window, he reseated himself upon the upturned box by the
+red-hot stove.</p>
+
+<p>Pooh! he'd been a fool to give way to retrospection. He was no
+exception to the general rule; most men mismanaged their careers&mdash;more
+or less. Still, he was bound to confess that he had done so rather
+more than less. Oh well, he would settle down to his fate. As for that
+other girl in the Yukon miner's dress, who would keep intruding
+herself, she also must be forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>But at that point, perversely enough, he began to think about her.
+What was she doing at the present time? Where was she? Did she still
+remember him? Had she made her fortune up there out of their last<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span> big
+strike? How had she construed his sudden and unexplained departure? He
+swore softly to himself, and rising, went over to the window again.
+Then he pressed closer as if to make certain of something, gazing up
+the long glimmering stretch of frozen river to the west.</p>
+
+<p>There was a strange man coming down; strange to those parts, at any
+rate, though Granger seemed to recognise something familiar in his
+stride. He was driving his dogs furiously, lashing them on with
+frenzied brutality, coming on apace, turning his head ever and again
+from side to side, peering across his shoulder and looking behind, as
+if he feared a thing which followed him&mdash;which was out of sight.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
+<h3>THE UNBIDDEN GUEST</h3>
+
+<p>Granger, having withdrawn himself to one side of the window so that he
+might not be observed from the outside, watched the stranger's
+approach in anxious silence. Nearer and nearer he came, till in that
+still air it was possible to hear the panting of his huskies as they
+lunged forward in the traces, jerking their bodies to right and left
+as they desperately strove to escape the descending lash of the
+punishing whip. The man himself tottered as he ran, stubbing the toes
+of his snowshoes every now and then as he took a new step. Once from
+sheer weakness he nearly fell, whereupon the dogs came to a sudden
+halt, sat down on their haunches, and gazed wistfully round; in a
+second he had recovered himself, with an angry oath had straightened
+out his team in their traces, and was once more speeding toward
+Granger's shack. The impression which his mode of travelling conveyed
+was that of flight; but from whom and whither can a man flee in
+Keewatin? Both he and his animals were evidently exhausted; they must
+have journeyed continuously through the previous day and night, and
+still they were in haste. "Well, all the better for me," thought the
+watcher, "for if he is so weary he cannot choose but stay; and if he
+stays with me, though he be a Company man, he will have to speak."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then fear seized hold of Granger lest Robert Pilgrim's discipline, or
+the enmity of the man himself, might be such that, though he
+endangered his life by the procedure, he would refuse the hospitality
+of a hated private trader. "Nonsense," said the voice of hope, "to
+where can he be travelling at this season of the year unless to Murder
+Point? Before ever he gets to the coast and Crooked Creek the winter
+will have broken up, and northwards there is nowhere else to go."</p>
+
+<p>So, as is the way with men who have exhausted this world's resources
+for rendering them aid, he began to pray; not decorously, with
+reverent, well-chosen words, but fiercely, with repetition, and below
+his breath. "My God, don't let him pass," he said; "make him stop
+here. Make him stop here, and spend with me at least one night." Then,
+when he had petitioned God, thinking perhaps that He would not hear
+him, he commenced to call upon Lord Jesus Christ. He clenched his
+hands in his excitement till the nails broke into the flesh. There was
+a God in Keewatin after all, there must be, since He had sent to him
+this stranger.</p>
+
+<p>All the while that he was praying and exclaiming thus, he was trying
+to judge of the man's errand from his dress. He was clad in the
+regulation capote of the Hudson Bay Company's employee; it was of a
+dark material, probably duffel, which reached to the knees. On his
+head was a fur-skin cap, over which he had drawn the hood of his
+capote so far down that his features could not be discerned. About his
+waist went a sash of scarlet, such as is worn by the Northwest
+<i>m&eacute;tis</i>. His legs were swathed in duffel leggings, so that they
+appeared to be of enormous size. On his feet he wore moose-hide
+moccasins which extended part way up his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span> legs, and to these his
+five-foot snowshoes were attached. His whip he carried in his left
+hand. About this last there was something familiar. Who was it that he
+had known in the past who had driven his dogs left-handed, and had had
+that swinging, plunging stride? The memory refused to concentrate, so
+he strove to guess at the man's identity by the process of
+elimination. He could not be a Hudson Bay mail-carrier bringing him a
+letter, for the factor refused to deliver all missives addressed to
+Murder Point. It was not probable that he was an express messenger of
+Gamier, Parwin, and Wrath, sent up post-haste from Winnipeg; they
+could have nothing of such importance to say to him that it could not
+wait for the open season, when travelling is less expensive. Nor was
+he a trapper bound on a friendly or business visit to the store; for,
+in the first place, this man was no Indian (he could tell that by the
+way in which he lifted his feet in running), and, in the second, he
+had no friend, nor any man in the district, save Ericsen, who would be
+seen with him in the open daylight. A foolish, strangling expectancy
+rose up within him. Might he not be the bearer of important and good
+news from the homeland? What news? Oh, anything! That his father, the
+visionary explorer of Guiana, who twenty years ago had set out on his
+last mad search for El Dorado, the fabled city of the Incas, and who
+for many years had been given up for dead, had returned at length with
+gold, successful from his quest&mdash;or, at the least, that his mother had
+relented and wanted him back. Speedily his hope turned to agonising
+suspense. Perhaps he was coming to tell him that his mother in England
+was dead. Then he laughed hysterically, remembering that Mr. Wrath was
+not the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span> sort of man to regard any death as serious, unless it were
+his own.</p>
+
+<p>By this time the stranger had covered the intervening two miles of
+river and was within thirty yards of the Point. He was slowing down.
+He had halted. His exhausted dogs were already curling themselves up
+beneath a snow-bank, wisely snatching a moment's rest as soon as it
+was offered them. Careless of their welfare, leaving them as they were
+to tangle up their traces, he was commencing to ascend the mound
+towards the store. Despite the clamour of welcome which raged within
+him, Granger did not stir; the influence of the North Land was upon
+him, compelling him to self-repression, making him stern and
+forbidding in his manner as was the appearance of the world without.
+From his hiding by the window he watched the man; as he did so a vague
+sense of fear and loathing took the place of gladness.</p>
+
+<p>His approach was slow and hesitating; continually he paused to gaze
+back along the river as if in search of a pursuer, then suddenly
+forward toward the shack as if for spying eyes which were reading his
+secret. Before he had come near enough to be recognised, he had pulled
+the hood still further forward, holding it together above his mouth
+with his right hand, so that of his face only his eyes were visible.
+With his left hand he fumbled in his breast, and Granger knew that he
+grasped a loaded weapon. "Does he mean to kill me?" he wondered; yet
+he made no effort to bar the door, or to reach for the rifle which
+hung on the wall above his head. He only smiled whimsically; amused
+that anyone should waste so much care over robbing a man of a
+possession which he himself so little valued<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>&mdash;his life. Personally
+he would welcome so easy a method of departure from Keewatin&mdash;one
+which was quite respectable, and would attach no responsibility to
+himself. When all has been said, there remain but two qualities of
+fear: the fear of life, and the fear of death. Granger was only
+conscious of the first, therefore he could afford to be amazingly
+daring under the present circumstances. Now he could no longer see the
+man, for he was standing beneath the walls of the shack; but he could
+hear that he was listening, and could hear him gasp for breath. One,
+two, three slow footsteps, and the latch was raised and the door flung
+wide. He waited for his guest to enter, and then, because he delayed,
+"Come inside," he cried; "confound you, you're letting in the cold
+air."</p>
+
+<p>He heard the snowshoes lifted across the threshold and rose to greet
+the stranger who, so soon as he had entered, made fast the door and
+confronted him without a word, still hiding his face from sight. He
+was a tall man, well over six feet and proportionately broad of chest;
+he had to stoop his head as he stood in the store, since the roof was
+none too high.</p>
+
+<p>After some seconds spent in silent gazing, "Well, and what d'you
+want?" asked the trader. The man made no reply, but tossed him a screw
+of paper which, when he had unfolded it and smoothed it out, read,
+<i>"Do all that is in your power to help the bearer. I am responsible.
+Destroy this so soon as it is read."</i> The note was unsigned, but it
+was in the handwriting of Wrath. Granger slid back the door of the
+grate and watched the scrap of paper vanish in a little spurt of
+flame. Then he looked up, and seeing that the man still stood
+regarding him and had removed none of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span> garments, not even his
+snowshoes from which the crusted ice was already melting, "All right,"
+he said; "I'll do my best. You must be tired, and have come a long
+journey."</p>
+
+<p>"I have," said the stranger, throwing back his hood, and for the first
+time displaying his face.</p>
+
+<p>Granger sprang forward with a startled cry, and seized the newcomer by
+his mittened hand. "By God, it's Spurling!"</p>
+
+<p>In a flash all the winter had thawed out of his nature and the spring,
+which he had despaired of, had returned. Once more he was an emotional
+living creature, with a throbbing heart and brain, instead of a
+carcass which walked, and was erect, and muttered occasional words
+with its mouth as if it were alive, and was in reality a dead thing to
+which burial had been denied.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it's Spurling," replied the traveller in a hoarse, uneager
+voice; then, "Has anyone been here before me?"</p>
+
+<p>Granger shook his head, and instinctively stood back a pace from this
+leaden-eyed, unresponsive stranger, who had been his friend.</p>
+
+<p>Spurling was quick to notice the revulsion. "And are you going to
+desert me and turn me out?"</p>
+
+<p>"Desert you! If you knew how lonely I have been you wouldn't ask that
+question."</p>
+
+<p>"I ought to know," he answered, and going over to the window looked
+out, turning his head from side to side in that furtive manner which
+Granger had noted in him when he had first seen him advancing across
+the ice.</p>
+
+<p>Facing about suddenly, he asked, "Is there any way out of here, except
+down there?" pointing to the river frozen in its bed, stretching away
+interminably to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span> west, through groves of icicles, and marble
+forest, like a granite roadway hewn out and levelled by a giant,
+vanished race.</p>
+
+<p>"There is no other," Granger replied, "unless you include the way out
+which is trodden by the dead."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling started almost angrily at the mention of this last pathway of
+escape, and scowled. It was evident that the fear which made his life
+a burden was the fear of death&mdash;which was proof to Granger that he had
+not been long in Keewatin. However, he controlled himself and
+murmured, "Six hundred and eighty miles is a long journey, and it's
+all that to Winnipeg. Within a fortnight the ice will break, and then
+for almost a month the only way will be impassable. Thank God for
+that!" Addressing himself to Granger, "And what lies ahead?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"The forest and three hundred odd miles of this Last Chance River till
+you come to the Hudson Bay and the House of the Crooked Creek."</p>
+
+<p>"Is there nothing in between?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only the Forbidden River, which neither white man nor Indian ever
+travels; it joins the Last Chance a hundred miles ahead."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, the Forbidden River! And no one ever travels there! Why not? Is
+it shallow or rapid? But then there is the winter; it cannot be that
+there's anything that doesn't freeze up here."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it freezes right enough."</p>
+
+<p>"Then?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Indians are afraid to travel it."</p>
+
+<p>"Of what are they afraid?"</p>
+
+<p>"Manitous, and shades of the departed."</p>
+
+<p>For the first time Spurling's face relaxed, the hunted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span> expression
+went out of his eyes; he almost smiled. "Well, I'm not afraid of
+them," he said.</p>
+
+<p>He commenced to unfasten his snowshoes and to take off the heavier
+portions of his dress. Granger stood by and watched him; he was
+puzzled by the man's manner, and heartsick with disappointment. What
+was the reason for the change which had crept over him in the three
+years since they had parted, and why had he made this journey at this
+season of the year, in haste, without warning? Six hundred and eighty
+miles seemed a long way to travel in winter, through a desolate land,
+only to tell your most intimate friend that you are not afraid of
+manitous and shades of the departed.</p>
+
+<p>He recalled the man whom he had known, so generous and open-hearted,
+who had walked with him at night beneath the London gas-lamps, sharing
+and comprehending those dreams and enthusiasms which others had
+derided, or compassionated as delusions of the mad. This was the man
+who had given him what might have been his chance, had he only been
+able to use it aright. Like a tawdry curtain drawn up at a Christmas
+pantomime on a dazzling transformation scene, so, at the memory, the
+veil of the present was instantly removed, revealing only the flashing
+splendours of past things, which lay behind. This same body which now
+crouched basely here before him had belonged to a hero once&mdash;to the
+man who, five long years since, had pushed on in spite of defeat,
+carrying with him by his courage his despairing companion over the
+deadly Skaguay trail. The Skaguay, where bodies of horses lay
+unburied, spreading pestilence abroad every hundred yards of the way;
+where the army of gold-seekers turning back was as great as the army<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
+pressing on; and those of the attack had momentarily to stand aside,
+so narrow was the path, for the wounded and spent of the retreat, who
+passed them by with ashen faces, some of them with death in their
+eyes, bidding them, "Turn back! Turn back! You will never get through
+alive."</p>
+
+<p>Many a time when his shoulders were bruised and broken, and he ached
+in every limb, and his clothes were sodden with rain, which he knew
+must shortly become stiff as boards when night had fallen and it had
+begun to freeze, and perhaps another horse had fallen and been left
+beside the trail, he also would have joined the retreat right gladly,
+unashamed of his cowardice, had not Spurling picked up his load with a
+laugh and dragged him on. What a fine brave fellow he had been in
+those early Yukon days! Why, it was he who, when they had reached the
+summit of that heart-breaking pass, had rescued young Mordaunt. Jervis
+Mordaunt, with a single horse, had packed his entire outfit
+single-handed to the topmost point of the trail, and then, when the
+hardest part of his journey had been accomplished and his goal was
+already in sight, his horse had given out and died. When they had come
+up with him, his beast had been dead three days, and, because he could
+not afford a new one, he had been packing his stuff on his own narrow
+shoulders into Bennett, whence the start by water for Dawson had to be
+made&mdash;a hopeless task, for Mordaunt was not a strong fellow, but slim
+and extraordinarily girlish in frame. Many of the travellers who had
+already attained the summit were flinging away their outfits and
+turning back in panic, terrified by stories which they had heard of
+winter and starvation in the Klondike; those who still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span> trudged
+doggedly forward were too selfishly preoccupied with visions of gold,
+and their own concerns, and fears lest the rivers and lakes should
+close up, to render him aid. Not so Spurling; in those days he was
+never too busy to lend an unfortunate a helping hand; besides, like
+most brave men, the thing which he valued highest was courage, and he
+was taken with the young chap's pluck. "I'm fairly broad," he had
+said, "and before the river freezes there's plenty of time for all
+three of us to get drowned. So look sharp, my girl, and hand your
+bundles up." From the first day he had nicknamed Mordaunt "The Girl,"
+because he was so surpassingly modest and had no beard to shave. So he
+and Spurling had shouldered Mordaunt's burden, and had made him their
+partner, and had carried him through to the gold-fields alive.</p>
+
+<p>Where was Jervis now? he wondered; then his thoughts returned to the
+panorama of that eventful journey. He remembered how in the mouth of
+the Windy Arm on Tagish Lake, when the sail swung round and sent him
+spinning overboard, he would most certainly have perished in those
+chill waters had not Spurling jumped in and held him up till the boat
+put back. It was Spurling's hand which had kept the boat steady in the
+boiling rapids of the White Horse, when he and Mordaunt had lost their
+nerve&mdash;yes, that same hand which was now plucking restlessly at the
+untrimmed beard which fringed that crafty, sullen face. How incredible
+it seemed that this body should contain the same man, and that the
+change should have taken place in five years! He contrasted that
+big-shouldered, song-singing fellow who had given them of his endless
+store of courage when their own was spent, compelling them to go
+through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span> the mush ice at Five Fingers, and the drift ice at Fort
+Selkirk, and had landed them safely at Dawson almost against their
+will, the last boat through before the Klondike froze up, with this
+secretive hang-dog individual who slunk through an unpeopled
+wilderness, twisting his neck from side to side, as though he already
+felt the halter there&mdash;like a Seven Dials assassin, fearful of arrest.
+There he sat by the window, with eyes fixed uncannily on the west,
+watching for the follower whom he could not see, but only felt.</p>
+
+<p>He turned round uncomfortably, feeling that Granger's eyes were upon
+him; then rose up abruptly, saying, "Ha, I was forgetting! My dogs
+must be fed."</p>
+
+<p>Granger watched him go out, and was glad of relief from his presence.
+If anyone had come to him a week ago and had said, "Druce Spurling
+will be here this day or next," his joy would have surpassed all
+bounds. Now he realised that there is a worse evil than solitude&mdash;the
+compulsory companionship of a man who once was, and is no longer, your
+friend. "Ach!" he muttered shivering, "I feel as if I had been sitting
+with my feet in an open grave." Then remorsefully he added, "The poor
+chap's in trouble. He was good to me in days gone by: I'll do my best
+to help him. Perhaps that's the kind of offal that I appeared to
+Robert Pilgrim when I made my journey to God's Voice last January, and
+he threatened to shoot me; yet, God forbid that I ever looked like
+that. Maybe that which I seem to see in Spurling is only the reflected
+change in myself. Christ pity us lonely men!"</p>
+
+<p>From the window he could see how Spurling was gathering his dogs
+around him, leading them past the Point northward to a bend where they
+could not be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span> seen by a man approaching from up-river. What was the
+meaning of such precaution? Why had he been so urgently requested to
+help the one man in the world whom he was most likely to help without
+urging, since he had been his closest friend? Why had he been ordered
+to destroy the note immediately when read? And why had Spurling, whom
+he had thought to be in Klondike making his pile, or having taken
+advantage of the secret knowledge which he had unwisely shared with
+him, to be in Guiana, sailing up the Great Amana seeking El Dorado,
+travelled these thousands of miles by sea and land only to visit him
+here in Keewatin thus surlily? Was it to hide? Well, if that was his
+purpose, there wasn't much chance of his being followed, or if
+followed, found.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>
+<h3>THE DEVIL IN THE KLONDIKE</h3>
+
+<p>Spurling, having returned from feeding his dogs, had reseated himself
+by the window, but he had not again spoken. When Granger had informed
+him that a meal was ready, and had called to him to come and partake,
+he had only shaken his head. When, however, it had been brought to
+him, he had eaten hungrily, bolting his food like a famished husky,
+yet never looking at what he ate, for his eyes were directed along the
+river-bed. He used neither fork nor spoon, carrying whatever was set
+before him hastily to his mouth in his hands. His whole attitude was
+one of hurry; he rested in haste, as if begrudging the moments which
+were lost from travel.</p>
+
+<p>Had he been the foremost runner in some great race, who had fallen at
+the last lap, and, waiting to recover himself before making the final
+dash toward the tape, watched anxiously lest his next rival should
+round the bend, and surprise him before he was up on his feet again,
+he could not have been more tensely excited. His breath came in gasps
+and spasms; his body jerked and trembled even while he sat. He began
+to do things, and did not finish them. He opened his mouth to speak,
+and was silent. He half rose to his feet, and fell back again. He
+turned his head to look at Granger, then thought better of it, and
+continued staring into the west.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span> Granger watched him, and wondered
+what might be the secret which he was hesitating to impart. Was his
+mind a blank through weariness? Was he arguing out some dreadful
+problem within himself? Or was he only mad?</p>
+
+<p>What frail and isolated creatures we are!&mdash;when once our power of
+communicating thought is gone, though we breathe and move above the
+earth, we are more distant one from another than if we were truly
+dead; for, when a soul has totally forsaken its body, and the body has
+ceased to express, we, who live, can at least imagine that the thing
+departed sometimes returns and hovers within ourselves. To live and be
+silent is a remoter banishment from Life than the irrevocable exile
+decreed by Death.</p>
+
+<p>Granger could now see that the change which he had noted in Spurling
+might quite well have been the work of a month or two months, and was
+due to trouble and neglect. The man was unwashed and unfed, and for
+many nights he had not slept. His eyes were ringed and bloodshot with
+fatigue, and with incipient snow-blindness. His cheeks were sunken and
+cadaverous with too much travel; his body was limp with over-work.
+Should the cause of his excitement be suddenly removed, he would
+collapse; it was nervous courage which upheld him. And there, despite
+all these alterations for the worse, he could still discern the old
+Spurling&mdash;the man whom he had loved. The brows retained their old
+frown of impudent defiance, and the mouth its good-humoured, reckless
+contempt. These had been overlaid by some baser passion, it was true;
+but they remained, showed through, and seemed recoverable. As he
+looked, the memory flashed through his mind of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span> Spurling at his
+proudest&mdash;on that night at the Mascot dance-hall, when they had
+carried into Dawson City the news of the great bonanza they had struck
+at Drunkman's Shallows. He was standing on a table, surrounded by a
+group of miners, leading the singing, roaring out the doggerel chorus
+of a local mining ballad:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, we'll be there with our bags of gold<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When the Judgment trumpets blare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When the stars drop dead and the moon stands cold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Tell the angels we'll be there."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Ha, the power of the man and his consciousness of conquest!</p>
+
+<p>Half to himself he began to hum the tune, beating time on the bare
+boards with his moccasined feet. In a moment Spurling had jumped up,
+"For God's sake, stop! I can't endure that," he cried. "Oh, to think
+of it, that I am come to this, and that it is like this we meet after
+all these years!" He covered his face with his hands, and, sinking
+weakly back in the chair, commenced to sob. Granger went towards him,
+and bending over him, flung an arm around his neck. For the moment the
+body before him was forgotten; the noble spirit of the man who had
+once stood by and helped him, was alone remembered. "Druce, tell me
+all," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't; you would shun me."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why did you come if you could not trust me?"</p>
+
+<p>"There was nowhere else to go&mdash;no other way of escape. They were all
+around me."</p>
+
+<p>"Who were all around you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Those who had come to take me to be hanged."</p>
+
+<p>Granger gasped, and shrank aside. Then his worst<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span> conjecture was
+correct&mdash;it was as bad as that! murder had been done.</p>
+
+<p>Spurling drew himself up suddenly, throwing back his hands and
+uncovering a face of ghastly paleness. One might have supposed that he
+had been the startled witness to the confession, instead of the man
+who had made it.</p>
+
+<p>"What was that I said just now?" he asked. "You must not believe it.
+It is not true; I am tired and overstrained. They've hunted me so long
+that I myself have come almost to believe their squalid accusations.
+Don't look at me like that; I tell you I am innocent. . . . Oh well,
+perhaps I did fire the shot; but, if I did, it was an accident. I
+didn't know that the rifle had gone off until I saw him drop . . . and
+when I laid my hand on him to lift him up, I found that he was dead.
+Ugh! Then I hid him in a hole in the ice, and, because he had been my
+friend, I thought he would lie quiet forever there and never tell."</p>
+
+<p>While these words had been in the saying, Granger had drawn nearer and
+nearer, so that now the two men stood face to face, almost touching,
+staring into one another's eyes. Who was this friend who had been
+shot? Could it have been Mordaunt? He seized hold of Spurling by the
+throat with both hands, and shook him violently, crying, "What was her
+name? Will you tell me that?"</p>
+
+<p>Spurling wrenched himself free and his eyes blazed threateningly. "It
+wasn't a woman," he said; "thank God, I haven't sunk to that." Then
+more slowly, gazing fixedly on Granger as if to calculate how far it
+was safe to confide, "and he wasn't a friend of yours," he added.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Granger turned away from the window that the murderer might not see
+his countenance; his lips moved as if he prayed. He passed his hand
+before his eyes as a man does who has been temporarily blinded by a
+sudden flash. He had become terribly aware how near he had been to
+committing the crime for which this man was hunted. The knowledge of
+that fact gave him sympathy, a lack of which is always based on
+ignorance. The compassionate man is invariably one who has been
+greatly tempted. In those few seconds whilst he withdrew himself, the
+whole portentous problem was argued out, "By how much is this man who
+intends, better than that man who accomplishes his crime?" He
+concluded that the difference was not one of virtue, but only of
+opportunity&mdash;which entailed no credit on himself. He had passed
+through Spurling's temptation scatheless, therefore he could afford
+him tenderness.</p>
+
+<p>"Druce," he said, speaking tremblingly, "it is terrible how far two
+men can drift apart in the passage of three short years."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why did you leave me?" asked Spurling sulkily, not yet reassured
+of his safety, nor recovered from his rough usage.</p>
+
+<p>"I left you because I feared that I might do the deed for which you
+are now in flight."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling sat up astonished. "Lord!" he exclaimed, "have all men felt
+like that? I've often wondered why it was that you went away that
+night, leaving no message and abandoning your claim. Pray, who were
+you fearful of murdering?"</p>
+
+<p>"Listen. If I tell you, it may make it easier for you to believe me,
+in spite of what has just happened, when I say that I sincerely want
+to help you."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He was interrupted. "I suppose you know," said Spurling with a
+shocking attempt at merriment, "that you are losing the thousand
+dollars which has been offered for my capture alive or dead? It's only
+fair to tell you that. If any man is to make a profit by my hanging,
+I'd rather that the man should be a friend."</p>
+
+<p>It was as though one should make an indecent jest in the presence of a
+woman newly dead.</p>
+
+<p>"I deserved that you should say that," Granger replied. "But listen to
+me this once, for we may never meet again; who knows, in this land of
+death? I want to explain to you how it was that I behaved as I did,
+and to ask your forgiveness."</p>
+
+<p>"Then make haste," said Spurling, as he drew his chair nearer the
+window, and returned his gaze to the west.</p>
+
+<p>Without the dark was falling, though the sky was still faintly stained
+with red. It was thus he sat in the unlighted room as they talked
+together through the night, a shadowy outline against the misty panes
+which never stirred, but stared far away across the frozen quiet of
+the land.</p>
+
+<p>Granger spoke again. "You know with what hopes we set out on our
+journey to Dawson; how we went there not for the greed of gold, but
+for the sake of that other and more secret adventure which, as a boy,
+I promised my father I would undertake when I grew to be a man&mdash;an
+adventure which the Yukon gold could make possible and could purchase.
+That was my frame of mind throughout all the time that we were poor up
+there. That first winter in the Klondike, when we were nearly starved,
+and our money gave out because our grub was exhausted and the price of
+provisions ran so high, when we were thankful to work for almost any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
+wages on Wrath's diggings if only we might get food and keep warm, we
+still kept our faith in one another and our purpose in sight. You'll
+remember how we used to talk together throughout those long dark days
+when, from November to February, we scarcely ever saw the sun and the
+thermometer sometimes stood at fifty below, and how we would plan for
+our great expedition to El Dorado, when our fortunes should be made,
+comforting ourselves for our present privations with thoughts of the
+land which Raleigh described. Those, despite their misery, were my
+best days&mdash;I had hope then. Little Mordaunt would sit beside us, with
+his face in his hands and his eyes opened wide with wonder, listening
+to what we said; when we had finished he would beg us to take him
+also, offering as his share, if he should be first to make his pile,
+to pay the way for all of us. It was then that we three made the
+compact which should be binding, that whenever our joint fortunes,
+whether owned by one alone, or two, or in equal proportions by all
+together, should amount to fifty thousand dollars, we would regard it
+as common to us all, and, throwing up our workings, would leave the
+Yukon for Guiana, in search of El Dorado. We were good comrades then,
+and did not calculate what ruin the avarice of gain may bring about in
+men.</p>
+
+<p>"When spring came, we set out to seek the gold which should redeem us,
+which lay just underground. All that summer we travelled and found
+only pay-dirt or colours, and at times not even that, till we came to
+the Sleeping River and pitched our camp at what was afterwards
+Drunkman's Shallows. How discouraged we were! We talked of turning
+back, saying that nothing of worth had ever been found in the Sleeping
+River.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span> We called ourselves fools for having wasted our time up there.
+Then, on what we had determined should be the last night of our camp,
+when we had made up our minds to return next day, Eric Petersen came
+by and joined us. He also had found nothing; worse still, had spent
+all he had, and, being down in the mouth, got drunk&mdash;not decently, but
+gloriously intoxicated. Somewhere about midnight, when, after twenty
+hours of shining, the sun had disappeared and the world was still
+bright as day, and we were all sleeping, he got up and went down to
+the river to bathe his aching head, and stumbled on the banks and,
+falling in, was nearly drowned. You heard him cry and, waking, ran
+down to the water's edge. As you stooped to pull him out, you saw
+that, where his foot had stumbled on the bank, it had kicked up a
+nugget. Then you roused us and, when we had prospected and found that
+gold was really there, we each staked a claim, and you an extra one as
+discoverer, and set off that same night on the run to register.</p>
+
+<p>"It was on the evening of the day we recorded that you had your great
+time at the Mascot, leading the singing, and being toasted all round.
+It seemed to me I had reached El Dorado that night,&mdash;and now I know
+that I never shall. So, after the fun was over, we went back to work
+our claims, and toiled day and night till the river froze up. The
+stampede had followed us, and every yard of likely land was staked for
+miles below and above. My claim yielded next to nothing, and
+Mordaunt's soon pinched out; but your two were the richest on the
+Shallows.</p>
+
+<p>"I was soon compelled to work for you for wages. Mordaunt, when he had
+taken ten thousand dollars<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span> out of his claim, agreed to do likewise.
+We should both have left you at that time and gone away to prospect
+afresh, had it not been for our early understanding that whatever we
+earned was owned conjointly. Just before the winter closed down upon
+us, we had taken out nearly fifty thousand dollars, the figure at
+which we had agreed to quit the Yukon; I had one, Mordaunt ten, and
+you had thirty-five thousand dollars&mdash;forty-six thousand in all.
+Mordaunt and I talked to you about selling out and starting on our
+greater quest, but you held us to the fifty-thousand limit, saying
+that six months' postponement more or less would make no difference,
+and that we had better have too much than too little capital in hand
+before our start was made. We yielded to your judgment inasmuch as you
+were the richest man, never suspecting that you were already
+contemplating going back on your bargain to share and share alike with
+us.</p>
+
+<p>"But after the burning had commenced, and the winter had settled down
+for good, and the days had grown short and gloomy, we noticed a change
+in your manner&mdash;one of which you, perhaps, were not fully conscious.
+Your conversation became masterful and abrupt; you made us feel that
+we were your hired men, and were no longer partners in a future and
+nobler enterprise. Gradually the certainty dawned upon us that you had
+repudiated your compact, and did not include us in your plans. Gold
+for its own sake I had never cared about as you had; I only valued it
+for the power it had to forward me in the quest of which I had dreamed
+since I was a child&mdash;the following in my father's footsteps and
+discovering of the city of the Incas, and, perhaps, of my father
+himself.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"When I had seen you growing rich whilst I remained a poor man, I had
+felt no jealousy; for I trusted in the promise we had exchanged and
+relied on your honesty in keeping your word. But, when I had perceived
+your new intention, something went wrong inside my brain, so that I
+began to construe all your former good as bad. I thought that from the
+first you had never intended to keep your word, and had brought me
+into the Klondike to get me out of the way, so that, possessed of the
+secret information which I had given you, you might steal a march on
+me, and set out for El Dorado by yourself. Whether that was your
+purpose I do not know; but, for doubting you, you can scarcely blame
+me. So, day by day, as I descended the shaft to the bed-rock, and
+piled up billets of wood, and kindled them, throwing out the muck,
+drifting with the streak, sending up nuggets to the surface, and dirt
+which often averaged ten dollars to the pan, I said to myself, 'Every
+shovelful you dig out, and every fire you light, and every billet you
+stack, is helping Spurling to betray you the earlier.'</p>
+
+<p>"At first I would not believe my own judgment, but drove my anger down
+by replying, 'He is no traitor; he is my friend.' But at night when I
+came up, and you spoke to me pityingly about my hard luck and your own
+increasing wealth, I knew what you meant. Mordaunt didn't seem to
+mind; he had ten thousand dollars of his own, so he only said, 'Give
+him time. He's all right. He'll remember and come round. His head's
+turned for the moment by his fortune and he's lost his standards of
+what is just. I daresay if this happened to you or me, we should have
+been as bad.'</p>
+
+<p>"But that did not comfort me much, for I thought,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span> 'A man who can
+betray and lie to you once, can always lie and betray.' I could not
+sleep at night for thinking about it and I brooded over it all the
+day; there was ever before my eyes the vision of you, sailing up the
+Great Amana without me.</p>
+
+<p>"If nothing else had happened and it had remained at that, I suppose I
+should have finished my winter's contract with you and have gone out
+again in the spring, either with Mordaunt or alone, prospecting for
+myself. As it was, I began to argue with myself. 'What better right
+has Spurling to this gold than I?' I said. 'If I had chosen this
+claim, as I might have done, all the wealth which is now his would
+have been mine. Had that been the case, I should have held to my
+bargain and have dealt squarely by him. Since he refuses to allow me
+the share which he promised me, I have a right to take it.'</p>
+
+<p>"You know what followed, how I hid some nuggets in my shirt, and you
+accused me and discovered them. You called me a thief, and threatened
+to expose me to the law of the mining camp. I told you that, since we
+had made that agreement to share conjointly whatever we found, I had
+as big a right to take charge of some of the gold as you yourself.
+Then you laughed in my face and struck me, asking if that was the
+usual way in which a labourer spoke to his employer. That blow drove
+me mad. I made no reply, for I had become suddenly crafty; I awaited a
+revenge that was certain and from which there could be no rebound.
+From that day forward the lust to kill was upon me; wherever I looked
+I saw you dead, and was glad. When the Northern Lights shot up they
+seemed to me, instead of green or yellow, to be always crimson, the
+blood<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>colour. When they crept and rustled through the snow along the
+mountain heights, I fancied that they were a band of murderers who
+fled from their crime, and turned, and beckoned, and pointed to me,
+and whispered 'Come.' As my imagination wrought within me I grew
+silent; not even Mordaunt could rouse me. But he guessed what was
+happening, and would often come to me and say, 'Don't get
+down-hearted. Whatever Spurling does, I still hold to my promise. You
+and I are partners with a common fund. We have eleven thousand dollars
+already, so cheer up.'</p>
+
+<p>"But it wasn't envy of your wealth had driven me mad; it was fear lest
+you should go off and leave me behind, and should get to Guiana and to
+El Dorado first. I couldn't shake off my hallucination however much I
+tried&mdash;which wasn't much; always and everywhere I could see you dead.
+You know that the Klondike with its few hours of winter daylight, its
+interminable nights, its pale-green moon which seems to shine forever
+in a steely cloudless sky, and its three long months when men rarely
+see the sun, is not a much better place than Keewatin in which to heal
+a crippled mind. So, with the passage of time, there was worse to
+come.</p>
+
+<p>"One morning as I came to the shaft, I found a stranger waiting there.
+It was dark, I could not see his face; since he said nothing, I passed
+him and, descending to the bed-rock, commenced to scatter the last
+night's burning that I might get at the thawed-out muck. Presently I
+heard the sound of someone following, and the creak of the rope as he
+let himself down in the bucket. I thought it was you, so I did not
+turn, but sulkily went on with my work. The footsteps came after me
+wherever I went, standing behind me. At<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span> last I swung round in anger,
+supposing that you had come to torment me; at that moment I had it in
+my heart to strike you dead. In the light of the scattered fire, I
+discovered that it was not you, but instead a man of about my height
+and breadth. 'What d'you want?' I asked him. He did not answer. 'Who
+sent you here?' I said. He was silent. Then I grew frightened; seizing
+a smouldering brand, having puffed it to a blaze, I thrust it before
+his face&mdash;and saw <i>myself</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"I was down there all alone and underground; no one could have heard
+me had I cried for help. In my terror I grew foolish and laughed
+aloud; <i>it seemed to me so odd that I should have such fear of
+myself</i>. When I had grown quiet, 'Who sent you here?' I asked again.</p>
+
+<p>"At last he answered, 'You called me.'</p>
+
+<p>"'What have you come for?' I questioned.</p>
+
+<p>"'To murder Spurling,' he replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Then in a choking whisper I muttered, 'Who are you?'</p>
+
+<p>"And he answered me, 'Your baser self.'</p>
+
+<p>"I looked for a way of escape, but he stood between me and the mouth
+of the shaft; to get out I would have had to pass him. I tried to make
+him speak with me again that I might draw him aside, and so might slip
+past him and get above ground; but he refused to stir. Then I grew
+fascinated, and went near him, and peered into his face. He was like
+me, yet unlike; he was more evil&mdash;what I might become at my worst. He
+was to me what you were, when you just now arrived, to the man whom I
+loved in London, and who saved my life in Tagish Lake. Having studied
+his body and his face I loathed him, and drew myself away to the
+farthest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span> hiding-place. There I crouched beside the gold streak for
+ten hours until the last glow of fire had died out, and I was left in
+darkness. Then, though I could not see him, I knew that he was there.</p>
+
+<p>"At last Mordaunt came and called to me. I begged him to come down.
+Thinking I was wounded, he lit a lantern and descended in haste. As he
+approached, I looked to see where <i>myself</i> had been standing; but,
+though I had felt him there the moment before, directly Mordaunt came
+he vanished. In my horror I told Mordaunt everything&mdash;and what do you
+think the little fellow did? Instead of laughing at me, or fleeing
+from me for his life because I was mad, he set down his lamp and,
+throwing his arms about me, knelt down there on the bed-rock and
+prayed. If it hadn't been for Mordaunt I should certainly have killed
+you in the days which followed. Whenever I was alone or in your
+company, that thing, which was my baser self, was there. He would
+stand behind you, so that you could not see him, with his hand
+upraised as if about to strike. He would beckon to me that I also
+should get behind you, and when you spoke to me contemptuously or
+harshly the evil of his face would reflect a like passion in me
+against you. But whenever Mordaunt was present he vanished, and I had
+rest from temptation; therefore I say that Mordaunt saved you.</p>
+
+<p>"I kept on hoping that when spring came I would be able to leave, and
+thus rid myself of my evil dread; but the longer I stayed the greater
+grew my peril. At length the crisis came.</p>
+
+<p>"You had been down river across the ice to Dawson on the spree and to
+arrange for the carriage of your bullion to Seattle. It was night, and
+I was just return<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>ing from the shaft, where I had been giving a last
+look to the burning. I had a rifle in my hand, and, as I arrived at
+the door of the cabin, raising my eyes, saw you coming up-stream with
+your dogs, with your head bent low as if you were tired. Also I saw in
+the moonlight that <i>that other</i> was noiselessly following you, stride
+by stride, stealing up behind. I saw him waving his arms to me,
+gesticulating madly and signing to me to kneel down and fire.</p>
+
+<p>"Suddenly all power of resistance left me; with my eyes upon his face,
+the memory of all the wrongs which you had dealt me, and my hatred of
+you, swam uppermost in my mind. I knelt down in the snow to take
+steadier aim and had my finger on the trigger, when the gun was
+snatched from behind. I turned fiercely round and found Mordaunt
+standing there. 'Quick,' he said, 'come inside.' He thrust the rifle
+beneath a pile of furs, and bade me tumble into my bunk and pretend
+sleep. Shortly after, I heard you come in and say that one of your
+dogs had been shot dead; but I did not stir. You came over and gazed
+down suspiciously at me, but seemed satisfied with Mordaunt's account
+of how I had been lying there for the past two hours wearied out with
+the day's work. Next day I could not look you in the eyes; also the
+memory of a woman I had loved had come suddenly back and changed me,
+making me ashamed. So two nights later I gathered together the few
+things I had and, abandoning my claim, fled.</p>
+
+<p>"If I could not trust myself with you, I could not trust myself in the
+Yukon. Every miner travelling with gold seemed to me a possible victim
+for my crime. I went about in fear lest I should see that evil thing,
+which called himself <i>myself</i>, returning to keep me company<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span> through
+life. I fled to escape him and, hoping to leave him behind me in the
+Klondike, went over the winter trail to Skaguay, the route by which
+two years earlier we had fought our way up, took steamer to Vancouver
+and came on thence to Winnipeg. My money was all but exhausted when I
+got there, I was broken in spirit and at my wit's end. By chance I met
+with Wrath, on whose claim in our first winter we had worked. He had
+gone back to his independent trading, and, at my request for
+employment, sent me up here to look after his interests at Murder
+Point. I was glad to come; after my experience on the Sleeping River,
+I was distrustful of myself in the company of men, never knowing when
+that <i>foreshadowing of my evil desires</i> might not return to hound me
+on to fresh villainies and despair. For one who wished to be alone,
+Heaven knows, I chose well. You're not burdened with too much society
+in Keewatin&mdash;that isn't the complaint which is most often heard."</p>
+
+<p>Outside the night had long since settled down&mdash;a night which with snow
+and starlight was not dark, but shadowy and ghostlike, making the
+interval between two days a long-protracted dusk beneath which it was
+possible to see for miles. Far away in the forest a timber-wolf howled
+dismally; the huskies in the river-bed, seated on their haunches,
+lifted up their heads and echoed his complaint. Then all was still
+again, nothing was audible except the occasional low booming of the
+ice, when a crack rent its path across the surface and far below the
+river shook its gyves, as though clapping its hands in expectation of
+the freedom of the spring to come.</p>
+
+<p>Against the window the silhouette of Spurling loomed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span> up, with the
+drifting dimness of the starlight for background, and the square of
+surrounding darkness for a frame of sombre plush; he seemed a
+man-portrait whom some painter had condemned forever to motionlessness
+and silence with the magic of his brush, and had nailed on a
+stretcher, and had hung up for ornament.</p>
+
+<p>At last he turned his head and stared into the blackness of the room,
+searching with his eyes for Granger. "So the deed which you feared to
+do, I have done," he said. "And here we sit together again, now that
+three years have passed; I, the man whom you hoped to murder and the
+man who has committed your crime; you, the man who stole from me,
+fired on me, missed aim, and ran away, and yet who at this present
+time are my judge. It is very strange! One would have supposed that
+with the breadth of a continent between us, you in Keewatin, I in
+Yukon, we need never have met. There is a meaning in this happening;
+God intends that you should help me to escape."</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
+<h3>SPURLING'S TALE</h3>
+
+<p>Granger from his place beside the red-hot stove said nothing, but
+bowed his head. Spurling saw his action through the darkness and took
+courage.</p>
+
+<p>"There is not much to tell," he said. "After you left us, my luck
+seemed to vanish. My great bonanza pinched out, as Mordaunt's had
+done. I spent the spring and summer in washing out the gold from my
+winter's dump, and in sinking shafts to locate another streak which I
+might follow in the winter to come. I found none, but at first I did
+not lose confidence. I had plenty of capital and could well afford to
+spend some of it in exploration. I was quite sure that my two claims
+contained a hundred times as much gold as I had taken out&mdash;all I had
+to do was to find its location.</p>
+
+<p>"What Mordaunt said to you about me was true&mdash;my sudden good fortune
+had turned my head; I flung my earnings right and left, spending them
+on the most foolish extravagances, and still remained avaricious. I
+developed a mania for asserting my power and getting myself talked
+about. You know that in those days a new 'millionaire' in the Klondike
+was expected to do some of that; if, when he came to Dawson, he was
+sparing, and refused to treat the town to half-dollar drinks till
+everyone was drunk, they'd take him by his legs and arms and batter
+him against a wall until he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span> gave in and cried, 'Yes.' Why, I've seen
+men set to and pan out from the sawdust on the floor of a saloon the
+gold which I had scattered. I performed such follies as made
+Swiftwater Bill famous when, after he had squabbled with his
+'lady-friend,' and he saw her ordering eggs, of which she happened to
+be fond, he bought up every egg in town at a dollar a piece, nine
+hundred in all, and smashed them, to spite her, against the side of
+her house. I was a confounded fool; if I hadn't been, I shouldn't have
+quarrelled with you, and we shouldn't have been here now&mdash;we might
+have been in El Dorado, perhaps.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, when I'd blown a good part of my money over stupidities for
+which I scarcely received even pleasure in return, I awoke to the fact
+that my workings had ceased to bear. Already the Sleeping River had
+got a bad name and was deserted; it was a commonplace that 'Drunkman's
+Shallows was played out.' I wouldn't acknowledge it. I took pride in
+the Shallows because I had discovered them; I wasted the remainder of
+my money in buying up other men's useless claims, and in engaging men
+to work them. Towards the end, even I had to own to myself that the
+streaks had pinched out and the Shallows were barren; but out of
+desperate bravado I kept on until my money was at an end. Then, when I
+was clean broke, I chose out a partner and went prospecting once
+again.</p>
+
+<p>"At first we found nothing, for, as I say, when you left me my luck
+departed. For months we wandered, finding only pay and colours, till
+we entered the Squaw River and discovered what we wanted at Gold Bug
+Bend. We stayed there working and testing the dirt till well into
+January; then one day we drifted into a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span> streak which panned out
+twenty dollars to the pan, and so we knew at last that we had struck
+it. We eyed one another suspiciously, for we each of us remembered how
+you had been treated, and we began to talk about the necessity of
+recording our claims and discovery. Neither of us would trust the
+other to go alone, for we both wanted the claim on which we had been
+working, where the rich streak had been located, so we set out
+together. At first we travelled leisurely, speaking to one another;
+but soon we grew silent, and began to race. My partner was a lighter
+built man than I, and had the better team of dogs, and carried no gun.
+Very soon he began to draw away from me; but I relied on my superior
+strength to catch him up, for the journey was long. Then, somehow, as
+he ran farther and farther ahead, the belief grew up within me, that,
+whatever I might do, God meant him to get there first as a punishment
+to me for what I had done to you. At that thought all my lust after
+power, and the memory of the mastery which I had lost, came back, and
+I said, 'I will outwit God this time, however.'</p>
+
+<p>"Mechanically, almost without thinking, I levelled my gun and
+fired&mdash;and saw my partner drop. When I came up with him, he was lying
+face-downwards, with his arms stretched out before him along the
+ground. I turned him over and called on him to rouse. I kicked him
+with the toe of my snowshoe, and tried to get angry, pretending to
+myself that he was shamming. Then I knelt down beside him and covered
+him with a robe, deceiving myself that he had fainted and would
+presently awake. After I had waited for what seemed to be ages, I
+called him by name, and, when he did not stir, I laid my finger on his
+eyeballs&mdash;and so I knew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span> that he was dead. When I knew that, fear got
+hold upon me; at every crack of the ice I persuaded myself that
+someone was coming up or down the frozen river, or had already seen
+me, and lay hidden behind a snow-ridge, watching all my doings. So I
+took up my comrade, and thrust him upright into a hole in the ice,
+trusting that because he had been my friend he would understand, and
+never tell. But his arms, which he had extended in falling, stuck out
+above the surface, as if signing my secret to all the world. They had
+grown stiff and frozen, and I could not bend them, so I knocked off,
+and piled up around and above them, blocks of ice.</p>
+
+<p>"Then, because I was fearful lest my coming alone without my partner
+into Dawson to record a claim might arouse suspicion, I turned back to
+the Gold Bug Bend. There I stayed and drifted with the streak for
+three months, and thawed out at least sixty thousand dollars' worth of
+muck. I had time to think things over. I came to the conclusion that I
+could not record my claim, since that might bring the miners up who
+would notice that my partner was missing; neither could I take down my
+dust to Dawson to express it to the outside, since that also would
+lead to questions being asked as to where I'd got it, seeing that it
+was so great in amount. So I determined to lie quiet until the summer
+time, and then to wash out only so much gold as I could carry about
+myself.</p>
+
+<p>"There was little chance of my being discovered on the Squaw River,
+for it is seldom travelled, and I calculated that in four months' time
+when the spring had come, the river would float the body far away to
+where it never would be found, or if found, then at a time when it
+would be unrecognisable. But in my first calculation I had not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
+reckoned with my loneliness, and the horror which comes of knowledge
+of hidden crime. By the end of March I could stand it no longer and
+set out for Dawson, where there were men in whose company I could
+forget.</p>
+
+<p>"Soon after I got there the winter broke up and, by the first of May,
+though the Klondike itself was still frozen solid to its river-bed,
+the snow and ice from the country and rivers to the south, which had
+been exposed to the rays of the sun, had thawed and, draining into it,
+had created a shallow torrent which, running between the banks above
+the ground-ice, gave an appearance of the Klondike in full flood. Very
+soon the water over-flowed, so that houses were deluged and men had to
+take to boats and the roofs of their cabins for safety; it looked as
+though Dawson would be washed away. The drifting ice commenced to pack
+and pile against the bridge above the town; unless the jam could be
+broken before the ground-ice loosened, the bridge must collapse. Some
+men volunteered to blow it up with dynamite. In so doing they caused
+the ground-ice to tear itself free from the bottom so that, the water
+getting underneath, it floated up and pressed the pack against the
+floor of the bridge, forming, for a half-minute, an impassable barrier
+against the torrent rushing down. The flood rose behind it like a
+tidal wave, tossing on its crest a gigantic floe, standing waist-deep
+in which I saw, for the second during which it flashed in the sun, a
+frozen man, whom I recognised, who gazed upright towards me with his
+arms upstretched&mdash;only for a second, then the bridge went down and the
+water leapt over it, driving timbers, and floe, and man below the
+surface, carrying them northwards passed the city, out of sight.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"The thing had been so sudden that only a few of those who were
+watching had realised what had happened; of these still fewer had seen
+the man; and of these only one had known and recognised my partner, as
+I had done. None of them could say for certain whether the man they
+had seen upon the floe had been alive or dead. In the confusion which
+followed the catastrophe this rumour was at first regarded as an idle
+tale to which no one paid much attention. But, when that one man who
+had seen and recognised came to me and inquired as to my partner's
+whereabouts, and I could give him no satisfactory answers, curiosity
+was aroused.</p>
+
+<p>"The Mounted Police instituted a search for the body, but as yet it
+was not found.</p>
+
+<p>"I was half-minded to leave the country and go outside. Would to God I
+had! But I was afraid that such conduct, following immediately upon
+this occurrence, would attract attention. I returned to the Squaw
+River and spent the half of another year up there. Then one day in
+November an Indian, who was passing up-river, stepped into my cabin
+and told me that the Mounted Police were searching for me. When I
+asked him why, he said that the English friends of my partner had been
+inquiring for him, and that I was known to have been the last man to
+be seen in his company. When that had been said, I knew the meaning of
+the sight I had witnessed when the bridge gave&mdash;my partner had sent
+his body down river on the first of the flood to warn me of my danger,
+as if he would say, '<i>Escape while you can; it will soon be
+discovered</i>.'</p>
+
+<p>"I gathered together what gold I could carry and, travelling by night
+only that I might not be noticed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span> (and you know how long November
+nights can be in the Yukon), I struck the trail for Skaguay&mdash;the route
+by which two and a half years before you had fled. I got out
+undetected, as I thought, and arrived at Vancouver. There I read in a
+paper that at Forty-Mile the body had been found. I was seized with
+panic and hurried on to Winnipeg; on the way I was alarmed to find
+that I was being shadowed. I escaped my follower on my arrival there
+and sought out Wrath, the only man I knew in town. I was sure that I
+could trust him if he were sufficiently heavily bribed; so I gave him
+all the gold I had, and told him the truth, and offered to furnish him
+with such information as would enable him to go up and stake the rich
+bonanza which I had left behind on the Squaw River&mdash;all this if he
+would only help me to escape. He agreed to accept my terms, despite
+the risks he was taking in helping to conceal a criminal. He told me
+that you were up here, and said that it was no good going East, or
+striking down to the States, since all the railroads would be watched,
+and that my only chance lay in making a dash due north for Keewatin.
+He gave me a guide for the first three hundred miles of the journey,
+and the swiftest team of huskies he had. He smuggled me out to
+Selkirk, and gave me introductions to such men as could be trusted on
+the way. Before I left, I heard that they had made me an outlaw by
+placing a thousand dollars on my head.</p>
+
+<p>"I've travelled day and night since then, only halting when my
+strength gave out, or when I had to hide till darkness came that I
+might pass unobserved by a Company's outpost.</p>
+
+<p>"And I'm followed; I know that. I have not seen him, but I can feel
+that he is drawing nearer, and now<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span> is not far behind. I knew that if
+I could reach you, in spite of what has happened between us, you would
+save me. Granger, you must save me, if not for the sake of what I am,
+then because of what I once was to you in our London days. I know that
+I've deteriorated and have become bad; but it was more the fault of
+the country than of the man. You know what happens to a fellow who
+lives up there, how greedy and gloomy he gets, always feeling that the
+gold is underground and that he must get to it even at the expense of
+his honour and his life. You've felt it, you came near doing what I
+have done. If Mordaunt hadn't stopped you, you would have stood where
+I now stand."</p>
+
+<p>Granger broke in upon the frenzy of his appeal, asking abruptly,
+"Where is Mordaunt now?"</p>
+
+<p>If his face had not been in the shadow, Granger would have seen how
+Spurling's lips tightened as to withstand sudden pain, and his body
+shuddered at that question. "Oh, Mordaunt is all right," he said. "He
+left the Yukon soon after you left&mdash;he said that the fun was spoilt
+without you. I daresay he's seeking for El Dorado or else is married."</p>
+
+<p>"You are sure of that?" asked Granger.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure of what? All I know is that he quarrelled with me over your
+affair because he thought that I had not used you justly; shortly
+afterwards we broke up our partnership, and I was told that he had
+gone out through Alaska, via Michael to Seattle."</p>
+
+<p>When the man at the back of the room said nothing, Spurling asked in a
+tone of horror, "Why, you don't think that I killed him too, do
+you,&mdash;just because I have owned to shooting one man?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what to think," replied Granger,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span> speaking slowly; "no,
+certainly I do not think that you killed him, <i>too</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, what?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind, since the matter's in doubt I will help you. What do you
+propose to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Go on till I come to the Forbidden River, and hide there till the
+hunt for me is over, and they think that I am dead."</p>
+
+<p>"And then, if you survive?"</p>
+
+<p>"Creep back into the world and begin life all afresh."</p>
+
+<p>"And how can I help you?"</p>
+
+<p>"By lending me a fresh team, for mine is all tired out, and giving me
+provisions for my journey, and delaying my pursuer when he arrives."</p>
+
+<p>"How shall I delay him!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you will know when you see him&mdash;there are many ways, some of
+which are very effectual." Spurling played with the butt of his
+revolver as he said these words, and looked at Granger tentatively,
+then looked aside. "For instance, the winter is breaking up and he
+might fall through the ice; or while he is staying here several of his
+dogs might die; or, at the least, you can tell him that you have not
+seen me and persuade him that he has passed me by. If he refuses to
+believe that, you can suggest that I have left the river and gone into
+the forest, and so put him off my track&mdash;anything to give me time."</p>
+
+<p>"He would scarcely believe the last," said Granger, "for on the Last
+Chance there is only one trail&mdash;by the river up and down. And I want
+you to understand Spurling, that if I do help you it will be by clean
+means; I intend to play fair all round."</p>
+
+<p>"Play fair! Do you call it fair play when a nation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span> sets out to hunt
+one man? I have only done what thousands have thought and intended.
+What better is the man who effects my capture, and gets the thousand
+dollars which they have set upon my head, and sends me to the
+scaffold, than I myself who without premeditation shot a man. You're a
+nice one to talk about playing fair to the fellow who gave you your
+chance, and was your friend, and whom you tried to murder! Which of
+us, do you suppose, is the cleaner man?"</p>
+
+<p>Granger did not answer; through the last few hours he had been asking
+himself that same question. Spurling, thinking he had offended, began
+to plead afresh. "Oh, John, if you knew all that I have suffered you
+would pity me. God knows I've repented for what I did with drops of
+blood. If I'd only thought before I acted, I might have known that I
+stood to gain nothing by it. What good was the gold to me when I got
+it? I could only hide it, and wealth is not wealth when you have to
+keep it secret to yourself."</p>
+
+<p>He paused exhausted, and fell back drooping in his chair. Granger's
+pity had been aroused. "Druce," he said, "I have promised that I will
+help you; you must be content with that."</p>
+
+<p>Spurting clutched at his hand and pressed it to his lips. "And there
+are things which you need not tell him?" he questioned. "Say that
+there are things that you will not tell."</p>
+
+<p>"There are things that I will not tell," Granger repeated. "I will not
+tell him that I have seen you, and will refuse to give him help."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling's eyes had again sought out the west and the intervening
+stretch of sky, where from the east the reflected light of dawn had
+already begun to spread.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I don't like the look of it," he muttered; "I can feel that he is not
+far behind. Every time I look up-river I expect to see him, a dull
+brown shadow, hurrying down between the banks of white. I must be
+going; while I stay I cannot rest."</p>
+
+<p>So, when all had been got ready and Granger had supplied him with a
+new outfit and an untired team of dogs, he accompanied him out on to
+the Point where the dawn was breaking. Then he told him of a cache
+which Beorn had made at the mouth of the Forbidden River, which he
+might open, and from which he could get supplies if his own ran short.
+He went with him a mile down the ice, that he might guide him round a
+part of the trail which was rotten and unsafe to travel. At parting,
+Spurling grasped his hand; pointing back to the danger spot he
+whispered, "That is one of the things which you need not tell." Before
+he could answer him, he had lashed up his dogs and was on his way
+northwards. It was then that the thought of a final test flashed
+through Granger's mind. "Spurling, Spurling," he called, "did you know
+that Mordaunt was a woman and not a man?"</p>
+
+<p>Whether he had heard Granger could not tell, for he did not halt or
+turn his head; driving yet more furiously, urging his huskies forward
+with the whip and shouting them on, he vanished round the bend.</p>
+
+<p>Granger stood gazing after him, listening to the last faint echo of
+his cries; then he turned slowly and walked through the half-light
+back to his lonely store. Over to his right, above the horizon the red
+sun leapt. He did not raise his eyes; but, as he walked, he whispered
+over and over to himself words which seemed incredible, "And, if it
+had not been for her, <i>I</i> should have been like that."</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
+<h3>CITIES OUT OF SIGHT</h3>
+
+
+<p>In Keewatin the human intellect stands forever at a halt, awed in the
+presence of a limitless serenity for which it can find no better name
+than God, since, of all things which are incalculable, He seems most
+infinite.</p>
+
+<p>In this land of rivers and solitude Man is unnecessary, disregarded,
+and plays no part; if, after two hundred odd years of white, and many
+centuries of Indian habitation, Man were to withdraw himself
+to-morrow, he would leave no permanent record of his sojourn
+there&mdash;only a few outposts and forts, several far-scattered
+independent traders' stores, one or two missions and fishing-stations,
+all of them built of wood, which within a decade would have crumbled
+to decay, over which the tangled forest would silently close up.
+Instinctively he knows himself for an impudent intruder on something
+which is sacred; he hears continually what Adam heard when he stole of
+the fruit which was forbidden, God walking in the garden in the cool
+of the day&mdash;the accusing footsteps of God. His brain is staggered by
+an unchartered immensity in which he has no portion, which he can only
+watch. His individual worth to the universe is dwarfed by the
+imminence of the All: so nothing seems very serious which is only
+personal and, since all things which we apprehend must become in some
+sense personal, nothing is very important.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span> The procession of human
+effort becomes a spectacle at sight of which Homeric laughter may
+sometimes be permissible, but tears never. If a man once gives way to
+weeping in Keewatin, he will weep always. Only by the exercise of a
+self-restraint which at first seems brutal can life be endured there.</p>
+
+<p>Granger, as he walked toward his store under the shadow of the dawn,
+was conscious of all this. The land was wrapped in the intensest
+quiet; the very crunch of his snowshoes seemed a profanation, though
+he trod lightly. When he had ascended the Point, he paused and gazed
+back. Already the thaw had commenced; down the still white face of the
+country, which lay at his feet like a shrouded corpse, the tears had
+begun to trinkle, though the eyes were tranquil and fast shut; the
+sight was as astounding to him as if a man six months dead should be
+seen to stir within his coffin of glass. Here and there in the expanse
+of forest he could see flashes of green and brown, of tree-tops from
+which the snow had fallen. The river-banks, which yesterday had seemed
+chiselled out of solid marble, were to-day tunnelled and scarred with
+tiny rills and watercourses which groped their way feebly riverwards.
+As he stood in silence meditating, he was startled by the whirr of
+wings, and looking southward descried the advance-guard of the first
+flock of ducks. "Ha, the spring has come," he cried; but immediately
+he checked his ecstasy, for his eyes had again caught sight of the
+emotionless expression on that great white face with its closed eyes
+turned toward the sun. Though no voice spoke it seemed to him to say,
+making by its silence its meaning plain, "There is nothing of which
+the importance is so great that we should forsake our calm."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He felt rebuked for vulgarity, as though he had been found shouting in
+a cathedral-nave where priests were praying for the peace of souls of
+the departed. He desired to hide himself; entering his shack, he
+pushed to the door. He was tired; his brain ached with thought, and
+his thought was disjointed. He could not believe that Spurling had
+ever come; it was all an hallucination. Thinking about the past had
+made him imagine all that, or else he had dreamed it in the night. He
+went over detail by detail all that had seemed to him to happen; and
+even then, when it fitted reasonably together, he could not be
+certain. It was too monstrous that Spurling should have become like
+that! He would not believe it. Then his anxiety for Mordaunt sprang up
+and commenced to craze him. The terrible question throbbed through his
+mind, "Is Mordaunt dead?"</p>
+
+<p>The mania for questions grew upon him. Three separate voices spoke
+clamorously at once: "Is Mordaunt dead?"</p>
+
+<p>"Did Spurling murder him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Am I mad?"</p>
+
+<p>He stumbled to the far end of the room and flung himself down in his
+bunk, burying his face in its coverings that he might shut out the
+light and gain a moment's rest. But his imaginings followed and knelt
+beside him.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if I must think," he whispered, "I will think of that which is
+best." He beckoned from out the shadows his memory of Mordaunt's face,
+and gave himself over to recalling all that it once had meant. They
+had nicknamed him "The Girl" because of his shyness and modesty, and
+had not always been particular in the jokes which they had made at his
+expense. Yes, and he had had a woman's ways from first to last.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
+Nothing that had happened had been able to coarsen him; he had never
+given way to loose talk or brutal jests, and in the presence of
+suffering had invariably been full of tenderness.</p>
+
+<p>Good heavens! pass on to the crisis&mdash;to that day when he had come to
+the top of the shaft and called down to him! He had answered his call,
+praying him in an agonized voice to descend and rescue him. He could
+see him now approaching hurriedly, yet cautiously, through the
+darkness, lifting high up his swinging lamp so that its rays fell
+across his face. He could still remember how absurd it had seemed to
+suppose that a creature, so small and fragile, could save him from
+<i>that other</i>. Yet he had; and after that, because of the relief he
+felt, he had confessed. Then, in a moment of compassionate
+self-forgetfulness, Mordaunt had placed his arms about him and had
+drawn down his head upon his breast&mdash;an action of which no man in
+dealing with another man was ever capable; the mother-instinct was
+manifested there. In the flickering lamplight, with his head pressed
+close to his companion's breast, feeling its rise and fall at each
+struggling intake of the breath, crouching underground upon the
+bed-rock, he had guessed the secret&mdash;<i>that Mordaunt was not a man</i>.
+From that hour he had loved her. She had never known that he shared
+her secret. Thank God, he had remained so much a gentleman that he had
+not told her that! Who she was, why she had come to the Klondike, what
+was her proper name, he had not permitted himself to inquire; for him
+it had been sufficient that she was a woman, and that he loved her,
+and that he was unworthy of her love. After she had seen him shoot at
+Spurling he had avoided her, lest by contact with him she should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span> be
+defiled. He had vaguely hoped at the time of leaving that the day
+might come, after he had cleansed himself and proved himself a man,
+when he might seek her out and ask her to be his wife. Through the
+last three years he had lived for that. To have asked her then would
+have been an insult, an act of cowardice. How would an upright woman
+answer a man whom she had just saved from homicide? How would she
+regard a man who had discovered the secret of her sex in such a
+manner, because of her compassion, and had not had the decency to keep
+that knowledge secret even from herself? So he had fled from the
+Shallows for a double reason; that he might not do violence to
+Spurling, and that he might not betray himself to her. He had left her
+without a hint of his going, or a word of explanation.</p>
+
+<p>What had she thought of him? He had often wondered that. Had she also
+loved him, and not dared to speak about it? He half-suspected that. If
+she had loved him and had spoken out, he would not have married her at
+that time, when even he despised himself; to have done so would have
+been to drag her down. Still, he could not help speculating as to what
+she had said and thought on that morning when she awoke in the winter
+dreariness, and, gazing round the cabin, found that he had vanished.
+Had she regretted him, and had she sometimes, when Spurling had become
+intolerable, gone aside and wept? After three years, though he had
+loved her, he could only recall her by her man's name, and picture her
+in her man's dress.</p>
+
+<p>Then, while he thought with closed eyes, that awful question came
+again, "Is Mordaunt dead?"</p>
+
+<p>Whilst she was in the world it had been possible for him to strive to
+be straightforward and courageous;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span> but, <i>if she was dead</i> . . .! If
+Spurling had murdered her, if he had lied to him and <i>she</i> was his
+partner, what then? Well, that all depended on whether Spurling had
+known her sex. If not, what a revenge he would take when he should
+confront him, and inform him that he had murdered a woman, and not a
+man! He knew Spurling; for him the public ignominy of being hanged
+would be as nothing compared with such private knowledge&mdash;it would
+thrust him into Hell in this life.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, but that could not be; God would not allow it! Spurling himself
+had said that he had not sunk so low as that. Yet, in case it might be
+so, he would keep his word and help him to escape&mdash;from the Mounted
+Police, but not from himself. He would be the executioner if there
+must be one. The law should not rob him of his revenge. He would save
+Spurling's life in case he might need to take it.</p>
+
+<p>Then, unbidden and against his will, there rose up the image of the
+man who had saved his life in Tagish Lake. Spurling had forestalled
+him, bribed him beforehand, by restoring him his own life in exchange
+for the life which he was doomed to take. Did that not make amends?
+Also he had rescued Mordaunt from disaster on the Skaguay trail, where
+he would certainly have perished had he been left. He had done
+unconsciously that which Granger proposed to do of set purpose&mdash;saved
+a life that he might take it. Did not that in some measure make
+amends? The problem was too complicated; it must work itself out in
+its own way. Yet, it would be a bitter irony if, after he had
+travelled a continent to avoid this deed, he should be forced to kill
+Spurling in the end&mdash;Spurling, who had come to him of his own accord.
+Still more burlesque would it be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span> if, after Spurling was at rest, he
+should be hanged in his stead.</p>
+
+<p>But perhaps Mordaunt was not dead.</p>
+
+<p>To rid himself of these morbid questionings, he would give his remoter
+memory the reins to-day, at whatever cost; it was pleasanter to
+remember bygone unpleasantness than to live with the ills which
+threatened his present life. He recollected how some one had once
+asked Carlyle, "Why does the Past always seem so much happier than the
+Present?" And Carlyle's stern reply, "Because the fear has gone out of
+it." How odd it seemed to him that he should be recalling Carlyle up
+there in Keewatin! Yet, because that answer was true, he took up the
+thread of his London life again, that so, with the drug of memory, he
+might lay to rest his immediate misfortunes. He was a little boy again
+in the old red house on Clapton Common. One by one he entered its
+homely rooms with their ancient furniture, quaint wall-paper, and
+general look of substantial comfort. Once more he leant out of the
+bow-window at the back and gazed beyond the hill, upon which the house
+was built, up which gardens climbed, divided by creeper-covered walls
+of crumbling brick, down to where at its foot the river ran through
+flats and marshes. Far away, a little to the right, old Woodford
+raised its head; to the left Chingford, as yet unmodernized, showed
+up; and straight ahead, at a distance of seven miles, the steeple of
+High Beech, in the kindly habitable forest of Epping, was in sight.
+This was the house in which he had first dreamed the dream by the
+glamour of which he had been led astray. His father had dreamed the
+same dream, and his grandfather before him; it seemed to be a part of
+the walls and masonry, so interwoven<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span> was it with his memories of that
+house. It had been the first faery-story which he had ever listened
+to, and had been told to him for the most part in that back room with
+the bow-window, as he had sat on his grand-father's knee on winters'
+nights.</p>
+
+<p>The first time that he had heard it he could not have been more than
+five, and his father was absent, so his grandfather said, pursuing the
+dream on the other side of the world. This was the story as he
+remembered it. "In the land of Guiana there is a golden city named
+Manoa, but El Dorado in the Spanish language, which stands on the
+shores of a vast inland lake whose waters are salt, which is called
+Parima, and which is two hundred leagues in length. Juan Martinez was
+the first white man to visit it, and he did so through no fault of his
+own! When he was with the Spanish army at the port of Morequito, the
+store of powder, of which he had charge, caught fire and was
+destroyed. His commander, Diego Ordas, was so enraged that he
+sentenced him to death; but being appealed to by the soldiery with
+whom Martinez was a favourite, he commuted his punishment to
+this&mdash;that he should be set in a canoe alone, without any victual,
+only with his arms, and so turned loose on the great river. By the
+grace of God he floated down stream and was captured by certain
+Indians, who, never having seen a European before or anyone of that
+colour, carried him into a land to be wondered at, and so from town to
+town, until he came to the golden city of Manoa of which Inca was
+emperor. Now the emperor, when he beheld him, knew him to be a
+Christian, for not long since his brethren had been vanquished by the
+Spaniards in Peru; therefore he had him lodged in his palace and
+ordered that he should be respectfully<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span> entertained. There Martinez
+lived for seven months, and all that while was not allowed to wander
+beyond the city's walls lest he should discover the country's secrets,
+for he had been brought thither blindfold and had been fifteen days in
+the passage. When, years later, he came to die, he confessed to a
+priest that he had entered Manoa at high noon and that then his
+captors had uncovered his eyes, and that he had travelled all that day
+till nightfall through its streets and all the next, from the rising
+to the setting of the sun, of so great extent was it, until he arrived
+at the palace. It was Martinez who had given to Manoa its name of El
+Dorado, because its roadways were paved with gold, and there was so
+great an abundance of that metal there that, before the emperor would
+carouse with his captains, all those who were to pledge him were
+stripped naked, and their bodies anointed with white balsam, over
+which through hollow canes was blown by slaves the dust of fine gold,
+so that when his guests sat down to drink with him, they glistened
+yellow in the sun like gilded statues.</p>
+
+<p>"When Martinez had obtained his freedom and returned to Trinidad, and
+told his story, many other adventurers set out in quest of Manoa; but
+none so much as saw it save only Pedro de Urra. He, after incredible
+labours, at length arrived at a mountain peak whence, looking down,
+far away in the distance he could just descry the shining roofs of
+palaces and golden domes of Inca temples, wherein, he was told, were
+stored gold images of women and children more beautiful than God had
+yet wrought into flesh and blood. But his strength was spent and his
+troops were famished, also the Incas' armies were moving forward to
+check his advance; therefore he had to retreat, and to return to the
+sea<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>coast, where he fretted away his life in dreaming of the
+splendours of which he had only just had sight. Fifty years later
+Berreo, governor of Trinidad, set out from Nuevo Reyno with seven
+hundred horse and slaves, and descended the Cassanar river, bound upon
+the same errand. What with fever and poisonous water he lost many of
+his men and cattle, so that, when he reached the Province of Amapaia,
+he had but one hundred and twenty soldiers left, and these were sick
+and dying; and so he also was forced to abandon his search. And this
+man Raleigh captured, and from him extorted his secrets, when he
+sailed to discover and conquer El Dorado for Queen Elizabeth, having
+in his company Jacob Whiddon, the English pirate, and George Gifford
+who was captain of the Lion's Whelp.</p>
+
+<p>"All the way across the ocean they studied the records of the
+adventurers who had sought before them, till they had them all by
+memory; for they hoped to find those same wonders which Lopez says
+that Pizarro found in the first home of the Incas: 'A royal city where
+all the vessels of the emperor's house, table, and kitchen, were of
+gold and silver, and the meanest of silver and copper for strength and
+hardness of metal. He had in his wardrobe hollow statues of gold which
+seemed giants, and the figures in proportion and bigness of all the
+beasts, birds, trees, and herbs that earth produceth; and of all the
+fishes that the sea or waters of his kingdom breedeth. He had also
+ropes, budgets, chests, and troughs of gold and silver, heaps of
+billets of gold, that seemed wood marked out to burn. Finally, there
+was nothing in his country whereof he had not the counterfeit in gold.
+Yea, and they say, that the Incas had a garden of pleasure in an
+island near Puna, where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span> they went to recreate themselves when they
+would take the air of the sea, which had all kinds of garden-herbs,
+flowers, and trees of gold and silver, an invention and magnificence
+till then never seen. Besides all this, he had an infinite quantity of
+silver and gold unwrought in Cuzco.' The counterpart of all these
+marvels Raleigh hoped to find, when he had sailed up the Orinoco to
+its watershed.</p>
+
+<p>"So, when he had gathered all the information which he could from
+Berreo, he departed and rowed up the river in the galego boat of the
+Lion's Whelp, till on the fourth day he dropped into the waters of the
+Great Amana. Up the Great Amana he travelled, always getting news of
+his city, always being told that it was farther inland. On the banks
+of this river grew diverse sorts of fruit good to eat, flowers and
+trees of such variety as were 'sufficient to make ten books of
+herbals.' And everywhere he saw multitudes of birds of all colours,
+some carnation, some crimson, some orange-tawny, purple, watchet, and
+of all other sorts, so that, as he himself has said, 'It was unto us a
+great good passing of the time to behold them, besides the relief we
+found in killing some store of them; and still as we rowed, the deer
+came down feeding by the water's side, as if they had been used to the
+keeper's call.'</p>
+
+<p>"Lured on by these delights, he journeyed farther inland until at last
+he came to the first great silver mine; but here the Orinoco and all
+the other rivers had risen from four to five feet in height, so that
+it was not possible by the strength of man or with any boat whatsoever
+to row into the river against the stream. However, before his return,
+one day as it drew towards sunset, he had sight of a crystal mountain,
+which was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span> said to be studded with diamonds and precious stones, which
+shone afar off, the appearance of which was like to that of a white
+church tower of exceeding height. Over the summit rushed a mighty
+river, which touched no part of the mountainside, and fell with a
+great clamour as if a thousand bells were knocked together; so, though
+he did not find El Dorado, he was somewhat comforted by the marvel of
+this sight. Also, before he left he saw <i>El Madre del Oro</i>, the mother
+of gold, which proved that treasure lay not far underground."</p>
+
+<p>So, hour after hour, and night after night, the old man had told his
+magic story of the search for El Dorado to the little boy. And
+sometimes he would vary it with other tales and legends of men who had
+gone upon quests equally wild; of Ponce de Leon, who had sought for
+the Bimini Isle, where arose a fountain whose waters could cause men
+to grow young again; of the Sieur D'Ottigny, who set sail for the
+Unknown in search of wealth, singing songs as if bound for a bridal
+feast; and of Vasseur, who first brought news of the distant
+Appalachian Mountains, whose slopes teem with precious metals and with
+gems beyond price. But always the narration would return to El Dorado
+on the shores of Parima. Then the little boy would ask, "But, Grandpa,
+is it true, or is it only a faery-tale? Was there ever such a city,
+and does it exist to-day?" Whereupon the old gentleman would grow very
+serious and would reply, "Certainly there is such a city, my dear; for
+when I was young I went in search of it, and your father is out there
+finding it to-day."</p>
+
+<p>After which answer he would get out maps, and show the child the red
+lines, which were his own journeys, and the exact spot in the
+watershed of the Orinoco<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span> where he believed the city to stand. Then
+they would reason about it together, bending low beneath the lamp,
+tracing out the various routes of past explorers, until his mother
+came in and, seeing what they were so busy about, carried him off to
+bed. At an early age he discovered that his mother approved neither of
+the grand-father's stories, nor of her husband's absence. She was
+often at pains to tell him that there was no such city, that the
+stories were all fables, and that his grandpapa had wasted his fortune
+and talents in its search. But the boy believed in the fables, for he
+liked to think of his father as sailing up the Great Amana, where the
+deer feed along the banks, until at last he came to the golden city
+where the men are like gilded statues. He was sure that his papa would
+return rich one day, bringing with him an Inca princess for his son to
+marry.</p>
+
+<p>But, when his father did return, he brought back with him only a
+fever-shattered body for his wife to nurse, and a plucky belief that
+he would succeed next time. Ah, but those were good days which he had
+spent by his father's bedside, when he had gazed on that fair-haired,
+soldierly man who had trodden in Raleigh's footsteps! He remembered
+how his father had laughed when he had asked in awe-struck tones
+whether he might be allowed to kiss his hands, and how he had said,
+"If I do not find, you will seek for it some day"&mdash;and then he had
+felt proud. How eagerly he had listened when the two explorers, father
+and son, had sat together and had talked over their various travels!
+And how he could remember his father's account of his latest journey!
+His mother had been out at the time when it was related; they never
+mentioned these matters in her presence because they pained her;
+moreover, if she was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span> near by when they were talked about, she would
+contrive some excuse for snatching the boy away. They had watched
+their opportunity, however, and his father had told him.</p>
+
+<p>He had set out in a canvas sailing boat, and had ascended the Orinoco
+for twenty days. Every now and then he had come to rapids, where he
+had had to go ashore to carry his boat, or to marshes, where he had
+had to wade. As he travelled farther from the mainland, his Indian
+guides had deserted him till there was none left, and he had had to go
+on alone. Day by day he had passed by great rocks, on which there was
+writing engraved, which, perhaps, contained directions for travellers
+who, ages since, had been bound for that same city; but they were now
+of no use to him, because they were written in a forgotten language
+and in an alphabet which not even the Indians could understand. So he
+had gone on until at last he came to the crystal mountain, and the
+waterfall which Raleigh had described; and after that he had travelled
+further than even great Raleigh himself, or any other white man. It
+was at this point that the boy had gasped and asked to be allowed to
+kiss his father's hands.</p>
+
+<p>Then his father had told him how beyond the mountain there had seemed
+to be nothing but tangled wood and swamp, and how he had caught fever
+and wandered on in delirium until, when he came to himself, he had
+found himself standing on the shores of what had once been a vast
+inland lake, but which had now become partially dry, through which it
+was only possible to wade. So he left his boat and waded on, sometimes
+shoulders high, for four days; for, though he was racked with pains,
+he would not give up because he believed the lake to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span> Parima. On
+the evening of the fourth day, when his strength was almost spent and
+he was ready to sink with faintness, he came to an island and saw in
+the distance, in the light of the setting sun, golden spires and the
+roofs of houses many miles away, which he knew to be El Dorado. But by
+this time he had only two days' provisions left and dared not venture
+further; so he, like Pedro de Urra, having come within sight of his
+desire, had been compelled to turn back. Of his return journey he said
+nothing; Granger learnt that from his mother in later years. It had
+been made in agonies of hunger and thirst, which had nearly robbed him
+of his life. Nevertheless, his father had told him that, so soon as he
+got well again, he was going back, and that he would reach El Dorado
+this time. True to his word, when his fever had left him, he had bade
+them all good-bye, making his son secretly promise that, if he should
+not come back, when he became a man, he would follow him in the quest.
+Then had come the two years of anxious waiting in which they had had
+no news of him, and the final acceptance of the belief that he was
+dead. But his grandfather would not lose faith; he himself had once
+been missing for five years. He said that his son had reached the
+city, and was pushing homeward through the Andes on to the Pacific
+side. Night by night, in that back room with the bow-window, he had
+collected his records and studied them beneath the lamp. "He must be
+about here by now," he would say, pointing to a certain place. But the
+boy's mother had only smiled sadly, saying, "Is he not yet
+undeceived?" Then one evening they had left him in his chair, and had
+not heard him come up to bed, and in the morning had found him sitting
+stiff and silent in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span> the sunshine, with the map of Guiana spread out
+before him and his finger on the spot where he had written EL DORADO,
+the magic word.</p>
+
+<p>The child had never forgotten that sight, its impression had sunk deep
+into his nature; somehow it had become symbolic for him of loyalty to
+one's chosen purpose in life. As he had once asked permission to kiss
+his father's hands, so, when there was no one in the room to watch
+him, he had stolen up and smoothed his hands with reverence against
+the cushions of the chair where the old grey head had last rested&mdash;but
+he had never sat there. After the old man's death, all things in that
+room became objects for his veneration. It was just this capacity in
+the small boy for hero-worship which his mother never tried to
+understand; so he kept his secret, and thus began the breach which was
+presently to widen. From that day Granger had pledged himself, when he
+should become a man, to go in search of his father and to inherit his
+quest; and to such a nature as Granger's that childish pledge was
+binding. He could never be persuaded that his father was dead; he
+always spoke and thought of him as a soldierly fair-haired man, living
+in a desirable land hard by a garden, like to that of the isle near
+Puna, which had herbs and flowers and trees of gold and silver, one
+who was an honoured guest in the emperor's house where the meanest
+utensils were of silver and copper for strength. At first, when only
+he and his mother were left, he had spoken to her of these fancies;
+but she had shown herself more and more averse to their mention, so he
+had learnt to keep his longings to himself.</p>
+
+<p>His mother was a practical woman, born of a race of lawyers and
+diplomatists. Hence she coveted above<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span> all things for her son, as she
+had done for his father before him, the certainties of life&mdash;social
+recognition and a banking-account; she had no sympathy with theories,
+however heroic, or with any kind of success which was not obvious and
+within hand-stretch. She was one of those safe people who always
+choose to-day's salary, if it be promptly paid, in preference to the
+more generous triumph of a to-morrow which may never come. She was
+wisely parsimonious in all things and, daring nothing herself, had no
+patience with natures which were more courageous. Much of her own
+money, and all of her husband's, had been spent by him in his
+fruitless explorations of Guiana. Now that he was gone, she discreetly
+invested what was left of her fortune, and deprived herself of all
+luxuries, so that when the time should come, her boy should have his
+chance in life unembarrassed by his father's previous reckless
+expenditures. She was proud of her son, for he was handsome; but she
+never realised that half a day of spoken love and sympathy can
+purchase more friendship than twenty years of benefits punctually and
+dutifully conferred&mdash;still less did she recognise the necessity for a
+mother consciously to cultivate a friendship with her boy. Not that
+she was ungentle; she craved his affection, but she made the mistake
+of demanding it as her right&mdash;all of which is the same as saying that
+she was mentally insensitive, and was unaware that with thoughtful
+people the road to the heart must first lead through the mind; of
+people's minds she was incurious. She gave her son the kind of
+education which befits men to inherit rather than to earn. His wishes
+were never consulted; nor even when he went to university was he given
+any choice. Like a dumb brute beast he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span> goaded forward without
+knowledge of his destination, and was expected to be grateful to the
+hand which kept him moving, and prevented him from turning aside.</p>
+
+<p>He permitted this well-intentioned despotism not through any lack of
+spirit, but partly because it was well-intentioned, and mostly because
+his immediate present seemed of little consequence to him. He felt
+himself to be an embryo prophet who awaited his hour; when that should
+strike, he would concentrate. Not until he was twenty-two years of age
+did he expostulate, and by that time it was too late; his training had
+made him dependent upon money for success. His mother had the money,
+and she selected the Bar as a suitable profession for him; then it was
+that he broke his twelve years' silence, and scandalised her with the
+information that his great ambition was to follow in his father's
+footsteps, and to find both him and El Dorado, fulfilling the promise
+which he had given as a child. Startled by this unexpected confession,
+she had charged him with disloyalty and ingratitude to herself; to
+avoid complications and a breach which he foresaw would become
+irreparable, he had accepted her choice and studied for a barrister.
+This utterance of his secret, however, had only served to make him
+aware of the intensity of his own desire. He could not work, he could
+not rest, he could not apply his mind; always he saw before him the
+tropic river with its multitude of carnation, crimson, and
+orange-tawny birds, its low green banks where the deer come down to
+graze, and far ahead and visionary the swampy lake, built on whose
+shore the golden city raises up its head. So books, and law, and
+London became for him the custodians of his captivity&mdash;things to be
+hated and despised.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the three years which followed he had made one friend, a mining
+engineer, by name Druce Spurling. In him he had confided, and Spurling
+had responded with a sympathy which did him credit, kindling to the
+romance of the story. He had tested with his expert knowledge the
+evidence which Granger had laid before him for the belief that such a
+city as El Dorado had existed, and he had been satisfied&mdash;or, at any
+rate, had been made certain that in the watershed of the Orinoco gold
+was yet to be found in great quantities, as in the Spaniard's time. He
+had promised that, so soon as he had the capital, he would help him in
+his quest. Granger coveted the journey for its adventure, and the
+opportunity of fulfilling his promise to his father; Spurling only for
+its possibilities of attaining wealth. In their community of ambition
+this difference of purpose was lost to sight. Then, when Granger was
+twenty-five and had just completed his course of reading for the Bar,
+his great chance came. It was the year of the Klondike gold-rush and
+Spurling was going out; he wanted a partner, and offered to take
+Granger with him if he, in return, would promise to give him one third
+of all the gold he mined. Their idea was that, with the money thus
+earned, they would be able to provide funds for the following up of
+their dream of El Dorado. Granger accepted the offer at once, partly
+influenced by his desire to prove to his mother that he <i>could</i> do
+something by himself. After a painful farewell, he had departed to
+seek his fortune in the North World.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, how his mother had cried when he went away! He recalled all that
+to-day, now that he was in Keewatin, and gazed back incredulously upon
+that mistaken former self, wondering whether he could have been really
+like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span> that. London, indeed! What would he not give to be in London
+to-day; to stand in Fleet Street, listening to the roar of the passing
+traffic and brushing shoulders with living, companionable men? Ah
+well, what good purpose would it serve to think about it! He had
+chosen his own fate. Here he was at Murder Point, and he would soon be
+married to Peggy, after which, no matter what avalanche of good luck
+befell him, there would be no return. What would his proud old mother
+say to a little half-breed grandchild? The mere thought made him
+smile. In cynical self-derision, he pictured himself accompanied by
+his Indian tribe, knocking at the door of the old red house on Clapton
+Common&mdash;and his reception there. He gave a name to his picture, and it
+was "<i>The Return of the Ne'er-do-well</i>."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>His brain was getting cloudy; he could not tell whether he was asleep
+or awake. He felt as if he had been bound hand and foot so that he
+could not stir, and had been raised aloft to a dizzy height. He knew
+that he was far above the earth, for he was very cold and was
+conscious of mists which drifted across his face and left it damp.
+Suddenly he discovered that he could open his eyes. Looking down, he
+saw with supernatural distinctness the entire course of the frozen
+river-bed. Far to the north he could descry Spurling, plodding
+desperately on across the thawing ice. A few miles to the west,
+perhaps an hour's journey from Murder Point, he could see a second
+figure, tall, soldierly, erect, which approached with swift clean
+strides, through the solitude, inevitably as Fate&mdash;the symbol of
+Justice in pursuit of Crime. He watched with fascination how the
+distance between the hunter and the hunted narrowed; only one thing
+could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span> save the criminal from capture&mdash;the intervention of Murder
+Point.</p>
+
+<p>And then the cloud rolled back again; he closed his eyes, and lost
+consciousness in untroubled forgetfulness.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
+<h3>THE PURSUER ARRIVES</h3>
+
+
+<p>He was awakened by a man bending over him and holding a lighted match
+to his face. Careless as usual of preserving his life, he did not
+attempt to rise or defend himself, but simply gazed back indifferent
+and a little bewildered. He did not recognise the man; he was an utter
+stranger. As if wearied with an inspection which did not interest him,
+he turned his eyes away, and found that the room had become dark. How
+many hours he had slept, he could not calculate; perhaps nine or ten.
+He wondered what had made the night return so quickly. He looked
+toward the window, and saw that it was blinded with snow; and, as he
+listened, could hear the roaring of the wind, and, in the lull which
+followed, the rustling and settling down of the flakes. Then the match
+went out, and neither of them could perceive the other's face. Granger
+arose and pushed back the shutter of the stove, that so they might get
+a little light. "I needn't ask you to make yourself at home," he said;
+"you've done that already."</p>
+
+<p>The stranger did not reply, but surveyed him closely all the while.</p>
+
+<p>"You must have had good company out there to be so silent now that you
+have arrived."</p>
+
+<p>Then the man spoke. "What's your name?" he asked abruptly. "Is it
+Granger?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I was always told so, and have as yet found no good reason for
+believing otherwise."</p>
+
+<p>"Then this is the store of Garnier, Parwin, and Wrath, to which I was
+directed by Robert Pilgrim of God's Voice?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is right, but I don't often have the pleasure of entertaining
+guests from God's Voice."</p>
+
+<p>The stranger paused in doubt, as though choosing the best words to
+say; then he blurted out, "But you're a gentleman?"</p>
+
+<p>"I hope so."</p>
+
+<p>"An Oxford man?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"What college?"</p>
+
+<p>"Corpus."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you row in the Eight?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought so. At what time?"</p>
+
+<p>"When Corpus went up five places and bumped the House on the last
+night."</p>
+
+<p>"I was stroke in the 'Varsity boat that year, and rowed at six in the
+Christ Church Eight that night."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you must be Strangeways?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Corporal Strangeways of the Northwest Mounted Police, but
+Strangeways of the Oxford boat at one time. I fancied I knew you; you
+rowed at seven for Corpus, and it was you who won that race."</p>
+
+<p>"I and seven others," laughed Granger; "but what brings you up here at
+this time?"</p>
+
+<p>"We'll talk about that later. At present I'm hungry; I've hardly had a
+meal since I left God's Voice."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you're travelling in haste?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, in haste."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Granger set to work to prepare a meal, while Strangeways talked to him
+of the Cornmarket, the Turl, and the Hinkseys, running over the
+familiar geography for the sheer pleasure of recalling kindly Oxford
+names. Presently he asked him if he remembered the little maid who had
+served in the river-inn of the King's Arms at Sanford. Granger had had
+a summer love-affair with that same maid, as had many a young
+water-man before and after him. One quiet Sunday evening, when her
+fickle passion had reached its short-lived height, he had even been
+allowed the felicity of accompanying her to vespers at the quaint old
+Norman Church, which lay snuggled away in woods behind the Thames.
+They had returned to the inn by a roundabout way, through the meadows
+beneath the twilight, speaking all manner of intense things, and, very
+wonderfully, believing both themselves and their sayings to be
+sincere. When he had entered his skiff and pushed out from the bank,
+she had called him back and royally permitted him to give her his
+first and, as it proved, only kiss. But he had not known that, and had
+rowed elated Oxfordwards between the hayfields, dreaming his ecstasy
+on into the future&mdash;when it had already achieved its climax, and
+slipped out of his life. Since then it had come to seem very simple
+and absurd, as do all love affairs, however august, which are lived
+down&mdash;for no love affair was ever outlived. So, because he had been
+fond of her, he was glad to listen to Strangeways, even when he
+related her newer conquests over more recent undergrads, and her later
+romantic history. By all accounts she was a modern Helen of Troy,
+uncontaminate, forever fair and forever juvenile.</p>
+
+<p>And all the while he was listening, Granger was plan<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>ning by what
+means he might detain Strangeways, and hazarding what progress
+Spurling had made by this time in his escape. "A life for a life," he
+thought; "and Spurling once saved my life. Until I have cancelled that
+debt, even though Mordaunt has been slain, I will stand by him."</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the winter months all meals were the same at Murder Point,
+consisting of black tea, salt bacon, and bannocks, which are a kind of
+hard biscuit, made of flour and water mixed to a thick paste and then
+baked. This diet becomes pretty monotonous, but is the traveller's
+universal fare in Keewatin. In those far regions men are not
+particular how or what they eat; of necessity they abandon the
+refinements of civilisation as needless and cumbrous. To-day, however,
+partly to protract his stay and so give Spurling time, partly to
+assert his waning gentility, the memory of which in its heyday
+Strangeways shared, he attempted to be lavish, to set a table, and to
+entertain. For cloth he spread a dress-length of gaudy muslin, such as
+Indians purchase for their squaws. He opened some tins of canned goods
+that he might provide his guest with more than one course. He built up
+his fire, and commenced to cook. All this used up time; and the
+expending of time was what he most desired.</p>
+
+<p>When the meal was finished Strangeways rose up restlessly, as though
+he had just remembered his errand, and went to the door to see what
+progress the storm had made. The moment the door was opened the wind
+swept in, driving a fall of snow before it.</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to me," said Granger, "that you're going to be snow-bound
+for a time. This'll make travelling dangerous, for the thaw has
+already weakened the ice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span> in places and now the snow'll cover them
+over, making them appear safe. It's strange, for blizzards don't often
+happen so late as this."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, there's one comfort," said Strangeways, "it's the same for all
+alike; if I'm delayed, so is someone else."</p>
+
+<p>Granger turned his back on him, and walked over to the window where he
+stood tapping on the glass, attempting to dislodge the snow which had
+spread itself out like a blanket across the panes. "Poor devil," he
+said, "I pity him, whoever he is. He can find no place of shelter in
+all the three hundred and twenty miles which stretch between God's
+Voice and Crooked Creek, unless he comes here or falls in with some
+trapper's camp."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you have had no one here lately?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I haven't seen an Indian for over a month. They don't visit me so
+late in the winter as this; they wait for the open season, when they
+can bring in their furs by water."</p>
+
+<p>"But the man I'm speaking of is white. He drives a team of five grey
+huskies, the leader of which has a yellow face and a patch of
+brindled-brown upon its right hindquarters. Haven't you seen such an
+one go by within the last twenty-four hours?"</p>
+
+<p>Granger shook his head; "Perhaps you've passed him on the way," he
+suggested; "if he knew that you were following him, he may have dodged
+you purposely and doubled back."</p>
+
+<p>"He knew all right; it was because he knew that I was following that
+he fled. I can hardly have passed him, for he was seen by a half-breed
+ten miles from God's Voice, and I've travelled slowly and kept a
+care<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>ful watch between there and here. Besides I tracked his trail to
+within an hour's journey of the Point, until the snow came down and
+obliterated it. He was going weakly at the last; both man and dogs
+must have been spent."</p>
+
+<p>"Then he must be somewhere to the westward, between the spot where you
+lost his trail and here."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps, but the argument against that is that his trail was at least
+twelve hours old. Anyhow, I shall have to wait until this blizzard is
+over. During that time he may struggle in from the west, or, if he has
+gone by, may be driven back here for shelter by the gale."</p>
+
+<p>Granger had not thought of that contingency, that Spurling might be
+driven back by the weather, might push open the door at any moment and
+give him the lie before Strangeways. Perhaps a look of fear passed
+across his face, which betrayed him. At any rate, the next thing he
+heard was Strangeways, saying to him in a careless voice, "Of course,
+between gentlemen it is scarcely necessary to ask you whether you are
+telling the truth!"</p>
+
+<p>"It is scarcely necessary."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I beg your pardon for asking."</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't. You've got to do your duty irrespective of caste;
+whatever I once was, you can see for yourself what I am."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, a gentleman down on his luck; but still a gentleman. Strange how
+one gets knocked about by life, isn't it? I little thought when I
+caught a glimpse of you, leaning on your oar exhausted at the end of
+that race, that the next time we should meet would be up here. It's
+curious the things a fellow remembers. Our boats were alongside, just
+off the Merton barge;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span> the first thing I saw when I recovered and sat
+up on my slide was your face, deadly pale, almost within hand-stretch.
+I don't recall ever to have seen you again until I struck that match
+an hour ago and held it to you, and you opened your eyes; then it all
+came back. When you were sleeping you looked haggard, just about the
+same as you did then. If I'd seen you awake, I don't suppose I should
+have remembered. . . . I didn't even know where Keewatin was in those
+days. If anyone had told me that it was a village near Jericho I
+should have believed him. I daresay you were nearly as ignorant; and
+now we're here in your shack."</p>
+
+<p>Granger, anxious to keep Strangeway's attention from his pursuit, and
+his own thoughts occupied, inquired, "And what brought you into the
+Northwest Territories?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, the usual thing&mdash;a girl. She was ward to my father, and was to
+inherit a considerable property when she came of age. I was in love
+with her, and my father was keen that I should marry her; there was
+only one hindrance, that her opinion didn't coincide with ours. I
+found out that my father was trying to break her spirit, and force her
+to his will. I couldn't allow that; so, having nothing better to do, I
+left home and came to Canada for a while. Mind you, I'm not condemning
+my father; he thought that he was doing the best for both our sakes.
+But I wish he'd left us alone; if he had, I daresay it would have come
+out all right. She was one of those girls of whom the physiognomists
+say, 'Can be led by kindness, but cannot be driven.' The moment she
+was ordered to do a thing, which in the ordinary course of events she
+might have chosen to do of her own free will, she refused and hated
+it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"When I got to Montreal I was confronted by that stupid superstition
+of the Canadians, that every young Englishman who has had a better
+education than themselves, and is possessed of a private income from
+the old country, must be a remittance-man and a ne'er-do-well&mdash;that
+he's been sent out because he wasn't wanted by his family. I tried to
+get employment; not that I needed it, but because I wanted to work.
+The moment I opened my lips and didn't speak dialect or slang, and
+displayed hands which were not workman's hands, I was shown out. So I
+drifted west to Calgary and, after doing a little ranching there,
+enlisted in the Mounted Police."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you like it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, it's rather a lark, arresting the people who at first
+affected to despise you. I can always keep myself cheerful by the
+humour of that. If you've lost your sense of the ridiculous, you'd
+better join the Northwest Mounted Police&mdash;for an Englishman the cure's
+certain."</p>
+
+<p>"And how about the girl?"</p>
+
+<p>"She did a Gilbert and Sullivan trick. After I'd left home my father
+guessed the reason of my departure, and instead of giving her a rest,
+redoubled his efforts to make her marry me, that so he might bring me
+back. He was fond of both of us; we'd been brought up together, and he
+couldn't bear the idea of either of us being separated from himself.
+He made an awful mess of things, poor old gentleman; he persecuted her
+with his arguments to such an extent that one morning he woke up and
+found that she had vanished. He made all sorts of inquiries, but to
+the day of his death could never get any news of her whereabouts."</p>
+
+<p>Strangeways paused and commenced to light his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span> pipe. Granger, who had
+become interested in the story, waited a minute for him to proceed,
+but when he had kindled his tobacco and still sat smoking in silence,
+"Well, and what next?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"That is all," said Strangeways; "now tell me about yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"I went into the Klondike with the gold-rush of nearly five years ago.
+I travelled with a man named Spurling, and a young chap named Jervis
+Mordaunt, whom we chummed up with in our passage over the Skaguay." He
+was conscious that Strangeways had jerked out his foot and was looking
+hard at him. He paid no attention to that, but proceeded leisurely
+with his tale. He conceived that it would answer his purpose better,
+in order that he might make the corporal unsuspicious of his share in
+Spurling's escape, to speak of him in a hostile manner, and to mention
+all the small and private faults which he could place to his
+discredit. He told a story of personal disputes between himself and
+his partners over the working of claims, which left the impression
+that Spurling and Mordaunt had always sided together against himself,
+and that finally he, getting sick of the climate, and quarrellings,
+and his continuous bad luck, had come outside, travelled to Winnipeg,
+and taken service with Garnier, Parwin, and Wrath, because he was in
+danger of starving. Of El Dorado, or his real reason for leaving the
+Yukon, he said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>When he had ended, Strangeways, who had never for a second removed his
+gaze, inquired in a hoarse, strained voice, "And this man Mordaunt,
+what was he like?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he was a slim little fellow; we nicknamed him 'The Girl' because
+of his ways, and because he was so slight."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"How old was he?"</p>
+
+<p>"He couldn't have been more than eighteen when we first met him, for
+he never had to shave."</p>
+
+<p>"Did he ever tell you anything about himself, where he came from, who
+were his family, or anything like that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not that I remember; he was always very close about himself. But what
+makes you ask these questions? Do you think that you recognise him?"</p>
+
+<p>Strangeways rose up and paced the room, betraying his agitation, but
+when he spoke his voice was level and restrained. "By God, I hope
+not," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Every moment Granger dreaded that he would hear him say that Mordaunt
+was dead, and yet he wanted certainty. He watched Strangeways pacing
+up and down, and longed to question him, yet was fearful that in so
+doing he would betray his own secret. At last he could bear the
+suspense no longer; that regular walking to and fro tortured him, it
+was like the constant swinging of a pendulum and made him giddy to
+look at. When he spoke, it was in a voice so shrill that it surprised
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me once and for all," he cried, "has anything happened to him?
+Is he dead?"</p>
+
+<p>Strangeways halted, and regarded him with a look half-stern,
+half-compassionate.</p>
+
+<p>"As for Spurling, you hated him, did you not?" he inquired.</p>
+
+<p>Granger clenched his hands and his voice trembled. "I hated him so
+much," he said, "that there were times when I would gladly have struck
+him dead."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, why didn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>Granger started; the question was spoken so fiercely,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span> and was so
+searching and direct. It aroused him to a sense of his danger, and
+helped him to recover himself.</p>
+
+<p>"In the first place you would have hanged me, and in the second there
+was Mordaunt." As soon as he had said it, he knew that he had made a
+slip.</p>
+
+<p>"And why Mordaunt?"</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated a minute, gathering himself together. He could feel the
+scrutiny of Strangeways' eyes and was conscious that he was breathing
+hard.</p>
+
+<p>The question was repeated, "And why Mordaunt?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because Mordaunt was such a clean fellow that I couldn't do anything
+shabby in his presence," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"How clean?" Strangeways persisted.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, in every way; he was so honourable."</p>
+
+<p>"But I thought you said just now that he always sided with Spurling
+when it came to a dispute?"</p>
+
+<p>"So he did in a sense. He never seemed to think that the thing we
+quarrelled about was worth while, and treated it all with a well-bred
+contempt. Spurling was usually the one who was unjust, and I the one
+who complained; so I was usually the one to start the wrangle.
+Therefore, though he despised Spurling, he always seemed to blame me
+for my pettiness."</p>
+
+<p>Strangeways turned on him his honest, manly gaze, as if he were about
+to ask again, "Is that the truth?" But he did not say it. Granger felt
+a cur for lying, but he was determined to fight for Spurling's life,
+and, if that were necessary, for his own revenge.</p>
+
+<p>"And you have not seen Spurling go by the Point?" asked Strangeways.</p>
+
+<p>"No." He said it quite ordinarily, as if he were answering a
+commonplace. Then he realised that he had been caught in a trap and
+had not manifested enough<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span> surprise. He slowly raised up his eyes,
+shame-facedly, like a schoolboy detected cribbing, when the master
+steals up behind.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid, after all, that you are not a gentleman," was all that
+Strangeways said.</p>
+
+<p>Granger shrank back and flushed as if he had been struck across the
+face; he did not attempt to defend himself or expostulate. The wind
+had died down outside; it was evident that the storm had spent itself.
+In the silence which followed he could hear the padding steps of the
+huskies going round the house, and the sound of them sniffing about
+the door. Strangeways, who had been fastening on his snowshoes
+preparatory to departure, walked across the room and raised the latch.
+He stepped out, leaving the door open behind him. A bar of moonlight
+leapt instantly inside, as it had been a fugitive who had been kept
+long waiting. Then he heard the voice of Strangeways calling,
+"Granger, Granger."</p>
+
+<p>He rose up hurriedly, thinking that perhaps Spurling had been driven
+back by the blizzard and was returning to his danger. When he reached
+the threshold he saw only this&mdash;the moon tossing restlessly in a
+cloudy sky, shining above a shadowy land of white; Strangeways
+standing twenty paces distant with his back towards him; and, seated
+on their haunches between Strangeways and the threshold, five lank
+grey huskies, one of which had a patch of brindled-brown upon its
+right hindquarters and a yellow face.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
+<h3>THE CORPORAL SETS OUT</h3>
+
+<p>It would have been easy to shoot Strangeways at that time, and he must
+have known it; yet, he was so much a gentleman that he accepted the
+risk, and had the decency to turn his back when circumstances
+compelled him to give a man the lie. Granger wondered whether courtesy
+was the motive; or whether he was only testing him out of curiosity,
+to see of what fresh vulgarity of deceit he was capable.</p>
+
+<p>As he stood in the doorway, his gaze wandered from the broad shoulders
+of Corporal Strangeways, late stroke of the 'Varsity Eight, to the
+treacherous eyes of the gaunt grey beast before him which, by reason
+of its unusual markings and untimely appearance, had once and forever
+thrown Spurling's game away. There was something Satanic and
+suggestive of evil about those green and jasper eyes, and the manner
+in which they blinked out upon him from the furious yellow head. Were
+they prompting him to crime, saying, "Why don't you fire? He can't
+defend himself; see, his back is turned?" No, not that. He
+half-believed that the brute was endowed with human intelligence, and
+had betrayed his late master of set purpose&mdash;perhaps, in revenge for
+the many beatings he had received on the trail from Selkirk to Murder
+Point. There was a vileness in the creature's look that was degrading
+and stirred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span> up hatred&mdash;and surely, the lowest kind of enmity which
+can be entertained by man is toward a unit of the dumb creation. That
+he should feel so, humiliated and angered Granger. Was there not
+enough of ignominy for him to endure without that? He drew his
+revolver, took aim at this yellow devil&mdash;but could not fire. The beast
+did not cringe and run away, zigzagging to avoid the bullets, stooping
+low on its legs, as is the habit of huskies when firearms are pointed
+at them; it sat there patiently blinking, a little in advance of its
+four grey comrades, with a mingled expression of amusement and boredom
+in its attitude, like a sleepy old bachelor uncle at a Christmas
+entertainment when Clown and Harlequin commence their threadbare jests
+and fooleries. He might have been yawning and saying to himself, "Hang
+it all! Why do I stay? I know the confounded rubbish by heart&mdash;all
+that these fellows will do and say."</p>
+
+<p>Granger's hand dropped to his side; this wolf-dog looked so far from
+ignorant&mdash;so much wiser than himself. Could it be that he also was
+playing in the game? Was it possible that he also was intent on
+helping Spurling? Well, then, he should have his chance.</p>
+
+<p>For himself the season for deception was at an end; he had lied to
+gain time for the fugitive, now let him see what truth could effect.
+He waded through the snow to Strangeways, tapped him on the shoulder,
+and was made painfully aware of the opinion held of him by the way in
+which the corporal screwed his shoulder aside.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I seem to you a pretty mean kind of a beast?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you do."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I seem so to myself; but I have an excuse to make&mdash;that this man once
+saved my life."</p>
+
+<p>"So you're a hero in disguise?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, but I couldn't go back on a man who had done that."</p>
+
+<p>"I fail to see that that is a reason why you should have lied."</p>
+
+<p>"I called it an excuse."</p>
+
+<p>"In this case the words mean the same."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, I had a reason: if the person whom Spurling murdered is
+the person whom I . . ."</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed! So you knew that much, did you?" At mention of the word
+"murdered," Strangeways had swung fiercely round and confronted
+Granger.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know that much. And if the man whom Spurling murdered is the
+man whom I suspect him to be, I had intended to dispense with law and
+to exact the penalty slowly, up here whence there is no escape,
+myself."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you'll be sorry to hear that you've lied to no purpose. The
+person whom Spurling murdered was not a man, you damned scoundrel."</p>
+
+<p>Strangeways turned sharply away from him, and, moving as briskly on
+his snowshoes as the unpacked state of the snow would allow, commenced
+methodically to go about the store in ever widening circles. He
+evidently suspected that the fugitive was still in hiding there, or
+had been at the time of his arrival, and had since escaped, in which
+case the snow would bear traces of his flight. When he had searched
+the mound in vain, he turned his attention to the river-bed where his
+team of dogs was stationed. Granger, watching him from above, saw that
+he had halted suddenly and was bending down. Then he heard him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>
+calling his dogs together and saw him harnessing them quickly into his
+sledge. Panic seized him lest Strangeways should drive away without
+telling him the name of <i>this thing, which was not a man</i>, which
+Spurling had murdered, and <i>whether the deed had been done in the
+Klondike</i>. Also he was curious to see for himself what it was that he
+had found in the snow down there, which made him so eager to set out.
+He ploughed his way down the hillside, breaking through the surface
+and slipping as he ran, till he arrived out of breath at the
+river-bank. Then he saw the meaning of this haste; approaching the
+Point from the northward was a muffled track, partially obliterated by
+the snow which had since fallen, which, on reaching Murder Point,
+doubled back, returning northward whence the traveller had come. It
+meant to Granger that, while he and Strangeways had been seated
+together recalling old times in the store, Spurling had come back. For
+what reason? No man would fight his way through a blizzard without
+good purpose; he would lie down where he was till the storm had spent
+itself, lest he should wander from his trail. This man had everything
+to lose by turning back. Then he discovered that the snow was speckled
+with dots of black, and, stooping down, discerned that they were drops
+of blood. Some of the blood-marks were fresh; the tracks themselves
+had been made, perhaps, within the last three hours. Spurling must
+have met with an accident, and, returning to the Point for help, had
+seen the stranger's dogs and sledge, and turning northwards again had
+fled. So thought Granger.</p>
+
+<p>Strangeways, in the meanwhile, was examining the feet of his leader.
+Presently he stood erect, and asked in a low voice, "Did you do
+that?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>"Look for yourself."</p>
+
+<p>Granger looked, and saw that the balls of the leader's forefeet had
+been gashed several times with a knife.</p>
+
+<p>"How should I have done it?" he replied. "I've been in your company
+every minute since you arrived."</p>
+
+<p>"Who did it, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know as well as I."</p>
+
+<p>"And what do you think of a man who could do that?"</p>
+
+<p>"That he was very desperate."</p>
+
+<p>"I should call him a Gadarene swine."</p>
+
+<p>Strangeways stood in angry thought for a few seconds; then he jerked
+up his head, and asked, "Can you lend me another team of huskies? Be
+careful when you answer that you tell me the truth this time."</p>
+
+<p>Granger smiled at the childishness of such threatening.</p>
+
+<p>"You will gain nothing by speaking like that," he said. "Unfortunately
+for you, unlike Spurling, I am not afraid of death&mdash;I should welcome
+it. Yet, while I live, I am curious; therefore I will promise you help
+on one condition, that you tell me who has been murdered, and where."</p>
+
+<p>Strangeways lifted his eyes and surveyed Granger, asking himself, "And
+is this statement also a lie?" But, when he spoke there were the
+beginnings of a new respect in his voice. "So you are not afraid of
+death?" he said. "Well, then, I owe you an apology for what I have
+called you, for I am; I am horribly afraid. I am afraid that I shall
+die before I have avenged this death."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me, who was it that was killed?" cried Granger, impatiently.
+"Was it a girl? There was a girl whom I loved in the Klondike; you
+don't know how you make me suffer."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Don't I?" replied Strangeways, grimly; and then with affected
+indifference, "There are a good many girls in the Klondike; the body
+of this one was found washed ashore near Forty-Mile."</p>
+
+<p>"What's her name?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's what I'm here to find out."</p>
+
+<p>"Did Spurling know that she was a woman when he shot her?"</p>
+
+<p>"So you know that also&mdash;that he shot her? Whether he knew, I don't
+care; the fact remains that she is dead and that he is suspected."</p>
+
+<p>"Only suspected?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, . . ."</p>
+
+<p>"By God!" cried Granger, bringing down his fist in Strangeways' face,
+"but you shall tell me! Was her name Mordaunt, and was she his
+partner, and did she wear a man's disguise?"</p>
+
+<p>Strangeways turned his head and dodged aside so that the blow fell
+lightly; drawing his revolver, he covered his opponent. Granger
+advanced close up, until the barrel of the revolver touched his face;
+then he halted and waited.</p>
+
+<p>Strangeways watched him; looked into his eyes amazed; then lowered his
+weapon and laughed nervously. "Oh," he said, "I remember, you are not
+afraid of death."</p>
+
+<p>"But I am of madness and suspense."</p>
+
+<p>Strangeways did not reply at once. Perhaps a sudden understanding had
+dawned on him, pity and a vision of what it meant to live through the
+eternal Now at Murder Point. He may have been asking himself, "For the
+lack of one small untruth, shall I thrust this man into Hell?" At any
+rate, when he answered he spoke<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span> gently. "No," he said, "she wore a
+woman's dress; be sure of it, your girl-friend is safe up there."</p>
+
+<p>Granger looked at him steadily, wondering why he should have lied;
+than he took his hand and pressed it in the English manner, "I believe
+you," he said. Yet, at the back of his mind a voice was persistently
+questioning, "Do I believe him? But can I believe that?"</p>
+
+<p>He was interrupted in his thoughts by Strangeways saying, "It's a pity
+that that poor brute should suffer; he's certain to die."</p>
+
+<p>The corporal went near, levelled his revolver and shot the leader
+between the eyes. The bullet did its work; the dog shivered, and
+tottered, rolled over on its side, tried to rise again, then stretched
+itself out wearily as if for sleep at the end of a hard day's travel.</p>
+
+<p>"You can do that for a mere husky," said Granger bitterly; "but you
+refuse to do it for a man."</p>
+
+<p>"The husky had a harsh time of it in this world and has no other
+life."</p>
+
+<p>"If that's so, he's to be congratulated; but there was the more reason
+why he should have been allowed to live his one life out. We wretched
+men are never done with life; if I were sure that there was only one
+existence and no reproaches in a future world, I could be brave to the
+end. It's this repetition of mortality, which men call immortality,
+that staggers my intellect, making me afraid&mdash;afraid lest there is no
+death."</p>
+
+<p>Strangeways shrugged his shoulders and scowled. He did not like the
+subject&mdash;it caused him discomfort; there was so much left for him in
+life. He planned, when he had captured Spurling and seen him safely
+hanged, to buy himself out of the Mounted Police, return to England,
+and there live pleasantly at his club<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span> in London and as squire on his
+estate. He would marry, he told himself; and though not the girl whom
+he had most desired, for he believed her to be dead, yet, like a
+sensible man, some other girl, who would be his friend, and bear his
+children, and make him happy. If once he could get out of Keewatin,
+having performed his duty honourably, he would do all that&mdash;when
+Spurling had been captured alive or dead.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore he broke in on Granger roughly, inquiring, "Where are those
+huskies which you are going to lend me?"</p>
+
+<p>"They are Spurling's huskies which he left behind when I lent him
+mine."</p>
+
+<p>"How long ago was that?&mdash;If they're Spurling's, they must be pretty
+well played out."</p>
+
+<p>"They are. They've rested for thirty hours more or less; but I don't
+think you'll manage to catch him up with them."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps not, but I'll try; he can't be more than three hours ahead."</p>
+
+<p>"Three hours with a fresh team is as good as three days."</p>
+
+<p>"You forget the difference between the two men."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't, for the one has the memory of his crime."</p>
+
+<p>"It's the memory of his crime that'll wear him out, and that same
+memory that'll give me strength."</p>
+
+<p>"Why? What makes you hate him so? Supposing he did kill a woman, it
+may have been an accident. She may even have felt grateful for the
+bullet, as I should have done just now had you shot me dead. It's
+horrible to kill anyone, but then the poor devil's fleeing for his
+life and he's suffering a thousand times more pain than he
+inflicted."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Is he? Does he suffer the pain of the man who follows behind?
+Supposing a certain man had loved that woman and had lost her, and had
+planned all his life on the off-chance of meeting her again, dreaming
+of her day and night, and then had suddenly learnt that she was
+brutally dead by Spurling's hand on some God-forsaken Yukon River,
+where the ground was hard like iron so that no grave could be dug by
+the murderer, and her body froze to marble and lay exposed all winter
+through the long dark days, with the bullet wound red in her forehead,
+and her grey face looking up toward the frosty sky, till the spring
+came and the water washed her body under and threw it up in a creek
+near Forty-Mile, where a year later it was discovered mutilated and
+defiled, do you think that her lover would be glad of that? Do you
+think that he would pity the black-guard who could do such a
+scoundrelly deed as that?"</p>
+
+<p>Strangeways was speaking wildly, his voice was trembling and his face
+was haggard and lined; he was crying like a child. "The man who could
+do a deed like that," he shouted, menacing the stars with his clenched
+hand, "the man who could do a deed like that is so corrupt that even
+God would search for good in him in vain. It's the duty of every clean
+man to hound him off the earth. While we allow him to live, we each
+one share his taint. I'll pray God every day of my life that Spurling
+may be damned throughout the ages&mdash;eternally and pitilessly damned."</p>
+
+<p>When Granger could make his voice heard, "You don't mean that she was
+Mordaunt?" he cried. All this talk about a woman who had been lost and
+loved paralleled his own case&mdash;he took it as applied to himself.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Strangeways recovered himself with an effort, "No, no," he said
+huskily. "Mordaunt, you have told me, was a man. I was only supposing
+all that."</p>
+
+<p>"But Mordaunt was not a man, but a woman in man's clothing."</p>
+
+<p>Strangeways closed his lips tightly together, refusing to take notice,
+pretending that he had not heard. Granger spoke again. "Mordaunt was
+not a man," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"In that case," answered Strangeways, "you know what the man suffers
+who is following behind. I will tell you no more than that."</p>
+
+<p>"You've told me enough and I will help you; only pledge me once more
+on your sacred word that this body was found in a woman's dress."</p>
+
+<p>Strangeways hesitated; then his eyes caught again the bleakness of the
+land and his imagination pictured the awful loneliness of life up
+there. Looking full on Granger he said, "On my most sacred word as a
+brother-gentleman, the body that was found was clothed in a woman's
+dress."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, thank God, she was not Mordaunt!" said Granger; "but because he
+knew her to be a woman at the time when he killed her, I will help you
+none the less."</p>
+
+<p>Having called together Spurling's huskies, they found them to be too
+weak for travel, with the exception of the leader, therefore they
+harnessed in the corporal's remaining four dogs, putting the
+yellow-faced stranger at their head. No sooner had they turned their
+backs and gone inside the store to bring out the necessary provisions,
+than the four old dogs, jealous of their new leader, hurled themselves
+upon him, burying their fangs<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span> in his shaggy hair, intent on tearing
+him to death&mdash;an old-timer husky can stand a good deal of that. He
+strained on the traces, exposing to them only his hindquarters,
+running well ahead, and keeping his throat safe. Not until the two men
+had clubbed them nearly senseless did they subside into sullen
+quietness; and then only so long as they were watched. Once a back was
+turned, the four hind dogs piled on to their leader and the fight
+recommenced.</p>
+
+<p>"You won't go far with them," said Granger. He did not notice the look
+of reawakened suspicion which flickered in Strangeways' eyes. "You
+won't go far with them; the moment you camp and that yellow-faced
+beast gets his chance, he'll chew your four dogs to pieces. That's
+what he's there for, it's my belief&mdash;he's playing Spurling's game.
+He'll take you fifty or a hundred miles from Murder Point, and there
+leave you stranded."</p>
+
+<p>"What would you advise?" This was spoken in a quiet voice.</p>
+
+<p>"I would advise you to wait here till the summer has come, and then to
+proceed by water."</p>
+
+<p>"But on snow I can follow his trail, whereas travel by water leaves no
+traces."</p>
+
+<p>"What does that matter? Instead of following him, let him return to
+you, as he did to-night. You've driven him up a blind alley on this
+Last Chance River; he can only go to the blank wall of the Bay, and
+then come back."</p>
+
+<p>"He can reach the House of the Crooked Creek."</p>
+
+<p>"And if he does, what of that? He'll be touching the blank wall then.
+They won't want him. The first question that they'll ask him will be,
+'And what have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span> you come here for?' If he can't give a satisfactory
+account of himself, they'll place him under arrest. When you get news
+of that, you can go up there and fetch him."</p>
+
+<p>"And if he doesn't get so far as that?"</p>
+
+<p>"You can set out by canoe and drive him back, and back, till you come
+to the Bay, and he can go no further."</p>
+
+<p>"He might hide, and I might pass him on the way&mdash;what then?"</p>
+
+<p>"In that case he'd double back and come past Murder Point, trying to
+get out."</p>
+
+<p>"In the meanwhile I should be a hundred, two hundred miles to the
+northwards, travelling towards the Bay on my fool's errand, and who
+would be here to capture him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I should."</p>
+
+<p>"Precisely."</p>
+
+<p>Granger started; the way in which that last word had been spoken had
+made Strangeways' meaning manifest. He blushed like a girl at the
+shame of it. "Surely you don't still distrust me? You don't think me
+such a sneak that, having got you out of the way, I'd let him slip by
+and out?"</p>
+
+<p>"It looks like it."</p>
+
+<p>"But, man, don't you realise that our interests are the same?"</p>
+
+<p>"Since when?"</p>
+
+<p>"Since you told me of a woman who was done to death on a Yukon river,
+and lay unburied all winter till the thaw came, and her body was
+washed down to a creek near Forty-Mile, where it lay through the
+summer naked, gazed upon, uncovered, and defiled."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I fancy you knew all that when you helped Spurling to escape."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but I didn't know that it was a woman, and I didn't know her
+name."</p>
+
+<p>"And you don't know her name now."</p>
+
+<p>"I do; it was Jervis Mordaunt who wore a man's disguise."</p>
+
+<p>"I told you that she wore a woman's dress."</p>
+
+<p>"I know. I know."</p>
+
+<p>"Then do you mean to tell me that I lied?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps, but not to accuse you. You said it out of kindness, and that
+was partly true which you said. You meant that the body was naked when
+it was found."</p>
+
+<p>"If you dare to speak of her like that again, I'll choke you, and run
+the risk of getting hanged myself. The land has debased you, as the
+Yukon debased your friend. I can read you; you're still half-minded to
+play his game, and that's why you want to turn me back."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I want to turn you back. Spurling's a hard-pressed man and he's
+dangerous. You can judge of what he is capable by what has just
+happened. He's cunning and, in his way, he's brave; he wouldn't
+scruple to take your life. Your best policy is to wait&mdash;either here or
+at God's Voice, as you think best. The ice will soon be unsafe to
+travel; already a mile from here, where the river flows rapidly round
+from the south-west, the part on the inside bend is rotten. I had to
+guide Spurling round that. At first, before I saw you and knew who you
+were, I was tempted not to warn you, to let you take your own chance
+and go on by yourself, and, perhaps, get drowned; but now, after I
+have seen you and after what you have told me, I can't do that."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"So you were tempted to let me drown myself, and now you are
+repentant?"</p>
+
+<p>Granger bowed his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I tell you that if the ice were as rotten as your soul or
+Spurling's, I would still follow him, though I had to follow him to
+Hell. If I've got to die, I'll die game&mdash;and you shan't turn me back."</p>
+
+<p>Granger ran out after him, calling him to stay, offering to guide him
+round the danger spot in his trail. But suspicion and untruthfulness
+had done their work. Only once did he turn his head, when at the crack
+of the whip the yellow-faced leader leapt forward in his traces. Then
+he answered him and cried, "He killed the woman I loved, and he shall
+pay the price though I follow him to Hell."</p>
+
+<p>So far as is known, these were the last words which Strangeways ever
+said.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
+<h3>THE LAST OF STRANGEWAYS</h3>
+
+<p>Granger returned to his shack and, closing the door, sat down beside
+the stove in his accustomed place. He commenced to fill his pipe
+slowly, stretching out his legs as if he were preparing for a long
+night of late hours and thoughtfulness. But he could not rest, his
+whole sensitiveness was listening and alert; the muscles of his body
+twitched, as if rebuking him for the delay which he imposed on them.
+He was expecting to hear a cry; whose cry, and called forth by what
+agony, he did not dare to surmise, only he must get there before it
+was too late. Somewhere between his shack and the Forbidden River he
+must get before the agony began. He rose up, and putting on his capote
+and snowshoes hurriedly, went out following Strangeways' trail. He had
+no time to realise the folly of his action&mdash;this leaving of his store
+unguarded and setting forth without an outfit at a season of the year
+when, perhaps, within a week the ice would break. He did not consider
+how far he might have to follow before he could hope to come up with
+Strangeways; nor what Strangeways would think of and do with him if,
+turning on a sudden his head, he should see the man who had lied to
+him coming swiftly up behind. He would probably shoot him; but Granger
+in his frenzy to save Strangeways' life did not think of that. His
+brain was throbbing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span> with this one thought, that if he did not catch
+him up before he reached the Forbidden River, he would have seen the
+last of him alive which any man would ever see in this world, unless
+that man were Spurling.</p>
+
+<p>So now there were three men spread out across the ice, two of whom
+followed in the other's steps. The first man was racing to preserve
+his own life, the second was pursuing to take it, and the third was
+following with all his strength that he might save the pursuer's life
+from danger. Of these three the last man alone had no fear of death.
+The other two were so eager to live, and one of them took such delight
+in life! Yet, Strangeways was rushing to his destruction as fast as
+that evil yellow-faced beast, tugging at the traces with might and
+main, could take him&mdash;to where beneath the ice, or in some forest
+ambush, lay crouched the hidden death. And if he should die, whose
+fault would that be? Granger was man enough to answer, "The fault
+would be mine. I told him untruth till he could not believe me when I
+spoke the truth which would save his life."</p>
+
+<p>Now that he was left solitary again, he resumed that old habit of
+lonely men of arguing with himself. Between each hurrying stride, he
+panted out within his brain his unspoken words, his thoughts gasping
+one behind the other as if his very mind was out of breath. Why had
+Spurling come back? Why hadn't he killed all ten huskies outright, and
+so prevented Strangeways from pursuing farther until the break-up of
+the ice? He would have gained a month by that. His deed bore about it
+signs of the ineffectual cunning of the maniac; it had been only worth
+the doing if carried out bitterly to the end. Yet Spurling had not
+gone mad; he was too careful of his life and future happiness to
+permit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span> himself to do that. Then he must have done it for a threat,
+hoping by the daring and grim humour of his brutality to strike terror
+into Strangeways and warn him back. Perhaps this was only one of many
+such experiences which had occurred all along the trail from Selkirk,
+and the pursuer had recognised both the motive and the challenge.
+Well, if you're compelled to play the game of life-taking, you may as
+well keep your temper, and set about it sportsmanly with a jest. Even
+in this horrid revelation of character there was some of the old
+Spurling left.</p>
+
+<p>Then his thoughts turned to Strangeways. He wondered, had he lied or
+told the truth when he asserted that the body was not Mordaunt's which
+was found at Forty-Mile? He hoped for the best, but he doubted. His
+manner had been against it, and so had Spurling's; they had both been
+keeping something back. Perhaps he had lied out of jealousy, because
+he could not endure to think that this girl, for whom he had been
+searching, who now was dead, had been loved by another man&mdash;and not a
+worthy man either, but one whom he despised.</p>
+
+<p>(Granger knew that he also would have felt like that. The mere denial
+of such a fact would have seemed somehow to reserve her more entirely
+for himself.)</p>
+
+<p>He had not been able to bear the thought that, now that she was beyond
+reach of all men's search, her memory should be shared with him by
+another man with an equal quality of affection&mdash;it had seemed to him
+like her hand stretched out from the grave to strip him of the few
+mementoes of her which he had. For these reasons he might even have
+lied truthfully, being self-persuaded that this Jervis Mordaunt was a
+different girl.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Granger heartily hoped that his suspicions might be mistaken, but . .
+. Whatever happened he must come up with him, and ask him that
+question once again. Maybe last time he had not spoken plainly;
+Strangeways had not grasped what he meant. He could not remember how
+his question had been phrased, but this time it should be worded with
+such brutal frankness that there could be no chance of error. He would
+lay hold of him strongly, and clasp him about the knees so that he
+could not escape. He would never release his hold till his doubts had
+been set at rest. He would say to him quite clearly, "I loved a girl
+in the Klondike who called herself Jervis Mordaunt; she passed for a
+man, and was clothed in a Yukon placer-miner's dress. She did not know
+that I loved her; so you need not grieve if this murdered girl whom
+you loved, and the one whom I call Mordaunt, were one and the same. I
+fled from the Shallows where we worked together, partly in order that
+she might not know that. Now will you tell me, once and for all, was
+this girl, whom Spurling murdered, called Mordaunt? If you love God,
+tell me the truth and speak out. I can bear the truth, but I cannot
+endure this suspense."</p>
+
+<p>With the careful precision of a mind uncertain of its own sanity, he
+repeated and re-balanced his phrases, distrusting his own exactness,
+fearful lest he had not chosen such words as would make his meaning
+plain. Ah, but by his gestures, if language failed him, he would cause
+him to understand. For such news, even though it should be bad news,
+he would pledge his honour to help Strangeways in his search for
+Spurling. He would even volunteer to go single-handed and capture him
+himself&mdash;bring him down to Murder Point by guile,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span> where Strangeways
+would be waiting to take him. The best and worst which he himself
+could derive from such a promise would be only that he should meet
+with death&mdash;but he should have thought of that offer earlier, and made
+it while Strangeways was with him.</p>
+
+<p>At that word <i>death</i> the purpose of his present errand flared vividly
+in his mind, and he hurried his pace.</p>
+
+<p>Looking back across his shoulder through the darkness, for the moon
+was under cloud, he could just make out where his store pinnacled the
+mound at the Point; he had left the door open in the haste of his
+departure and, over the threshold slantwise across the snow, the fire
+from the stove threw an angry glare. It was only a mile from the Point
+to the bend, yet he seemed to have been journeying for hours. The
+surface of the river was difficult to travel because the snow which
+had fallen was wet; it shrank away from the feet at every stride. For
+this season of the year in Keewatin the night was mild; there was a
+damp rawness, but scarcely any frost in the air. If the ice had been
+rotten in the morning at the bend, it would be doubly treacherous now.
+Ah, but he had warned Strangeways! Surely he would be sufficiently
+cautious to half-believe him at least in that. When he came to where
+the river turned northwards, he would forsake the short-cut of the old
+trail and swing out into the middle stream, or work safely round along
+the bank. If he couldn't scent danger for himself, his huskies would
+choose their own path and save him, unless&mdash;unless, feeling the
+smoothness of the old trail beneath the snow, they should lazily
+choose that, or unless that leader of Spurling's should wilfully lead
+them astray; but surely the four hind-dogs would have sense not to
+follow him, and would hang back.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He kept his eyes on the darkness before him, but to the northeast all
+was shadowy; he could discern nothing. Yes, there was something moving
+over there. He judged that he had already traversed three-quarters of
+that interminable mile; surely he would be able to catch up with him
+now. The recent blizzard had wiped out the old trail, but he could
+still feel it firm beneath the snow; he was following in Strangeways'
+tracks&mdash;Strangeways' which had been Spurling's. Then he came to a
+point where the staler tracks, which were Spurling's, had branched out
+into mid-stream to round the bend; but he saw to his horror that
+Strangeways' had kept on to the left by the winter trail, toward the
+spot of which he had warned him&mdash;he had even suspected that that final
+warning was a trap.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, there he was straight ahead of him; he could see him distinctly
+now. The moon, rising clear of cloud, made his figure plain. He called
+to him, and it seemed that he half-turned his head. He was keeping
+perilously near in to the bend. He called to him again, and signed to
+him with his arms to drive out. Then once more a cloud passed before
+the moon, making the land seem dead.</p>
+
+<p>He advanced cautiously, moving slowly, testing the strength of the ice
+at each fresh step before trusting it with his weight. Underneath he
+could hear the lapping of the current as it rushed rapidly round the
+bend, and could feel the trembling of the crust beneath his feet, as a
+man does the vibration of an Atlantic liner when the engines are
+working at full pressure, and every plank and bolt begins to shake and
+speak. When he had come to where Strangeways had been standing, he
+stood still and listened. He could hear no sound of travel,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span> no
+cursing a man's voice, urging his dogs forward, or cracking of a whip.
+Then he felt the ice sagging from under him, and the cold touch of
+water creeping round his moccasins. From a rift in the cloud, a
+segment of the moon looked out. Before and behind him lay the frozen
+expanse of river, with its piled-up banks on either hand, and its
+heavy blanketing of snow, smooth and level, making its passage seem
+safe. Far over to the right stretched the trail of Spurling, showing
+ugly and black against the white, where his steps and the steps of his
+dogs had punctured the surface. Just before him, three yards distant,
+the ice had broken open, leaving a gaping hole over whose jagged edges
+the water climbed, and whimpered, and fell back, like a fretful child
+in its cot, which has wakened too early and is trying to clamber out.</p>
+
+<p>As Granger watched, heedless of his own safety, a hand pushed out
+above the current, the hooked fingers of which searched gropingly for
+something to which they might make fast. Granger, throwing himself
+flat in the snow, so as to distribute his weight, crawled towards it.
+The hand rose higher, and then the arm, followed at last by the head
+and eyes of Strangeways, but not the mouth. He had caught hold of a
+point of ice and was trying to pull himself up by that; but something
+(was it the swiftness of the current?) was dragging his body away from
+under him so that the water was still above his nose and mouth.
+Granger wormed his way to within arm-stretch and clasped his hand; but
+the moment he commenced to pull, the weight became terrific&mdash;more than
+the weight of one man&mdash;and he himself began to slide slowly forward
+till his head and shoulders were above the water. Something was
+tug<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>ging at Strangeways from below the river, so that his body jerked
+and quivered like a fisherman's line when a well-hooked salmon is
+endeavouring to make a rush at the other end.</p>
+
+<p>Granger was leaning far out now, the surface was curving from under
+him and his chest had left the ice. Then he realised what had
+happened: the loaded sledge had sunk to the bottom of the river-bed,
+and was holding down the four rear-dogs by their traces; but the
+leader, by struggling, had fought his way to within a few inches of
+the outer air, and, clinging on to Strangeways' throat and breast, was
+fiercely striving to climb up him with his teeth to where breathing
+might be found, in somewhat the same manner as Archbishop Salviati did
+in Florence to Francesco Pazzi, when the Gonfalonier hurled them both
+out of the Palazzo window, each with a rope about his neck.</p>
+
+<p>(Strange what men will think of at a crisis! Granger was grimly
+amused, and half-disgusted with himself. How absurd that of all things
+at such a time he should have remembered that!)</p>
+
+<p>The weight of the four rear-dogs and the loaded sledge were gradually
+dragging the leader down, and, with him, Strangeways. He held on
+desperately; now and then, as he made a fresh effort, his yellow snout
+would appear above the water or the top of his yellow head&mdash;except for
+that, he might not have been there. But Granger was intent on
+Strangeways; staring into his eyes, which were distant the length of
+his arm out-stretched, he was appalled at the consternation they
+reflected, and the evident terror of the end. If he could only get at
+his knife, he might be able to effect something; but his knife was
+beneath his capote, in his belt,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span> and both his hands were occupied,
+the one with supporting the drowning man, the other with preventing
+himself from slipping further.</p>
+
+<p>He wanted to speak to Strangeways, but he could not think of any words
+which were not so trivial as to sound blasphemous on such an occasion.
+The man was growing weaker and heavier to hold; his eyes were losing
+their vision, and the water rose in bubbles from his mouth. There was
+only one last chance, that if he could support him long enough for the
+husky at his throat to release his grip and die first, he might be
+able to drag him out.</p>
+
+<p>Though all this had been the work of only a few seconds, his arm was
+becoming numb and intolerably painful. Whatever it might cost him, he
+promised himself that he would not let go till hope was at an end. He
+was slipping forward again; he would soon overbalance. But what did
+that matter to one who did not fear death? After all, an honourable
+out-going is the best El Dorado which any man can hope to find as
+reward for his long life's search. If he were to die for and with
+Strangeways, he would at least prove to him that he was not entirely
+worthless.</p>
+
+<p>Then, before it was too late, he found his words. "Be brave," he
+shouted hoarsely, "be brave! It is only death."</p>
+
+<p>It would have seemed a preposterous supposition yesterday that the
+private trader at Murder Point should ever be in a position to bid the
+veriest scum among cowards to be brave. As he spoke, the intelligence
+came back to Strangeways' eyes, the fear went out from them and the
+features, losing their agony, straightened into an expression which
+was almost grave.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span> His hand became small in Granger's palm, as though
+it were offering to slip away.</p>
+
+<p>Some deep instinct stirred in Granger; he suddenly loved this man for
+the self-denial which that act betrayed. If there was to be a denial
+of self, however, he was emphatic that his should be the sacrifice.
+Was it this thought of sacrifice which brought religion to his
+mind&mdash;some haunting, quick remembrance of those wise words about
+"dying for one's friend"?</p>
+
+<p>Quite irrationally and without connection with anything which had
+previously occurred, leaning yet further out at his own immediate
+peril, shifting his grip to Strangeways' wrist that he might hold him
+more firmly, he whispered, "Jesus of Galilee! Jesus Christ!"</p>
+
+<p>The face of the drowning man took on an awful serenity, a look of
+holiness, as if at sight of something which stood behind Granger,
+which he had only just discerned. He even smiled. Suddenly, with the
+determination of one who had concluded and conquered an old
+temptation, he wrenched away his hand. Granger made one last effort to
+reach him, but the tugging of the beast below the surface, or its dead
+weight, had drifted him out of arm-stretch. He sank lower. The water
+rose, almost leisurely it seemed as if now certain of the one thing it
+had desired, higher and higher up his face till it had reached his
+eyes, quenched them, and nothing was left but a few bubbles which
+floated to the surface and broke, sparkling in the moonlight. Granger
+did not stir; as he had been paralysed, he lay there rigid with the
+black waters washing about his face and hands. Then very slowly, as
+though reluctant not to die, he drew himself back. When he had reached
+safety, rising up, he gazed around; the land looked more deso<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>late
+than ever. The first words which he said were spoken sacredly, with
+bated breath. "And that man told me," he muttered, "that he was afraid
+of death. . . . To prefer to die at such a time, rather than risk my
+life, was the act of a man who was very brave." And next he said, "I
+wonder what were his last words when he crashed through the ice? I
+expect he said, 'Damn.' Well, that was as good as any other word to
+say; after all, all swearing, taken in a certain sense, is a form of
+prayer&mdash;a bluff assertion of belief in the divine."</p>
+
+<p>Granger turned slowly about, and commenced to make his way back to the
+Point. At first he spoke aloud to himself as a thought occurred. "I
+distrusted that yellow beast of Spurling's from the first." "Now at
+any rate Spurling is safe." "I haven't yet discovered whether Mordaunt
+is dead,"&mdash;and so on. Then he ceased to speak with his lips, and his
+thoughts were uttered in the silence of his brain. They had all to do
+with Strangeways.</p>
+
+<p>He wondered what vision had been his, causing him to smile as he sank.
+Did he think of that girl, and that he was going to meet her? Or of
+the old home in England? Or of his school-days? Or was it the Thames
+he thought about&mdash;of Oxford with its many towers, and the cry of the
+coach along the tow-path as the eight swings homeward up-stream, in
+the grey of a winter afternoon, to the regular click of the rowlocks
+as the men pluck their blades from the water, feather and come forward
+for the next stroke, making ready to drive back their slides as one
+man with their legs? He was certain that whatever happened, and
+however he should go out of life, did God spare him a moment's
+conscious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>ness, it would be the vision of Oxford with its domes and
+spires, its austere and romantic quiet, its echoing cloisters and
+passages, its rivers with their sedges of silver and of grey, which
+would float before his dying eyes,&mdash;or would he think of Christ? Had
+Christ been the vision which this man had seen?</p>
+
+<p>Strange thoughts for Keewatin! But death is always strange.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
+<h3>THE BREAK-UP OF THE ICE</h3>
+
+<p>Nearly a month had gone by since the night on which Strangeways died.
+Not that time mattered much to Granger, for, like the immortals, men
+in Keewatin have dispensed with time: they have accepted as true the
+lesson which philosophers have been striving to teach the world ever
+since the human intellect first commenced to philosophise&mdash;that there
+are no such ontological facts as Time and Space. Among the men of this
+vast northern territory the outward expression of religion is rare;
+they do not often speak, and then only of such interests as are
+superficial to their lives. Yet here, in their fine neglect of the two
+sternest of self-imposed, human limitations, the religious instinct is
+manifest. As it would be sacrilege to count God's breaths, were that
+possible, so to them it seems a kind of blasphemy to number the
+recurrence of their own small perceptions when the Divine Perceived
+seems so entirely unconscious of their very existence. Hence it
+happens that one does not often hear a traveller speak of having
+journeyed so many days or miles; his division is more casual, and
+embraces only his own immediate actions&mdash;he has travelled so many
+"sleeps," nothing more.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule, Indians are utterly deficient in the time-sense and can
+give no intelligent account of their age. Their calendar is enshrined,
+if they have one, in symbols<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span> which they use as decorations, painted
+on the inside of their finest skins. They make their reckoning of the
+years from some event which was once important to themselves, or to
+their tribe. Thus, stars falling from the top to the bottom of a robe
+represent the year of 1833, and an etching of an Indian with a broken
+leg and a horn on his head stands for the year in which Hay-waujina,
+One Horn, had his leg "killed." Back of that which is comparatively
+immediate to their own experience, they have ceased to count or to be
+inquisitive.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their pleasures in a long immortal dream."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>So with both the joys and sorrows of these Northland men; hurry is not
+necessary where time is unrecognised, and turbulence of emotion,
+whether of grief or gladness, is felt to be out of place in a
+<i>dream-being</i>, whose sole reality is its unreality. Their personal
+unimportance to the Universe, and remoteness from the Market-place of
+Life allow them to dawdle. Their experiences have no sharp edges, no
+abrupt precipices, no divisive gulfs, no defined beginnings and
+endings. The book of their sojourn in this world has neither chapters
+nor headings; the page runs on without hindrance from tragedy to
+comedy, comedy to farce, farce to melodrama, and thence to tragedy
+again&mdash;always it returns to tragedy. They stride round the Circle of
+the Emotions without halting, merging from joy into sorrow without
+preface, till one day the feet grow wearier and lag, the eyes grow
+clear and, almost without knowing it, as did Strangeways, their dream
+going from them, they awake&mdash;motionlessly pass out of life, and enter
+into <i>What</i>?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If smoothness of passage and apparent endlessness be the two main
+qualities of the divine existence, then the lives of men in Keewatin
+are both divine and real; only we, of the outside world, would call
+this same smoothness dulness, and its endlessness its most torturing
+agony.</p>
+
+<p>The past month had dragged by with Granger as would a century with
+normal men, except that in the entire span of those hundred years
+there had been no summer. In them he had lived through and remembered
+every emotion which had ever come to him. His brain was confused with
+remembering, fevered with anguish of regret for things lost, which
+would never come again. He had nearly succumbed to that most unmanly
+of all spiritual assailants, the coward of Self-Pity&mdash;would have
+succumbed, had not Self-Scorn rendered him aid.</p>
+
+<p>From sunrise to sunset the winter had slowly thawed: the trees had
+uncovered their greens and browns, thrusting themselves forth from
+beneath the rain-washed greyness of the melting snow; the river,
+reluctantly at first, had cracked and swayed, and become engraved by
+miniature streams which ate their way, as acid on metal, across its
+surface. Strange messages those narrow streams of water wrote; strange
+they seemed at least to Granger as he watched them day by day.
+Sometimes they seemed to be writing words, and sometimes drawing
+faces. The words he could not always decipher; when he did they were
+mostly proper names, STRANGEWAYS, SPURLING, MORDAUNT, EL DORADO. The
+faces were more easy to recognise, and three of them corresponded to
+the first three names. There was one morning when he awoke, having
+dreamed of the horrible revenge which he would take,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span> and going to the
+window was appalled to see a new face scrawled upon the ice&mdash;his own,
+yet not his own; the evil likeness to the self which had come to him
+in the Klondike. He was puzzled, and set to work to discover the
+reason for these signs. Then a verse which he had once learnt as a
+child came back to him, "Jesus stooped down and wrote with his finger
+on the ground, <i>as though he heard them not</i>. And <i>they which heard
+it</i>, being convicted by <i>their own</i> conscience, went out one by one,
+beginning at the eldest, even unto the last; and Jesus was left alone,
+<i>and the woman</i>."</p>
+
+<p>So he knew that it was God's hand which had etched that warning
+likeness overnight, which his own conscience had discerned, accusing
+him. Also, in gazing upon that drawing he heard a voice, which was his
+own voice, used as a medium for another mind, saying, "Now that thou
+hast seen what thou art like, go out, that I may be left alone <i>and
+Spurling</i>." So Granger had agreed with God that day that he would
+cease from his dreams of human vengeance, and leave Him alone with
+Spurling. He did not dare to tell God all his thoughts, but he felt
+certain that, had Spurling's opinions been consulted, he would have
+preferred to be left alone with John Granger. It was terrible enough
+to have to dwell between God's footsteps, as all men must who live in
+Keewatin, when His eyes were averted, and He Himself walked by
+seemingly unconscious of your presence; but to have to live there when
+He had noticed your presence, and His face was lifted up, while His
+gaze was bent upon you, with no hope of escape, a fugitive from human
+justice, alone in an empty land with your own conscience and Him as
+your accuser, that was to protract the shamefaced confusion of the
+Last<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span> Judgment through every day of your life. Granger felt that in
+making that compact he had done his worst by Druce Spurling.</p>
+
+<p>In the middle hours of the night which followed this agreement, which
+he chose to think of as his compromise with Deity, he was awakened by
+a thunderous sound, and jumping from his bunk saw that the river had
+broken up and the ice was going out, as though God, having finished
+His argument which He had written there, were rubbing out His words.
+Flinging wide the door, he ran down the mound to the bank, shouting
+like a boy. As he went he had a panoramic vision of all the other men,
+both white and red, along the six hundred miles of river which
+stretched from the great lake to the Hudson Bay, who had been awakened
+as he had been, and now, or sometime that night, would be doing what
+he was doing, rushing half-clad beneath the stars down to the
+river-bank calling on the loneliness to rejoice&mdash;the loneliness, which
+throughout the frozen months had listened so faithfully to all that
+they had had to say, blasphemous or otherwise, and had made no reply.
+But this night both silence and loneliness were violated, and cried
+aloud with rage protestingly; whereat the river only clapped its hands
+and squeezed its passage, and huddled between its ruined
+winter-barriers ever northward to the freedom of the Bay.</p>
+
+<p>This was the one night in all the year when revolt was permitted, and
+the Bastile of Keewatin fell. Fell! Yes, soon the summer would raise
+it up again in a newer form, only a little less intolerable; and
+afterwards the winter, that master-builder, would return as a king
+from his exile. But no one thought of such catastrophe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span> to-night. For
+the moment it seemed that the reign of tyranny was ended and the
+millennium had begun&mdash;chaos, which men mistake for millennium.</p>
+
+<p>Granger stood above the bank repeating to himself over and over, "The
+ice is going out! The ice is going out!" as if it were a fact
+incredible. Every moment the air vibrated with a roar, and the earth
+was shaken as some new horseman of the ice was overthrown and hurried
+by in flight, only to halt presently, ranged side by side with some of
+his fellows, to make yet another stand. Certainly it was a battle
+which was being fought, and one which must be lost.</p>
+
+<p>As far as sound could travel, from the west and from the north, he
+could hear the cannonade, and what seemed like the clatter of hoofs,
+and the clash of thrown-away swords. It was possible to imagine
+anything when Nature was making a change so titanic. Now the water was
+the black horse of Revelation, with a sable rider on his back who
+carried "a balance in his hand,"&mdash;and he was in pursuit. And the ice
+was the pale horse, and he that sat upon him, his name was Death, and
+Hades followed with him,&mdash;and he was in flight. And now, when some
+great floe jammed in its passage round the Point, and the ice piled
+up, it became for Granger a magician's silver palace in Aragon, which
+a dark-mailed knight of Christendom had travelled leagues to demolish.
+Outside it shone resplendent and crystal in the starlight; but within
+it was full of uncleanness, and by day it would vanish.</p>
+
+<p>He amused himself with these fancies, and followed them to their
+furthest length. He could see the faces of the beleaguered, now evil
+with terror, peering out from the casements, and the stern old
+enchanter in the turret,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span> over whose ledges flowed down his snow-white
+beard. He could hear the hoarse-throated clamour of the knight as he
+led his company about the walls, and rammed in the castle's gateway,
+shouting, "For Christ! For Christ!" The structure trembled and the
+turret commenced to wave in the air, as it had been a banner. The
+sorcerer looked out, his eyes were filled with dismay&mdash;he could not
+withstand that name of 'Christ'; he plunged from the height, spreading
+abroad his arms, and was lost in the blackness of the underground. The
+dark host swept over the palace still shouting, "For Christ! For
+Christ!" In the twinkling of an eye, both the evil one and the
+avenging host were gone&mdash;all was resolved into turbid water and
+submerged, groaning ice.</p>
+
+<p>So he watched the break-up of the ice, and the travelling of the river
+which, slipping by at his feet, going forth to wander the world, left
+him stationary. Perhaps some drops of this Last Chance River would
+some day be washed up in a wave on the tropic shores of Ceylon, or,
+having spent a winter in the Arctic, would be carried down in a berg
+and, having melted, flow on round Cape Horn to the Pacific till they
+came to Polynesia, where they would be parted by the swimming hands of
+dusky, slender girls. He grew jealous at the thought, and bending down
+baled out some of the water in his palms, and threw it on the ground,
+saying angrily, "You at least shall stay." Then he laughed at his
+folly and was comforted by thinking, "When my body is dead, it also
+will journey forth. I must be patient like the river, and wait. In
+God's good time I also shall wander round the world."</p>
+
+<p>"But shall I know? Shall I be conscious of that?" the spirit of
+discontent inquired.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Granger shook his head irritably, as if by so doing he could throw off
+these troublesome imaginations. Since the death of Strangeways, he had
+not recovered his poise of soul. Ah, and Strangeways! Was Strangeways
+conscious of his body's release, and the permission which death had
+given him to wander forth? How odd to think that that body, which had
+been born of a woman in England and tended by her hands, which had
+strolled through English lanes and over Oxford meadows, gesticulating
+and talking, doing good and evil, which even in its life had brought
+the man who inhabited it so many miles from home, now that the soul
+had departed from it, should be hurrying away alone to hide itself in
+Arctic fastnesses! Did Strangeways know that? Was he conscious of this
+new adventure? Well, if God was so anxious to take care of Spurling,
+He could be trusted to look after Strangeways&mdash;if anything of him
+survived.</p>
+
+<p>The melting of the ice had chilled the air. The coldness of his yet
+living body awoke him to a realisation of the petty suffering of that
+small part of his universe which was explored and known. Taking one
+last look at the ruin which the one night's thaw had worked, the
+pinnacles, and beauty, and whiteness which it had destroyed,
+"Courage!" he said, "for this is life."</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
+<h3>A MESSAGE FROM THE DEAD</h3>
+
+<p>The sun was shining down; the spring rains had ceased; within less
+than a month winter had vanished, and summer had swept through
+Keewatin with a burst of gladness. The land was riotously green;
+through the heart of it wandered the river, newly released, a streak
+of azure, or of gilded splendour where smitten by the sun. Although
+its waters were running freely, many memories of the frozen quiet
+still remained in the shape of ice piled up along its banks, sometimes
+to the height of fifteen feet, and of snow in the more shady hollows
+of the forest, which glimmered distantly between leaves and branches
+hinting at secret woodland lakes. Even the most backward among the
+trees had commenced to unfold their buds. All day long, and through
+the major portion of the night, the frogs continued to whistle in the
+marshes and along the river's edges. Flock after flock of duck
+arrived, flashing their wings against the sky, dropping from under a
+cloud suddenly, and coming to rest in the water with a shower of
+spray, where they rode at ease side by side, like painted, anchored
+merchantmen returned in safety from the earth's end. Now the wild
+swan, teal, or goose would go by with a whirr of wings, crying
+hoarsely. To make the world seem yet more wide an occasional gull
+would heave in sight, drifting without effort in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span> silent flight
+majestically. In the forest Granger was conscious of a commotion at
+the cause of which he could only guess. Love was at work in the
+shadows, or what among the dumb creation passes for love. There was a
+continual stirring of leaves, the rustle of branches forced aside, the
+scattering of birds, those spies and betrayers of the four-footed
+animal, and the grievous low wail of the wolf. Sometimes a fish would
+leap in the river, flash silvery and dripping in the sunlight, on its
+bridal journey from the ocean. Was it an act of gallantry, he
+wondered, which some deep-sea female witnessed from beneath the ripple
+of the stream, or was it a terrified effort to escape from love. He
+knew what that best of all passions could mean to the forest animal,
+and how cruel it might become. Often in the fall of the year he had
+watched a doe, seen her dash down the river bank, stand quivering,
+leap in and swim, made fearless of man because she knew that her
+lover, the stag, was not far behind.</p>
+
+<p>This frenzy of passion set him thinking, and made him long for the
+return of Peggy Ericsen. He knew that his love for her was not of the
+highest, was little more than physical, not much nobler than forest
+love; but what was a man to do, and how guide his conduct when all the
+world was a-mating? On occasions he had a clearer vision, and realised
+with a sense of sudden shame to how low a level he had sunk. Then he
+would strive to throw off this attraction for a half-breed girl by
+recalling the faces of all the other women whom he had admired and
+loved. Yet this also was dangerous, for it caused him to remember
+Mordaunt, thoughts of whom roused up anger within him against
+Spurling. He had agreed to leave him to God, and could not go back on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>
+his word; therefore he must forget Mordaunt and, if his mind must be
+haunted by womankind, think only of Peggy. Peggy! Well, she was not a
+bad little sort. Pretty? Yes. But between her and himself there could
+be no community of mind. He knew that for hundreds of years it had
+been the custom of traders and white trappers to take to themselves a
+squaw from a tribe of friendly Indians, sometimes for the sake of
+commercial advantages, sometimes for defence, sometimes for domestic
+convenience, rarely for love. But there his education, which would
+have served him well in an older land, stood in his way, as it had so
+often done, making him over-delicate.</p>
+
+<p>He could find it in his heart to wish himself more ignorant and less
+refined. That glamour of intellectual gentility, which England sets
+such store by, had made him unfit for the outdoor brutalities of
+northern life. In his catastrophe he knew that he was not single,
+though there was small consolation in that; all through Canada he had
+encountered younger sons, drawing-room bred young gentlemen, who
+worked in lumber camps, on railroads, and in mines by day, and spelt
+out their Horace from ragged texts by brushwood fires, beneath the
+stars, or in verminous shacks by night. Their power to construe a dead
+language served to differentiate them from their associates, and,
+rather foolishly if heroically, to bolster up their pride.</p>
+
+<p>But, to return to Peggy, what a pity it was that she had insisted on
+the marriage ceremony! Yet, he respected her for that. <i>But</i>, and
+there was always a but in Granger's reasonings, suppose he should get
+his chance to return to England one day! And this would certainly
+happen to him on his mother's death. And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span> suppose, when he had
+tethered himself to this half-breed wife, he should get word that
+Mordaunt was still alive! Granger was always at a loss when the moment
+for decision presented itself; he was too moderate, too far-sighted
+and philosophic to act immediately. It takes an abrupt, coarse-grained
+man, or a prophet, to handle a crisis efficiently; your man who is
+only endowed just beyond the average sees too far&mdash;and not far enough.
+The insolent infringement of personality which he had suffered as man
+and child from his mother's unwise interference had caused him to
+become a chronic hesitator. As usual, in this case as in all others,
+he determined to let matters slide, to give circumstance an unfettered
+opportunity to evolve its own event. He was content to remain the
+spectator of his own career, allowing Chance to be the only doer of
+the deeds which went to make up the record of his life. And what would
+Chance do next? The Man with the Dead Soul might return at any hour
+from his winter's hunt, bringing with him his daughter, in which case
+most surely his book of life would commence to write out its latest
+chapter of disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>Beorn had cached a canoe at the mouth of the Forbidden River, and
+therefore would reach the Point up-stream from the northward. Granger
+found excitement in the thought that any minute, looking out from his
+window, he might discover the approach of his future wife. The more he
+allowed his fancy to dwell upon her, the more pleasant her image
+became for him. After all, there is always something of romance, at
+first at any rate, in marrying out of your blood heritage. Pizarro
+must have felt that when he took to himself Inez Huayllas Nusta, the
+Inca princess. The havoc of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span> affection which was being enacted
+secretly beneath the shadow of the forest trees urged him on, crying,
+"Take your pleasure while it is yours, winter will return. Short views
+of life are best." Having listened to that advice for several days, he
+allowed himself to be persuaded. It seemed to him, when he remembered
+how they had parted, that it would be a gallant and reconciling act to
+set forth to meet her. Moreover, though the mind that was in him stood
+aside from the project in disdain, the body cried, "Forward! Forward!"
+in chorus with the song of the wild-wood.</p>
+
+<p>Early one morning he carried down his canoe to the water's edge,
+loaded it with a week's provisions, padlocked his store and set out.
+As the prow drove forward down-stream, exultation entered into him. He
+was playing at saying good-bye to his long exile; miles ahead lay the
+Hudson Bay, and beyond that England. If his boat were not so frail and
+his arms were stronger, by pressing on and onward he could escape.
+These were scarcely the thoughts with which a man should set out to
+meet his bride. Desires to meet and avoid her alternated even now,
+when with each fresh thrust of the paddle he approached her nearer
+presence. Yet, even to his way of thinking, there was something epic
+in the situation&mdash;that this girl of an alien tradition and a savage
+race, with her copper skin, and blue-black hair, and timid eyes,
+should be threading her passage up her native river, through the early
+summer, toward her western lover who was hastening down the self-same
+primeval highroad to meet her. Oh, he would be very happy with Peggy!
+Thus imagining himself on through the labyrinth of passionate fancy,
+he floated down stream, shrouded in the morning mist. He had to go<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
+slowly, for he could not see far ahead, and travel by water was still
+treacherous by reason of belated floes of ice. Over to the eastward
+the sun winked down on him with a dissipated bloodshot eye, knowingly,
+with the cruel misanthropic humour of a tired man of the world who,
+regarding idealism as a jest, had guessed at the purpose of his errand
+and was eager to declare his own shrewd cleverness.</p>
+
+<p>And if the sun is a cynic, who can blame him? He alone of created
+things has an intimate knowledge of all live things' love affairs,
+from when Eve shook back her hair and lifted up her lips, to the last
+girl kissed in Japan. The canoe drifting out of a scarf of mist
+brought Granger in sight of the bend, where Strangeways had been
+drowned. He plunged his paddle deeper in the water, thrusting it
+forward to stay the progress of the prow, and glanced from side to
+side, then straight ahead. He had caught the smell of burning. On the
+northern side of the bend, curling above the trees, he could detect
+the rise of smoke. Someone had lit a fire and was camping there. But
+who? Was it Beorn and Peggy? No, they would not camp so near their
+destination; they would have pushed on to the store for rest. Nor
+could it be men from the Crooked Creek coming up to God's Voice; the
+season was as yet too early for them to be expected. Then, was it
+Spurling?</p>
+
+<p>Paddling out into the middle stream, he stole beneath the farther
+bank, and, rounding the bend, came in sight of two men, the one seated
+upright before the fire cooking his bannocks, the other stretched out
+twenty paces distant at the edge of the underbrush, completely covered
+with a robe, motionless as if he slept. The man who was awake looked
+up, shaded his eyes, then rising to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span> his feet came down to the water's
+edge and waved his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Granger recognised in him his friend P&egrave;re Antoine, the gaunt old
+Jesuit of Keewatin. No one could remember, not even the Indians, at
+what time he had first come into the district; he seemed to have been
+there always and was of a great age. Yet, despite his many years, he
+could travel miracles of journeys in the name of Mary's son. It was
+said of him that he was always to be seen mounting the sky-line in
+times of crisis and temptation; that he knew by instinct where men
+were in spiritual peril, as the caribou scents water; that he had
+often broken out of the forest unexpectedly in time to prevent murder.
+There were Indians to be found who would circumstantially assert that
+they had met with P&egrave;re Antoine, five hundred miles distant from the
+spot where he had last been seen, walking in the wilderness radiantly,
+wearing the countenance of Jesus Christ.</p>
+
+<p>Granger recalled these legends as he gazed toward the camp; he watched
+the figure of the sleeping man&mdash;and he thought of Spurling. Was this
+Spurling? He tried to make out the man's identity by his figure's
+outline, but the robes which were piled above him forbade that. Yet
+within himself he was sure that his guess was correct. What was more
+likely than that Antoine should have met the fugitive wandering up the
+Forbidden River, perhaps sick and starving, should have taken his
+confession and compassionately have brought him back? Probably it was
+Antoine's purpose that they two should be reconciled. He might even
+have converted Spurling and have brought back God into his life, so
+that now he was willing to return to Winni<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>peg to give himself up, and
+to take his chance of death.</p>
+
+<p>Having run his canoe aground between the bank-ice, he stepped out and
+grasped the Jesuit's hand.</p>
+
+<p>"God has arrived before you this time, P&egrave;re Antoine," he said, jerking
+his head in the direction of the sleeping man; "he has already done
+your work. I have promised Him that I will do no harm to your
+companion, so you have arrived too late."</p>
+
+<p>"If it was God who arrived," he said, "I am content."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke significantly, hinting at a further knowledge of which he
+supposed Granger to be possessed.</p>
+
+<p>"If it was not God, then who else?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, who else?"</p>
+
+<p>Granger, in common with most white men of the district, had fallen
+into the Indian superstition that P&egrave;re Antoine was omniscient; it came
+to him as a shock that he might be unaware of how God had written on
+the ice. Usually in talking with the priest he took short-cuts in his
+methods of communication, leaving many things understood but
+unmentioned, as a man is wont to do when conversing with himself.</p>
+
+<p>"There is no doubt that it was God," he said; "He did not want me to
+murder this man. He wished that I should leave him alone, to be judged
+in the forest by Himself. Therefore, if you have brought him here with
+you to make us friends, I will not do that; but I will promise you, as
+I have promised God, that I will not be his enemy."</p>
+
+<p>Antoine tapped him on the arm gently, looking him full in the face
+with his grave, penetrating eyes: "And did not God Himself arrive too
+late?" he asked.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Granger flushed hotly, for he thought that he detected an under-tone
+of accusation in the way in which those words were uttered. "Tell me,
+is he dead?" he asked abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"He is dead."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it . . . is that his body over there?"</p>
+
+<p>"You should know best."</p>
+
+<p>Involuntarily Granger sank his voice, now that he knew that that
+sleeping man was dead. He pressed closer to the priest and commenced
+to whisper, now that he knew that no noise of his, however loud, could
+disturb the rest of this man who would never wake. Sometimes, when in
+the hurry of his speech his voice had been by accident a little
+raised, he would cease speaking, lift up his head, and peer furtively
+from side to side, then over to where the dead man lay, to make
+certain that he had not stirred,&mdash;all this lest someone in that great
+silence should have heard what he had said. Thus does the presence of
+the dead accuse living men, as if by our mere retention of life we did
+them injury. Wheresoever we encounter them, whether in the hired pride
+of the vulgar city hearse, or in the pitiful disarray of bleached
+bones and tattered raiment strewn on a mountainside, they make even
+those of us who are remotest from blame feel guilty men.</p>
+
+<p>"But, P&egrave;re Antoine, I did not kill him," Granger was saying. "I was
+gravely tempted, but God wrote upon the ice and stayed my hand. This
+man was once my friend, and is now again&mdash;now that he is dead. Let me
+uncover and look upon his face."</p>
+
+<p>But the priest withheld him. "Not yet&mdash;not yet," he said. "Let us
+first talk together awhile, that I may hear what has happened, and get
+to understand."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So there in the quiet of the early morning, with nothing to break the
+stillness save the crackling of the fire, and the flowing of the
+river, and the occasional flight of a bird, Granger told the priest
+all his story, from his first dream of El Dorado to the thoughts of
+escape and of Peggy Ericsen which he had had, as drifting down-stream,
+he had caught the smell of burning and come in sight of the bend. It
+was a true confession; nothing to his own discredit was left out.</p>
+
+<p>When he came to an end the mist had lifted, and the sun rode high in
+the heavens disentangled of cloud. All the time that he had been
+speaking the priest had sat motionless, with his head bent forward
+listening, his knees drawn up and his arms about them. Now that the
+tale was over, he slowly turned his head; and then it was for the
+first time that Granger knew what the Indians meant when they said
+that they had met with P&egrave;re Antoine in the wilderness, walking
+radiantly, wearing the countenance of Jesus Christ. There was such a
+brightness about him that he could not bear his gaze, but trembling
+with a kind of fearful joy fell forward on his face, covering his eyes
+with his hands. And still the priest said nothing, not trusting
+himself to speak, perhaps, so great was his compassion.</p>
+
+<p>But it was not long before Granger was conscious of a hand, hard and
+horny and ungentle, as far as outward circumstance could make it so,
+which rested on his head. At last he spoke. "I think I understand," he
+said, and then, after a pause, "but you will never help yourself or
+the world by merely being sad. No man ever has."</p>
+
+<p>When Granger answered nothing nor lifted up his head, he spoke again.
+"Does that seem a strange<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span> judgment to pass on you here in Keewatin?
+Does it sound too much like the speech of a city man? Nevertheless, it
+is because of your flight from sadness that you have met with all your
+dangers. All your life you have spent in striving to escape from
+things which are sad. Why did you dream of El Dorado when you were in
+London? Because, as you yourself have told me, exquisiteness of dress
+did not reassure you of another's happiness; you were always
+remembering that a decent coat may sometimes cover cancer. You are one
+of those who suffer more because of the sores of Lazarus than Lazarus
+himself. That is well and Christlike, if you suffer gladly&mdash;which you
+do not. So you left London and travelled half across the world to
+Yukon, only to find a greater wretchedness; for your misery growing
+vicious pursued you, and goaded you on to crime. Once more to escape
+you left Yukon and came to Winnipeg, and came up here, and still you
+are sad. Will I tell you why? Always, always you have depended on
+yourself for escape and rest. That is useless, for your sadness does
+not belong to any city, or any land; it is within yourself. Wherever
+you have travelled you have carried it with you. You must look for
+help from outside yourself."</p>
+
+<p>Again he paused, but Granger did not stir. Then he repeated, speaking
+yet more gently, "I am an old man and have lived in Keewatin the
+length of most men's lives, yet I have not always lived up here. I was
+not always happy, and I say to you, you must look for help from
+outside yourself."</p>
+
+<p>Then Granger answered him, keeping his head still bowed.</p>
+
+<p>"Where, where must I look for help?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Lift up your head."</p>
+
+<p>He obeyed, and the first sight he saw was the face of P&egrave;re Antoine
+bent above him. Again he was struck with its likeness to the
+traditional face of Christ&mdash;but the face was that of a Jesus who had
+grown grey in suffering and had been often crucified, who was very
+ancient and had not yet attained his death. Then he thought he knew
+what le P&egrave;re had meant by saying that he must look for help from
+outside himself. He turned his eyes away and gazed into the sunshine,
+and on the greenness of the awakened country. Somehow it all looked
+very happy and changed from what it had been before they two had met.
+He vaguely wondered whether already he might not be now experiencing
+that help. But, as had always happened to him after tasting of a
+momentary joy, in turning his head he found a new grief awaiting him,
+for there, twenty paces distant, stretched out at the edge of the
+underbrush, covered with a robe, he caught sight of that recumbent
+figure, lying motionless as if it slept. He shuddered, and seizing the
+priest by the arm, speaking hoarsely with suppressed excitement,
+exclaimed, "Where did he come from? But where did you find him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I found him stretched out on the bank-ice, awaiting me as I paddled
+up-stream toward the bend."</p>
+
+<p>"Then he was coming back. God must have met him down there on the
+Forbidden River and have spoken with him face to face; he could not
+endure His voice, so he fled. Oh, to come back at such a season, when
+the river was in flood, he must have been terribly afraid. He must
+have clambered his way up-stream, all those hundred miles, running by
+the bank. P&egrave;re Antoine, you know many things, what kind of words<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span> were
+those, do you suppose, that God spoke to Spurling?"</p>
+
+<p>"The kind of words which God always speaks to men; He told him the
+truth about himself."</p>
+
+<p>"The truth about himself? There are few who could endure to hear
+that."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, He would accuse him with a question, I think."</p>
+
+<p>"What makes you say that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because that is the way in which God usually speaks to men. He asked
+Adam a question, and Adam hid himself; he asked Cain a question, and
+Cain became a vagabond in the earth."</p>
+
+<p>They sat in silence awhile, and then Granger said, "And if God were to
+speak to me, what question would He ask?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think he would say, 'John Granger, by how much are you better than
+Spurling, whom you condemn?'"</p>
+
+<p>"You are right; yes, I think He would say that. Even I have asked
+myself that question before to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"You did not ask yourself; it was God's voice."</p>
+
+<p>"And I could give no answer to what He said. P&egrave;re Antoine, before we
+met, I had often wondered what I would say to Spurling should we meet
+again. I had planned all manner of kindly phrases to make him again my
+friend; but I had thought of him as coming to me prosperous, with the
+approval of the world. When he came to me in poverty, asking help, in
+peril of his life for a sin which had been almost mine, I turned him
+away. He had chosen me out from among all men between Winnipeg and the
+Klondike, as the only one to whom he could safely go for help; and I
+turned him away. I see it clearly now; God sent to me this man whom I
+had wished to murder, when he had performed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span> my crime, that, by
+endangering my life for his, I might cleanse myself. When all men had
+failed him, he and God expected that I, at least, would understand.
+But for Mordaunt, I might have had to flee as he fled, changed by the
+raising of a gun and hasty pulling of a trigger into a Judas to all
+that is best; I might have had to support within me his utter
+solitariness and agony of mind, and have been compelled to see myself
+as debased throughout and forever by a single, momentary act. How he
+must have suffered! I shall fear to die now; till now I have been
+afraid only of life."</p>
+
+<p>"Why will you fear to die?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I shall meet with Spurling, and then I shall hear God's
+question and His accusing voice."</p>
+
+<p>The priest laid a hand upon his shoulder gently. "Ah, my child, but
+you forget," he said; "in the country where Spurling has gone he will
+have learnt how to understand."</p>
+
+<p>That thought was new to Granger, that of the two faults his own was
+the greater and that forgiveness belonged to Spurling. He sat
+motionless for a long time arguing it out; he wanted to be exactly
+just to both Spurling and himself. The fire died down and P&egrave;re Antoine
+threw on more brushwood; the sun grew tall in the heavens and a rain
+cloud gathered in the west; the floe-ice caught in its passage round
+the bend, gasped and whined and, tearing itself free again, vanished
+down river out of sight. The arithmetic of the problem stood thus:
+Spurling's sin had been the result of a sudden violence, his own of a
+conscious and premeditated uncharitableness. Which sin was morally the
+worse, to shoot a fellow creature in a fit of passionate desperation,
+or to turn your back upon a bygone benefactor who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span> comes to you in
+distress, comes to you when his heart is breaking, because he can
+trust himself with no one else? "My sin is the greater," Granger told
+himself, "I am more wrongful than wronged against"; his thoughts going
+back to what le P&egrave;re had said, he added, "I am Cain, and yet I judged
+Spurling as if I had been God Himself."</p>
+
+<p>He was roused from his meditation by a dull thudding sound which had
+commenced behind his back; turning his head, he saw that P&egrave;re Antoine
+was already digging a grave. Rising without a word, he began to lend a
+hand. They had not gone far when they found that the ground was hard
+as granite, that it had not yet thawed out; then they commenced to
+look for stones to pile upon the body so that, since the grave would
+be shallow, they might raise a mound above it to prevent the wolves
+from getting the body out.</p>
+
+<p>By the time they had completed their preparations the rain was falling
+in large and heavy drops, and the storm was blowing in great gusts
+through the forest, causing the young leaves to shudder and whisper
+together, and to turn their backs to the wind. The priest and the
+trader stood upright from their work and gazed at one another. Already
+the narrow hole, which they had scooped out, was filling with water;
+there was no time to lose; yet neither seemed inclined to hurry. At
+last P&egrave;re Antoine said, "So you are sure that you did not do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot be sure of that."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, but you did not do it in the way I mean? You did not kill him
+with the strength of your hands?"</p>
+
+<p>They went together to the edge of the underbrush where the dead man's
+body lay, and carried it, without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span> disturbing the coverings, to the
+side of the grave; there they set it down.</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot bear that he should lie in that dampness," Granger broke
+out; "I remember when we were in London, how he used to hate the wet.
+Coldness he could put up with or the hottest sunshine, but he could
+not endure the damp. He said it made him feel as though the world was
+crying, like a dreary woman because her youngest child was dead. We
+can't drop him into that puddle and leave him there."</p>
+
+<p>He commenced to strip off his clothes, and to fold them along the
+floor of the grave. When he had apparently made all ready, he stooped
+down again and smoothed out a ruck, lest its discomfort should irk the
+dead.</p>
+
+<p>"Now," he said, "let me see his face for the last time, for he was my
+friend."</p>
+
+<p>Le P&egrave;re bent down, and drew the coverings back to the waist, while
+Granger leant over him in his eagerness. The body, having lain upon
+the ice, had been well preserved, no feature had been disturbed; but
+it was not the body of a man who was newly dead, nor was it the face
+of Spurling. So absorbed had Granger been by thoughts of the comrade
+whom he had treated harshly, and by the mysterious meaning of the
+writing which he had seen upon the ice, that the likelier solution of
+the problem of this man's identity had not entered into his head, that
+the body might be that of Strangeways, thrown up by the back-rush of
+the current around the bend.</p>
+
+<p>"Strangeways," he muttered, "it is Strangeways." And with those words
+his charity towards Spurling began to ebb.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>P&egrave;re Antoine, when he heard it, realising that these were the remains
+of an officer of justice, for whom, when he did not return, search
+would be made, and not of an escaped murderer with a price upon his
+head, at news of whose death Authority would be glad, went down on his
+hands and knees and began to examine the clothing of the dead for
+proofs of his identity, which could be sent in to headquarters for the
+establishing of his death. He foresaw that there was need for care;
+when the matter came to be investigated, it would be discovered that
+Granger had been Spurling's partner in the Klondike; questions would
+certainly be asked of Robert Pilgrim, as Hudson Bay factor and head
+man of the district, concerning Granger's conduct in Keewatin, and no
+good word could be looked for from that quarter. That which would tell
+most heavily against him would be this fact, that two men, separated
+by a few hours, were known to have passed God's Voice en route for the
+independent store of Garnier, Parwin, and Wrath, the first a hunted
+criminal, the second an officer of justice&mdash;the criminal had escaped
+and the officer was dead. Presumably both pursued and pursuer had
+arrived at Murder Point, for the body of Strangeways, the follower,
+had been found a mile down-river below the Point. Then where was
+Spurling? And how had he managed to escape, if he had not been helped?
+Who could have helped him save Granger? And why was Strangeways dead?</p>
+
+<p>These were some of the many questions which avenging justice would be
+sure to ask, and, however skilfully they might be answered, the priest
+knew well that it would be difficult to prevent suspicion from
+attaching to a hated independent trader, especially when it became<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
+known that he had once been the fugitive's friend. Why, he himself had
+suspected Granger at first!</p>
+
+<p>His present purpose was, if possible, to gather such proofs from the
+dead man's clothing as would exclude the doubt of foul play, and
+establish as a fact Granger's assertion that the corporal had arrived
+at his death by the accident of drowning.</p>
+
+<p>In the meanwhile, he was not meeting with much success in his search,
+for the right arm of the dead man was pressed so rigidly across his
+breast that it could not be moved without breaking; the hand was
+concealed and the fingers tangled in the folds of his dress, as if
+even in the last moments of life he had been conscious that he kept a
+secret hidden there. Only with violence could it be forced aside, and
+to this the priest was averse; he commenced to cut away the clothing,
+above downwards from the neck, below upwards from the belt. The cloth
+ripped easily, having become rotten with the wet, but the trimmings of
+fur were tough and obstinate to separate. When he had slit the capote
+and under-garments above and below the arm in two big flaps, he rolled
+them back, laying bare the breast, where he discovered a silver chain
+which went about the neck, the pendant to which, wrapped in the
+portion of the dress that had covered it, was clutched in the icy
+hand. He now cut away the stuff from around the hand, and, with a
+severity which seemed both profane and cruel, bent back the fingers
+one by one, compelling them to release their hold, so that the bones
+were heard to crack.</p>
+
+<p>"What are you doing?" cried Granger, angrily, being roused by the
+sound from an unsatisfactory examination of the mixed feelings which
+had arisen within him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span> on discovering that Spurling, whom he had just
+been regretting, was not dead. "Why must we torture him? Why can't we
+leave him alone, and lay him decently in his grave?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps in order that we may prevent you from being hanged."</p>
+
+<p>"From being hanged! You mistake me for Spurling, P&egrave;re Antoine; your
+memory must be failing. What have I done to deserve such courtesy at
+the hands of Fate? Why should men want to hang me?"</p>
+
+<p>"For the murder of Strangeways."</p>
+
+<p>Granger stood back, and drew himself erect, as if by asserting his
+physical cleanness and manhood he could refute the accusation. He
+lifted up his head and gazed with a fixed stare on the landscape,
+seeing nothing. Yes, it was true, they could make that accusation;
+there was sufficient evidence for suspecting him and, with the aid of
+a few lies and inaccurate statements on the part of his
+enemies&mdash;Robert Pilgrim, for instance, and Indians whom he had
+offended&mdash;sufficient evidence might be got together to bring him to
+the gallows. A fitting ending that for the son of the ambitious mother
+who had stinted herself and planned for his success, and a most
+appropriate sequel to the example of reckless bravery set by the last
+two generations of his father's house!</p>
+
+<p>Dimly, slowly, as he stood there in the northern icy drizzle, with his
+eyes on the muddy river hurrying toward its freedom between jagged
+banks, he came very wretchedly to realise that there was only one way
+in which he could save himself, a way, albeit, which both his loyalty
+and honour forbade, by becoming ardent in the pursuit and effecting
+the capture of Spurling,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span> that so he might prove his innocence. An
+emotion of shame and self-disgust throbbed through him that it should
+have been possible for him, even for a moment, to entertain such a
+coward's thought as that. He shook himself free from temptation and
+looked about. What was P&egrave;re Antoine doing? What had he meant by saying
+that he was perhaps preventing him from being hanged? Did he still
+believe him to be guilty, as he had evidently done at first?</p>
+
+<p>P&egrave;re Antoine was intent upon his undertaking; when asked, he only
+shook his head, saying, "If I believed you guilty, why should I
+endeavour to find the signs which will prove you innocent? Would I do
+that, do you think, if I believed you to be a guilty man?"</p>
+
+<p>Granger was softened by those words; they meant a great deal to him at
+such a time, spoken as they were curtly by one who was so eager to
+rehabilitate his character before all the world that he had no moments
+to waste in argument. They were far more convincing to him of the true
+opinion which le P&egrave;re held of him than an hour consumed in apology,
+which would have been an hour spent in idleness. He came and knelt
+down by the side of the priest, and gazed on the results of his work.
+He saw the cold white face of Strangeways with the eyes set wide,
+staring upwards at the clouds. Their gaze did not seem to concentrate
+as in life, but like that of a well-painted portrait, while the eyes
+themselves remained fixed, wandered everywhere. Yet, when he settled
+his attention upon them, they seemed to look at him alone as if, since
+the lips were silent, they were trying to speak those words which the
+body had come to utter; if he turned his head away for a moment and
+then looked back, they seemed themselves<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span> to have changed their
+direction and to be staring again incuriously out on space, having
+abandoned hope of delivering their message. And he saw the naked
+throat and neck, and the marks where the teeth of the yellow-faced
+husky had clashed and met; last of all he saw the silver chain and the
+pendant attached, which P&egrave;re Antoine had at that moment succeeded in
+freeing from the cold clenched hand.</p>
+
+<p>"What have you there?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know yet. Lift up the head, so that we can slip the chain
+over and find out."</p>
+
+<p>Granger did as he was bidden; but, as he stooped to his task, he was
+horribly conscious that the dead man's eyes were intently fixed upon
+him, as if they knew and lived on, though every other part of the
+motionless body was dead and ignorant.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, here it is. It's a locket."</p>
+
+<p>Granger started up from the ground trembling. "P&egrave;re Antoine, do you
+think we ought to look at it?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Look at the eyes of that dead man."</p>
+
+<p>"They seem to me to be saying 'yes.'"</p>
+
+<p>Granger looked again, went near, bent down and looked carefully; then
+he turned his head. "You are right," he said; "I also think they are
+saying 'yes.'"</p>
+
+<p>The priest put the locket in his hand. "It is for you to open it," he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>It was of gold and studded with turquoise, a woman's trinket and
+old-fashioned, the chasing being worn flat in places; the silver chain
+was common and strong, and had evidently not at first belonged to it,
+being of modern manufacture&mdash;probably a comparatively recent
+pur<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>chase. Granger looked it over critically, but could get no hint of
+its contents from the outside. On the front was engraved a monogram J.
+M., and on the back a coat-of-arms. The lines of the monogram were
+distinct and sharp to the touch, they must have been cut many years
+after the locket itself was made, but the coat-of-arms seemed
+contemporary with the rest of the chasing. He tried to open it, but
+the dampness had caused it to stick, so that he broke his nails upon
+the fastening. He took out his knife and attempted to lever its edges
+apart with the blade. At last, growing impatient, he set it on its
+hinges upon a rock and commenced to hammer it with a stone. At the
+third blow the fastening gave, and the sides fell apart. He could see
+that it contained a miniature, and, on the other side, a lock of hair;
+but the glasses which shut them in were mist-covered. He rubbed them
+clean on the lining of his coat and looked again.</p>
+
+<p>The portrait was that of a young girl, fresh and innocent, about
+eighteen years of age; her hair, worn loose, all blown about, fell
+upon her neck and shoulders in long curls; her eyes were blue and
+intensely bright; her face was animated, with a certain dash of
+generous spirit and healthy defiance in it, which were chiefly denoted
+by the full firm lips and arching brows&mdash;and the face was the face of
+Mordaunt. For the first time, he saw the woman whom he had loved, in
+her rightful woman's guise. He had often longed that he might do that;
+it had made him feel that he shared so small a portion of her life
+that he should know her only by her man's name and remember her only
+in her Yukon placer-miner's dress. He would have stooped to kiss her
+lips at that time, had it not been for the presence of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span> dead, who
+had also loved her and from whom he had stolen his treasure. Would his
+body be able to rest in the grave when thus robbed of the symbol of
+the passion which had caused its blood to pulsate most fiercely in its
+life?</p>
+
+<p>Then he fell to thinking other thoughts&mdash;of how strangely this
+knowledge had come to him, from all across the world, by the hand of a
+rejected lover who was dead. Had this been the secret which the
+corporal had waited to tell him, thrown up on the ice, lying silent
+and deserted throughout that month at the bend; had he been waiting
+only to say, "I hold the knowledge which you most desire in my
+clenched right hand. Here is her woman's likeness. I require it no
+longer, now that I am dead?" No, surely he had not delayed for that.
+Then suddenly he realised that this must mean that the woman herself
+was dead. He remembered distinctly those last words which Strangeways
+had spoken, even as though he were now repeating them again aloud, "I
+tell you if the ice were as rotten as your soul or Spurling's, I would
+still follow him, though I had to follow him to Hell." And his last
+utterance had been a reiteration of that promise, "He killed the woman
+I loved, and he shall pay the price though I follow him to Hell."</p>
+
+<p>This was the fulfilment of that promise; though he himself was dead,
+he had delayed his body near Murder Point that, with his pale and
+silent lips and the portrait which hung about his neck, he might urge
+his rival on in their common cause of vengeance. "I will pray God
+every day of my life that Spurling may be damned throughout the
+ages&mdash;eternally and pitilessly damned," he had said, and now that the
+days of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span> life were over his body had tarried behind to continue
+that errand, so far as was possible, into the days of his death. When
+they had parted that night, a month ago outside the shack, he had told
+a lie; he had denied that the woman was Mordaunt who had been
+murdered, and had tried to prove his words by asserting that the body
+which was found in the creek near Forty-Mile had worn a woman's dress.
+Now he had come back to silently refute his own statement, and to
+declare the truth which would stir up anger and give him an inheritor
+of his revenge.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, was a new reason why he should become ardent in the
+pursuit and effect the capture of Spurling, that by so doing he would
+be behaving honourably by a man who was dead. He saw in it at present,
+with his cynic's eye for self-scorn and self-depreciation, only an
+added excuse and more subtle temptation for the saving of himself.
+"No, I cannot do it," he said. And yet, somewhere at the back of his
+brain, the monotonous and oracular voice of a wise self-knowledge kept
+answering, "But you will do it, when you have had leisure to be
+lonely, and have tortured yourself with memories of her."</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to Granger as though Strangeways himself were the speaker of
+those words; but when he turned round hotly, prepared for argument, he
+found that the eyes had become glazed and vacant, and that at last the
+body was truly dead. It had no need to live longer&mdash;it had delivered
+its message.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>
+<h3>THE LOVE OF WOMAN</h3>
+
+<p>It was past noon before they had completed Strangeways' burial at the
+bend. When they had finished, the skies had cleared themselves of
+storm and cloud, and the sun shone out again. The air was full of
+earth-fragrance, and the landscape was cool and fresh. Nothing of
+disorder remained, no sign that a man was dead, save only a mound of
+piled-up stones and sod, surmounted by a little cross of branches
+bound together with twisted grass.</p>
+
+<p>P&egrave;re Antoine had searched the body with scant results, for he had
+found no more than the warrant for Spurling's detection and arrest,
+and the fragments of two torn and well-nigh obliterated letters, at
+which latter he had only glanced up to the present. Nor had he seen
+the contents of the locket as yet, for when he had asked Granger what
+was its secret, he had received as answer, "Oh, nothing, only a young
+girl's face." So he had been foiled in his endeavour to gather
+materials for the establishing of Granger's innocence, should that be
+assailed, and had discovered nothing which might be of use in his
+defence. All he could contribute was his own personal evidence that
+the appearance of the body, as he had seen it, bore out Granger's
+account in every detail as to the manner in which Strangeways'
+catastrophe had occurred, and that his deportment,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span> when he had
+charged him with murder, had proved conclusively to himself that there
+was no ground for such an accusation.</p>
+
+<p>When they had returned to the store and had had supper together,
+Granger sat for a long while with the locket open before him, gazing
+intently on the portrait. Suddenly he looked up. "Have you seen
+Beorn?" he asked. "Do you know whether he is on his way back?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have not seen him."</p>
+
+<p>"Antoine, you must stay here with me until he returns."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was on my way to meet Peggy when you met and stopped me; I want you
+to marry us."</p>
+
+<p>"But why now and at once?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because if we're not married she won't live with me,&mdash;and I must do
+something to break down my loneliness by getting a new interest into
+my life. If I don't, I shall be always thinking of what has happened,
+and shall go mad,&mdash;in which case it will be the worse for Spurling. I
+don't want to kill him&mdash;at least, not until he has had his chance to
+explain himself. I'm sure now that it was Mordaunt whom he murdered,
+but I'm still uncertain as to whether he knew that she was a woman, at
+the time when he killed her&mdash;he may not know even yet. If he did it
+mistaking her for a man, I might be able to forgive him; anyhow, I can
+say so now, while you are with me. What I should do and think if I
+were left here miserably alone, I dare not tell. Yet, if what
+Strangeways said to me is true, that her body was found at Forty-Mile
+in a woman's dress, which would mean that Spurling killed her,
+well-knowing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span> that she was a girl, why then I would go in search of
+him, and tell him what I thought about him, and shoot him carefully,
+and be glad when he was dead."</p>
+
+<p>"But you have promised God to leave him alone with Himself."</p>
+
+<p>"And shall I be the first man who has gone back on his prayers and
+promises? There's nothing to be gained by talking about it; fate must
+work itself out. But if you want to understand what Strangeways felt,
+and what I am still feeling, then look at that."</p>
+
+<p>He handed him the locket. P&egrave;re Antoine took it and bent above it. At
+last he said, "Why, she's only a girl . . . and he killed <i>her</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and he killed her when her back was turned. Now do you
+understand?"</p>
+
+<p>"May God help you!" was all that Antoine said. Granger went over to
+where he sat and, from above his shoulder, gazed down upon the
+portrait. The face had in it so little that was tragic that it seemed
+impossible to realise that its owner should have encountered such a
+death. When the smile upon the painted lips seemed so fresh and
+imperishable, it seemed incredible that the lips themselves should be
+now silent and underground.</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder where she lived and what sort of a girlhood she had,"
+Granger said.</p>
+
+<p>"I have here two letters which I found upon Strangeways; perhaps they
+may tell us something about her."</p>
+
+<p>P&egrave;re Antoine produced the letters from an oilskin pouch. They were in
+a pointed feminine hand, and the ink was faded. Granger lit the lamp,
+for the twilight without was deepening into darkness; spreading out
+the crumpled sheets on his knees before him, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span> read their contents
+aloud. Across the top, left-hand corner of the uppermost page was
+scrawled in a rude, boyish writing, "<i>The first letter she ever wrote
+me</i>"; the letter itself had been evidently penned by a young girl's
+hand. It bore the address of a school in London, and ran as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Dear Eric.</span></p>
+
+<p>I am very miserable hear and sometimes wonder why I was
+ever brought into the world. Your Papa was very kind to me
+once, but why has he scent me away from you? You did not
+want me to be scent, and so I can tell you all about myself. I
+am very home-sick hear. I say home-sick, though I have no
+home; I have always been a stranger in your Papa's house. I
+suppose I am reely home-sick for you. I think it is because you
+and I are seperated that I am sorry. The girls hear are not
+always kind; they say that I look as though I had been crying,
+and then of course I do cry when they say that. But if my eyes
+are red, I don't care. I want you badly and I'm writting to
+tell you that. Don't forget to feed my rabbits.</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 20em;">Your loving little friend,</p>
+<p class="right">J. M.</p></div>
+
+<p>The second was marked in the same way, but in a manlier hand, "<i>Her
+last letter to me</i>."</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Dearest Eric.</span></p>
+
+<p>I am so sorry that I am the cause of all this trouble, and that
+I cannot love you in the way that you and your father so much
+desire. I would do anything to make you happy save that&mdash;play
+the coward, and say that I love you as a woman should
+whom you were going to marry, when I do not. I have always
+been used to think of you as a brother, which is natural, seeing
+that from our earliest childhood we have grown up together. I
+thought that you would be content with that; no other kind of
+affection for you has ever entered into my heart or head.</p>
+
+<p>Your father was very angry with me last night after you went
+out. He said that I, by my conduct, had led you on to <i>expect</i>;
+believe me, I never meant to do that. It never occurred to me
+that there was any need to be careful in your presence. The
+truth is, I have always been an interloper in your home; you will
+remember how, long years since, when first I went to boarding-school,
+I told you that . . . (four lines were here undecipherable,
+being faded and rubbed out). When I look back, I see
+that in all my life you have been my only friend&mdash;which makes
+me the more unhappy that this has happened. Mind, I don't
+mean to accuse your family of unkindness; I only say that I,
+perhaps naturally, was never one of them. If I thought that you
+would be willing, knowing how I feel toward you, to make me
+your wife, for the sake of your peace I might consent even to
+that. But you are not such a man. (Three lines were here
+obliterated.) Let there be no bitterness between us by reason of
+harsh words which others have spoken; what has happened must
+make a difference, but I want to remain still your friend. This
+recent occurrence seems to make it necessary that one of us
+should go away&mdash;there will never be any quiet in your father's
+house while we both live there. Don't be alarmed or surprised
+if you get word shortly that I have vanished.</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 20em;">Yours as ever,</p>
+<p class="right">J. M.</p></div>
+
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
+<p>To this letter was added a note in Strangeways' hand at the bottom of
+the page, "<i>She was not to blame; it was I who left</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"We have not learnt very much about her from those two letters, have
+we?" said P&egrave;re Antoine. "They are ordinary, and leave many questions,
+which we wanted to ask, unanswered."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, they do little more than confirm Strangeways' own statements,
+and yet. . . ."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"They tell us that her true initials were J. M., the same as those of
+her assumed name, and the same as those of the monogram on the locket;
+and they tell us of her great loneliness."</p>
+
+<p>"But I can't see how a knowledge of that one fact&mdash;her great
+loneliness&mdash;will help us; it does not reconstruct for us the details
+of her life so that we can imagine her to ourselves, nor does it
+contribute anything towards your defence."</p>
+
+<p>"Bother my defence. I don't much care if I am hanged; that would at
+least be a final solution, so far as I am concerned, to this problem
+of living. What troubles me at present is, how is this woman feeling
+about my marriage with a half-breed girl? Now these letters help me;
+they make me certain that whatever I may be compelled to do at any
+future time by reason of my isolation, she will not be hard upon me,
+but will understand. This marriage with Peggy, for instance, looks
+like a betrayal of her. And though she is dead, I should hate to
+grieve her in the other world."</p>
+
+<p>Granger paused, and then he added fiercely, "And I'm glad of that last
+letter for another reason, because it states so clearly that she never
+loved the other man."</p>
+
+<p>"That can make no difference now."</p>
+
+<p>"But it can," said Granger, rising to his feet, and speaking in a
+strained whisper, with clenched hands, "I tell you it can. If I
+thought that she had ever really cared for him, I would shoot myself
+here and now, that I might be beside her to get between him and her.
+The thought that he was there with her all alone in the vastness, free
+to do and to say just whatever he pleased, and that I was shut out,
+would drive me crazy. Do you think that, if I supposed that he had got
+his arms<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span> around her over there, I could ever rest&mdash;if I thought that
+she would allow him? One little pull of a trigger, the report of a
+revolver, which I probably shouldn't hear and in any case shouldn't
+care about, and the journey would be accomplished and I could be
+bending over her. It sounds very tempting. But I'm prepared to live
+out my life like a man, now that I know that she understands. If she
+hadn't known what loneliness meant, she might misjudge my motives in
+taking up with Peggy, and might, out of revenge, instead of waiting
+for me, herself take up with Strangeways before my arrival there."</p>
+
+<p>P&egrave;re Antoine watched him gravely for some seconds after he had
+finished speaking; then he said, "I don't think that Heaven is quite
+like that; but none of us can be certain, perhaps your views are as
+correct as those of anyone else. When I was a young man, before I came
+to Keewatin, I should have been angry with any man who had said to me
+a thing like that&mdash;but we come to hold strange opinions in this land
+where all things, judged by our former standards of sanity, even God
+Himself, seem mad. At that time I longed to be dogmatic and definite
+in all my beliefs on religion, and this life, and the
+after-world&mdash;that was why I became a Jesuit, that I might exchange
+despair for certainty. Now, priest though I am, like you I see one
+gigantic interrogation mark written over sky and earth&mdash;and because of
+it I am grateful. I have learnt that the whole attraction of religion
+for the human mind, and the entire majesty of God depend on His
+mystery and silence, and the things which He does not care to tell. If
+all our questions were answered, we might lose our God-sense. If we
+knew everything, we should cease to be curious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span> and to strive. Of one
+thing only are we certain, that Jesus lived and died, and that though
+we live in the uttermost parts of the earth, it is our duty to be like
+Him."</p>
+
+<p>"And Spurling&mdash;if Spurling dwells near us in the uttermost parts of
+the earth?"</p>
+
+<p>"He also is God's child."</p>
+
+<p>"It is easy for you to talk, P&egrave;re Antoine; you are an old man, and,
+being a priest, have never loved a woman yourself."</p>
+
+<p>The stern, grey features of the Jesuit relaxed; he hesitated, then he
+said, "My child, don't be too sure of that. Perhaps I may be
+attempting to live this life well only in order that I may make sure
+of meeting and being worthy of one such woman in the after-world. If
+that were so, it would be great shame to me, for I ought to be
+striving to live this life well solely for the love of Christ."</p>
+
+<p>He fell silent, sitting with his head bent forward, his gnarled hands
+folded on his knees before him. A far-away look had come into his
+eyes, a fixed expression of calmness, as though they slept with the
+lids parted. Granger watched the hands, mutilated and ruined, with
+three fingers missing from the right, and two from the left; and yet,
+despite their brokenness, he thought how beautiful they were. There
+was scarcely a part of the priest's body that had not been at some
+time shattered with service. It had never occurred to Granger that
+P&egrave;re Antoine, like most other men in the district, had a past which
+did not belong to Keewatin&mdash;memories of a happier time to which he
+might sometimes look back with the painfulness of regret. Antoine had
+been there so long that there was no man who remembered the day when
+first he arrived. He seemed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span> as natural to the landscape as the Last
+Chance River itself. And now suddenly, in an electric moment of
+sympathy, his past had revealed itself.</p>
+
+<p>Granger watched and waited, hoping that presently he would explain. It
+occurred to him as a discovery that he had no knowledge of the
+priest's real name or of his family. At his nationality he could only
+guess, supposing him to be a Frenchman or a French-Canadian. How
+incurious he had been! And, in this case, lack of curiosity had meant
+lack of kindness; he blamed himself. He, like all Keewatin, was ready
+in time of crisis to draw upon the old man's strength, but beyond that
+he had never shown him real friendship&mdash;he had never been conscious of
+any desire to hear about the man himself. And now he had learned that
+this man also had a tragedy, and, like himself, had loved a woman who
+was now long since dead. He wanted to ask him questions, that so he
+might make up for omitted kindnesses; but he was restrained when he
+looked upon the grey dreamy countenance, for it was evident that le
+P&egrave;re was wandering in the idealised meadows of a bygone
+pleasantness&mdash;a country which was known only to himself. So Granger
+returned his eyes to the portrait which he had taken from the dead
+man's hand, and, gazing upon it, tried his best to fill in the blanks
+in his little knowledge of the woman he had loved.</p>
+
+<p>He constructed for himself a picture of an ivied manor-house, terraced
+and with an old-world garden lying round about it, where her childhood
+had been spent and where she had grown to girlhood. He told himself
+that there must have been a river somewhere near, and he imagined her
+as stretched upon its banks in the summer shadows. And he thought of
+the school<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>house in London, and the little heart-weary child who had
+penned that letter there. He re-read it, and then once again re-read
+it, suffering the same agony of longing for things irrecoverable which
+this small creature had suffered years ago, who was now beyond all
+knowledge of pain. What a mystery it was that across that expanse of
+space and years her letter should have drifted down to him, from
+London to Keewatin, carried over the last few yards of its journey in
+the breast of a man who was already dead. It made him feel less of an
+exile that a miracle like that could happen&mdash;it was almost as though
+she herself had appealed to him from the hidden world. It made him ask
+himself that question, which so many had asked before him, "<i>And are
+we really ever dead</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>P&egrave;re Antoine stirred, rose up and walked over to the window, where he
+stood in the shadow, outside the circle of the lamp's rays, with his
+back turned toward the younger man. There was something which he
+wanted to say, but which he found difficult to express. Granger
+guessed that, and so he said, "Antoine, you are thinking of <i>her</i>
+to-night. She must have lived very long ago. Was she anything like the
+portrait of this young girl?"</p>
+
+<p>There was silence. Then, still gazing away from him, his long lean
+figure blocking out the moonlight, the priest returned, "All white
+women seem alike to one who has lived long in Keewatin. Yet that face
+did seem very like to hers; but it is many years ago now, and I may
+not remember her well. She died; and she was everything that was of
+worth to me in this world. I begin to fear that she is all that I
+count of highest value in the next."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"But why fear? I should not fear that."</p>
+
+<p>"Because, being a missionary, with me it should be otherwise. I became
+a Jesuit through distrust of myself. I knew, when she had been taken
+from me, that because of my despair, if I did not bind myself strongly
+to that which was highest, I should sink to that which was worst. And
+I knew that if I sank to that which was worst, she would be lost to me
+throughout all eternity. So, in order that God might give her to me
+again in a future world, I strove to bribe Him; I asked that I might
+be sent to this hardest of all fields of missionary labour, hoping
+that thus I might acquire merit. Since then a new doubt has come to
+haunt me, has been with me half a century; the fear lest the life
+which I have led may count for nothing, may be regarded as only
+sinfulness, because I have done God's work for her sake rather than
+for the sake of His Christ, and that therefore as a punishment to me
+she may still be withheld. Ah, I have fought against her memory,
+trying to cling only to God! That has been useless. So I have gone on
+doing my best for my fellow-men, hoping that He may overlook the
+motive, and judging only by the work, may give me my reward in the
+end,&mdash;may allow me to be with her."</p>
+
+<p>"Antoine, I am a sinful man and one who is little qualified to judge
+of God's purposes, but I think that He will grant you your request.
+But if you, with all your goodness, are banished from her whom you
+loved most on earth, how can I hope for success?"</p>
+
+<p>Then the Jesuit turned round and faced him. "It was because I feared
+for your success that I mentioned my own trouble," he said. "You are
+planning to do a thing which is right in marrying this half-breed
+girl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>&mdash;you owe it to her and to God, inasmuch as you have lived with
+her. But you will be doing her a greater wrong than if you were to
+leave her unmarried, if, when you have made her your wife, you think
+only of the dead white woman. When the turmoil of living is over, you
+want to meet and be worthy of the woman who wrote those letters, you
+tell me; your best chance of success in that desire is in trying to
+forget her in this world, by giving all your affection to the woman
+who is your wife, and trusting to God's goodness to give you the
+rewards which He knows that you covet after death. Don't make my
+mistake&mdash;it means torture in this life, and, perhaps, disappointment
+in the next. Be true to the choice which you have made, and leave the
+rest to God's mercy. I have not been strong enough to do all that I
+advise, for, though I love Christ, I am shamed into owning, old man
+though I am, that I more often do His work in the hope of re-meeting
+with a woman who is dead than out of loyalty to Christ Himself."</p>
+
+<p>"P&egrave;re Antoine, you do not judge kindly of your own actions as Christ
+would judge of them; you Catholics, in making Christ God, forget that
+He also was a lonely man. I think it is not as a God, but as a peasant
+that He will judge us, having knowledge of what we have suffered&mdash;if
+He judges us at all. It is more likely that He will just be sorry for
+us, that we ever thought that He would judge us."</p>
+
+<p>"Whether I judge kindly or not, will you try to take my advice? I have
+told you a secret to-night which never, since I came to Keewatin, have
+I told to any man. And I have told you that I may save you. Believe
+me, if you cannot love your daily companions for their own sake in
+this world, whoever and wherever they are,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span> you will fail to find love
+for your own sake in the next&mdash;and to love well, whatever you love you
+must love for itself, and not for any future and mercenary end."</p>
+
+<p>Granger moved restlessly, but remained silent; then he sat still and
+thought. P&egrave;re Antoine also said nothing, for he knew that the man
+before him was reasoning his way toward a decision upon which all his
+happiness must depend.</p>
+
+<p>But to Granger the problem appeared quite otherwise; it seemed to him
+that he was being asked to abandon another pleasantness for the sake
+of Peggy, a half-breed girl, for whom he had been prepared already to
+sacrifice his career. To be sure, his career was not of much value at
+present, and didn't seem a large thing to sacrifice; but then, when it
+comes to giving anything away, even the most thorough-paced pessimist
+is capable of turning optimist about its worth.</p>
+
+<p>Since he had become certain of Mordaunt's death, he had vaguely
+planned out for himself a course of spiritual debauchery, though he
+would not have applied to it such a word. He had expected to marry
+Peggy Ericsen, and to live with the memory of the woman for whom he
+had really cared. His wife was to have been the servant of his comfort
+and desires, and the dead woman the companion of his mind and daily
+round. So he hoped, by keeping Mordaunt near him in his thoughts, to
+qualify himself for attaining her after death, and to atone for his
+apostasy in marrying a different woman while yet on earth. Throughout
+all his reasoning ran a streak of madness, of which he himself was
+totally unaware. And now, when he had completed arrangements to his
+own satisfaction, here came this Jesuit telling him that such a course
+of action savoured of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span> adultery, and would probably end in the eternal
+separation of Mordaunt from himself.</p>
+
+<p>Presently he heard a sound of moving. He looked up. Antoine was
+standing before him, on the outer edge of the light which was thrown
+by the lamp, appearing huge and prophetic against the background of
+dwarfed shadows which crawled over wall and ceiling, crowding behind
+him. His awe for the office of the man returned to him, blotting out
+the equality which the past few hours of confession had brought about.
+Once more he recalled how it was said that le P&egrave;re had been seen
+walking in the wilderness, wearing the countenance of Jesus Christ. He
+looked like that now. Granger, made conscious of his own premeditated
+wrong-doing, shrank back before him. Yet the words which P&egrave;re Antoine
+uttered were very simple: "I am an old man, and I knew what I was
+saying," was all he said.</p>
+
+<p>Granger rose to his feet. "I'm going out," he said. "I'll return in a
+little while and give you my decision."</p>
+
+<p>He passed out from the close stale air of the shack into the
+starlight; he could be nearer God there. A low, leisurely wind was
+journeying over the forest, crooning softly to itself as it went.
+Dominant over all other sounds, as was ever the case at Murder Point,
+the wash of the ongoing river was to be heard&mdash;even in winter, when
+every other live thing had ceased to stir, it was not silent. But now,
+in the early summer of the northern year, it laughed uproariously and
+clapped its hands against the banks in its passage, as if the water
+were calling to the land, "Good-bye, old fellow; you won't see me
+again for many a century. It was the end of the ice age when last we
+parted." To Granger the shouting of the river was for all the world
+like that of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span> a troop-ship departing for a distant country. "Farewell,
+farewell," it cried. The sound of its going made him weary with a
+sense of world-wideness; if he was left behind to-day, when once he
+had joined himself to a daughter of that country, he would be forever
+left behind. But he had come outside not to reargue his way over the
+old ground, but to decide. To do that he must be alone, quite
+solitary; and there, just outside the shack, he was all too conscious
+of P&egrave;re Antoine's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Slowly he commenced to descend the Point toward the river-bank. As he
+went, a new desire sprang up within him&mdash;to speak with Strangeways; if
+possible to make a compact and extort some approving sign from that
+dead man. Stepping into the canoe, he pushed off lightly and set out
+for the bend. The nearer he drew, the sterner his face became; he was
+thinking of what he should say, and one has to be careful in what he
+says in speaking with a man who is dead. Soon he came in sight of the
+flimsy little cross which they had raised, and saw the stones which
+they had piled above the body, shining white and grey in the
+moonlight; then with a twist of the paddle his canoe shot in toward
+the bank and the prow grated on the ice. Granger stepped out and
+beached his craft above the water's edge. With slow deliberate steps
+he went forward till he stood above the grave. There, with his hands
+clasped behind him and his head bowed, he waited for a few minutes
+listening, half expecting that something would happen. When nothing
+stirred, he went upon his knees, as if he prayed, placing his lips so
+near to the grave that sometimes they touched the stones and mould;
+and so he began to speak to the man imprisoned beneath the ground.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Strangeways," he said, "you know everything about me now, and you
+ought to understand. I want to act fairly by you. I didn't do that in
+your lifetime; if I had, you might not now be dead. I ought to have
+warned you about the ice at first, and I ought to have told you the
+truth about Spurling; then you might have believed me. But I did try
+my best to save you in the end. P&egrave;re Antoine says that I may get
+hanged for your death; but I don't mind that so very much, if I can
+only act fairly by you now."</p>
+
+<p>He paused to hear whether there was any sound of movement underground;
+when he heard none, he knew that the dead man was listening and
+waiting eagerly for what would come next. Crouching still nearer, so
+that he might narrow the space between them, "Strangeways, are you
+listening?" he said. "We both loved her, and neither of us won her in
+this world; but because you are dead, you are nearer to her now than I
+am. I want you to promise me to do nothing till I have come."</p>
+
+<p>And still when he halted, waiting for his answer, nothing stirred.
+Presently he spoke again. "I have a reason for asking which, if you
+remember anything of what you suffered in this life, you should
+understand. To save myself from madness, I must have a companion, and
+so I am going to marry a woman of this country. In order that I may
+live well with her, and even in order to marry her, I must pledge my
+word to forget Mordaunt while I am in this world. Now do you
+understand? I cannot pledge my word until you have promised me that
+you will do nothing until I am also dead." He fell forward over the
+grave and lay there silent. His brain had become numb; he could
+fashion no more words&mdash;perhaps in the interval which elapsed he
+slept.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span> Then it seemed to him that the chambers within his brain were
+lighted up, so that pressing his face against the crannies and between
+the stones he could look right down, and see distinctly the narrow bed
+of the grave whereon the body of Strangeways rested. The eyes of the
+body were open and the lips were working, trying to say something. By
+watching the lips he discovered that they kept on repeating, over and
+over, one word; then he read that that word was <i>revenge</i>. "I cannot,
+I cannot," he whispered. "I have promised God that I will not; and,
+moreover, to take revenge on Spurling would be to remember her."</p>
+
+<p>Was it that he moved as he slept, or did the thing which he thought he
+saw actually occur! Some stones slipped from off the mound and, to his
+eyes looking down into the grave, it seemed that Strangeways' hand
+began to grope frantically after the locket which had been about his
+neck, and that, finding it missing, his face became angry and he
+strove to rise, causing the stones to fall and the ground to tremble.</p>
+
+<p>Granger jumped up, and stood there shaking with his hands clenched and
+his head thrown back, prepared.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you answer me?" he cried in despair. "Don't you know how I
+suffer? If you consent to what I have asked of you, give me a sign? If
+nothing happens, I shall know that you are cruel and do not care."</p>
+
+<p>When he had waited in vain some seconds, he lost his nerve and his
+courage. Kneeling beside the grave he commenced to weep, smoothing the
+stones with his hands coaxingly like a child, and whispering, "Give me
+a sign. Give me a sign. Give me a sign."</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he paused in his pleading. The rustling of water against a
+travelling prow, and sound of paddles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span> thrust in, forced back, and
+withdrawn, struck upon his ears. He threw himself full length along
+the ground; he did not want to be discovered there. Stealing up-stream
+from the northward, creeping close in to the opposite bank to avoid
+the current, came a canoe, sitting deep in the water, heavily laden
+with furs; the stern-paddle was held by a tall and thickly bearded
+man, and in the prow, even at that distance and in that shadowy light,
+it was possible to make out that the second figure was that of a girl.
+Granger recognised them immediately, and knew that the Man with the
+Dead Soul and his daughter had returned. He also noticed that Eyelids
+was not there. They did not see him, but quickly vanished round the
+bend.</p>
+
+<p>When all was silent and lonely again, Granger arose. "It is a sign,"
+he said. Standing above the grave, before departing he spoke once more
+with the man who lay buried there. "Strangeways, you may rest quiet
+now," he said. "Though I cannot revenge her as you have desired, we
+can both, in our separate ways, be true to her."</p>
+
+<p>He delayed a moment to have what he had said confirmed; but this time
+no token either of dissent or approval was vouchsafed.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
+<h3>HE REVIEWS HIS MARRIAGE, AND IS PUT TO THE TEST</h3>
+
+<p>It was the first week in June; for a fortnight John Granger had been a
+married man. He was now removed a sufficiently just distance from his
+bachelor-hood to be able to estimate the value of the change which
+this new step had wrought in his career.</p>
+
+<p>Its true worth to him had been that it had converted him from a
+Londoner in Keewatin into a man of the Northland. This might mean,
+though it need not, that he had retrograded to a lower type; at all
+events it meant that he was robbed of his excuse for considering
+himself an exile, bearing himself rebelliously toward his environment,
+and being unhappy. By joining himself to Peggy by the rites of the
+Roman Church, he had made an irrevocable choice, had slammed the door
+of opportunity and return to civilisation in his own face, and had
+adopted as his country a land where no one has any use for money or
+for time, and where nothing could ever again be of very much
+importance. He had not realised all that a fortnight ago when, at the
+bidding of the Jesuit, he had made this girl his wife; but since he
+had lived in her company he had come to realise. Mercifully there is
+no situation, however bad, which may not develop the peculiar virtue
+whereby it can be endured. He had learnt his virtue by observing
+Peggy, an Indian<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span> virtue at that&mdash;stolidity. In a great lonely
+territory, where men say good-bye to one another for twelve months at
+a stretch, and sometimes forever, they arrive at a philosophy of life
+which consists in waiting very patiently and unambitiously for the
+next thing which the good God may send. To attain this sort of
+quietness a man must be quite hopeless, for so long as he hopes he is
+liable to disappointment. Also he must live each day as though it were
+his first, for to remember things past is to court regret. He must
+permit himself to know none of the extremes of emotion, either of joy
+or of sadness; to this end he must consider himself as a non-partisan
+in life, a careless spectator before whose eyes the groping shadows
+pass. The traffic of words is a labour, and a more frequent cause of
+misunderstanding than of interpretation&mdash;therefore it is wiser, if
+peace be desired, to keep always silent. Where a gesture will do the
+work of a word, let a gesture suffice.</p>
+
+<p>All this Granger had learnt during the fortnight which he had lived
+with his wife; in watching her, he had studied to forego his former
+turbulence of mind as a thing most foolish, and had determined to sink
+down into the dull acceptance of a destiny against which it was
+profitless to contend&mdash;a kind of resigned contentment. If he was to be
+hanged to-morrow for Strangeways' death, that was no reason why he
+should disturb himself to-day; if that was to happen, it would come to
+pass in any case,&mdash;nothing that he might do or say could prevent it.
+The momentary pain of dying is usually much less intense than the
+hours of cowardly suffering which men bring upon themselves by
+prevising the anguish of their last departure, so he told himself. So
+to-day he sat outside his store in the sunshine and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span> smoked his pipe,
+the freest and silentest man in all Keewatin, and, he would have had
+himself believe, the most stably contented.</p>
+
+<p>That night, when he had left P&egrave;re Antoine and had gone to consult the
+dead man at the bend, had been the turning-point in his frenzy. It
+seemed to him, as he looked back, to have happened long ago when he
+was little more than a child, at a time before his enlightenment, when
+he had supposed very foolishly that he was of importance to God and to
+his fellow-men. Now he had come to know that he was of no importance
+even to himself. He blew out a cloud of smoke and watched it vanish in
+the air; in other days he would have smiled, but it was not worth the
+effort now. The relation of that whiff of tobacco-smoke to the
+unplumbed space, throughout which it would be dispersed, was about the
+same as that of his present existence to the rest of the world.</p>
+
+<p>When, having said good-bye to Strangeways, he had followed the Man
+with the Dead Soul back to the store, he had made up his mind to the
+inevitable, and had been prepared to greet Peggy with a certain
+display of joy. Before ever he could put his thought into action, his
+intention had been repelled. As he had drawn nearer to the crazy
+wooden pier which ran out from Murder Point, he had seen the shadowy
+shapes of the trapper and his daughter, bending down, unloading their
+canoe, moving slowly hither and thither through the night. As he had
+come up, he had hailed them. To his call Beorn had made no reply, had
+only turned his head and nodded, while Peggy, stooping over a pile of
+furs, had thrown him the customary salutation of the Cree Indian to
+the white man, used both on arrival and departure, "Watchee"&mdash;which is
+a corruption of "What cheer."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span> No other words of greeting had passed
+between them, and he, when he had landed, had set to work at once to
+help them with their unlading. When that was finished and the furs had
+been carried up to the store, they had raised their tent, kindled
+their fire, brewed their black tea, cooked their bacon, and gone to
+rest. Granger had so far intruded on their reserve as to ask them to
+spend the night in his store, but his invitation had been ungraciously
+refused with a shake of the head.</p>
+
+<p>Next day P&egrave;re Antoine had married them, after which he had departed,
+promising, however, to return before the summer was out. Granger had
+said nothing more to him either concerning Spurling or the death of
+Strangeways, except to insist that the warrant for the arrest,
+together with the letters and locket which had been found, should be
+left with himself; nevertheless, he had been well aware that these
+things were largely responsible for the hurry of the priest's
+departure. At first he had not been surprised at the silence of Peggy,
+for he had grown accustomed to the shy modesty of women who are
+Indian-bred. The women of Keewatin accept it as their fate that they
+are born to be subservient to men&mdash;to be their burden-bearers. But at
+the end of a few days, when her demeanour had shown no sign of change,
+he had become a little curious. In the early part of the year the
+white blood that was in her had been more manifest, and because of it
+she had been proud. When she had insisted that he should marry her, if
+he would live with her, the reason she had given him for her demand
+had been <i>because her blood was white</i>. Since then she had journeyed
+into the winter-wilderness with the menfolk of her family, like any
+other Indian or half-breed girl, and in the primeval solitariness of
+the land<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span> the red blood of her mother had asserted itself; the hand of
+her native deity had been laid upon her mouth, staying her flow of
+words, the shyness of the forest-gods had entered into her eyes, and
+the Lord God of Women had stooped her shoulders, causing her to carry
+her head less bravely, binding the hereditary burden of the red woman
+upon her back. She had unlearned in those few months all the conceits
+of self-respect which she had been taught in the school at Winnipeg,
+and had reverted to the ancient type from which she was sprung,&mdash;the
+river Indian. Granger, as he watched her, guessed all this, for had
+not he himself been parted from his old traditions?&mdash;and he had not
+known Keewatin till he was a grown man. Well, these people had lived
+there longer than he had! They should know what was best suited to
+their circumstance, he told himself; and so, without questioning or
+combatting their social methods, he resigned himself to accept their
+modes of life.</p>
+
+<p>It was a strange wedding that he had had&mdash;very different from the kind
+he had planned for himself in the heat of his passion, when he was a
+younger man. And this was a strange woman whom he must call his
+wife&mdash;one who worked for him tirelessly with her head and hands, but
+who appeared to crave for none of his affection, and with whom he
+could have not a moment's conversation; the exchange of a few
+monosyllables and signs in the course of a day seemed to be the most
+that he might expect. Yet, because of her meekness and faithfulness,
+and her ready willingness to serve, he was conscious of a growing
+protective quality of love for her. If he could prevent himself from
+adopting her reticence, he promised himself that he would gather her
+whole heart into his own by and by.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He did not as yet realise that the mere fact that he could feel thus
+towards her, when no speech had passed between them, was an indication
+that she was communicating herself in a more vigorous and sincerer
+language than that of words. This difference between them, that he
+expected her to use her lips to explain her personality, and that she,
+far from imagining that she was silent, believed herself to be in her
+deeds most eloquent, was one of the few traits remaining to him of the
+street-born man.</p>
+
+<p>As an example of their reservedness was the fact that, though Eyelids,
+Peggy's brother, had set out on the winter hunt and had not returned,
+no explanation of his delay had been forthcoming, nor had Granger
+summoned up the energy to inquire for himself. On their first arrival
+he had felt distinctly curious as to his whereabouts. Had he come
+across traces of Spurling and gone in pursuit of him? Had he heard
+from some stray Indian that Spurling was an outlaw, with a price upon
+his head? Had Beorn, having found that his cache at the Forbidden
+River had been broken into, dispatched his son to follow up the thief
+and exact revenge? Or was Spurling dead, and had Eyelids killed him,
+for which reason he was afraid to come back?</p>
+
+<p>For the first few days after his marriage these questions and answers
+had been continually running through his head; but since he had learnt
+the lesson that nothing was of much importance, he had almost ceased
+to care. Why should he trouble to inquire? If he did, he might get no
+reply; and if he was answered, the probability was that his only gain
+would be something fresh to worry about. The unreturning of Eyelids
+was one small detail of the total unreality, the dream which he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span> had
+once taken so seriously, which in former times he had called life; and
+of that dream the arrival and flight of Spurling were the nightmare.
+No one of all these happenings had ever been&mdash;they were unactual: and
+the chances were that even he himself was no reality.</p>
+
+<p>Beorn Ericsen, the Man with the Dead Soul as he was called, was a
+fitting tutor to a pupil of this philosophy. Compared with him, his
+daughter was a whirlwind of words; the lesson of silence, which she
+taught by her behaviour, she had first learnt from her father on the
+winter trail&mdash;in the presence of his stern taciturnity she appeared a
+garrulous amateur.</p>
+
+<p>Whence he had originally come, no one had ever persuaded him to tell.
+On his first arrival in the district, which was reported to have taken
+place nearly forty years ago, for the first two years he was said to
+have conducted himself more or less like a normal man. At that time he
+must have been near mid-life, for he was now well past seventy to
+judge by his appearance. Even then, on his first coming, something had
+happened, which he did not care to talk about, which made him glad of
+the dreary seclusion of Keewatin. It had been generally supposed that
+he was badly wanted by Justice, for having shot his man in a border
+hold-up, or for deeds of violence in some kindred escapade.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, he had set about his living in Keewatin in earnest, as
+though he had determined to stay there. Having attached himself to the
+Hudson Bay Company, he soon proved himself to be an expert trapper,
+and a man who, for his reckless courage, was to be valued. Promotion
+seemed certain for him and, despite the fact that he had joined the
+Company late in life, the likelihood of his attaining a factorship in
+the end was not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span> improbable. It was then, after he had won the
+confidence of his employers, that he had taken that journey to the
+North, through an unexplored country, from which he had come back
+dazed and dreary-eyed, so that it seemed as though he must have met
+with some dire calamity in the winter desolation, one from which few
+men would have escaped alive, which had robbed him of his reason. When
+they had asked him where he had journeyed, "Far, far," was all he
+would reply. And when, hoping to satisfy their curiosity by a less
+direct method, they had questioned him, "What did you see up there?"
+"Blackness&mdash;it was dark," was the most that he would answer them.</p>
+
+<p>Because of these answers there were some who supposed that, emulating
+Thomas Simpson, he had penetrated into the Arctic Circle and had gazed
+upon the frozen quiet of an undiscovered ocean. He had wrested from
+God the secret which He was anxious to withhold, they said, and God in
+vengeance had condemned him to be always silent. But the Indians
+explained his condition more readily, speaking in whispers about him
+around camp-fires among themselves. The last place at which he had
+been seen by anyone on that journey was at the mouth of the Forbidden
+River, along whose banks it was commonly believed stretched the
+villages and homes of manitous, and souls of the departed. The Crees
+asserted that this was not the first man who, to their knowledge, had
+wandered up that river and had thus returned. Some few of their
+boldest hunters had from time to time set out and, roving further
+afield than their brethren, had likewise trespassed all unaware within
+the confines of the spirit-land. So they said that Beorn had been to
+the Land of Shadows, and that, by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span> reason of his surpassing strength,
+he had contrived to escape; but that he had left his soul behind him
+there, and it was only his body which had come back.</p>
+
+<p>From that day he had been known as <i>The Man with the Dead Soul</i>.
+Gradually, as the years went by, the deathly vacancy had gone out of
+his eyes, but he had remained a man separated from living men. He
+rarely spoke, but from the first his peculiarities had made no
+difference to his expertness as a trapper&mdash;he was more skilful, white
+man though he was, than many of the Crees themselves. All the strength
+which should have been spent upon his soul seemed to have gone to
+preserving the perfection of his body. For a man of his years, he was
+surprisingly vigorous and erect&mdash;no labour could tire him. This, said
+the Indians, was the usual sign of bodies which lived on when their
+souls were dead. He was much feared, and his influence in the district
+was great; in gaining him as a partisan, Granger had achieved a
+triumph over Robert Pilgrim, and had improved his status among the
+native trappers more than could have been possible by any other single
+act.</p>
+
+<p>Beorn was reverenced as a kind of minor deity; no wish of his, however
+silently expressed, was ever denied by an Indian. When he had chosen
+Peggy's mother to be his wife, it had been done merely by the raising
+of his hand. Straightway the girl's father had driven her
+panic-stricken forth from his camp, compelling her to go to this
+strange bridegroom, lest a curse should fall upon his tribe. To her,
+if absence of cruelty is kindness, he had been uniformly kind. Love is
+not necessary to an Indian marriage, so she had not been too unhappy.
+At Peggy's birth, having first borne him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span> a son, she had died. The
+little girl had been brought up and cared for by the silent man; the
+shy tenderness she expressed for him went far to prove that she, at
+least, had discovered something more vital within him than could be
+expected to reside in the body of a man whose soul was dead. His
+sending of her to the school in Winnipeg had shown that he was not so
+forgetful as he seemed to be of the outside world which he had left.
+This last act had come as a great surprise to all who knew him; but
+they had contrived to retain their old opinion of him by asserting
+that this was the doing of P&egrave;re Antoine.</p>
+
+<p>Only on rare occasions had Beorn let any of his secrets out; when he
+got drunk he recovered his power of speech, or, as the Indians said,
+for a little space his soul returned. This had happened less and less
+frequently of recent years. It was well remembered by old-timers at
+God's Voice how once, in the early morning in Bachelors' Hall, at the
+end of a night's carousal, when the trappers and traders from the
+distant outposts had made their yearly pilgrimage to the fort bringing
+in their twelve months' catch of furs, Beorn, under the influence of
+rum, had risen uninvited, and, to the consternation of his intoxicated
+companions, had trolled forth a verse from a fighting mining ballad.
+As well might the statue of Lord Nelson climb down from its monument
+in Trafalgar Square and, with the voice of a living man, commence to
+address a London crowd. The verse which he sang ran as follows; to the
+few who were aware, it solved the mystery of an important portion of
+his hidden early history:</p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The Ophir on the Comstock<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Was rich as bread and honey;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Gould and Curry, farther south,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Was raking out the money;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Savage and the others<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Had machinery all complete,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When in came the Groshes<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And nipped all our feet."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>When he had completed the verse, he had slowly gazed round and caught
+the look of amaze which had dawned in the countenances of his drunken
+associates. He had come to himself and grown sober. Suddenly an
+expression of intense fear and hatred had shot into his eyes; without
+saying another word, he had turned his back on the company and gone
+out into the early morning, floated his canoe, and fled as one who was
+pursued for his life. That verse had explained many of Beorn's
+eccentricities to one of those who had heard it, and he had told the
+rest. Its singing had meant that, sometime in the early sixties, Beorn
+had taken part in the gold-rush to the Comstock, and had worked and
+prospected in the Nevada mines.</p>
+
+<p>This was his solitary glaring indiscretion in all the course of his
+forty years spent in Keewatin. Though he had had many opportunities
+since then to repeat the event when under the influence of liquor, he
+had allowed nothing more of any importance to escape his lips. He had
+never spent much time at God's Voice, only turning up at the end of
+his hunt to dispose of his catch of furs, after which he would vanish
+into the wilderness again. He avoided on every occasion and was
+restless in the company of men. Very rarely was he encountered on his
+hunting-trips by any of the Indians or trappers. When once he had set
+out, he was not seen again until he returned of his own choice. The
+few times that he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span> had been met, he was far to the northward, about
+the point where the Last Chance and Forbidden Rivers join, whence they
+flow on together till they tumble their crowded waters into the
+freedom of the Hudson Bay. Because it was always in this locality that
+he had been met, a rumour got abroad that, when his body was not
+dwelling among living men, it journeyed up the Forbidden River, to
+reunite with his exiled soul in the habitations of the dead.</p>
+
+<p>Granger had listened to all these reports from time to time, but he
+had paid small heed to them; he was certain in his own mind that,
+should he live solitarily in Keewatin for forty years, as Beorn had
+done, a similar web of legend would be woven about himself. The man's
+conduct was to him self-explanatory; in his early manhood he had
+committed some passionate wrong, and had fled into the wilderness to
+escape the penalty, only to find that the executioner was there before
+him&mdash;the Silence, and that the enduring of loneliness was a more cruel
+punishment than any that an earthly judge could have measured out. The
+boat was one and the same which carried Beorn, Spurling, and himself.
+He promised himself that, by and by, as in the case of Peggy, he would
+break through Beorn's silence, get to know the man, plunge deep down
+till he held his heart in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>So he sat outside his store in the June sunlight, oblivious of himself
+and the passage of Time, lifted high above the strife, and
+impartially, like an ancient deity, reviewed the lives of men.</p>
+
+<p>On the boarded floor of the shack he could hear the moccasined feet of
+Peggy moving busily to and fro, as she prepared the meal. They had
+netted some white-fish over night, so their larder was freshly
+supplied.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span> On the edge of the pier, which ran out from the Point,
+Beorn sat, mending one of his traps. Along the top of the roof perched
+a row of whisky-jacks, most impertinent of birds, who, when a man has
+carried his food almost to his mouth, will flash down, light on his
+hand, and, before he knows that they have arrived, filch away the
+morsel. Somewhere across the river a whippoorwill kept on uttering its
+plaintive cry, as it were Beorn's lost soul come back, pleading
+insistently for permission to take up its residence in his body once
+again. And over against the farther bank a brood of yellow ducklings
+swam in and out among the rushes, hidden behind which their mother
+watched and waited. The noon came on apace, the shadows shortened, and
+everything grew silent; over forest and river a restful stillness
+settled down. If the Last Chance would always look like that it would
+be almost habitable. Had it been placed in any country where there
+were men, it would be considered beautiful just now. Ah, well, after
+he had been married a few years, he would have his children running
+hither and thither, laughing and chattering, about the Point; then it
+would be in his own choice to make of his environment what he liked.
+Gazing whimsically forward to such a time he could conceive that, were
+he given the opportunity to return to civilisation, by some curious
+turn of the wheel of fortune, he might prefer to stay; that such an
+opportunity might be possible, it would first be necessary that he
+should have been acquitted from all suspicion concerning the death of
+Strangeways.</p>
+
+<p>It was easy to be optimistic on such a day; there was a cleanness of
+youth about the appearance of this newly awakened world which reacted
+on the watcher's mind.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Peggy had come out from the shack and was seated on the threshold;
+even she was conscious of a certain elation, for she was humming to
+herself one of those endless, tuneless, barbaric Indian airs which
+only take on the pretence of music when they are assisted by the
+stamping of many feet, and the clapping of many hands. When Granger
+turned his head in her direction, she lowered her eyes, and her
+singing ceased. He had not meant that she should do that; he was
+merely wondering whether she was really a pretty girl and whether, if
+he were to take her back with him to England, she would be seen as
+beautiful by London eyes. London eyes! What had they ever seen that
+was essentially beautiful and free? They could judge of the latest
+fashion in hats, and of the proper size of the laced-in waist; but
+what had they ever seen of the naked, sinuous grace of the human body
+as God made it and had meant that it should be seen? Of nakedness and
+simplicity, and all things genuine, the civilised man had been taught
+to be ashamed. No, no, to-day, in the sunshine, he felt sure that he
+would not return to the insincerity, artificiality, and the
+blinkered-eyes of the town, were he given his choice. He wanted to
+breathe cleanness, and to see God's hand at work, and to be <i>a man</i>;
+in London, or any other city, individuality and all these things would
+be denied. He could be very happy now, he believed; now that he was
+not lonely any longer, because he had a wife. He wished that he could
+find a language in which to tell her these things. But he feared to
+speak; he knew that as yet, just returned from the winter-trail, she
+would not understand.</p>
+
+<p>While he had been thinking, she had slowly raised her eyes; she was
+not looking at him, but northeast,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span> down-river, toward the bend.
+Turning suddenly, he caught the direction of her gaze. Glancing down
+to the pier, he discovered that Beorn's eyes were also turned that
+way. What were they waiting for? What were they anticipating? Was it
+the return of Eyelids that made them so expectant? During the past
+fourteen days he had often caught them thus waiting and gazing, as
+though stoically prepared for news of whatever kind. He suspected that
+they had some secret which they were not willing to share with
+him&mdash;this would account to an extent for Peggy's reticence. But what
+secrets of importance could they have, dwelling as they did on the
+Last Chance? Probably Eyelids' delay was only a matter of traps and
+furs which had been cached. Then, as he watched Peggy, he saw a look
+partly of fear, partly of bewilderment, spread over her face. She
+glanced down to her father; he was still gazing in the same direction,
+towards the bend, and she, seeing him rise to his feet and wave his
+hand, following his example, also rose up and waved. Granger was on
+his feet immediately, that so he might see more clearly; turning his
+eyes down-river, he watched steadfastly in the direction in which the
+father and daughter gazed. He saw nothing that was not customary; it
+seemed to him that he must have looked too late.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Peggy?" he broke out.</p>
+
+<p>She swung round slowly, giving herself time to make her face
+expressionless; it was evident that she had forgotten his presence in
+her excitement.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing," she said, and turning about, passed into the darkness of
+the house.</p>
+
+<p>Granger did not like it. When there are only three of you, one of whom
+is your wife, to whom you have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span> been married only a fortnight, it is
+not pleasant to be the one left out. He had thought at first that they
+might be on the lookout for York boats, which might soon be expected
+to pass by on their way from the House of the Crooked Creek to God's
+Voice. But one does not wave his hand to a York boat which is not yet
+in sight. It seemed certain to him now that Eyelids was in the
+vicinity, signalling to them secret information, which they were eager
+to keep from himself. Had they stumbled across the grave of
+Strangeways, and wondered what it meant? A grave more or less in
+Keewatin does not usually trouble a living man; nevertheless, he ought
+to have told them about it and have explained about Spurling. He would
+tell them his secret presently, and get them to tell him theirs in
+exchange. In the meanwhile, he would watch the bend.</p>
+
+<p>There was no sound of footsteps in the shack. Turning his head very
+slowly, so that it could hardly be seen to turn, he could perceive the
+shadow of Peggy out of the tail of his eye from where he sat; she was
+standing behind the window, a little way back from the panes so that
+he might not discover her, and she was also watching. If this system
+of spying were to go on for long, there would soon be an end to his
+dreams of freedom and marital peace at Murder Point. Already he was
+inclined to revise his opinion as to what he would do, were he given
+the opportunity for escape to a becitied and more populous land. The
+more he thought about it, the more certain he became that he would
+choose to escape. A half-breed girl who was almost pure Indian in her
+manners&mdash;and Peggy seemed that to him now&mdash;could never be a fitting
+companion for an educated white man. He'd been something more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span> than a
+fool to marry her. The entire business was a farce, from start to
+finish; and then he remembered that nearly every farce ends in
+someone's tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>He was interrupted in his bitterness by a shout from up-river. While
+they had been all engaged in watching the northeast, a swift canoe,
+carrying two men, had stolen in from the west. It was approaching the
+pier; before he had time to get down, its occupants had landed and
+were shaking hands with Beorn effusively, emitting low, hoarse cries
+of "Watchee. Watchee."</p>
+
+<p>As he descended the mound, he scanned their travelling outfit, that he
+might guess their errand. They carried no cargo, nor was their canoe
+the broad-built, slate-coloured conveyance of the Hudson Bay Company;
+it was birch-bark, constructed for speed, and carried in the bow a
+miniature sail. They must be the bearers of a letter, or of important
+verbal tidings.</p>
+
+<p>He shook hands with them in silence, nor did he ask them at once to
+deliver to him their message, well knowing from unhappy experience
+that to attempt to hurry an Indian is to cause him to delay. Instead,
+he set about doing them favours, that so they might be the more
+willing to oblige him. He led the way up to his store and, displaying
+to them his wares, told them to choose themselves each a present.
+There were gaudy shawls, beflowered muslin dress-lengths, rifles,
+watches, clocks, suits of clothing and city head-gear, probably
+misfits or the refuse of a bankrupt's stock which Wrath had bought
+cheap, all of them long since out of date; there were even battered
+dolls and children's toys lying about mixed up with canned goods and
+groceries&mdash;a miscellaneous array. Arranged along one wall were all the
+implements of the trapper's trade and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span> the articles of common use,
+such as kettles, pans, enamel cups and plates, coils of rope, etc.
+With the inborn thriftlessness of the Indian, at the articles of
+essential worth they only glanced, after which they turned aside from
+them. Not until an hour had passed did one of the men make up his mind
+to take a top-hat for his present, broad-brimmed and dusty, from off
+which most of the silk was worn&mdash;a relic, perhaps, of the outside
+respectability with which one of the Winnipeg partners had been wont
+to clothe himself years since, when he went to church and still had
+hopes that one day he might live to see himself an honest man. But the
+second visitor could find nothing that met with his approval; now that
+his companion was owner of the top-hat, he felt that of all things,
+sacks of flour, rifles, sails, knives, that was the one and only
+present which he would have chosen. Granger was losing patience,
+though he did not dare to show it. There were so many tidings which
+that letter, if letter it was, might contain&mdash;news concerning
+Spurling, Strangeways, his mother, Mordaunt. To cut his suspense short
+by a few minutes he was willing to pay almost any price. Still the
+Indian procrastinated and seemed to be more and more inclined to
+become obstinate and offended. Transgressing the usual rule of a
+trading-store, he had seated himself on a pile of nets and was
+striking a match to light his pipe.</p>
+
+<p>Granger gazed round his stock in desperation, endeavouring to discover
+something, whatever its value, which would be acceptable.</p>
+
+<p>A sudden inspiration came to him. Reaching up to a shelf, he took down
+an oblong box, about nine inches in length, adjusted several parts of
+it on the inside,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span> wound it up with a key which was in the back, and
+set it on the counter. A whirring, coughing noise was heard, as though
+a creature hidden inside was clearing its throat to prevent itself
+from choking; after a few seconds of this, a voice, so thin and
+whispering that it seemed impossible that it should ever have come
+from a person who owned a chest, commenced to sing with an atrocious
+perversion of the vowels,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Sife in the h'arms of Jesus,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Sife on 'is gentle breast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There by 'is love o'ershadowed<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Sweetly my soul shall rest."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He cut it short at the end of one verse, for he could endure no more
+of that&mdash;the tears were in his eyes. Ugly as the dialect was in itself
+and often as it had revolted him in former days, there was something
+hauntingly pathetic about it when combined with religion, and sung in
+Keewatin by that weakling voice; the London voice, shut up in the
+mildewed box, was an exile like himself. When he was a child, he had
+heard his mother sing those words, and that was at a time when he
+believed in the faith which they expressed. For him there was now no
+overshadowing God&mdash;only a careless, and perhaps unconscious, tyrant.</p>
+
+<p>But he had accomplished his purpose, for the Indian was won over and
+beaming with pleasure. Gramo-phones had not been long introduced into
+the district as articles of trade; as yet only the chiefs and most
+successful trappers could purchase them. To own one was equivalent to
+keeping a butler in civilisation. Seeing the greed in the man's eyes,
+he told him that he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span> could have it so soon as he had declared his
+business and delivered his message.</p>
+
+<p>This promise caused the oracle to work. Diving his hand beneath his
+shirt, the Indian drew forth a pouch which was slung about his neck,
+and, opening it, produced from it a letter. Then snatching up his
+play-thing, he and his companion, proud in his top-hat, went outside
+to build their fire, and to make their camp, leaving the trader to
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>Granger rose up and made fast the door behind them, so that he might
+be undisturbed. Now that he held within his hand the solution to the
+problem of their visit, he was willing to postpone the fuller
+knowledge lest it should make him sad. Sitting himself down on the
+edge of the counter he drew forth his pipe and filled it slowly; and
+when that was done, still more slowly commenced searching for a match,
+found it at last and kindled the tobacco. He looked at the address; it
+was in Wrath's handwriting, but the envelope bore no stamp&mdash;it had
+evidently been sent up by him in haste over the entire six hundred and
+eighty miles by private carrier. That meant that the news was
+important, for such means of transit were expensive. Breaking the
+seal, he found a letter enclosed, which had been addressed to him in
+care of Wrath; it also was unstamped, but it bore in the left-hand
+corner the name of his mother's firm of London solicitors. About it
+was folded a note from Wrath himself, which read:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Dear Granger</span>,</p>
+
+<p>The enclosed letter arrived here by yesterday's mail. It was
+accompanied by a letter to myself from some London lawyers,
+urging me to deliver it into your hands in the quickest possible
+time, regardless of expense. Carrying out my instructions, I am<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
+sending it up to you by private messengers; heaven knows how
+long it would take to get to you, were I to send it any other way.
+Of course I shall dock the cost of its transit from your salary,
+which means that if you don't have a good year's trade, I sha'n't
+have much to pay you.</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 20em;">Yours,</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Charles E. Wrath.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>His mother's lawyers! That meant that his mother had relented, and was
+anxious to have him home again. His heart leapt at the thought&mdash;and
+then he remembered that there were Peggy and the death of Strangeways
+as obstacles to his return.</p>
+
+<p>He undid the wrapping of the lawyer's letter and, as he read, the
+blood went from his face. It was to tell him, in formal language, that
+his mother was dead, and that, if he would fulfil certain conditions,
+he was to become heir to the property which she had left. The estate
+was valued at fifteen thousand pounds. The conditions were, that he
+was to return to England within four months from the writing of this
+letter, and take up his permanent residence there. If for any reason
+he should be unwilling or unable to agree to these terms, the money
+was to be divided among certain charities which his mother had named
+in her will. That was all. So the chance for which he had waited had
+come at last, and he was unable to take it&mdash;and his mother was dead!</p>
+
+<p>He sat very still and motionless. The flies drummed against the
+panes&mdash;they also were captives. Outside, across the river, the
+whippoorwill continued to cry, demanding entrance into Beorn's body
+because it was his soul. Peggy came to the door, tried to open it,
+rattled the latch and announced that the meal was ready: he took no
+notice of her, and presently she went<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span> away. For hours he sat like a
+man of stone, making no pretence at thinking; of one fact only was he
+aware, that with both hands, for the want of a little patience, he had
+thrown away all his chances of return. He was lost&mdash;lost&mdash;lost.</p>
+
+<p>As the hours dragged by the flies grew tired of trying to escape, and
+the whippoorwill of calling; the whole world fell silent. He wished
+that the darkness might come, so that he might hide himself; but in
+June time, on the Last Chance River, it is never utterly night. When
+the sun has sunk from the sky the sunset lingers, gradually working
+round toward the dawn; through the summer months, as if to make amends
+for the long dark winter days, it always leaves a little torch of
+promise burning somewhere along the horizon. The perpetual brightness
+of the world outside seemed to jeer him; it was as careless in its way
+as the winter had been of the solitariness of his soul.</p>
+
+<p>But at last the shadows lengthened in the store, and through the
+dusty, cobwebbed window he could see that the sky had grown indigo and
+grey. So his mother was dead, and he would never look on her again.
+They had not understood one another, and now, with whatever longing he
+might desire it, he could never explain. He had abandoned her for the
+sake of his father's quest, that he might seek out El Dorado&mdash;and this
+was the wage of his sacrifice, thirty, perhaps forty long years of
+life at Murder Point, shared in the company of a squaw, a hurried
+burial one day, and an unnoticed grave.</p>
+
+<p>He could not accept the conditions set forth in the lawyer's letter
+and return to London in the two months which remained&mdash;there were the
+Mounted Police to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span> prevent him, and there was Peggy. He had chosen his
+own path in life, and he must follow it without complaint to the
+bitter end. He tried to think himself back into the opinion of the
+morning, when he had fancied that he preferred the Last Chance River
+to any other place. He could not think that now; he knew that it was
+no more than a consoling lie. Then he ceased to think and grew drowsy.</p>
+
+<p>He was aroused by the faint and far-away sound of singing. The dusk
+had gathered and it must be nearing midnight. He was stiff from
+sitting so long in a cramped position; he rose to his feet and rubbed
+his eyes. The window was ruddy with the shifting light of the Indians'
+camp-fire; occasionally, when the flame shot up, its brightness stole
+across the ceiling and illumined the walls of the store. He listened;
+the tune that was sung seemed to him familiar and puzzled him, for he
+was not fully awake. Drifting through the stillness of the northern
+twilight, at an hour when even the beasts of the forests held their
+breath because of God's nearness and His solemnity, there reached his
+ears the vulgar strutting tones of a music-hall singer's voice:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"As I walked through Leicester Square<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With my most magnificent air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You should hear the girls declare<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Why, he's a millionaire;'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And they turn around and sigh,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And they wink the other eye,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'He's the man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo.'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The coarse suggestiveness of the words, the cheap passions which they
+implied, the leer and pomposity with which they had been uttered by
+the comedian, the unhealthy, narrow-chested, pavement-bred audience<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>
+by which the effort had been greeted with applause, the total
+uncleanness and unnaturalness of city-life, came vividly home to him.</p>
+
+<p>He did not stop to reason, or to trace his repugnance to its
+source&mdash;to his native hostility to the impurity and strengthlessness
+of multitudes of creatures who arrogantly boast that they are
+civilised&mdash;he was too angry for that. He was only conscious that a
+vain and impertinent echo of the town had, by his instrumentality,
+found its way into and vilified the secret refuge of God's austerity.
+Tearing back the bolts from the storehouse door and lifting the latch,
+he rushed out into the cool half-light.</p>
+
+<p>Half-way between himself and the pier he saw the Indians' camp-fire,
+with four figures squatting round, two of which were Peggy's and
+Beorn's. Running down the descent, he burst into their midst, seized
+the offending gramophone and crushed it down with his heel into the
+flames. His foot was scorched, but he did not care for that. When his
+work was accomplished, turning savagely upon his spectators he said,
+"I'll teach you to offend God's silence," and strode away, leaving
+them staring after him through the shadows, terrified and amazed.
+Suddenly he returned; there was a gentler look upon his face. Going up
+to where Peggy sat, he took her by the hand, and, without a word, led
+her out of the circle of firelight towards the shack.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>
+<h3>THE DEAD SOUL SPEAKS OUT</h3>
+
+<p>The Man with the Dead Soul was drunk, heartily and shamelessly drunk;
+Granger, the contriver of his condition, sat facing him, impatiently
+waiting to see whether that was true which the Indians said, that,
+when drink had subdued his body, his soul returned for a little space.</p>
+
+<p>The nominal occasion of the carousal was the home-coming of Eyelids
+and, as Granger had subtly put it, "the celebration of his own
+entrance into the family of Ericsen." However, in a country from which
+there is no means of escape, save through the magic doors of
+imagination, and where men get so bored with themselves, and their
+environment, and one another, that they are willing to seek a
+temporary release by drinking such noxious drugs as pain-killer,
+essence of ginger, of peppermint, etc., for the sake of the alcohol
+which they contain, the only excuse necessary for intoxication is
+opportunity. Spirits of any kind are strictly forbidden in Keewatin,
+that the Indians may be protected from intemperance; nevertheless,
+despite all precautions of the Mounted Police, a certain quantity
+finds its way up in disguised forms, or smuggled in sacks of flour and
+bales of traders' merchandise.</p>
+
+<p>Granger, being well aware that the fool says with his lips what the
+wise man knows in his heart, had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span> determined that both the menfolk of
+his adopted house should play the fool that night. Whatever Beorn and
+Eyelids might do or say, and however intoxicated they might become, he
+had planned for himself that he would keep quite sober, with his wits
+about him, that he might recall next day what they had done and said
+when thus taken off their guard. There were two problems which he was
+anxious to solve; the first, the reason for his brother-in-law's long
+delay; the second, what it was that they watched for with such
+eagerness, and waved to at the bend.</p>
+
+<p>The latter problem had become still more perplexing since Eyelids'
+return that morning, for in the afternoon, when they were sitting
+together outside the shack, he also had seen something down-river,
+and, following his father's and sister's example, had risen to his
+feet, commenced to wave, and, when it had disappeared, had inquired,
+"Who was that fellow?" Straightway Beorn had scowled him into silence,
+and Peggy, leaning over, had whispered some words in a Cree-dialect,
+which Granger did not understand; whereupon an expression of fear and
+wonder had come into Eyelids' face. When Granger, having taken him
+apart, had asked him for an explanation, he had only shaken his head
+stupidly, saying that he must have been mistaken, and that there was
+nothing there. This was manifestly false, for during all the remaining
+portion of the daylight his eyes had kept continually furtively
+returning down-river towards the bend.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that he also had seen something, did away with Granger's
+supposition that it was to her brother, lurking in the vicinity, that
+Peggy had signalled with her hand&mdash;and made him the more curious to
+know<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span> the real cause. Could it be Spurling, he wondered, who had made
+a compact with them and lay in hiding there? If that was so, then what
+had been the reason of Eyelids' delay,&mdash;for he had not stayed to
+collect any caches of furs, but had come back empty-handed, walking by
+the river-bank. He had watched to see whether anyone had put out from
+the store to leave provisions at the bend; but no one had been there,
+unless at a time when he slept. His passion to share the secret had
+become all-consuming, as curiosity must when it works in the mind of a
+lonely man. To this end he had shadowed Eyelids all that day, giving
+him no opportunity for private talk with his family, and, finally, had
+prepared this trap of a drinking-bout, hoping that someone might
+commit himself. As yet he had this to his advantage, that the
+half-breed, though he had witnessed the signals, was almost as
+ignorant as himself as to their real purport, and was therefore,
+probably, just as curious.</p>
+
+<p>They were sitting in a room, empty and comfortless, which was built on
+to the end of the oblong which comprised the store. Its walls were
+damp, and the news-papers, with which they had been covered, sagged
+down from the boards like monstrous goitres. It had one window, which
+looked riverwards, across whose panes, dust and cobweb smirched, a
+muslin curtain had been hung by a previous agent, who was reputed to
+have drunk himself to death. This was its only attempt at decoration,
+save for a faded photo of a girl attired in early Victorian dress,
+across the right-hand corner of which was scrawled, "Yours, with love,
+from Gertrude." She looked a good girl, and Granger felt sorry for her
+because, by the ordinary laws of nature, she had prob<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>ably been dead
+for many years; and he also felt sorry for her because he was certain
+that the man who had placed her picture there had gone away and
+disappointed her in her love.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps he had been the agent who, sitting there night after night,
+gazing upon her portrait, torturing himself with memories of the
+happiness which he had lost, had drunk himself to death. If that was
+so, she had had her revenge. Going closer, he saw that the
+photographer's name was recorded there, "Joseph Dean, New Bedford,
+Mass." So she had been a New Englander, and her lover, whoever he was,
+had probably started life as a sailor in the whaling fleet which at
+that time set out annually from New Bedford for the North. In Keewatin
+the memories of men for their neighbours, especially if they happen to
+be private traders, are very short.</p>
+
+<p>The room contained little furniture. There was a wooden shelf, knocked
+together out of packing-cases, which ran along one side of the wall
+and had probably done service as a bed. There was an upturned box, on
+which a man might seat himself; and a low three-legged stool which
+would serve as a table&mdash;that was all. In imitation of the no more
+lavish accommodation set apart for single men at the Hudson Bay
+Company's forts, the room was commonly known as Bachelors' Hall. The
+door was fast-shut; the curtain was half-drawn before the window,
+shutting out the long-tarrying June twilight; the three men had been
+there together for four hours, and as yet nothing of importance had
+transpired, and no word had been spoken.</p>
+
+<p>Eyelids, with his lashless lids (hence his sobriquet) half-closed,
+squatted on the floor, Indian fashion, directing his pipe to his mouth
+with uncertain hand. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span> other hand fumbled continually in his
+breast, as if he kept something hidden there. Granger wondered what it
+was.</p>
+
+<p>Beorn sprawled his great length of legs along the shelf, his back and
+head resting against the wall. His eyes were very bright, and a long
+and ugly scar, which extended from the right of his forehead to his
+lower jaw, and which Granger did not remember to have noticed before,
+showed swollen and red through the tangled mass of his grey beard. His
+pipe also was in his mouth, but his hand was still steady. Under the
+influence of drink a new intentness had come into his face, all his
+features seemed to be more keen and pointed. Every now and again he
+would remove his pipe, as if he were about to break into speech; then,
+either through laziness or from the tyranny of his habitual caution,
+he would replace it and, as it seemed to Granger, relapse into
+memories. He watched him closely, and he thought he saw the elation of
+old successes, and emotions of forgotten defeats, flit across his
+countenance. Granger himself was quite sober, having only pretended to
+drink; if he sat a trifle huddled on his box and lurched unsteadily,
+it was only that he might keep his companions unsuspicious.</p>
+
+<p>On the crazy little stool between them stood a candle from which the
+wax occasionally dripped, so that for a moment the flame would die
+down, causing the shadows to shorten. A jam-jar did service as a
+tumbler; there was one between the three of them, which meant that
+they had to drink quickly in order not to keep the next man waiting.
+Granger served out the whisky, and he served it neat&mdash;when men are
+intent on getting drunk they do not procrastinate by adding water.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Eyelids was getting more and more peaceful and foolish, smiling first
+to himself and then slily to Granger, as though he had some very happy
+knowledge which he was burning to communicate. At last he pulled out
+his hand from his shirt, and there was something in it. Beorn, raised
+three feet from the floor on his shelf, could not see what his son was
+doing, nor did he care; he was reliving the past, when there was no
+Eyelids.</p>
+
+<p>But Granger watched; the fingers opened a trifle and revealed the
+shining of something yellow. Quick as thought, before the fingers
+could close over it again, he pretended to lose his balance, and,
+shooting out his foot as if to save himself, sent the yellow lump
+flying from the half-breed's palm. It shot into the air, fell with a
+thud, and rolled scintillating into the darkness across the boarded
+floor. Before he could be detained, Granger had sprung after it and
+held it in his hand. He faced round, ready to defend himself; but
+there was no necessity. Eyelids, having attempted to rise and having
+found that his legs would not carry him, had sunk back to his
+squatting position on the floor, where he was smiling foolishly and
+nodding his head as much as to say, "I've been telling you all
+evening, but you would not believe me; now I have proved my word!"</p>
+
+<p>Beorn was sitting upright on his shelf, looking at him keenly. As
+Granger approached, he held out his hand; Granger placed the yellow
+lump in it.</p>
+
+<p>"Gold," he cried, and his eyes flashed; "a river nugget!" Then
+weighing it carefully, "Three ounces," he said; "it's worth about
+forty dollars."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know that?" asked Granger. "Was it river gold that you
+found on the Comstock? I thought that it was quartz."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It was quartz afterwards, but nuggets and dust first." Then,
+remembering himself, he asked suspiciously, "But what d'you know about
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I ought to know something," Granger replied, speaking thickly and
+shamming intoxication; "I ought to know something; I was one of the
+first men in on the Klondike gold-rush."</p>
+
+<p>"Damn it! So you were one of the Klondike men? Tell me about it."</p>
+
+<p>Granger had intended to spin him a yarn about great bonanzas in Yukon,
+which he had discovered. It was to have been a hard-luck tale of
+claims which had been stolen, and claims which had been jumped, and
+claims which had been given away for a few pounds of flour or slices
+of bacon in crises of starvation; but in the presence of the old man's
+eagerness, and with the shining nugget of temptation between them, he
+drifted unconsciously into straight talk and told him his own true
+story.</p>
+
+<p>At first, while he was feeling his way, he gave the history of Bobbie
+Henderson, and Siwash George, and Skookum Jim, the real discoverers of
+the Klondike; and of how Bobbie Henderson was done out of his share,
+so that he still remained a poor man and prospector when others, who
+had come into the Yukon years later, had worked their claims, grown
+wealthy, and departed. Then he recited the Iliad of the stampede from
+Forty-Mile, when the rumour had spread abroad that Siwash George had
+found two-dollars-fifty to the pan at the creek which he had named
+"Bonanza"; how drunken men were thrown into open boats, and men who
+refused to credit the report were bound hand and foot with ropes by
+their friends and compelled to go along, lest they should lose the
+chance of a lifetime; and how,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span> where to-day Forty-Mile had been a
+noisy town, to-morrow it was silent and deserted, with none left save
+a few old men and sickly women to tell the story.</p>
+
+<p>To all of this Beorn listened with small attention, for he kept
+muttering to himself, "But how did he know that there was gold there?
+How did he discover it?" Granger wondered to whom he was referring&mdash;to
+his own son, to Siwash George, or to someone else; but he dared not
+ask him a leading question lest his suspicion should be aroused. He
+went on with his narration feverishly, forgetting in his excitement
+his resolution to keep sober, emptying the tumbler of whisky
+recklessly, turn and turn about with his companion, waiting and
+watching to see whether, in the Indian phrase, the dead soul would
+return. When he commenced to speak of himself, of his passage from
+Skaguay to Dawson, of the wealth which he found and lost at Drunkman's
+Shallows, and of his flight, Beorn became interested; his eyes blazed
+and every few seconds he would give him encouragement, ejaculating
+hoarsely, "Go on. Go on."</p>
+
+<p>So he carried his history to an end with a rush, for now he knew that
+the dead soul had come back. He finished with the sentence, "And then
+I went to Wrath, for I was nearly starving. 'For God's sake, man, give
+me some employment,' I said. 'I can't steal; they'd put me in gaol for
+that, and so I should disgrace my mother. And I can't cut throats for
+bread, for then I should get hanged. But, if I have to endure this
+agony much longer, I shall do both.' And his reply was to send me up
+here, to this ice-cold hell of snow and silence, to mind his store and
+watch the Last Chance River flowing on and on, until the day of my
+death. God curse the reptile and his charity."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Man with the Dead Soul turned his head aside and there was silence
+for a moment. Then, bending down and having assured himself that
+Eyelids was asleep. "I've known all that," he said; "but, unlike you,
+I did more 'an intend&mdash;I killed my man. I guess you an' I are o' one
+family now, so there's no harm in tellin'. I don't just remember who
+you are, nor how we happen to be here this night; but you placed that
+gold in my hand, so I reckon you're all right. You ain't a Mormon, are
+you?" he asked abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>Granger, taken aback by the question, smiled slowly and shook his
+head.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, I'd have you to know," Beorn continued, "that I was
+brought up in the Mormon faith. One o' the earliest memories I have is
+o' the massacre o' the Latter-Day Saints at Gallatin, when Governor
+Boggs issued his order that we should be exterminated an' driven out.
+I can still see the soldiery ridin' up an' down, pillagin' our city,
+insultin' our womenfolk, an' cuttin' down our men. I can just remember
+the misery o' the winter through which we fled, an' the tightness o'
+my mother's arms about me as we crossed the Mississippi, goin' into
+Illinois for safety. From my earliest childhood my mind has bin made
+accustomed to travellin's, an' privations, an' deeds o' blood. That's
+the sort o' man I am.</p>
+
+<p>"It was six years after the Gallatin affair, when our city o' Nauvoo
+had been founded, that the mob once more rose agin us an' murdered our
+prophets, an' placed our lives in danger. Again we fled, crossin' the
+Mississippi on the ice, till we gained a breathin' space at Council
+Bluffs. A year after that, under Brigham Young, we passed through the
+Rockies to the Great Salt Lake an' came to rest. All this persecootion
+caused<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span> our people to become a hard an' bitter race; but I'd have been
+true to 'em if it hadn't bin for my mother, an' the manner o' her
+death. How did she die? Don't ask me, for I can't tell you. She was a
+Swede, a kind o' white slave, who was kept with several other women by
+my father. She went out one day, an' never came back. I believe she'd
+got heartsick, an' was plannin' t' escape with a feller o' her own
+nationality, a newcomer. Anyhow, when I asked my father about her, he
+threatened me into silence. He was a priest o' the order o'
+Melchizedek, a powerful man among the prophets. From that hour I hated
+Mormonism, an' determined t' escape whenever my chance occurred. It
+came sooner 'an I expected.</p>
+
+<p>"The Californian gold-rush had robbed the Saints o' the seaboard to
+which they was hopin' to lay claim. They began to get nervous lest the
+southern territories, from Salt Lake to the Mexican frontier, might
+also be lost to 'em if they didn't do something so they organised the
+State of Deseret, an' sent out expeditions to take it up before it
+could fall into the Gentiles' hands. My father, I believe, had grown
+'fraid o' me, lest I should take his life; so he had me included in
+the first expedition, which consisted o' eighty men, an' was sent to
+garrison a Mormon station in Carson Valley, Nevada.</p>
+
+<p>"I've allaws had a nose for gold, an' we hadn't bin there a month
+before I'd discovered an' washed out a little dust from a neighbourin'
+gulch. I kept my secret to myself, an' when I'd gathered enough,
+bought provisions, stole a horse, an' ran away, escapin' over the
+Sierras into California, where I hoped that the Mormons, an'
+especially my father, would lose all trace o' me an' give me up for
+dead. For eight years I drifted along the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span> coast from camp to camp,
+but didn't have much luck. I even went so far south as Mexico, where I
+laboured in the silver mines an' learned the Mexican method o'
+crushin' quartz with arrastras.</p>
+
+<p>"All this time I was haunted by the memory o' the gold which I'd
+washed out in Carson Valley; the more I thought about it, the more
+certain I was that untold riches lay buried there. However, I was
+fearful to return, lest I should fall into the clutches o' the
+priesthood o' Melchizedek or o' the spies o' Brigham Young. I was an
+apostate, an' my father was my enemy; I knew that, should I once be
+recovered by the Mormons, no mercy would be shown me. At last the news
+came that the struggle o' the Saints for possession o' Nevada had been
+given up, an' that messengers had bin sent out from Salt Lake biddin'
+all emigrants return. For eight years I'd bin unmolested; I thought
+that I'd bin forgotten, an' that it was safe to turn my steps
+eastward.</p>
+
+<p>"I travelled day an' night to get back to my first discovery; I was
+tortured wi' the thought that before I got there someone might have
+rediscovered it, an' have staked it out. I'd crossed the Sierras, an'
+was within a two-days' journey o' my destination, when I came to a
+lonely valley as the sun was settin', an' there I camped. The place
+looked God-forsaken; there was nothin' in sight but rocks, an' sand,
+an' sage-brush. I lit my fire, an' tethered my horse, an', being
+dog-tired, was soon asleep. Suddenly I woke up, an' was conscious o'
+footsteps goin' stealthily, away from me into the darkness. I jumped
+to my feet an' seized my gun; but my eyes were dazed with sleep an'
+firelight so that I could see nothin'. I ran out into the shadows,
+followin' the footsteps, but, before I could come up with 'em,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span> their
+sound had changed to that o' a horse, gallopin' northward, growin'
+fainter and fainter.</p>
+
+<p>"I returned to my camp an' examined my baggage; nothin' was missin',
+not even the gold which I'd carried&mdash;all seemed safe. I sat up an'
+watched till daybreak, an', havin' snatched a hasty breakfast,
+commenced t' pack my animal. Then it was that I discovered, slipped
+beneath a strap o' my saddle, a sheet o' paper. Unfoldin' it, I saw
+that it was scrawled over in a rude an' almost unreadable hand. This
+was what it said, 'This demand of ours shall remain uncancelled, an'
+shall be to you as was the Ark o' God among the Philistines. Unless
+you return to your father's house an' to the people o' your father's
+faith, you shall be visited by the Lord o' Hosts wi' thunder an' wi'
+earthquakes, wi' floods, wi' pestilence, wi' famine, an' wi'
+bloodshed, until the day of your death, when your name shall not be
+known among men.'</p>
+
+<p>"I was seized with panic, for then I knew that the spies o' Mormon had
+traced me. But I wouldn't turn back, for I knew that the treasure for
+which I had waited, as Jacob waited for Rachel, lay straight ahead. So
+I rode forward, tremblin' as I went, carryin' my gun in my hand. At
+the end o' the second day I came t' Johntown, an' found that many
+things had changed since I had left. There were a dozen shanties in
+the town; these were occupied wi' gamblers, storekeepers, an'
+liquor-sellers, includin' two white women an' Sarah Winnemucca, the
+Piute princess. But the placer-miners had been at work, an' the
+gulches were dotted with the tents an' dugouts o' men who had
+discovered my secret for themselves. Thomas Paige Comstock was in the
+gang, the man who gave his name to the first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span> great strike. They
+called 'im Old Pancake, 'cause he was too busy searchin' for gold to
+bake bread. Even at that time, as wi' spoon in hand he stirred the
+pancake batter, he kept his eyes on the crest o' some distant peak,
+an' was lost in dreams o' avarice.</p>
+
+<p>"I hadn't bin there long before I took up wi' a feller named Peter
+O'Riley, an' we became pards. We determined to try our luck in the
+Walker River Mountains, where some new placers had bin started; but we
+hadn't got the money, so we agreed t' work a claim in Six-Mile Canon
+till we'd taken out enough dust t' pay for an outfit. We dug a trench
+straight up the hillside, by Old Man Caldwell's Spring, through blue
+clay an' a yellowish kind o' gravel. But the spring wasted down the
+slope, so we stopped work on the trench an' commenced to sink a pit to
+collect the water an' make a reservoir. We hadn't sunk more 'an four
+feet when we struck a darker an' heavier soil, which sparkled as we
+shovelled it above ground. We washed out a panful, an' found that the
+bottom was fairly covered in gold. This was the top o' the famous
+Ophir, had we only known it. We jumped to our feet an' shouted, for it
+was the richest placer that had as yet bin found. We gave up our
+notion o' the Walker River, an' I began to laugh int' myself at the
+Mormon threat, that I should suffer from all the plagues o' Egypt, an'
+die an unknown man. We were rich&mdash;rich&mdash;rich.</p>
+
+<p>"Just as we were finishin' our day's work, Old Pancake rides up. He'd
+bin lookin' for a mustang that he'd lost, an' came gallopin' over the
+ridge, with his long legs brushin' the sage tops. We tried to hide our
+discovery, but his eyes were too sharp for that. He saw the gold from
+our last clean-up glistenin' in the bottom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span> o' the pan, as the sunset
+lit on it. 'You've struck it, boys,' he cried.</p>
+
+<p>"Jumpin' from his horse, he went down into the pit t' examine for
+hisself. He stayed down there some time; when he come up his face was
+grave. He'd done a lot of thinkin' in a very short while. He sat down
+on the hillside, an' was silent for so long that we began to suspect
+there was somethin' up.</p>
+
+<p>"At last he said, 'Now, see here, boys, this spring was old man
+Caldwell's. I an' Manny Penrod bought his claim last winter, an' we
+sold a tenth to Old Virginia th' other day. If you two fellers'll let
+Manny an' myself in on equal shares, it's all right; if not, it's all
+wrong.'</p>
+
+<p>"We were a bit afraid o' Old Pancake; he'd bin longer in the district
+'an we had. We didn't think to doubt his word, though, as we
+afterwards discovered, every word that he spoke was false. Anyhow,
+after a lot 'o argiment, we agreed to let him an' Manny Penrod in on
+the terms which he'd suggested. That was the beginnin' o' the Johntown
+gold-rush, an' I, for the second time, was one o' the discoverers. At
+first we named the place Pleasant Hill Camp, an' I can tell you it was
+mighty pleasant to be takin' out a thousand dollars a day per man. But
+later, when a city commenced t' spring up, it was necessary t' find
+some other name. We quarrelled a good deal about what we'd call it;
+but one night, when Old Virginia was goin' home with the boys drunk,
+carryin' a bottle o' whisky in 'is hand, he stumbled as he reached his
+cabin, an' the bottle fell an' was broke. Risin' to his knees, with
+the neck o' the bottle held fast in 'is hand, he coughed out, 'I
+baptise this ground Virginia town.' An' so Vir<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>ginia town, which was
+afterwards changed t' city, the handful o' shanties was named.</p>
+
+<p>"For all that my prospects were lookin' so rosy, I was really havin'
+bad luck. Day after day, I was throwin' away wagon-loads o' 'blue
+stuff,' as all th' other miners were doin', an' as those who had gone
+before us had done&mdash;we damned it, an' didn't know its value. A month
+after I'd sold out, a feller had some o' it assayed, an' it was found
+to be worth nearly seven thousand dollars in gold an' silver per ton.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess that curse o' the Mormons was more powerful 'an it seemed at
+first sight&mdash;it's followed me through life an' ruined all the men with
+whom I've come in touch. Old Virginia was thrown from his horse, an'
+killed while drunk. O'Riley sold out his share for forty thousand
+dollars, the bulk o' which he spent in wildcat speculations, so that,
+what wi' disappointment an' loss, he finished out his days in a
+madhouse. Penrod sold for eight thousand, an' soon spent everything he
+had. Old Pancake sold for eleven thousand, an' lost every dollar.
+Then, gettin' sick o' seein' other fellers grow rich out o' what had
+bin his, he wandered off prospecting an' blew out his brains wi' his
+own gun in the mountains o' Montana. A chap named Hansard, one o' our
+first millionaires, died a pauper an' was buried at the public
+expense. As for myself, you can see what I've become&mdash;the Man wi' the
+Dead Soul."</p>
+
+<p>He paused, and looked round at Granger. "<i>The Man wi' the Dead Soul</i>,"
+he repeated, "that's what I am. When I die, my name will not be known
+among men."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't suppose there's any of us'll be remembered long," said
+Granger. "There's a man out there on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span> the bend; I was at Oxford with
+him. He was one of the finest oars that England ever had. The papers
+were full of him once. A sporting edition never came out but . . ."</p>
+
+<p>He was interrupted. "Pass the whisky," Beorn said; "if we're goin' to
+be forgot, it don't much matter what we do or have done; an' we may as
+well forget."</p>
+
+<p>He swallowed the spirit greedily at one quick gulp. "Where'd I got to?
+Oh, yes, I'd sold out my claim for money down, an' made a fool o'
+myself. You see I thought that my find was a gash-vein an' would soon
+peter out, an' that I was doin' somethin' mighty clever to sell at
+all. Instead o' which, I'd only skimmed the surface an' hadn't gone
+deep enough. The men who bought from us sank down till they came to
+the main lode, an' then there was the discovery o' what that 'blue
+stuff,' which we'd bin throwin' away, was really worth; from them two
+causes came the Washoe gold-rush. You never saw anythin' like that,
+not even in the Klondike. It was maddenin' for me to stand by an'
+watch these men, who'd come from a thousand miles east an' west, just
+t' handle the pickin's o' the wealth which I had once possessed an'
+hadn't had the sense to know about. They lived in tents, an' huts, an'
+holes in the hillsides, an' paid seventy-five cents for a pound o'
+flour, in the hopes that, when the summer 'ad come, they might get a
+chance to prospect.</p>
+
+<p>"Before winter 'ad gone, they was leadin' strings o' mules across the
+mountains, on blankets spread above the snow, that they might get
+provisions in an' prevent us from starvin'. An' I, the feller as
+they'd come to rob, had to sit still an' watch it all.</p>
+
+<p>"Before the roads were fit for travel, all the world<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span> was journeyin'
+towards us. There were Irishmen, pushin' wheelbarrows; an' Mexicans
+with burros; an' German miners, an' French, an' English, an' Swedes,
+ploddin' through the mud across the Sierras with their tools upon
+their backs; there were organ-grinders an' Jew pedlars, an' women
+dressed as men, all comin' to Virginia City to claim the gold which I
+'ad lost. I sat every day idly watchin' their approach, an' I hated
+them. I'd begun to believe in the Mormon's curse, an' to let things
+slide. There didn't seem to be much sense in stakin' out a new
+claim&mdash;if I made another fortune, I felt certain that I'd surely lose
+it all.</p>
+
+<p>"Along wi' the adventurers an' prospectors came desperadoes, who
+intended to make their fortune at the gun's point, by shootin'
+straight! There was the Tombstone Terror, an' the Bad Man from Bodie,
+an' Sam Brown, the greatest bully o' them all. One night a half-witted
+feller asked him how many men he'd chopped. 'Ninety-nine,' says Sam,
+'an' you're the hundredth.' He seizes him by the neck an' rips him to
+pieces wi' his bowie-knife. Then he lay down an' went to sleep on the
+billiard table, while the father gathered up what remained o' his son
+from the floor.</p>
+
+<p>"An' there was El Dorado Johnny, who, whenever he was goin' to shoot a
+man, bought a new suit o' clothes an' had a shave, an' got his hair
+cut an' his boots polished so that, in case there was any mistake, he
+might make a handsome corpse. These were some o' the men that I lived
+among, an', like God, I said nothin' to any of 'em, but watched an'
+was interested in 'em all.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I enjoyed myself, for I couldn't help laughin' quietly at
+their expense. 'What went ye out for to seek?' I would ask as, sittin'
+by the outskirts o'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span> the town, I saw this army o' men an' women
+struggle in from the mountain trail. An' then I'd answer myself, 'We
+have come that we may dig out gold, that others may take it from us.
+We have come to exchange our health an' hope for disease an'
+disappointment. We have come to gain all the world, which we shall not
+gain&mdash;an' to lose our own souls.'</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you, it's mighty strange to think o' where all the gold, which
+those brave chaps o' the Old Virginia days dug out, has gone. Some o'
+it's been made into a necklace t' hang about a lady's throat; and some
+o' it's gone to Rome t' gild a cross; and some o' it's been made into
+a weddin' ring that a young girl might get married. I don't suppose
+the folk in the old lands ever think of how far the gold which they
+wear has travelled, nor how many have died in its gettin'. Some, which
+'as bin made into a watch and goes to the city every day, may have
+come from King Solomon's mines in ships o' Tarshish; an' the king may
+have worn it hisself in his temple, or have given it away to the
+dark-skinned girl that he wrote that song about.</p>
+
+<p>"When I thought o' these things in Old Virginia, it made me sort o'
+happy, so that I didn't mind what the Mormons 'ad said. Time seemed so
+endless, an' life so short, that I didn't seem called on to worry
+myself&mdash;only t' watch. If I found a new claim which panned out rich, I
+didn't work it myself; for I knew that, though I seemed lucky, I
+should end unlucky. An' I didn't tell anyone else about it; an' if
+they found it out for theirselves, I was angry. I'd found the Ophir,
+an' hadn't made anythin' out o' it&mdash;that was a big enough present for
+one man to make to his world.</p>
+
+<p>"So I just looked on, an' saw the fools rushin' in who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span> expected to
+pile up fortunes. And I saw the camels comin' in an' out, carryin'
+salt to Virginia from the desert. They'd bin brought from Asia, an' I
+could see that they felt as I felt, an' despised the greed an' hurry
+o' what was goin' on. Later some of 'em got so disgusted that they
+escaped from their drivers&mdash;at that time they was bein' used in
+Arizona t' carry ore. I've often smiled when I've fancied the terror
+o' some lone prospector, should one o' them long-legged brutes poke up
+his nose above a ridge where gold had just been found, and sniff
+scornfully down on the feller. Some o' them camels may be still livin'
+an' doin' it at this very minute."</p>
+
+<p>Beorn opened his jaws wide and laughed. Granger had never heard him
+laugh before, and the sound was not pleasant. There was nothing of
+mirth about the man or in anything that he said&mdash;there was only
+disappointment and scorn. His bitterness became horrible when he
+pretended to be merry. "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh;
+the Lord shall have them in derision." It was like the thunderous
+scoffing of the Lord God of the Hebrews.</p>
+
+<p>The candle had gone out, and the eerie light of the northland dawn,
+drifting into the room through the little space of window that was
+uncovered, made him and his companion look old and comfortless. But he
+was anxious to hear the last of the story before the soul departed, so
+he said, "And how was it that you left the Comstock Mines and came
+into Keewatin?"</p>
+
+<p>"I told you that I'd done what you intended, that I killed a man. I
+did more 'an that, I killed many. You see, at that time there was no
+proper minin' law in America; so when men got t'quarrellin', they
+soon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span> took t' fightin'. So long as the Comstock was only
+placer-minin', we knew what we were about, an' there was no
+trespassin', but when we took t' tunnelling', it wasn't long before we
+was borin' under one another's ledges. The Comstock veins, startin'
+near the surface, dipped toward the west, an' therefore the first
+great conflict came with the nearest line o' claims t' the westward.
+The ledges here were very rich an' almost perpendicular, an' so the
+slopin' shafts o' the Ophir, Mexican, etc., soon ran int' the vertical
+shafts on the 'middle lead.'</p>
+
+<p>"The earliest case t' be tried, which I remember, was that o' the
+Ophir against McCall. The court met in a stable, an' each side come
+armed. One witness was shot at several times as he was ridin'
+homeward, down a ravine at nightfall. Party spirit ran too high, an'
+the danger o' bringin' in a unanimous verdict was too great for any
+jury t' risk their lives by comin' to an agreement. There was no
+justice; so there was nothin' left but to fight it out, the same as
+when nations go to war. An' what were they goin' to fight about? A
+metal which was only val'able because o' its rarity&mdash;which had no
+value in itself, an' couldn't help men t' godliness; one which you
+couldn't make an engine out o', nor a plough, nor even a sword,
+because it was too soft. But in order to possess it, they was goin' to
+take each other's lives. I, an' every other man in that town, had
+thrown away or were throwin' away our souls for a thing which was
+truly worthless.</p>
+
+<p>"One night as I slept, I heard a voice callin' to me an' sayin', 'I
+will make a man more precious than gold; even a man than the golden
+wedge o' Ophir. Therefore I will shake the heavens, an' the earth
+shall remove<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span> out o' her place, in th' wrath o' the Lord o' Hosts, an'
+in the day o' his fierce anger.' I heard that voice callin' to me not
+once, but several times; an' when I woke up, an' walked through the
+town, an' saw the men o' the Ophir preparin' to shoot down the men o'
+the McCall, I could still hear the voice repeating, 'Even a man than
+the golden wedge o' Ophir.'</p>
+
+<p>"I went back to my shanty, an' found my Bible, an' read it many days,
+never stirrin' out. I remember there was one passage that seemed to
+accuse myself, an' to explain my own failure&mdash;'If I have made gold my
+hope, or have said to the fine gold, "Thou art my confidence"; if I
+rejoiced because my wealth was great, an' because mine hand had gotten
+much; if I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walkin' in
+brightness, an' my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath
+kissed my hand: this also were an iniquity to be punished by the
+judge, for I should have denied the God that is above.'</p>
+
+<p>"I'd done all that. When I'd looked at the sun, I'd seen gold; when
+I'd looked at the moon, I'd thought of silver; an' when I'd found both
+the silver an' the gold in the Ophir, by Old Man Caldwell's Spring, my
+mouth had kissed my own hand&mdash;an' not God's. An' what I'd done, every
+one else was doin' in Virginia City; an' the Lord o' Hosts was angry,
+an' that was why men were killin' one another. So, when I'd sat still
+an' figured it all out, I said, 'God spoke to me because I'm the one
+man on the Comstock who, when he's found gold, tries to bury it; an'
+He spoke to me because He wants me to join with Him, an' help Him to
+shake the heavens.' So out I walked, day after day, an' watched things
+growin' from bad to worse; an' when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span> I'd seen all I wanted, I come
+home an' read my Bible&mdash;I knew that when God had need o' me He would
+send His messenger.</p>
+
+<p>"One night a miner come to my cabin, an' he said, 'Are you ready to
+fight for the Fair-Haired Annie?'</p>
+
+<p>"'I'm ready,' I said, 'but what's it all about?'</p>
+
+<p>"'From a drift, a hundred feet down,' said he, 'that we're workin' on
+at present, we can hear the picks o' the Bloody Thunder drawin' nearer
+an' nearer; they'll break through to-morrer into one o' our ledges.'</p>
+
+<p>"'What then?' I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"'We're goin' to have a band o' men waitin' for 'em in the dark on our
+side o' the ledge, an' everyone o' those men is goin' to be armed. The
+moment that the picks o' the Bloody Thunder drive through an' the wall
+goes down, the men o' the Fair-Haired Annie are goin' to fire.'</p>
+
+<p>"'All right,' I said. 'I'm wi' you. I'll be there.'</p>
+
+<p>"So next day I, an' twenty other men, were lowered down the shaft; an'
+before we saw daylight again, the Fair-Haired Annie an' the Bloody
+Thunder had gone to war. That was the first o' the underground fights
+which took place on the Comstock. I picked my men, and paid 'em ten
+dollars a day, an' called my gang 'The Avengers o' the Lord.' No one
+'cept myself knew what that meant, but they learnt t' fear us, for we
+fought to the death. Often when I was waitin' in the dark, listenin'
+to the sound o' the rival miners comin' nearer, I would repeat to
+myself the words, 'I will make a man more precious 'an gold; even a
+man than the golden wedge o' Ophir.' An' when a poor chap lay dyin', I
+would say to him those words."</p>
+
+<p>"So you were sorry for the men you killed?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I was sorry, though that did small good to 'em. When the Lord's
+bent on destroyin', He don't take much account o' persons. When the
+first born o' Egypt were slain, He killed the evil wi' the
+good&mdash;served 'em all alike. But it's heart-breakin' work to be made an
+avenger o' the Lord."</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't understand. What was there to avenge?"</p>
+
+<p>"What was there to avenge? Why, the sinfulness o' those men, who was
+diggin' out the power an' temptation to sin from the place where God
+had hidden it. He meant that it should stay there forever; but now
+it'll be handed down from generation to generation, as is King
+Solomon's gold, temptin' our sons' sons to lose their souls as ours
+were lost."</p>
+
+<p>"And when all the fighting was done, did the soldiers get after you?"
+asked Granger. But Beorn's eyes were closing, and the soul was
+departing as day returned. Already the sun was leaping above the
+horizon, and the sigh of the waking forest was heard. Granger seized
+him by the arm and shook him&mdash;he had learnt only the least part of
+that which he desired to know. "Was it for that crime that you fled,
+till you came at last to Keewatin for safety?" he shouted. "Quick,
+Beorn, tell me. Why did you go to the Forbidden River?"</p>
+
+<p>The eyes did not open; but, as if the soul were answering him with a
+last warning as it passed out of the door of the body, the lips
+stirred, "Ay, man, it's terrible&mdash;the things men give for gold."</p>
+
+<p>The face had become so ashy pale that Granger bent above it, painfully
+listening for the intake of the breath, to assure himself that Beorn
+was not dead. His clamour had aroused Eyelids; looking down towards
+him, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span> saw that his eyes were wide and motionless, gazing towards
+the window with an expression of drunken terror.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter?" he asked sharply.</p>
+
+<p>The half-breed did not reply, but crouched and pointed with his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Granger, turning his head and following the direction indicated,
+looked towards the triangle of uncovered window-pane, and there saw
+the face of a man, gazing hungrily in upon him&mdash;yet, not upon him, but
+upon the nugget which lay sparkling by Beorn's side upon the shelf. It
+was a face that seemed dimly familiar, but thinner and more haggard.
+At first it seemed to be his own face&mdash;the face of that <i>self</i> from
+which he had fled. Then he recognized, and knew that Spurling had
+returned.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span>
+<h3>SPURLING MAKES A REQUEST</h3>
+
+<p>There had been a time when Granger had desired to kill Spurling, and,
+though latterly he had not consciously wished that he were dead, yet
+he resented his reappearance; his presence broke in as a
+storm-influence on the stoical quiet which he had attained. This man
+stood for so many things which had been sinful and passionate in the
+past&mdash;things which it had cost him so much even to attempt to forget;
+things which he had promised himself that he would forget for Peggy's
+sake. And now, because he had chosen to return, it seemed necessary
+that he should call to mind the entire tragedy by asking the question,
+"When you shot that woman in the Klondike, did you know that she was
+not a man? And was she clothed in a woman's dress?"</p>
+
+<p>Even though he kept silence, any hour Spurling himself might reopen
+the subject by inquiring after Strangeways, as to whether he had
+pursued farther, as to how he had fared, as to where he was at
+present. Granger was by no means certain that he did not already know
+that the corporal was dead. He shrank from the discomfort of playing
+the accuser again; he shrank still more from making the ugly
+confession that he himself was likely to be suspected of having
+committed a kindred crime,&mdash;a confession which would tend to degrade
+him to the level of this man whom he affected to despise.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span> So, from
+day to day, he postponed his questions and, in the meanwhile, watched
+Spurling narrowly.</p>
+
+<p>His conduct had been very curious since that morning of his arrival,
+when he had announced himself by playing the spy, through the window
+of Bachelors' Hall, on the inhabitants of the Point. How long he had
+been there, and how much he had heard of what the Man with the Dead
+Soul had had to say, kneeling outside in the semi-darkness with his
+ear pressed against the pane, Granger had no means of discovering. But
+from the first it was clear to him that Spurling and Eyelids were
+possessed of a common knowledge, which made them enemies. Perhaps they
+had met before near the Forbidden River, and this had been the cause
+of Eyelids' delay.</p>
+
+<p>Under ordinary circumstances, the mystery would soon have been swept
+aside by the putting of a single interrogation; but men on the Last
+Chance River get out of the habit of asking leading questions; in
+their parsimony over words, they prefer to watch and to wait the
+reading of the minds of their fellows, and the secreting of their own
+motives, is almost their only pastime. So Granger watched and waited.</p>
+
+<p>In Spurling, so soon as he had been fed and cared for, he was quick to
+discover a change. He had become manlier and braver&mdash;more like his old
+self. He carried himself with a kind of timid pride, as though he knew
+himself to be of a greater value than he was likely to be reckoned at
+by others; almost as though he were confident that he was possessed of
+a claim to merit which, once stated, could not fail to be recognised.
+At the same time, there was a distressful hesitancy in his manner, not
+unnatural under the circumstances,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span> of a man not sure of his
+acceptability. He seemed forever on the point of declaring himself,
+and forever thinking better of his decision&mdash;postponing his
+declaration to a later time. His bearing was an irritating combination
+of false humility and suppressed self-assertion.</p>
+
+<p>Beorn, when he had recovered from his debauch, was as silent,
+absorbed, and uncompanionable as ever. He appeared to have retained no
+memory of what he had said, and to be quite unconscious of Spurling's
+arrival&mdash;he had become again in all things the Man with the Dead Soul.</p>
+
+<p>But with Peggy and Eyelids it was different. Half-breeds as they were,
+and, by reason of their Indian blood, instinctive disguisers of
+emotion, their aversion for Spurling was plain. Sometimes, when his
+back was turned and they thought that they were unobserved, they would
+glance swiftly up at one another, and an expression would come into
+their eyes, a small pin-point of angry fire, which betokened danger
+for the man they hated. Very strangely to Granger, since Spurling's
+arrival, they had manifested a great fondness for being in his own
+company; one or other of them was never far from his side. Though he
+turned upon them angrily, telling them that he wished to be by
+himself, they continually disobeyed and, next minute, like faithful
+dogs, with apologetic faces, were to be found watching near by. What
+was the motive of their conduct? Did they think that he was in danger,
+and required protecting?</p>
+
+<p>But there was a graver happening which he had noticed. With Spurling's
+return, he had thought that now certainly he had solved the mystery of
+the signalling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span> to the bend. On the first day, however, he had found
+himself mistaken. Sitting in the doorway of his store, he had watched
+the undesired one go down to the pier, push off in a canoe, and paddle
+down-river for a bathe. Quarter of a mile from the bend, he had seen
+him back-water, rise to his knees, gaze straight ahead in a startled
+manner, and then, turning quickly about, come racing back like one
+pursued for his life. Looking round, he had seen that Peggy and
+Eyelids were also witnessing these tactics, with expressions which
+betrayed their consternation. As he watched, they had raised their
+hands and waved. When Spurling had landed, he had been waiting for him
+at the pier-head. "What was it that you saw over there?" he asked
+sternly.</p>
+
+<p>Spurling, being panic-stricken, had at first found difficulty in
+recovering his voice. Then, "Where? What do you mean?" he had panted.</p>
+
+<p>Granger, in silence, had pointed northeasterly towards the bend.</p>
+
+<p>With a nervous laugh, though his face was bloodless, Spurling had
+replied, "Nothing. I saw nothing. I just thought that it looked a bit
+lonesome, . . . so I turned back."</p>
+
+<p>Gazing at him attentively, and seeing how he trembled, Granger knew
+that he had not answered truly. With a shrug of his shoulders,
+twisting round on his heel, he had said sneeringly, "On the Last
+Chance River we don't run away from loneliness as though the hangman
+were behind us. If we did, we should be running all the time."</p>
+
+<p>He had not stayed to see the effect of his words, but long afterwards,
+when he looked down to the water's edge, Spurling was still sitting
+there, with his head between his hands and his body shaking.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Early one evening, some days later, he came to him and said, "Mr.
+Granger," and it sounded oddly from those lips&mdash;in the old days, even
+in the beginning of their acquaintance, they had never mistered one
+another, "Mr. Granger, is there anywhere we can go to be quiet? I have
+something very private which I want to say."</p>
+
+<p>"O yes, there's the whole of Keewatin."</p>
+
+<p>"But isn't there some place where we shan't be overheard?"</p>
+
+<p>"We can paddle down to the bend. There's only one man who can hear us
+there&mdash;and he's in his grave."</p>
+
+<p>"Not there. Not there," Spurling had cried, trembling with fear and
+excitement.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, if you're so particular, you can speak with me here."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling looked round to where, at a short distance, Eyelids was
+diligently idling above a broken net. "Somewhere where we can't be
+overheard," he reiterated. At that moment Eyelids turned his head.</p>
+
+<p>This continual spying on all that he did, the reason for which he
+could not comprehend, was getting on Granger's nerves; he felt that it
+would be a relief to be alone, even though it meant being alone with
+the man whom he had most cause to hate. However, somehow he pitied him
+just now; perhaps because of the manner of his address, which had
+brought into sharp contrast their present relations with those of
+other days.</p>
+
+<p>"There's the island up-river to the westward, where I keep my dogs in
+summer-time; if that will suit your purpose."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling showed his pleasure at the suggestion, and, hurrying his
+steps, led the way down to the river-bank.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span> Getting into a canoe, they
+set out towards the west. They had not gone half a mile before they
+caught the sound of paddle-strokes behind them. Turning about, they
+saw that Eyelids was following. He attempted to loiter, and threw in a
+line as if his only intention were to fish. Granger flushed with
+anger. Without a word, he commenced to paddle back till they drew
+nearly level with the intruder, who pretended to be so engaged in his
+pastime as not to notice their approach. Then he cried in a voice that
+was choking with rage, "Get back to the Point, you half-breed spy. If
+you dare to follow me again, I'll turn you out to-morrow, and you can
+take your trade elsewhere." Nor would he proceed farther on his
+journey till he had watched his brother-in-law get safe to land; then,
+with a twist of the paddle, he brought his own craft round, and
+continued towards the sunset. Two miles up-river, in the
+middle-stream, stood a rocky island; as yet it was only a dull grey
+speck in a pathway of red.</p>
+
+<p>They pushed on in silence up the straight, dark grove of mysterious
+forest. Water-birds were calling in the rushes; at one point, as they
+passed, a great bull caribou lifted up his head from drinking, and
+regarded them with a look of curiosity, totally void of fear; a heron
+drifted slowly over the tree-tops, and disappeared. To Granger, with
+even this short distance placed between himself and his customary
+associates, there came a sense of release, and with it an instinct for
+kindness. As they neared the shore of the island, the huskies
+commenced to howl; soon they could see them bunched together on the
+shore awaiting their arrival. A dog in the north, even though he has
+been imported, is never heard to bark. To hear them at first, a
+stranger might suppose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span> that a woman was wearily weeping herself to
+death in the forest, because of a grief which was inconsolable. The
+wail of the huskies, reaching him at intervals across the expanse of
+water, seemed the voice of his own desolation, coming out to meet him.</p>
+
+<p>The whole world was empty, and he began to feel the need of
+friendship. He let his eyes linger on the head and shoulders of the
+man in front of him, and remembered with what eagerness long ago, when
+awaiting his arrival at some appointed rendezvous, he had striven to
+catch sight of him approaching, towering above the littler people of
+the London crowd. And now, instead of brief and chance-snatched
+moments, they were allowed to pass whole days together; yet, because
+of what had happened, they could find no pleasure in one another.
+Pleasure! The only sensation which he derived from Spurling's company
+was one of intense annoyance. And there had been a time when, if
+anyone had dared to tell him that that could ever happen, he would
+have denied it with an oath.</p>
+
+<p>Could it be that the fault was his own, and that he had misjudged this
+man? He recalled how, when he had discovered Strangeways' body at the
+bend, and had thought it Spurling's, he had bitterly accused himself
+of all manner of unkindness. He smiled grimly at the remembrance&mdash;it
+was human nature to do that. He could quite well imagine that at some
+future time, when Spurling was truly dead, he might blame himself
+afresh, with an equal bitterness and an equal sincerity. It would be
+easy to judge charitably of him then, for he would be beyond power of
+working any further mischief to the living. It is fear, not cruelty,
+which lies at the root of all uncharitableness. If apprehension were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span>
+removed from our lives, it would be possible for the weakest man to
+live well. It was the fact that, trusting in God, he took no thought
+for the morrow, which enabled Jesus to become Christ.</p>
+
+<p>Gliding round the island, they came to a sandy cove, which faced the
+sunset. There they landed. Lifting the canoe a dozen paces up the
+shore and placing it in the scrub, where it might be out of sight,
+they struck into the brushwood by a narrow trail, which at once
+commenced to climb. After three minutes of travelling, they came out
+on to a tall bare rock, to one side of which grew a solitary pine.
+From there they could command a view of the river on every side.</p>
+
+<p>Granger settled himself down, with his back toward his companion,
+propping himself against the pine-trunk, with his face towards the
+fading light. The huskies gathered hungrily round in a semicircle,
+squatting on their haunches, wondering whether the coming of these men
+meant that they were going to be fed. The frogs croaked in the river;
+the mosquitoes trumpetted about their heads; save for these sounds,
+and the continual low murmur of the river, there was absolute quiet.
+In this environment, his eyes upon the faery domes and fiery spires of
+the western sky, into the inmost mystery of which the Last Chance
+River led, that torturing and old desire, which had always made it
+impossible for him to enjoy the moment in its flight, again possessed
+his mind: he had known it from a child, the ambition to follow,
+follow, follow, in the hope that somewhere, perhaps behind the setting
+sun, he might arrive at the land of perfectness for which he craved.</p>
+
+<p>His thoughts were disturbed somewhat brutally by a voice behind.
+"Still careless of your life! I see you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span> hav'n't brought your gun with
+you. How did you know that it wasn't 'Die,' that I wanted to say?"</p>
+
+<p>He turned lazily round, and was surprised at the altered expression
+which had come into Spurling's face. It was frank and self-reliant,
+and, oddly enough, had a look that was almost tender.</p>
+
+<p>"What made you say that?" Granger inquired.</p>
+
+<p>Spurling drew nearer. "Well, a fellow had to say something to break
+the ice," he replied; "so I thought I might as well give you your
+chance of taking the worst impression of me." He paused; then he asked
+in a low voice, "You were thinking of London and the old times?"</p>
+
+<p>Granger nodded his head.</p>
+
+<p>"I've often done that; I can understand. It was torture to me in the
+Yukon, and it was madness to me over there," pointing with his hand to
+the northward, where the Forbidden River lay. "What would you say," he
+added, "if I were to tell you that it could all come back again?"</p>
+
+<p>Granger's reply was quiet and calculated, so that it seemed to be
+quite within the bounds of courteous conversation. "I think I should
+tell you that you lied," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"But if I should give you proof that not only the old things were
+possible, but that El Dorado might come true, and that within a year
+we could seek it out together, as we have always planned to do?"</p>
+
+<p>For answer Granger jerked out his foot, and sent a gaunt grey husky
+flying, which had come within his range. It was one of those which
+Spurling had left behind over two months ago at Murder Point, when he
+had exchanged teams with Granger in his endeavour to escape
+Strangeways. Spurling, when he saw it, recog<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>nised the meaning which
+Granger's action implied. It was as if he had said, "So the old things
+are possible, are they, you villain? What about that man whom you say
+that you killed, whose body was washed up near Forty-Mile?" He opened
+his lips to explain, and then fell silent. It was impossible to excuse
+himself in the presence of those wolfish beasts, who had been
+witnesses to all the degradation of mind and body which had overtaken
+him in that terrible escape. No man could estimate the penalty which
+he had had to pay for his moment's folly, except one who had endured
+it. When he allowed his memory to dwell upon it, that frenzied rush
+across half a continent seemed to have occupied all his life. The
+thought of it made him afraid.</p>
+
+<p>"Good God! And my mother meant me for a minister!" he exclaimed,
+burying his face in his hands.</p>
+
+<p>Granger looked up suspiciously, but he said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I never told you that," he continued fiercely, "and I suppose you
+don't believe me now. Seems somehow odd to you, I daresay, that Druce
+Spurling should ever have thought himself worthy to talk to men about
+their souls and Christ. You'd have thought it a good joke if I'd told
+you even when you knew me at my best. <i>When you knew me!</i> Bah! You
+never knew me; you were always a harsh judge when it came to setting a
+value on things which you didn't understand."</p>
+
+<p>When Granger still kept silent and gave no sign of interest, Spurling
+broke out afresh: "Damnation! I tell you you never knew anything about
+me. You were always too selfish to take the trouble to get into other
+folks' insides; yet you went about complaining that people were
+unsympathetic. Here's the difference between us; I may be a scoundrel,
+but whatever I've<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span> done I've played the man and never blamed anyone
+else for my crimes, while you&mdash;! You were always a weak dreamer,
+depending on others for your strength. You were discontented, but you
+never raised your littlest finger in an attempt to make men better.
+All you could think of was yourself, and your own ambition to escape.
+So though, perhaps, I've sunk to a lower level than you have ever
+touched, I want you to know there was once a time when I did reach up
+to a nobler and a better."</p>
+
+<p>Gradually, as he had spoken, there had grown into his voice a
+concentrated fury. He was giving utterance to an old grievance over
+which he had brooded for many years; as happens frequently in such
+cases, only a portion of his complaint could be proved by facts, the
+remainder being an overgrowth of embittered imagination.</p>
+
+<p>His eyes sought out the face of the man whom he accused, but it told
+him nothing; he sat there silent, with his head thrown back a little,
+unemotional as the distant stretch of cold grey river up which he
+gazed.</p>
+
+<p>The sun had vanished, and the prolonged dusk of the northland was
+stealing from out the forest. At length Granger answered him: "It may
+be true, and if so, what follows?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, nothing: only I thought I'd tell you this so that one man might
+not think too badly of me, if before long I should be called upon to
+die. I must have looked a horrid beast when I came to you last April."</p>
+
+<p>Whether consciously or not, Granger nodded his head, as much as to
+say, "You did. Most certainly you did."</p>
+
+<p>His companion broke into a harsh laugh. "The Reverend Druce Spurling!
+How d'you like the sound of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span> it? That's what I might have been to-day,
+and a fat lot you care about it."</p>
+
+<p>To Granger, as he listened, there had come the painful knowledge,
+bearing out the accusation that he had never cared for the inward
+things of men, that this was the first scrap of confession which
+Spurling had ever let fall in his presence. Why, up to that moment he
+had not heard a word about his mother, and had certainly never
+credited him with a pronounced religious instinct.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, perhaps that statement, which had sounded so exaggerated at
+first, was true; and he was a hard and selfish man. Up to now he'd
+excused himself on the score of his superior sensitiveness and
+ideality. Probably it was this same error which P&egrave;re Antoine, in
+gentler manner, had tried to point out, when he said, "You will never
+help yourself, or the world, by merely being sad. No man ever has. It
+is because of your flight from sadness that you have met with all your
+dangers. All your life you have spent in striving to escape from
+things which are sad." His thoughts travelled back to those earlier
+days, when he'd poured out his troubles to Spurling, and told him all
+about himself; and always with the assurance that he would be
+understood and would gain sympathy. John Granger as he had been then,
+now seemed like a complaining child to himself. He was certain that,
+were he to be met by that old self to-day, he would have no patience
+with him. But Spurling had had patience.</p>
+
+<p>So, when all was said and done, he must consider himself a pretty
+worthless fellow; and, after all, Spurling, despite his blood-stained
+hands, was probably the better man.</p>
+
+<p>"Why Spurling failed to become a parson"&mdash;a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span> strange topic for thought
+and conversation this, on the Last Chance River at nightfall!</p>
+
+<p>But Spurling was speaking again, timidly and half to himself. "Suppose
+God should brand a mark on our foreheads for every crime which we have
+perpetrated, I wonder what kind of beasts we should appear to one
+another then?"</p>
+
+<p>Turning his head, in order that his face might not be seen, Granger
+replied, "Much the same kind of beasts, I suspect, as we appear to one
+another now." Then, speaking more hurriedly, "It wasn't to talk of
+these things, and to ask me that question, that you required me to
+come with you to some place where we might be by ourselves. Tell me,
+what is it that you want me to do for you? You were good to me once,
+and I'm willing to help you in any way that is honourable, and that
+isn't too dangerous."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling laughed shortly, and said, "It isn't your help that I'm
+asking; it's you that I'm trying to help. Here, look at that." He
+passed something to him. "I didn't act squarely by you in the
+Klondike, and I want to make up for it now. When we made that strike
+in Drunkman's Shallows, the success of it turned my head; even then,
+if you'd not been so impatient, I think I should have come to myself
+and have behaved decently. You put my back up with your suspicions,
+and by seeming to claim a part of my wealth as though it were yours by
+right. But I'm anxious to forget that now."</p>
+
+<p>In the meanwhile, Granger had been examining the thing which had been
+placed in his hands. It was wrapped up carefully in several rags,
+which were knotted and tedious to untie. When he had stript them off,
+he found that they contained a nugget, somewhat bigger<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span> than the one
+which Eyelids had shown him, but of the same rounded formation, as
+though it had been taken from a river-bed. "Where did you get it?" he
+asked excitedly.</p>
+
+<p>"Where the half-breed got his&mdash;from the Forbidden River. Does El
+Dorado seem more possible to you now?"</p>
+
+<p>But Granger was thinking, and he did not answer the question. Suddenly
+the dream of his life had become recoverable. He had forgotten Peggy,
+and Murder Point, and even Spurling himself. Once more in imagination
+he was sailing up the Great Amana, following in his father's track.
+Once more he saw, as in Raleigh's day, the deer come down to the
+water's side, as if they were used to the keeper's call; and he
+watched anxiously ahead lest, in the rounding of the latest bend, the
+shining city should meet his sight and the salt expanse of Parima,
+from whose shores its towers are said to rise. In his eyes was the
+vision of the island near Puna, which Lopez wrote about, with its
+silver herb-gardens, and its flowers of gold, and its trees of gold
+and of silver; and in his ears was the tinkling music, which the
+sea-wind was wont to make as it swept through the metal forest,
+causing its branches to clang and its leaves to shake. He was far away
+from Keewatin now, making the phantom journey to the land of his
+desire.</p>
+
+<p>"Does El Dorado seem more possible to you now?"</p>
+
+<p>He turned to Spurling a face which had grown thin with earnestness,
+"Druce, tell me quickly," he said, "how long will it take us to get
+there?"</p>
+
+<p>"To get to El Dorado? The answer to that you should know best. But to
+get to the place on the Forbidden River where this gold was found? Oh,
+about five days."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Let us go there at once, then, before Beorn finds us out."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, Beorn! The old trapper who put that half-breed on my track!"</p>
+
+<p>"Did he do that? Tell me about it."</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span>
+<h3>MANITOUS AND SHADES OF THE DEPARTED</h3>
+
+<p>"After I had left you, I journeyed three days to the northward, till I
+came to the mouth of the Forbidden River. There I found the cache
+which you spoke to me about; but I did not break into it at that time,
+as I was still well provided with food and ammunition. Because you had
+told me that the Forbidden River was unexplored and never visited,
+being haunted by Manitous and shades of the dead, I turned into it and
+travelled up it&mdash;I thought that I should find safety there.</p>
+
+<p>"On the second day, just as evening was falling, I saw the flare of a
+camp-fire, about two miles ahead. You'll remember that my nerves were
+badly shaken when I came to you at Murder Point; and they hadn't been
+much improved by those five days of flight through the winter
+loneliness. When I saw that light blaze up in the distance, I began to
+be afraid&mdash;and it wasn't the fear of men that I was thinking about. I
+waited until it was utterly night and then, leaving my dogs behind,
+stole stealthily forward to prospect. As I drew nearer, I saw that a
+hut of boughs had been erected, and that a man was sitting, with his
+rifle on his knees, before the fire. He was very old and tall. But I
+had no opportunity to get a closer view of him, for, at that moment,
+he must have heard me; he put his head on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span> one side to listen, and
+rose to his feet. Without the waste of any time, he fired in my
+direction. Luckily I had thrown myself flat along the snow, for the
+bullet whizzed over my head. He advanced towards me a little way, and
+then, thinking that he had been mistaken, went back to his fire,
+grumbling to himself, and sat down. The cold ate into my bones, yet I
+dared not stir until I was certain that he had gone to sleep.
+Presently he arose, looked suspiciously around, piled more wood on his
+fire, and went into his hut.</p>
+
+<p>"I hurried back to where I had left my dogs, harnessed them in and,
+leaving the river-bank, travelled into the bush for a distance of
+about two miles; there I tied them up, and then returned to the river
+by myself, coming out at a point somewhat nearer to the old man's hut.
+I lay down behind a clump of trees and waited. Before day had come, I
+could hear that he was astir; but he seemed to be almighty busy for a
+Keewatin trapper, who was only changing camp. About midday he had made
+his preparations, and, stamping out his fire, set out down-stream, in
+the direction of the Last Chance River. I knew that in half-an-hour he
+must come across my trail, and have his suspicions of the previous
+night confirmed. Sure enough, after he had passed my place of hiding
+and had got below me about three hundred yards, he struck my tracks.
+He pulled up sharply, and wheeled round, as if he could feel that my
+eyes were watching him; he threw up his head like an old bull caribou
+scenting danger.</p>
+
+<p>"I had left two trails leading from that point, the one towards his
+hut and back again, the other into the bush to where my dogs were
+tethered. If he was determined to follow up the latter and to trace me
+to my hid<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span>ing, I was ready for him, and would have the advantage of
+knowing his whereabouts, whilst he was ignorant of mine. He must have
+been going through some such argument himself, for presently he
+whipped up his dogs and, with one last glance across his shoulder,
+continued on his journey. When he had vanished, and I had made certain
+that he did not intend to return, I went forward to inspect his
+abandoned camp.</p>
+
+<p>"Inside the hut I found that the floor was of earth and below the
+snow-level, making evident the fact that it had been erected before
+the winter had commenced. When I examined the walls, which were
+constructed of boughs and mud, I came to the conclusion that they had
+been standing for many years, but had been renewed from time to time.
+All this made it clear to me that you had been mistaken in saying that
+the Forbidden River had never been travelled. The next thing to
+discover was what had brought the old man up there. The earth of the
+floor was not packed together, but looked loose and rough, as though
+it had been newly dug. This gave me my first clue to the secret. When
+I walked above it, it did not sound solid, so I commenced to scrape
+away the earth. Six inches down I came to branches of trees spread
+crosswise, as though to form a roof to a cellar. Pulling these aside,
+after another hour of labour, I looked down into a pit which had been
+hollowed out. It was getting dark now, so I lit a fire.</p>
+
+<p>"I climbed into the pit, by some rudely fashioned stairs which had
+been shaped in the side of the wall, and soon found myself on level
+footing. Groping about down there, I could feel that the sides were
+tunnelled, and had been roughly timbered with the stems of trees.
+Going above ground, I fetched a torch and then saw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span> all that I had
+commenced to suspect&mdash;and a good deal more.</p>
+
+<p>"Piled up in one corner was an outfit of miner's implements, pans,
+axes, spades, picks, etc., and close beside them was a sack of
+moose-hide. Whipping out my knife, I cut through the thongs by which
+the sack was tied; it lurched over, letting fall a dozen ounces or so
+of gold dust. On searching round, I found in another corner a second
+sack containing nuggets. When I went about the walls, and pushed my
+way into some of the tunnels, I was made certain that I was in one of
+the richest placer-mines that I had ever set eyes on. Then I went up
+to consider what all this meant.</p>
+
+<p>"Here was I, a man fleeing for his life, and here was this old man, a
+pioneer in an unexplored region, who, for some reason of his own, was
+keeping secret the knowledge of his bonanza, yet taking the gold out
+all the while. Couldn't I, by making the world a present of his
+knowledge, buy back my life? Soon I recognised that that was folly;
+the world would accept the present, but it would also demand my life.
+There was nothing for it but to act by stealth. If I could once get
+out of Keewatin with all these riches, I would be able to purchase my
+escape; especially if I should remain in hiding for a year or so,
+until the search had been abandoned, and I had been given up for dead.
+Then I could sneak out and get to South America, where I was not
+known, and commence life afresh. The thought of South America brought
+El Dorado to my mind, and then I remembered you, two hundred miles'
+distant at Murder Point. 'Why shouldn't I tell Granger?' I said. 'Then
+we could both escape, and go in search of El Dorado together, as we
+have always planned.'"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He paused and looked at his companion to see what effect his words had
+had. Granger was sitting with his head bent forward, his knees drawn
+up and his arms about them, all attention, with a strange look of
+hunger in his eyes. "Well, for God's sake don't keep me waiting,
+Druce. Go on," he said.</p>
+
+<p>It was the second time that Granger had called him "Druce" in less
+than two hours; he was now certain of his ground.</p>
+
+<p>"If you are willing to help me, I think we can do as we have always
+planned. What do you think about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm willing to the death. But after you'd discovered the mine, what
+did you do then? Did the old man come back?"</p>
+
+<p>"The next few days I kept a careful lookout, in case I should be
+surprised. When nothing happened, I commenced to prospect for myself.
+I could not do much as the ground was frozen; but I thawed out some of
+the dirt, and gathered a few nuggets of pretty fair size. Then the
+river broke up, and I thought that I was safe for at least a time. But
+soon my provisions began to run low, so that it became necessary for
+me to turn back to the Last Chance River to break open the cache. I
+postponed the journey as long as I dared, and at last set out, with
+only enough flour and bacon to keep me going for two days. It was hard
+travelling, for my dogs were of no use to me, the snow being too moist
+for the passage of a sled. I had to work my way along by the
+river-bank, through melting drifts and tangled scrub. I dared not
+light a fire when I camped at night, lest it should be seen by the old
+man, and he should steal up and kill me while I slept.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I thought I began to see why he had gone away so meekly, though he
+knew that a stranger had found him out and was likely to stumble on
+his treasure: so long as I was in hiding, I had had him at a
+disadvantage; but now, having gone away quietly without resistance, he
+was able to await me under cover at the Forbidden River's mouth, and I
+would be the one who would run most risk when we came to an encounter.
+He had known that sooner or later I should run short of grub, and be
+forced to return to the Last Chance, and to pass by his ambush; all
+that he had to do was to await me, for there is but one way out.</p>
+
+<p>"It took me three days to make the journey and when, as night was
+falling, I came in sight of the spit of land which divides the two
+rivers, on which the cache had been made, I had exhausted my supply of
+rations. I was faint with hunger and perished with cold; but I dared
+do nothing to provide for myself until I had made certain that I was
+not spied upon.</p>
+
+<p>"The river-mouth looked deserted enough; on either bank it was bare of
+trees&mdash;a bald and bleak expanse of withered scrub, affording little
+cover. It would be difficult for any man to approach me, without being
+seen before he had come within gun-range. I followed along the
+left-hand bank, which I had been travelling, till I reached the point
+where the Last Chance and Forbidden Rivers join. Gazing up and down
+the Last Chance, the same scene of desolation met my eyes; there was
+no flash of camp-fire or sign of rising smoke. In the north, from
+which quarter the wind was blowing, I could detect no smell of
+burning. I began to think that I was safe, and determined to make
+short work of breaking into the cache and getting back to the hut<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span>
+again. Then I awoke to a fact which I had overlooked in my anxiety to
+avoid a surprise attack, that the cache was on the right-hand bank and
+that I was on the left.</p>
+
+<p>"The river was flowing rapidly, carrying down tree-trunks and grinding
+blocks of ice, so that it seemed impassable. Every now and then the
+hurrying mass would jam and pile up, forming a pathway above the
+current, but not for so long a time as would allow me to climb across.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd been going on half-rations for several days in order to make my
+food eke out and, consequently, was miserably nourished. A death by
+drowning is preferable any day to the slower tortures of starvation; I
+made up my mind to cross the river at once, at whatever cost. I began
+to forget my fear of the hidden enemy in my eagerness to satisfy my
+hunger.</p>
+
+<p>"Retracing my steps, I walked up-stream, searching for a tree-trunk
+which would be of sufficient weight to carry me. I planned to launch
+out a quarter of a mile above the point which I wished to make on the
+other side, and to trust to the current, and what little steering I
+could manage, to get me across. I lost much time in my search, for the
+larger logs which had been driven ashore had got wedged, and required
+more than one man's strength to refloat them.</p>
+
+<p>"When I found a trunk of sufficient size, the wind had dropped and a
+mist was settling down, which made it difficult for me to see anything
+that was not immediately before my eyes. A haunting sensation of
+insecurity began to pervade my mind. I hardly know how to describe it;
+it was not dread of a physical death, but fear lest my soul might get
+lost. Though I was now<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span> about to imperil my life, for the preservation
+of which, during the last half year, I had made every effort of which
+a human being is capable, that seemed to me as nothing when compared
+with this new danger. If a man dies, he may live again; but if his
+soul is snatched from him, what is there left that can survive? This
+was the menace of which I was aware&mdash;a menace of spiritual death, to
+the cause of which I was drawing nearer through the mist. My whole
+desire now was to procure the provisions for which I had made the
+journey, and to escape.</p>
+
+<p>"I got astride the trunk, steadying myself with a long birch-pole
+which I had cut, and pushed off. The water was icy cold, causing my
+legs to ache painfully, as if they were being torn from my body by
+heavy weights. Soon the log was caught in the central current and
+began to race. Like maddened horses, foaming at my side, before, and
+behind, the drift-ice rushed. In the misty greyness of the night,
+these floating ruins of the winter's silence assumed curious and
+terrifying shapes. Sometimes they appeared to be polar bears, having
+human hands and faces; sometimes they seemed to be huskies, with the
+eyes and ears of men; but more often they were creatures utterly
+corrupt, who, swimming beside me, acclaimed me as their equal and as
+one of themselves.</p>
+
+<p>"I remembered the reason which you had stated why the Forbidden River
+is never travelled&mdash;and I knew the power of fear as never before. I
+could not see where I was going; no land was in sight. I could
+perceive nothing but mocking befouled faces, and they were on every
+side. With my steering pole I pushed continually towards the right,
+dreading every moment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span> that I would lose my balance, or would be swept
+out into the Last Chance far below the cache. These thoughts made me
+desperate, and I renewed the struggle with something that was more
+than physical strength; I knew that, should I die at that time, I
+would become one of those damned grey faces.</p>
+
+<p>"The crossing could not have occupied more than a few minutes, but
+they seemed like ages. I felt as though, for so long as I could
+remember, I had been sitting astride a log, hurrying through a mist on
+a rushing river.</p>
+
+<p>"Presently I heard the grating of ice against ice and the cannoning of
+logs, and I knew that I was nearing the other side. There was a sudden
+shock; the tree which I rode swung round, and I found myself
+scrambling wildly up the bank out of the reach of the hands which were
+thrust out after me. I rose to my feet and ran, tripping and falling
+continually as my snowshoes plunged deep in the melting crust. Each
+time I fell, it seemed to me that I had not tripped, but had been
+struck down from behind by the river-creatures which pursued me. Then
+the sound of the water grew more faint, the mist closed in upon me,
+and I sank exhausted. I had no idea of my position as regards the
+cache, nor would I have any means of finding out until morning should
+come and the fog should rise. But I knew that it would be fatal to sit
+still in my sodden clothes, on the drenching snow, without a fire,
+till daylight; so I got upon my feet and commenced to tread slowly
+about.</p>
+
+<p>"Presently behind the mist I could hear something moving, which was
+following and keeping pace with me stride by stride. Its footsteps did
+not seem to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span> those of a man, but more frequent and lighter. I was
+in that state of mind when suspense is the worst part of danger; I did
+not care particularly how much I had to suffer if only I might know
+completely what death and by whose hands I was to die. Drawing my
+revolver, I made a plunge forward in the direction from which the
+sound had come. I saw nothing; but, when I stopped and listened, I
+could hear the footsteps going round about me at just the same
+distance away. I determined to pursue them; at any rate such an
+occupation would keep me in motion and prevent me from perishing from
+cold and dampness. But it's difficult to hunt the thing by which you
+are hunted. Towards daybreak a slight breeze got up which, coming in
+little gusts, cleared alleys in the heavy atmosphere as it forced a
+passage. The footsteps had ceased by this time, but I could hear the
+creature's panting breath; for some reason it had ceased to follow. I
+waited until I heard the breeze coming and then made a rush in the
+direction from which the breathing came. There, straight before me,
+sitting on its haunches, I saw the shadow of what appeared to be a
+gigantic timber-wolf; the only part of it which I could discern
+plainly was its eyes, which, to my terrified imagination, blazed out
+dazzling and huge through the gloom like carriage lamps.</p>
+
+<p>"And another thing I noticed, that it was sitting beside the cache for
+which I was searching. Then the breeze died down, the mist closed in
+again, and I could detect nothing of the creature's presence but the
+sound of its breath.</p>
+
+<p>"With my revolver in my right hand and my knife in my left, I crept
+slowly forward. Just ahead of me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span> I could see something stirring, and
+I fired. There was a scramble of hurrying feet, and then silence.</p>
+
+<p>"When I came to the cache, it was deserted. I should have delayed till
+daylight, but my hunger was so great that I could not wait. Breaking
+it open, I sat down to gorge myself on the first thing that came
+handy&mdash;some raw fish which had been buried there. Something moved
+behind me; before I had time to turn properly round, it had leapt on
+my back. I could not draw my revolver, there was no time; my only
+weapon was my knife. I saw the great face and eyes peering over my
+left shoulder and made a downward stab, gashing open a deep wound from
+the ear to the lower fangs. With a cry that was almost human, the
+beast jumped back and vanished.</p>
+
+<p>"When day had come, I took as much of the provisions as I could carry,
+and made good my escape. I was surprised at the old man's absence, and
+fearful lest at any moment he might turn up. I did not cross the river
+at the mouth, but worked my way along the right-hand bank, intending
+to cross higher up and nearer the hut, where it was more narrow. At
+noon I made a halt and snatched a little sleep, for I had purposed to
+travel through the night. Some hours after darkness had fallen, I
+began to be haunted with the old sense that something was following.
+At first I heard no sound, for I was travelling over open ground.
+Presently I had to enter a thicket, and there I was made certain; for
+I could distinctly hear the snapping of branches, as if bent and
+forced aside by the passage of some forest animal. I pushed rapidly
+ahead, for it was not the safest place in which to be attacked. As I
+glanced across my shoulder and from side to side, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span> continually
+caught glimpses of a thing which was grey.</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes I was certain that I saw a face peering out at me from
+above the brake; but whether it was that of the old man or of the
+timber-wolf, I could not tell&mdash;strangely enough, their faces seemed to
+me to be one and the same. When the day came, I felt that I was free
+again, and making camp I slept. The same thing happened next night,
+and the night after that, for it took me more than three days to make
+the homeward journey. But each night, as I moved farther away from the
+Forbidden River's mouth, the creature which followed had to traverse a
+longer and longer trail to come up with me, as I approached nearer to
+my destination.</p>
+
+<p>"After I had crossed the river and reached the hut, he rarely came;
+and then only when the dusk had fallen early because of clouds or
+rain. Yet there were times, just before the dawn, when I fancied that
+I could see him watching me from the bank."</p>
+
+<p>"But what has this got to do with the half-breed?" Granger broke in
+impatiently.</p>
+
+<p>"That's what I'd like to know myself. But I don't know, so I'm simply
+giving you facts as they happened. The horror of that wolf's face,
+which I confused with my memory of the old man's, made a deep
+impression on me; I suppose that's why I've said so much about it.</p>
+
+<p>"However mistaken you may have been about the Forbidden River never
+having been travelled, you were correct enough when you told me that
+it was haunted. . . . And it isn't pleasant to be living a five-days'
+journey from the nearest white man, in a place where the beasts look
+like lost souls and have the eyes of the damned."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Granger shrugged his shoulders, "And the half-breed?" he inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"The half-breed turned up five weeks after my return from the cache.
+I'd been out cutting cord-wood and, when I came back, he was sitting
+at the door of the hut. How long he'd been there, I could not tell; I
+had been absent for perhaps two hours. I tried to find out how he'd
+come, but he pretended not to understand; so, as I know no Cree, our
+conversation wasn't very lengthy. At first, however, in spite of the
+danger of his discovering who I was and what I was doing there, I was
+pleased to see him, for I was getting moody and low-spirited with
+living by myself. I tried to be content with supposing that he was a
+trapper, who had strayed out of his district and had lighted on me by
+accident.</p>
+
+<p>"We sat by the fire outside the hut and smoked together, smiling and
+exchanging signs every now and then, to show that we were friendly.
+But I watched him closely, and soon perceived that he was far more
+knowing than he was willing to admit; I began to believe that he had
+visited me with a purpose. I hadn't allowed him inside the hut for
+fear he should see the pit, which was uncovered, and should guess the
+secret or get suspicious; but I noticed that, whenever he thought that
+I was not watching, his eyes would slowly turn in that direction. I
+determined to put him to the test. Though it was as yet quite early, I
+built up the fire for the night and signed to him that I was sleepy.
+He nodded his head and went on smoking; so I lay down and feigned to
+close my eyes. I must have fallen asleep, for when I woke the blaze
+had died down to a mound of charcoal and glowing ash, with here and
+there a little spurt of flame. When I looked stealthily round,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span> I
+discovered that my companion was missing, but by listening I could
+hear a sound of moving within the hut. Just then I saw his figure
+coming out, so I lay down as though I had never wakened. He stood in
+the doorway smiling to himself, holding something which sparkled in
+his hand. Then he returned to the fire and sat down quite near to me,
+so that he could watch my face.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I must have betrayed myself for, without any warning, he
+flung himself upon me, slipping a noose about my neck as I attempted
+to rise, which he drew tight, so that I was nearly strangled. Standing
+behind me, jerking at the noose, he commanded me to hold up my hands.
+I was too choked and dazed for struggle, so did as he bade me. When he
+had bound me hand and foot, and gagged me, he threw me inside the hut
+and, without a word of explanation, departed down-stream on his
+journey.</p>
+
+<p>"I tried to burst the thongs, but they were too stout either to loosen
+or to break. I wormed my way out on to the river-bank and tried to
+chafe them against a rock, but only succeeded in bruising my flesh.
+The sun came out and shone down upon me till my thirst grew agonising.
+It seemed to me that at last I had run to the end of my tether. Then a
+thought occurred to me; wriggling toward the fire, I found that it
+still smouldered. By pushing and scraping with my bound hands and
+feet, I managed to get some leaves and twigs together, which soon
+sprang into a blaze. I waited until it had died down into a narrow
+flame, over which I held my hands till the thongs were charred; then,
+with a quick twist of the wrists, which caused my scorched flesh to
+flake off in shreds, I wrenched my hands apart.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span> This is all true that
+I am telling you; you can see for yourself. Already you must have
+noticed those marks." He held out his wrists for Granger's inspection;
+they were horribly mutilated.</p>
+
+<p>"And after that, when you got better, did the half-breed leave you
+undisturbed or did he come back?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did not see either the half-breed or the old man again until that
+early morning when I gazed in through the window at Murder Point . . .
+and, do you know, that scar on the old man's face is in the same place
+as the wound which I gave the timber-wolf?"</p>
+
+<p>Granger laughed nervously. "And what d'you make of that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I hardly dare to say; but, somehow, that beast seemed to me to be
+more than a wolf&mdash;it looked like a dead soul."</p>
+
+<p>"A dead what? You've said that once before to-night."</p>
+
+<p>Spurting stared at him, amazed at his agitation. "A dead soul," he
+repeated; "a soul which has gone out from a man, and left his body
+still alive."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know what name the Indians have given to that old man?" asked
+Granger in an awe-struck voice.</p>
+
+<p>"How should I know? I think you called him Beorn."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but his other name is the <i>Man with the Dead Soul</i>."</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span>
+<h3>IN HIDING ON HUSKIES' ISLAND</h3>
+
+<p>They stared at one another in silence, striving not to realise the
+meaning of those words; yet their meaning was unavoidable.</p>
+
+<p>Both knew the legend of the <i>loup-garou</i>, the grim tradition of the
+peasants of Quebec which the <i>coureurs des bois</i> have carried with
+them into every part of Canada. Often in the Klondike, when seated
+round the stove on a winter's night, they had heard it retold by
+French-Canadians, in low excited whispers, with swift and frightened
+turnings of the head. They had laughed at it in the daylight: yet at
+night, when the tale was in the telling, it had seemed very real to
+them. Then there had come that Christmas-Eve, when Jacques La France
+had been found dead in his shack, with a hole in his neck, just
+outside of Dawson City. Little Baptiste had owned with tears to the
+crime, and had excused himself saying that he had been compelled to
+the shooting because Jacques was his dearest friend, and Jacques had
+become a <i>loup-garou</i> through not attending the Easter Sacrament for
+seven years; as everybody knew, only by the inflicting of a bloody
+wound on his beast's body could his soul be saved from hell.</p>
+
+<p>The jury who had tried him had been composed mostly of
+French-Canadians. When it had been proved to them that wolf tracks had
+been found before<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span> the dead man's threshold, they had acquitted
+Baptiste, and had apologised for his arrest, in defiance of the
+judge's disapproval.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Two and a half years at Murder Point had made Granger undogmatic on
+problems of metempsychosis, and of the extent to which the barriers
+which hedge in Man's spiritual life may be pushed back.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed not unlikely to him that there were men whose souls,
+consciously or unconsciously, either by reason of their crimes or for
+the better accomplishment of an evil desire, could go out from their
+bodies while they slept, and be changed into the forms of beasts of
+prey between sunset and dawn-rise. At all events, this was a
+phenomenon which could not be disproved, and there were many who
+believed it true.</p>
+
+<p>So he recalled unjudgingly the story of Jacques, also he remembered an
+instance still nearer home&mdash;that of the Hudson Bay factor, who had
+prayed to God that he might gaze with his living eyes upon his
+disembodied soul.</p>
+
+<p>It was not the possibility of the fact which he doubted, but
+Spurling's motive in telling him such a tale.</p>
+
+<p>Might he not have shown him the gold only in order to regain his
+friendship, and then have lied to him in order to restrain him from
+investigating, and, perhaps, with the purpose of sowing distrust in
+his mind concerning Beorn and Eyelids? Whatever had been his purpose,
+<i>there</i> was the gold; Granger was determined, in spite of the risk, to
+see the Forbidden River for himself. Spurling was speaking, "And his
+eyebrows meet," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Granger knew to what he was referring, for, all the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span> world over, where
+this belief is current, it is supposed that the werewolf may be
+detected in his human guise by the meeting of his eyebrows, which
+appear like wings, as if his soul were prepared for flight.</p>
+
+<p>He was about to reply, when his hand, straying about his throat,
+chanced upon the silver chain by which the locket of Mordaunt was
+suspended, which he had stolen from the body of Strangeways. It was
+like a warning voice, recalling the past, which urged him to distrust
+this man. Spurling must have seen the change, for he leant over
+towards him appealingly, as if he were about to entreat him to be
+patient. With a gesture of annoyance Granger rose to his feet and
+commenced to walk away; but he halted sharply and drew into the
+shadow, signing to Spurling to keep quiet. From very far away, borne
+on the stillness of the night, they could hear the rhythmic beat of
+several paddle-blades.</p>
+
+<p>Crawling upon his hands and knees, Spurling joined him. "What is it?"
+he asked. "Is it Eyelids again?" Granger pointed up-river. "They're
+coming from the west," he whispered, "and there are at least four men
+by the sound of the blades."</p>
+
+<p>"What men come from the west at this season? Surely, they should be
+travelling in the opposite direction, going towards God's Voice?"</p>
+
+<p>"They should be, and it is for that reason that I fear for your
+safety."</p>
+
+<p>Nothing more was said, but Spurling guessed what was implied&mdash;that
+this might be a fresh messenger of justice, coming down the Last
+Chance River to rob him of his life.</p>
+
+<p>Very stealthily, taking advantage of every shadow, they crept down the
+hillside through the underbrush,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span> till they came to the cove where
+they had landed. Twenty paces from the water's edge they hid
+themselves, at a point from which they could command a view of the
+travellers' approach.</p>
+
+<p>Nearer and nearer the monotonous swirling of the water, beaten by the
+paddles, came; the darkness ahead of the island shifted and took
+shape; they could distinctly hear the sound of men's voices, engaged
+in low-pitched and angry conversation. A large canoe, carrying six
+men, which flew the red flag of the Hudson Bay Company, shot out from
+the shadows. Now they could make out some of the words which were
+being spoken by two of the travellers.</p>
+
+<p>"And you say that you believe he's innocent! Well then I tell you that
+he's a damned scoundrel. If he didn't actually kill him, it wasn't for
+lack of the desire; you may bet your sweet life on that. In any case,
+he's a demoralising influence in the district, and it's best for all
+parties that he should be put out of the way."</p>
+
+<p>A second voice interrupted at this point; it seemed to be arguing and
+trying to conciliate, but its tones were so low and spoken so rapidly
+that it was only possible to gather its general intention. The first
+voice spoke again.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care about the other man; there's no sense in looking for
+him. He's probably dead by now. But the fellows I can't stand are
+these blamed private traders; they're always up to some dirty work.
+When I get my chance of putting one of them out of business, I don't
+hesitate. To hell with all private traders, I say."</p>
+
+<p>The canoe had now drawn level with the cove, so that Granger was able
+to recognise its occupants. In the stern sat the Indian steersman,
+with a rifle ready to his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span> hand. Next to him sat a large red-bearded
+man, broad in the shoulders, massive in the jowl, almost brutal in his
+evidence of strength; even in that dusky light one could feel that his
+face was clenched in a scowl, and that his eyes were piercingly gray
+and cruel. Facing him, with his back towards the prow, sat P&egrave;re
+Antoine, a little bent forward, gesticulating with his hands, his
+whole attitude that of one who is trying to explain and persuade.
+After him came the remaining three Indian and half-breed paddle-men,
+sharp-featured and unemotional, stooping vigorously to their work.</p>
+
+<p>"And what do you propose doing?" asked P&egrave;re Antoine.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, what I've already told you a dozen times&mdash;treat him like a mad
+dog. I shall arrest him at once, and take him back with me as prisoner
+to God's Voice. When once I've got him there, I shall make him confess
+and get together sufficient evidence to have him hanged. This whole
+affair has been a scandal, and I'm going to put a stop to it. I shall
+make an example of this man. Why, soon it won't be safe to travel
+anywhere, unless you go protected. He must have had a nice lot of
+ruffians for his friends, if this fellow Spurling was a specimen. And
+now they've taken to paying him visits. . . ."</p>
+
+<p>The canoe bore the speaker out of earshot, leaving the listeners with
+the sentence uncompleted.</p>
+
+<p>Granger was aroused from some very uncomfortable imaginings by
+Spurling, who, touching him on the elbow, exclaimed in surprise, "Why,
+it isn't me; it's you they're after!"</p>
+
+<p>Then, when he received no answer, he asked, "What is it that you have
+done?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was Cain accusing Judas with a vengeance.</p>
+
+<p>"Done! I've done nothing," Granger exclaimed, pushing him aside;
+"Robert Pilgrim is mistaken."</p>
+
+<p>"That's what we all say, until we are forced to own up."</p>
+
+<p>But Granger was not listening to what Spurling said; he was tortured
+with the truth of one sentence which he had heard that night. "If he
+didn't actually kill him, it wasn't for lack of the desire." How had
+Robert Pilgrim guessed that? As he himself had confessed to
+Strangeways, he had been tempted at first to let him go on his way
+unwarned, and take his chances of falling through the ice. Eventually
+he had cautioned him, but so late and in such a manner that his words
+had only had the effect of skilfully forwarding his earlier base
+intention. <i>If he had not actually killed him, it was not for lack of
+the desire.</i> And by how much was he superior to this man, crouching at
+his side, whom he had so often condemned and had again condemned that
+night?</p>
+
+<p>Spurling answered that question for him. Rising to his feet and
+stretching his cramped arms and legs, he remarked, "Well, of course,
+if you won't take me into your confidence, there's nothing more to be
+said. If you don't want to tell me, I won't trouble you by asking
+again; but it seems to me that we're both in the one boat now."</p>
+
+<p>This new sense of equality with his companion, though it was only an
+equality in crime, had suddenly brought about a change for the better
+in Spurling. He carried himself freely, in the old defiant manner, and
+had lost his attitude of cringing subservience. At first Granger had
+it in his heart to hate him for the change, knowing,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span> as he did, that
+it arose from an unhesitating acceptance of this chance-heard,
+unproved assertion of his own kindred degradation. But soon the hatred
+gave way to another emotion, which, perhaps, had its genesis in a
+memory of those earlier days, when this man had been willing to stand
+between him and the world. In gazing upon him, looking so big and
+powerful, he was comforted with a sense that his misery was shared. A
+latter-day writer has wisely recorded, "I have observed that the mere
+knowing that other people have been tried as we have been tried is a
+consolation to us, and that we are relieved by the assurance that our
+sufferings are not special and peculiar. In the worst of maladies, the
+healing effect which is produced by the visit of a friend who can
+simply say, 'I have endured all that,' is most marked."</p>
+
+<p>And it was this consolation which Granger now began to experience in
+Spurling's presence.</p>
+
+<p>Though the separate circumstances which lay behind their common
+accusation were utterly different, the one man being innocent of the
+infamy wherewith he was charged and the other guilty, their danger was
+the same.</p>
+
+<p>Without telling him anything of Strangeways' death or entering into
+any explanation of the reasons for which he was suspected, Granger
+determined to face, without dispute, the premier fact in the
+case&mdash;that he was hunted for his life as was Spurling&mdash;and to plan for
+the future with him, as though he were his fellow-criminal in result
+as well as in intent.</p>
+
+<p>They returned to their former station, on the rock beneath the
+solitary pine, from which they could command a view of the approach to
+the island on every side,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span> and there lay themselves down, so that
+their presence might not be observed. Then Granger spoke, "Well, and
+what is to be done?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>Spurling's answer was brief and to the point. "Hide here till the way
+is clear; then seek out the Forbidden River, and afterwards escape."</p>
+
+<p>"But Eyelids knows where we are, and he may betray us?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but he does not know, unless you have told him, that I am a man
+with a price upon his head; and it is me, not you, whom he hates."</p>
+
+<p>"And we have no food."</p>
+
+<p>"If the worst comes to the worst, we have the huskies; and it seems to
+me that the priest was your friend&mdash;and then there is your wife."</p>
+
+<p>Even in his present predicament Granger could not restrain a smile,
+for it had not occurred to him to rely on Peggy for help&mdash;<i>his wife</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he replied grimly, "there is my wife."</p>
+
+<p>But before the night was over he had occasion to regret his sneer.
+They had agreed to keep watch, turn and turn about, two hours at a
+stretch. Spurling was on guard, when Granger was aroused by the
+furious yelping of the huskies on the shore which was nearest to the
+river-bank.</p>
+
+<p>Peering cautiously over the edge of the rock, they could see that
+something was swimming down the current, making for the island, but
+whether man or animal they could not yet discern. As it came nearer
+they saw that it was a head, upon which was balanced a burden, which
+the swimmer supported with one hand. Running down to where the huskies
+were gathered, they cuffed them into silence, and there waited. The
+laboured breathing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span> grew louder and louder; presently a face was
+lifted clear of the water, which Granger recognised. Turning to
+Spurling, as he stepped into the river to help the swimmer out, he
+whispered, "It's Peggy."</p>
+
+<p>He caught her in his arms, and, taking her bundle from her, drew her
+safe to land. She was naked and shivered in the cold night air&mdash;a
+slender statue of bronze. Her hair hung dripping about her shoulders,
+and her eyes were bright with excitement. Granger thought, as he gazed
+on her, that he had never realised how beautiful she was. Freed from
+her conventional European garments, there was a grace of rebellion
+about her which brought her into harmony with the forest environment,
+which was also unconfined.</p>
+
+<p>But she had come to the island on a serious errand, and with no
+thought of being admired. Drawing her husband to one side, she told
+him that he would find a revolver and food, sufficient for three days,
+in the bundle which she had brought, and advised him to lie quietly on
+the island until Robert Pilgrim should have gone away. She told him
+that P&egrave;re Antoine was his friend, and was doing his best to save him.
+When Granger asked her how she had known where he was, she replied
+that Eyelids had told her, but that she had made him promise to tell
+no one else, so that even Antoine was in ignorance of his whereabouts.
+She had given them to understand that he had set out for God's Voice a
+week ago, and had simulated surprise and grave concern that he had not
+arrived before the factor's departure; but she added, "They know that
+I am lying."</p>
+
+<p>When Granger referred to the murder with which he was charged, and
+began hurriedly to explain why he had not told her about it, she
+became strangely per<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span>turbed, and cut him short, saying that she must
+get back to the store before her absence was observed. It was quite
+evident to him that she had not for a moment doubted but that he was
+guilty; it was also evident that so small a misdemeanour as killing a
+man was not reckoned in her code of morals as being very blameworthy.
+He felt hurt at her lack of faith in his integrity; but afterwards,
+when he came to think things over, was amazed at her unswerving
+loyalty in spite of that deficiency.</p>
+
+<p>He watched her plunge into the river on her return journey, swim
+across, run lightly up the bank to where her clothes were lying, and
+disappear in the gloom of the forest.</p>
+
+<p>"If I could only learn to care for her," he thought, "even here, in
+Keewatin, I might have something left to live for." And then, in the
+solemnity which precedes the sunrise, made conscious of the emptiness
+which her departure had left, he added, "And I do begin to care."</p>
+
+<p>It was noticeable that in all that she had said, she had made no
+reference to Spurling. For the next three days they lay in hiding, no
+one coming near them, either friend or enemy. To occupy the time, and
+forget their anxiety, as though they were not men who dwelt beneath
+the shadow of death, they talked of their old quest, making plans for
+the future, and mapping out with their fingers in the dust new routes,
+by the following of which El Dorado might be attained. And it was thus
+that they strove to escape the pain of the realness of their
+present&mdash;by entering into a faery land, sufficiently remote from life
+to remain unthreatened.</p>
+
+<p>It was in this land of the imagination that they had first met, and
+formed their friendship. Revisiting it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span> in one another's company, the
+hideousness of what had happened was, for the time being, blotted out;
+they renewed their former intimacy and passion. With the mention of
+familiar names, kind associations of bygone pleasures were aroused,
+and the old affection sprang to life. They shrank from any allusion to
+such things as had befallen them since their London days. Yet
+continually, in the midst of the most eager conversation, one or other
+of them would glance up, and cast his eyes along the river to the
+eastward, remembering Murder Point. It was in the early dawn of the
+fourth day, when, gazing toward the store, Granger descried two red
+squares of sail flapping against the sunrise. It was his lookout, and
+Spurling was asleep. He aroused him, bending over him and crying, "The
+York boats are coming from Crooked Creek; we shall be rid of Robert
+Pilgrim now." When Spurling was thoroughly awake and had seen the
+sails for himself, he asked him to explain. Then Granger told him how,
+in the summer of every year, the outposts of the Hudson Bay Company
+send in their winter's catch of furs to the head fort of their
+district, which in this case was God's Voice, where the skins are
+baled and graded, and dispatched to the London headquarters&mdash;which,
+being the most important duty of a factor's year, meant that Robert
+Pilgrim would have to return in order to superintend.</p>
+
+<p>All through the long June day they waited, hoping to see their enemy's
+departure; but the sails had been lowered and nothing was now visible
+of the York boats save their tall bare masts jutting above the
+river-banks. At times they would see groups of voyageurs, walking
+distantly among the trees, perhaps assisting the factor in one last
+lazy search for the fugitive. As the heat of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span> the afternoon increased,
+even these disappeared. But, when evening was come, they saw, to their
+great joy, that the sails were hoisted again; and presently, borne to
+them over the brooding stillness, they heard the cries of the rowers
+and the thud of the heavy oars in the wooden rowlocks. Those sounds
+meant freedom to them; they trembled in their excitement.</p>
+
+<p>Peering out from between the bushes, they watched the approach of the
+two black galleys, each with its eight oarsmen and cargo of piled-up
+bales, like pirate craft returning with their spoils. The flashing of
+the gawdy scarves of the men, the motion of their bodies as they stood
+up for the stroke, flung their weight upon the enormous oars, and sat
+down at the finish, only to rise up again with monotonous shouts of
+encouragement, the banging of the sail against the mast, the rippling
+of the water as the prow pressed forward&mdash;all these spoke of life to
+the watchers, of endeavour, and bravery, and travel, causing their
+blood to redouble its pace and their hope to arise. There was still
+one doubt which troubled them, lest, in spite of the need of his
+presence at the fort, the enmity of Robert Pilgrim should have
+persuaded him to stay. But that was soon laid to rest, when in the
+bows of the leading York boat they saw his canoe, and later, as the
+sail swung round, caught a glimpse of the red-bearded man himself,
+seated in the stern. Antoine was by his side. As the boat passed by,
+they strained their ears to catch any scrap of conversation which
+might be of use to them in making their escape. But the noise of the
+voyageurs and of the wind in the sail was deafening, moreover the boat
+was making good headway, so that they only overheard one phrase:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You've brought me on a fool's errand. You say the man is dead, and
+you've shown me his grave, and yet. . . ." It was Pilgrim who was
+speaking; but before he had finished his sentence, his voice was
+drowned in the shouting of the men and the splashing of the blades.</p>
+
+<p>Granger, having watched them out of sight, turned to Spurling with a
+sigh of relief. "Thank God, they've gone," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Then he noticed that his companion was deadly pale. "What's the matter
+now," he asked; "are you so badly cut up at parting with such dear
+friends?"</p>
+
+<p>"Did you hear what he said?" gasped Spurling, pushing his face nearer,
+and staring Granger squarely between the eyes. "Did you hear what he
+said? 'You say the man is dead, and you've shown me his grave, and
+yet. . . .' And yet what? Can you guess how that sentence was going to
+end?"</p>
+
+<p>Granger was bewildered by his ferocious earnestness. He could not
+imagine its purpose, or what had caused it. "Why, of course I heard
+what he said," he replied. "I suppose Antoine's been trying to
+persuade the factor that I am dead, and he's loath to believe it."</p>
+
+<p>"If that is what he meant all the better for us, but I doubt it."</p>
+
+<p>But why he doubted it Granger could not get him to confess; so,
+turning his mind to other thoughts, like a sensible man, he set about
+launching the canoe, preparatory to the return to Murder Point. The
+last sight they saw as they paddled away, was the four gray huskies,
+which Spurling had brought with him on his first arrival, seated on
+their haunches in a row by the water's edge, raising their dismal
+voices to the sky. "Looks as though<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span> those damned beasts were doing
+their best to call Pilgrim back," said Spurling.</p>
+
+<p>On the way to the Point they talked matters over, and determined that,
+since they had no time to waste, they would stop at the store only so
+long as was necessary for the getting together of an outfit, and would
+depart for the Forbidden River that night. Eyelids and Beorn were to
+be left in charge at Murder Point, which would serve to flatter at
+least one of them, and would keep them occupied. If they should demand
+an explanation for this sudden going away, the answer was obvious,
+that Granger did not choose to be arrested by the factor of God's
+Voice. There was only one embarrassment which stood in their way,
+which was that in Granger's absence the boat would probably arrive
+from Garnier, Parwin and Wrath, bringing articles of trade in exchange
+for his year's collection of furs, letters of instructions from the
+partners for the future conduct of their interests, and expecting to
+carry back to Winnipeg his annual statement of accounts. He made up
+his mind to meet this difficulty by ordering Peggy to tell the
+partners that he was dead. Such a report, he calculated, were it
+believed and properly circulated, would help him greatly in his escape
+from Keewatin, when he had gathered his gold on the Forbidden River
+and was ready to go out. This course of action had been suggested to
+him by the unfinished sentence of Robert Pilgrim, which they had
+overheard.</p>
+
+<p>As they drew near the Point, they were struck with the profoundness of
+its quiet. They themselves had experienced so great a change in their
+four days of absence, so much of emotional strife and perturbation,
+that they were somehow surprised to find it unaltered.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span> Beorn, as
+usual, was sitting on the pier-head, smoking his pipe; he did not look
+up or recognise them. Eyelids, on the other side of the river, was
+setting his evening nets: he nodded to Granger from across the water,
+smiled and went on with his work. On entering the shack, they
+discovered Peggy busily engaged over the evening meal, as though they
+had forwarned her as to when they would arrive. Her face betrayed
+neither annoyance nor pleasure&mdash;she might never have visited Huskies'
+Island. In the presence of so much that was commonplace, Spurling's
+fantastic account of what had happened to him on the Forbidden River
+seemed absurd and outrageous.</p>
+
+<p>It took them two hours to prepare their outfit and carry it down to
+the canoe; they were in no hurry to set out, for so long as they were
+on the Last Chance they intended to travel only by night.</p>
+
+<p>No one seemed to notice their doings, and even they themselves,
+becoming infected with the quiet of their surroundings, gradually
+ceased from conversing, and, except for an occasional necessary
+question, did their work in silence. At last, when it had grown as
+dark as it ever is in June time in Keewatin, signalling to one another
+with their eyes, they agreed that it was time to set out. Spurling
+having stepped down to the pier, Granger looked round for Peggy. He
+found her sitting in the grass a few paces behind him; she had come
+there so gently that he had been unaware of her nearness. Taking his
+place beside her, he commenced to speak to her the words which he had
+planned to say. She listened attentively, making no sign which would
+betray her state of mind. "Do you understand?" he asked her; and she
+for answer bowed her head.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Thinking that she was indifferent as to what became of him, he rose to
+his feet, saying in a hard voice, "Good-bye. I must be going. Thank
+you for what you did for me on the island!" He had turned his back and
+descended the mound a few paces, when he felt her clinging to his
+hand, pressing it against her cheek, and he knew that she was crying.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, what's the matter?" he asked, bending down to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't go, don't go," she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not, Peggy? I've not been of much use to you. I don't think
+you'll miss me."</p>
+
+<p>"I hate that man," she panted.</p>
+
+<p>"But why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because he's taking you away from me; and, though you may return from
+this journey, there will come a day when you will not return and I
+shall be left alone."</p>
+
+<p>Granger was surprised at her display of passion&mdash;she had seemed to him
+so cold. He had come to think of her as only a squaw-wife: but it was
+the white woman in her who had spoken those words. He tried to comfort
+her, denying her doubts and talking to her as though she had been a
+frightened child. But throughout all that he said she kept on
+whispering, "He is taking you away from me. One day he will see to it
+that you do not return."</p>
+
+<p>And had Granger stopped to think, he would have known that what she
+said was true; for, when once his dream of El Dorado had become
+capable of accomplishment, she would be to him as nothing. He heard
+Spurling calling him by name. Lifting her to her feet, he kissed her
+upon the mouth, and, amazed at his own kindness, as though he had done
+something shameful,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span> ran down the mound, stepped into the canoe, and
+launched out.</p>
+
+<p>Bending forward to Spurling, who was sitting in the bows, "It's El
+Dorado or death this time," he whispered. Spurling did not answer him,
+but he saw him crouch his shoulders as if to avoid a lash, and heard
+his mutter, like the echo of his own voice, "<i>Or death</i>."</p>
+
+<p>The canoe was travelling heavily, for Spurling had stopped paddling.
+Granger was about to expostulate with him when, watching him more
+attentively, he discovered that his eyes were fixed upon the bend. As
+they drew nearer, and were passing by, his body trembled and he buried
+his face in his hands. Not until the bend was behind him did he take
+up his paddle&mdash;and then he flung himself into the work with frenzy, as
+one who fled.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span>
+<h3>THE FORBIDDEN RIVER</h3>
+
+<p>"If we are to get back before the winter closes in upon us we must
+start to-night."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling looked up from the pan of dirt which he was washing. "You've
+said that ten times a day in the last two weeks if you've said it
+once," he snapped.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but I mean it this time. We've got all the gold that we can
+carry. If you won't come with me, I shall take the canoe and start
+back by myself."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you will, will you? And d'you think that I don't see through your
+game?" Then noticing how Granger's hand had gone instinctively to his
+hip-pocket, he added, "And if it comes to fighting, I go armed
+myself."</p>
+
+<p>In a flash both men had whipped out their revolvers, but Spurling was
+the fraction of a second late; Granger had him covered.</p>
+
+<p>"So you're going to murder me, after all," Spurling continued
+sneeringly. "You've postponed it a long time; it was at Drunkman's
+Shallows that you were going to do it first. Your excuse then was that
+you weren't John Granger, but your baser self. You were always a good
+hand at excuses. And pray who are you now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Throw away that revolver," shouted Granger, in a voice that was thick
+with anger.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Spurling tossed it a couple of yards away.</p>
+
+<p>"No, that won't do. Throw it into the river. Don't rise to your feet;
+crawl to it on your hands and knees."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling looked at him surlily to see whether he dared disobey, then
+did as he was commanded. There was a flash of silver as the weapon
+spun through the air, a commotion of spray, as though a fish had
+risen, and a distant and more distant shining as it sank down and
+settled on the river-bed.</p>
+
+<p>"That's right. Now let me tell you, Druce Spurling, that you're a fool
+for your pains. If either you or I are to be alive this time next
+year, however we may feel towards one another at present, we've got to
+act as though we were friends. There'll be time enough for quarrelling
+when we've seen the last of Murder Point, and have passed out over the
+winter trail with our gold, and know that we are safe. Why, you fool,
+we've been here nearly four months and we've already got more gold
+than we can take with us; it's October, and the river may close up
+almost any day."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling began to mutter something about how, if it weren't for
+Granger, <i>he'd</i> be able to get out all right.</p>
+
+<p>"What's that you're saying?" Granger interrupted him. "I've heard that
+tale ever since we set out and I'm sick of hearing it. You fancy that
+the Mounted Police think that you are dead, and have ceased to search
+for you, and that I'm the man they're after now. You say that I'm
+known in the district, and that you are unknown, except by that
+half-breed who caught sight of you as you went by God's Voice;
+therefore you argue that I am a danger, a hindrance to you. You'd like
+to get rid of me, so that you may get out with the gold, in safety, by
+yourself. It's the same old trick that you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span> tried to play me in the
+Klondike; you want to reach El Dorado without me. You swine! Do you
+know why it is that the Mounted Police are after me? It's because I
+took pity on you, remembering old times, and tried to prevent your
+being hanged&mdash;that's why. And you make it an excuse for deserting me.
+I've not told you that before, and I can see that you don't believe me
+now. Well, I'm not going to give you the details which would prove
+it&mdash;I'm not asking for gratitude from such a cur as you've turned out.
+All I'm going to say is this: from the first of your coming up here
+I've tried to play fair by you; I've done more than that, I've come
+near giving you my life&mdash;giving, mind you, not letting you take it as
+you've been inclined to do many times. And I'm willing to play fair
+until the end&mdash;until we get outside and are safe; then we can each go
+on our separate ways, if we so decide. I know where I'm going&mdash;to El
+Dorado. I daresay you're going to try to get there too, but that is
+none of my concern. I'm concerned with the present. That canoe is
+mine, and what's left of the grub is mine. The gold we share between
+us. If you don't want to come with me I'll take the canoe and other
+things which belong to me, and my share of the dust and nuggets, and
+you can stay here. But if you come with me, you've got to be
+honourable and behave like a man&mdash;not a husky. I give you two minutes
+to make your choice."</p>
+
+<p>"There isn't any choice to be made," growled Spurling; "you offer me
+your company or starvation. I choose your company, much as I detest
+it. And I'd like to know who you are to speak to me like this? And
+what there is to lose your temper about? If you'd explained what you'd
+wanted, I'd have come quietly; but I'd<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span> rather cut my throat at once
+and be done with it than be ordered about by a man like you&mdash;a fellow
+married to a squaw-wife."</p>
+
+<p>Granger's face went white and his lips trembled; his finger closed
+upon the trigger, then with an effort he controlled himself. "I think
+I've heard enough from you on that point," he said; "suppose we drop
+this discussion and get the canoe ready?"</p>
+
+<p>He turned upon his heel and walked into the hut, followed more slowly
+by Spurling.</p>
+
+<p>This was by no means their first falling out in the past four months;
+from the night that they left Murder Point things had been going from
+bad to worse. Given two men who set out into the forest together,
+bound by the strongest ties of friendship, who travel in one another's
+footsteps and sleep side by side for days and nights at a stretch,
+without seeing any other face but one another's and their own
+reflected visage, with nothing to break the silence but their own
+voices, and the cries of the wilderness, which have become
+irritatingly monotonous because of their sameness and frequent
+reiteration, and it is a thing to be marvelled at if they do not come
+back enemies. But when they set out each with his own hidden secret,
+each with his own private suspicion of his companion, with a gnawing
+enmity between them which has been changed into a show of friendship
+only by force of circumstance, when the object of their journey is a
+possession over which they have quarrelled before and parted company,
+concerning which they are already secretly jealous, then the final
+relationship of those two men can be forecast without any fear of
+error.</p>
+
+<p>Before they had reached the Forbidden River they had ceased to
+converse. By the time that they had landed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span> at the hut, their nerves
+were jangled. Before they had been working there many days they had
+thought their way over all their old grievances, and, like petulant
+children, were on the lookout for any new cause of offence. The cause
+had come when Spurling, tired with rocking the cradle, his face and
+hands swollen by the sun and mosquito-bitten, had said, "I don't see
+why we should take all this trouble. I'm going to quit work."</p>
+
+<p>Granger was attending to the flume which they had constructed. "You're
+going to do no such thing," he had said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I am; you're not my master and I shan't ask your permission.
+There's as much gold as we shall require in those two sacks which the
+Man with the Dead Soul washed out. If you've got such a scrupulous
+conscience, you can dig out your share; but I'm not going to help
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"So you've turned thief now, in addition to your other profession,"
+was the retort which Granger had thrown back.</p>
+
+<p>Out of such small foolishnesses had arisen quarrel after quarrel, so
+that it had become only necessary for Spurling to make a statement for
+Granger to contradict him, or for Granger to express a desire for
+Spurling to thwart its accomplishment. Day by day they would toil
+together, digging out the muck, emptying it into the sluice-boxes or
+testing it in the pan, without exchanging a word; then some trifling
+difficulty would arise, for which, perhaps, neither of them was
+responsible, and they would seize the opportunity to goad one another
+on to murder with the evil of what they said. On one point only were
+they agreed&mdash;the gathering of the most wealth in the shortest time;
+for wealth meant to them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span> escape and the preserving of their lives. To
+this end they feverishly laboured both day and night, reserving no
+special hours for sleep and rest. Yet, even in their escape, as has
+been seen, they did not necessarily include one another; so far as
+Spurling was concerned, when once the gold had been acquired, it was
+"each man for himself." There was no loyalty between them; they were
+kept together only by a common avarice, and by fear of the wideness of
+the Northland.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there were times when Granger would waken to a sense of something
+that was better. By the end of August they had washed out all the dust
+and nuggets that they could possibly carry, and it was then that he
+had recognised that greed, regardless of consequence, had become the
+master-passion of both their lives. The words which the Dead Soul had
+spoken to him would come back, "I will make a man more precious than
+fine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir"&mdash;and he would
+look at Spurling and, bending down above the water, he would regard
+himself. Going over to Spurling he would say, laying his hand upon his
+shoulder, "Druce, in spite of the harsh things which we have spoken,
+we must still be friends, and seek out El Dorado together."</p>
+
+<p>After such a reconciliation they would talk together of their plans
+and the various ways in which they would amend their lives; but
+gradually they came to know that, while they lived, their hatred never
+could be dead, and, defiant of whatsoever resolutions they might make,
+would surely reassert itself. It was the spirit of the North which
+spoke through them, and not they themselves&mdash;the spirit of silence,
+striving to utter itself, and of enmity to all the world.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>They carried out their treasure from the hut and placed it in the
+canoe. It was done up in all kinds of packets, in flour-sacks, empty
+tobacco-tins, torn strips of blanket which they had sewn together, and
+abandoned clothing tied up at the arms and legs. Before they had
+placed it all in, together with what remained to them of their outfit,
+the little craft sat so low in the water that it was evident that it
+would be swamped if there was added to its burden the weight of two
+men. They were compelled to sit down and consider how much of their
+outfit could be abandoned. Even then, when they had rejected all the
+provisions, save those which were necessary for a five days' journey,
+and their blankets and their rifles, the canoe was still unsafe.</p>
+
+<p>At Spurling's suggestion they limited themselves to half rations and
+took off all their clothing except their trousers and shirts; and
+still it was too heavy. Very reluctantly they set to work to take out
+some of the gold, commencing with the smaller amounts. When they had
+finished, they had thrown out all their last month's work, and still
+the canoe was by no means steady.</p>
+
+<p>Spurling, with the foresight and thrift of a man who has a long life
+before him, went into the hut and, bringing out a spade, commenced to
+dig. When he had made a hole of sufficient width and depth, he buried
+the abandoned nuggets and gold dust.</p>
+
+<p>Granger watched him to the end. Then, with a touch of bitterness in
+his tones, he asked, "And what's that for?"</p>
+
+<p>"In case I should ever be able to come back," said Spurling, "and so
+that no one else may find it."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you worry yourself, you'll be in El Dorado<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span> before that time,
+or else hanged. In either case, a trifle like that won't matter."</p>
+
+<p>He scowled; Granger's flippancies on the subject of death, especially
+death with a rope about his neck, always made him feel unhappy. He
+tried to take his place in the stern, but Granger would not trust him
+there; he signed to him to take the forward paddle, where he would
+have no opportunity of making a surprise attack. They pushed off and
+quickly lost sight of the hut, the discovery of which had meant so
+much to them. Now that they had procured their wealth and abandoned
+their diggings, all their eagerness was for escape.</p>
+
+<p>The sunset lay behind them, and before, like a black-mailed host,
+preparing to dispute their passage, the shadows of night were
+gathered. During the past month the forest leaves had turned from
+green, and gray, into copper, yellow, and flaming red. The branches of
+the tallest of the underbrush were already bare and, clustered
+together beneath the tree-trunks, created the effect of scarves of
+mist which shifted from silver to lavender. The floor of the forest
+was of gold, where the fallen foliage had scattered; but, where the
+scrub-oak grew, it was golden splashed with blood. The dominant tone
+of the landscape was of gold and blood; through the heart of which ran
+the river, changing by infinitesimal, overlapping shadings from yellow
+into red, from red into night-colour, from night-colour into
+nothingness. Down this roadway passed the trespassers, with the thing
+which they had stolen weighing down their canoe to the point of
+danger; murder was in their hearts, and grey fear ran before them.
+Instinctively they bowed their heads, suspicious of one another,
+peering ahead into the dis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span>tance for an enemy who awaited them, and
+from side to side or behind for one who followed.</p>
+
+<p>During their stay at the hut, nothing had come near to disturb
+them&mdash;nothing in human guise. But from the first they had been aware
+of the timber-wolf, which Spurling had seen on his first visit and had
+described to Granger. It had not shown itself in the daytime and had
+rarely been seen in its entirety at night; but they had known that it
+was near them by the rustling of the bushes, and had at times caught a
+glimpse of its shadow, or of its eyes looking out at them from under
+cover.</p>
+
+<p>Even when they had not heard it, they had come across its footprints.
+Towards the dawn, had one of them risen early and strayed far from
+camp, he had sometimes seen it cross his path ahead, or had heard it
+tracking him. So nervous had they become, that they had never stirred
+far from one another; while one had slept, the other had kept watch.
+Perhaps this dread of a constant menacer, and the more terrible fear
+of being left alone in its presence, had prevented bloodshed when
+their more furious quarrels were at their height. Of a mere wolf, no
+man who is armed need have terror; their discomfort arose from the
+suspicion that this creature, which watched and lay in wait for them,
+was more than an animal.</p>
+
+<p>There had been a night when it was Spurling's turn to keep guard, and
+he had slept. Granger had wakened with a nervous sense of peril.
+Through the open door of the hut he had seen the silver of the
+moonlight in the tree-tops across the river and had seen the outline
+of his companion stretched along the ground. As he watched, he had
+seen a shadow fall across the threshold,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span> followed by a head. It was
+grey in colour, the ears were laid back, and the fangs were bared as
+if with hunger. But it was the eyes which had absorbed his attention.
+They were angry and reproachful; he had seen them before&mdash;they were
+the eyes of a man whose soul is dead. They recalled to him that night
+when Beorn had declared himself. That he recognised them, as he
+admitted to himself when daylight was come, may have been only fancy;
+but the impression which he had while he gazed on them was very real.
+Moreover, he saw distinctly the scar of the wound which Spurling had
+inflicted in his fight at the cache. Then the head had been withdrawn,
+and the hut had been darkened by a huge form which stood across the
+doorway. He had heard Spurling turn over on his side, rouse up and cry
+out.</p>
+
+<p>The form had crouched and sprung, and the light shone in again. There
+was a sound of scuffling outside, followed by a thud. Leaping to his
+feet, dazed and bewildered, he had run out in time to see a
+timber-wolf of monstrous size, with Spurling's arm in its mouth,
+dragging him away into the forest. Careless of his own safety, he had
+gone after the animal, belabouring its head with the stock of his
+rifle, for he was afraid to shoot, lest he should wound his companion.
+It had dropped its prey and fled, bounding off into the dusk between
+the tree-trunks, leaving Spurling a little mauled but not much
+injured. This experience had served to prove to them that, however
+much they hated, they were still indispensable to each other's safety,
+and must hold together.</p>
+
+<p>Granger, for his own peace of mind, had sought to find an explanation
+for this happening. If the beast was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span> indeed Beorn's soul, then why
+was it exiled there, on the Forbidden River? Had Beorn killed the
+miners, in his underground fights on the Comstock, not out of
+righteous indignation, as he had stated, but only for the pleasure of
+destroying life and out of envious, disappointed avarice? Had he
+mocked God consciously in making Him responsible for those crimes, and
+in attributing to Him their inspiration? If these things were so, then
+this might have been his fitting punishment, that, when by his own
+wickedness he had made himself an outcast from the company of mankind,
+and had been compelled to banish himself, for the sake of his own
+preservation, to a land where nothing was of much value, money least
+of all, there he had discovered the gold in the profitless search of
+which he had made himself vile. The power over gladness, which it
+would have represented to another man, had been of no use to him now,
+for he had not dared to take it out of the district to where it would
+acquire its artificial worth; yet he had not dared to remain on the
+Forbidden River: for there was no food there. So his body and soul had
+parted company; his body going south to God's Voice, while his soul
+stayed near to the thing after which it had lusted, for which it had
+exchanged its happiness, to guard it, that it might not become the
+possession of a freer man and bring him the gladness which to a
+murderer is denied.</p>
+
+<p>This had seemed to Granger to be the only explanation which fitted in
+with all the facts. In accepting it, he had found room for the
+suspicion that he also had laid waste his life not for the sake of
+romance, not for his dream's sake, but for the sake of greed alone.
+Having made gold his hope, having said to the fine gold, "Thou<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span> art my
+confidence," he had committed an iniquity to be punished by the judge.</p>
+
+<p>Had he suffered all that punishment as yet, or was there worse to
+follow? Would the worst that he could expect be death? Once, when he
+was poor, he had only feared life; but now, with his treasure beneath
+his feet, with the canoe gliding southward on the journey out, there
+was added this new terror&mdash;the fear of death. He desired most
+passionately to live now.</p>
+
+<p>Darkness had fallen and the air was growing colder. Presently, flake
+by flake, the first snow of winter drifted down. The two men said
+nothing, but they paddled faster, for the chill struck into their
+chests through their shirts, making them repent the folly which had
+led them to abandon their clothing that more gold might be carried.
+Every now and again, Spurling broke out into a fit of coughing and, as
+he shivered, the canoe trembled. As for Granger his hands were heavy,
+his arms ached, and his fingers were numb; he dimly wondered at his
+own perseverance that he still continued to ply his paddle. As the
+cold spread through him, his senses took to sleeping. He was aroused
+by a sudden jerk and a shout from Spurling, "Curse you. Back water.
+Turn her head out into the river."</p>
+
+<p>Looking up, he saw that they had struck the bank and come near
+capsizing. And he saw more than that; scarcely two yards away a pair
+of glowing eyes shone out at him.</p>
+
+<p>"For the sake of God, make haste," cried Spurling; "the brute's about
+to pounce."</p>
+
+<p>With a twist of the paddle he swung the canoe's head round, and with
+the help of Spurling drove her out. They were none too early, for,
+just behind them,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span> where a moment since the canoe had been hanging,
+they heard a splash.</p>
+
+<p>For the rest of the night they kept watch over themselves lest they
+slept. Till the dawn broke, whenever they turned their eyes toward the
+bank, they could discern the grey streak of the timber-wolf, dodging
+in and out between the tree-trunks, keeping pace with them. So long as
+they were on the Forbidden River they journeyed both day and night,
+allowing themselves scant time for rest. If they had been eager to get
+there, they were still more anxious to get away. When in the middle of
+the third night they swung out into the Last Chance, they stopped and
+looked back. The moon was shining; sitting squarely on its haunches
+they could see the timber-wolf, which had run out on the spit of land
+to the water's edge, gazing after them malignantly.</p>
+
+<p>Breaking the long silence, Spurling said, "Thank God, he can come no
+further."</p>
+
+<p>"But his body awaits us at Murder Point," Granger replied.</p>
+
+<p>"I can deal with men's bodies," Spurling said. Then they moved onward,
+pressing up against the current.</p>
+
+<p>At the first hint of daylight they landed and hid themselves, lest, in
+that deserted land, their presence should be detected. The precaution
+proved wise, for about noon a party of belated voyageurs passed
+northward en route for the Crooked Creek. They were singing, keeping
+time with their paddles; their careless gladness made the hunted men,
+for all their gold, feel envious.</p>
+
+<p>They dared not kindle a fire, and at last, that they might save the
+little warmth they had, were compelled to lie down together, breast to
+breast, clasping one another closely as though they were friends. At
+sun<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span>set they again set out. All night long to Granger the sky seemed
+filled with uncouth legendary animals, which trooped across the
+horizon file on file. Sometimes they were Beorn's camels, sometimes
+they were timber-wolves or brindled huskies with yellow faces, but
+more often they were creatures of evil passions, for which there are
+no names. To avoid looking at them, he would keep his eyes in the
+canoe or would stare at Spurling's back. But the sight of his
+companion's monotonous movements, compelling him to go on working when
+his arms ached and his body seemed broken, caused such mad fury to
+arise within him that he feared for his own actions, and was glad to
+return his eyes to the clouds. At dawn, as though a golden door had
+been opened, the creatures passed in and disappeared, and he saw them
+no more till sunset.</p>
+
+<p>For himself, he would gladly have lain down, and died, had not
+Spurling with the same indomitable courage which he had displayed on
+the Dawson trail, roused him up and compelled him with his brutal
+jibes to play the man. By the end of the first day on the Last Chance
+their food gave out, and since leaving the hut all their meals had
+been scanty; then they would willingly have given a third of the gold
+which they carried in exchange for a hatful of the flour which, in
+their greed for nuggets, they had left behind on the Forbidden River's
+banks. If a bird flew over their heads, they dared not fire a gun lest
+its report should be heard, so great was their fear of possible
+arrest.</p>
+
+<p>As their weakness increased, the downward rush of the current seemed
+to gather strength; there were times when their progress was almost
+imperceptible. Sufficient snow had already fallen to cloak the land in
+white<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span>ness, and they were very conscious that every day the
+temperature, was sinking lower. In the middle of the seventh night of
+their journey they felt something grate against their prow, and they
+knew that the river was freezing over. They had only five more miles
+to traverse; they were too exhausted and stiff with cold to attempt to
+reach their destination by walking along the bank, even if they had
+been willing to abandon their treasure; so there was nothing for it
+but to make one last effort. So nerveless were they with fatigue that,
+when they went by the bend, Spurling forgot to be afraid of the thing
+which he had seen there; he had not the strength to remember. They
+reached the pier when the dawn was breaking, so faint that they could
+not rise and crawl out. They would have drifted back over the way
+which they had travelled, had not the ice closed in and held them.</p>
+
+<p>Two hours after their arrival, Eyelids looked out from the window at
+Murder Point and, seeing them, came to their rescue and lifted them
+into the shack.</p>
+
+<p>They had arrived none too early, for that day the river froze over,
+the snow fell in earnest, and the Keewatin winter settled down.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span>
+<h3>THE BETRAYAL</h3>
+
+<p>Granger had been sick and delirious for several days as a result of
+exposure and starvation. Day and night Peggy had nursed him with
+unwearying attention; one would have supposed that he had been always
+kind to her, and that she was greatly in his debt. Since his brain had
+cleared she had said little to him; but, when she touched him, he
+could feel the thrill of passion that travelled through her hands. Her
+face told him nothing; it was only when suddenly she raised up her
+eyes that he saw the longing which they could not hide. Because her
+eyes betrayed her, she rarely looked at him. He would gladly have
+spoken with her frankly, but her reserve deterred him, and, moreover,
+a great anxiety weighed upon his mind&mdash;he did not know how many of his
+secrets and hidden intentions he had let out in his ravings. The
+altered bearing of his companions made him aware that they had each
+learnt something fresh about himself, one another, and the manner in
+which he regarded them. The Man with the Dead Soul was alone
+unchanged.</p>
+
+<p>So he sat among them on his couch of furs as morosely as Beorn
+himself, striving to grope his way back into the darkness from which
+his mind had issued, torturing himself to remember how much his lips
+had admitted during the time when his vigilance was relaxed. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span> could
+only recall the shadows of his words and acts; the real things, which
+lurked behind the shadows, continually evaded capture. Yet it seemed
+to him that he must have laid bare all his life, confessing to Eyelids
+and his sister his every affection and his every treachery, whether
+accomplished or intended.</p>
+
+<p>Then, if he had done that, he had told Peggy to her face how he was
+purposing to desert her! It was this suspicion which kept him silent;
+he waited for her to reveal herself. But she refused to help him; in
+her looks there was no condemnation, and in her treatment of him
+nothing but gentleness. Surely there should have been contempt, if she
+had known <i>all</i> about him!</p>
+
+<p>Two pictures stood out so sharply from the background chaos of his
+impressions, that he believed them to be veritable memories. The one
+was of Peggy kneeling at his side, taking him in her arms, as though
+he were a child, and laying his head upon her breast, and of himself
+mistaking her for his mother or Mordaunt, and speaking to her all
+manner of tenderness. The other was of his perpetual terror lest
+Spurling had gone southward without him, having stolen his share of
+the treasure; and of one night when Peggy to quiet him had roused up
+Eyelids, who had brought in Spurling&mdash;and Spurling's hands were bound.</p>
+
+<p>When he had come to himself, his first action had been to look round
+for Spurling&mdash;and he was not there. Two days had now passed, and there
+was still no sign of him. As his strength returned, the fear of his
+delirium gained ground upon him&mdash;lest Spurling had escaped. Brooding
+over the past with a sick man's fancy, he discovered a new cause for
+agitation&mdash;<i>if Spurling had departed, he would never know the truth
+about Mordaunt</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span> For the recovery of the gold he scarcely cared now;
+the apparent actualness of Mordaunt's presence, bending over him in
+his delirium, had recalled her vividly to his memory, awakening the
+passion which he had striven to crush down, so that now it seemed
+all-important to him that he should ask Spurling that one question,
+"Was the body that was found near Forty-Mile clothed in a woman's
+dress?"</p>
+
+<p>The return of a certain season, which the mind has associated with a
+special experience, will often arouse and poignantly concentrate an
+old emotion, which has been almost forgotten throughout the other
+months of the year. The arrival of Spurling, and the agony which he
+had suffered when he had begun to suspect that the woman whom he loved
+was dead, had happened when the snow was on the ground; perhaps it was
+the sight of the frozen river and the white landscape which now caused
+him to remember so furiously the vengeance which he had planned,
+should Mordaunt prove to be the woman whom Spurling had murdered. So,
+for the time being, the seeking of El Dorado and preserving of his own
+life seemed paltry objects when compared with the asking of that
+question, and the exacting, if need be, of the necessary revenge.</p>
+
+<p>On the third day after the recovery of his senses he could endure his
+suspicions no longer. Peggy had gone out for a little while; Eyelids
+was busy in the store; only the Man with the Dead Soul was left with
+him in the shack. Seizing his opportunity, he got up and dressed. He
+was so weak that at first he could scarcely stand. Tottering toward
+the door, he already had his hand upon the latch when Beorn arose and
+followed him. Though Granger had asked him no question, "I will show
+you," he said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Outside they met Peggy returning; but her father waved her sternly
+aside, and, putting his arms about Granger to support him, guided him
+to the back of Bachelors' Hall. A stoutly built cabin was there, which
+stood by itself and was windowless, the door of which was iron-bound
+and padlocked; it was used as a cell in which Indians and half-breeds
+were kept, should they grow refractory. Producing the key, he opened
+the door; as they entered they were greeted with a volley of curses.</p>
+
+<p>In the farthest corner lay a man, crouched on a bed of mouldy furs.
+The cell was not often used, and was covered with decaying
+fungus-growth from the dampness of the past summer. When Granger tried
+to speak to him, his voice was drowned by the sort of noise that a dog
+makes when it comes out from its kennel; then he saw that Spurling was
+chained low down to the floor by his hands and feet, so that he could
+not stand upright. With an hysteric cry of gladness he ran forward,
+and was only saved from Spurling's teeth, as he bent back his head, by
+Beorn, who pushed him to one side so heavily that he fell to the
+ground. Then Eyelids came in, and picked him up and carried him back
+to the shack.</p>
+
+<p>For the next few days he had plenty of leisure to reflect. He wondered
+whether Beorn's treatment of Spurling, and the fact that he had shown
+him to him on the earliest occasion, was meant as a threat to himself;
+or had the disclosures which he had made in his delirium given him the
+impression that he also was entirely Spurling's enemy. The bearing of
+Eyelids and of Peggy led him to believe that the latter supposition
+was correct. His natural instinct was to free<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span> the man at once,&mdash;but
+he thought better of it; Spurling would be at least kept out of
+mischief there till he himself was well.</p>
+
+<p>Now that his mind was at ease, he commenced to mend rapidly; when two
+more days had passed, he was up and able to get about without much
+help. On visiting the trading-store he found that his canoe was lying
+there, just as he had brought it back; nothing of its contents had
+been removed or unpacked. He sat down beside it, and tried to
+formulate his plans.</p>
+
+<p>So far, in spite of his illness, everything had happened for the best.
+Spurling was safe until he should require him. The gold was now in his
+absolute possession. Very shortly Eyelids and Beorn would set out on
+their winter's hunt, leaving him, save for Peggy, free to act
+unobserved. But he had made a discovery, the knowledge of which
+disturbed him&mdash;that a part, at least, of the reason for Peggy's
+reticence and new gentleness was that before long she would be a
+mother. That fact made him feel differently towards her; he could not
+now desert her, for it would mean abandoning his child.</p>
+
+<p>When he pictured to himself what the Northland might do for a child
+who was fatherless, especially if it were a girl, he knew that,
+whatever plans he made, they must include his half-breed wife.
+Moreover, her approaching maternity appealed to the chivalry in his
+nature, making him ashamed that he had ever thought to leave her.
+Until his child was born, at whatever risk to himself, he must
+postpone his departure and lie in hiding at Murder Point. And after
+that? He must take her into his confidence, as he should have done
+long ago, as if she were all white.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span> He would have to leave her behind
+at first, but would make arrangements for her to follow after him when
+the road was clear.</p>
+
+<p>Having arrived at this point, his train of reasoning was broken off by
+the appearance of Eyelids, who came to ask for two outfits, and to
+inform him that he and Beorn had determined to set out on the winter
+trail that night. The rest of the day was spent in preparations, and
+the getting together of their teams of huskies.</p>
+
+<p>Just before they left, a visit was paid to Spurling in the cabin, and
+the key was handed over to Granger. While there, Granger referred to
+the matter which he had been wanting to mention all day. Turning to
+Eyelids, as though it were of little importance, he said, "Before you
+return, as I daresay you've noticed, something will have happened. I
+want you to promise me to come back for Christmas Eve, so that we may
+celebrate the event." Then, throwing aside his disguise of
+indifference, he spoke more earnestly, "I want you and Beorn to
+promise me that."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling looked sharply up from his corner; being ignorant of the
+matter which Granger hinted at, he watched to see if the words
+contained a reference to himself. Peggy turned her head away and began
+to steal softly out. But her brother stayed her, and throwing his arm
+about her shoulder, said, "I promise you; we shall return." And Beorn
+gave him his hand as a sign of his assent.</p>
+
+<p>They closed and locked the door on the prisoner, and the father and
+son set out.</p>
+
+<p>A sudden instinct for carefulness had prompted him to make that
+request. At the last moment he had thought that he noticed on Beorn's
+part a certain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span> uneasiness in handing over to him the custody of
+Spurling. He was afraid that the distrust might grow upon him, causing
+him to return unexpectedly, perhaps just at the time when he and
+Spurling were starting on their southward journey. It was to prevent
+such an interference with his plans that he had named a definite time
+for their next meeting, for, by so doing, he had given Beorn to
+understand that he intended to remain at Murder Point throughout
+December. The hinting at the birth of his child had added to his
+request a show of naturalness, and had at the same time let them know
+that he was aware of his wife's condition&mdash;a difficult knowledge to
+communicate to people who spoke rarely, and then only of trivial
+affairs. As yet he had not decided as to when he would set out, for he
+hesitated between the manfully fulfilling of his new responsibility
+and the callously accomplishing of his old purpose; if he should
+choose the latter, he had provided for Peggy so that she would not be
+left too long by herself, by the promise which he had exacted from her
+brother and father to return for Christmas Eve.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time he was left truly alone with her. Standing side by
+side, they watched the trappers descend the Point to the pier, where
+their dogs lay waiting them. The whips cracked and the teams
+straightened out.</p>
+
+<p>For a few strides they moved toward the opposite bank and then, to
+Granger's amazement, wheeled to the left, and commenced travelling
+up-river to the west. The loaded sleds swung lightly over the ice and,
+as he listened, the shouting of the drivers and the yelping of the
+huskies grew fainter, till they were no more heard. He was made
+terribly afraid by the direction they had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span> taken, for he knew that
+Beorn's trapping grounds had always lain to the northwards, and never
+around God's Voice; they were still less likely to do so now, since he
+had quarrelled with the factor. Then why had he gone to the west?</p>
+
+<p>He turned to the girl at his side to question her, "Did you know that
+they were going there?" he said. She did not answer him; he saw that
+her eyes were intently fixed upon the bend. Her lips moved, and her
+hands made the sign of the cross upon her breast as if she were
+praying. Without replying, she entered the shack.</p>
+
+<p>He did not follow her, for his feelings were changed with anger. He
+felt that, whether knowingly or unknowingly, they had betrayed him
+through their secretiveness. While he had been absent they must have
+heard that Spurling was a man with a price upon his head. They might
+even have learnt it from Pilgrim at the time of his June visit, but
+had not laid hands upon him because he had appeared to be his friend.
+But now since their return, in his delirium he had probably uttered
+words concerning Spurling which had left them with the impression that
+he desired his death&mdash;and had given them their excuse for gratifying
+their own covetousness and revenge for the Forbidden River trespass.</p>
+
+<p>Even what he had said to them about returning for Christmas Eve might
+have been taken as having a double meaning, referring not only to the
+birth of the child, but also to the thousand-dollar reward to be
+gained by the arrest. Spoken as it was, in the prison-cabin, that was
+most likely how it had been taken. Since they had accepted him as
+their confederate, it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span> seemed evident that they did not know that the
+arrest of Spurling might entail his own hanging. If all that he had
+conjectured was true, he had now no option but to release Spurling and
+to make good his escape with him at once; for from Murder Point to
+God's Voice was no more than seventy miles. At once! But he would not
+be strong enough to travel for some days yet, and Spurling could not
+be in very excellent condition for such a journey&mdash;to be thrown into
+an out-house and left there for a fortnight, with back bent double and
+arms and legs bound, is not the best kind of training.</p>
+
+<p>Before doing anything rash he would talk to Peggy, and find out how
+much she knew about it. Following her into the shack, he made fast the
+door and threw himself on the pile of furs which had been his couch.
+The lamp was not lighted, but the stove was red-hot and scattered an
+angry glare. He called to her; she came to him timidly from the far
+end of the room and sat down beside him. He commenced abruptly by
+telling her that the man who was chained out there in the cabin was a
+murderer. Did she know that? She nodded. How did she know that? She
+shuddered, and pointed with her hand out of the window in the
+direction of the bend.</p>
+
+<p>He did not gather what she meant, but for the present he let it pass.</p>
+
+<p>And did she know that there were a thousand dollars offered for
+Spurling's capture? She shrugged her shoulders, and again gave her
+assent. Then, raising himself on his elbow, he asked her plainly, "Is
+that what Eyelids has gone to get?"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled down at him as though she were owning to something worthy;
+"I hope so," she said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why do you hope so," he asked in a hard voice; "because of the
+money?"</p>
+
+<p>She drew back from him as though he had affronted her. "No, not for
+that," she said, speaking slowly.</p>
+
+<p>"Then why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because he is trying to take you away from me."</p>
+
+<p>"And you think that when the Mounted Police have hanged him that it
+will be all right, and I shall stay here?"</p>
+
+<p>She did not answer him, but he knew that she was thinking of her
+child. "Whether Spurling escapes or is taken," he said, "will make no
+difference to my doings. I cannot stay; they are hunting for me,
+because they think I also am a murderer."</p>
+
+<p>She turned sharply round. "But we are doing this to save you; we
+thought that you agreed and understood. When you have given them this
+man, they will pardon you, and you will be allowed to stay."</p>
+
+<p>"Who told you that? Was it Antoine?"</p>
+
+<p>"Robert Pilgrim."</p>
+
+<p>He laughed in her face. "Bah! Robert Pilgrim!" he exclaimed. "He told
+you that, and you believed him! Why, you little fool, he doesn't care
+a curse what happens to Spurling, whether he's caught or gets away;
+it's me that he's anxious to put to death. But he couldn't have told
+you that when we were in hiding on Huskies' Island, or you'd have
+betrayed us then."</p>
+
+<p>"He sent word to us by a messenger while you were away. But, if I had
+known, I shouldn't have betrayed you then, for this man seemed to be
+at that time your friend."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why have you done so now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because he has become your enemy and you hate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span> him; and because there
+is no other way of saving you for my child and for myself. He is
+trying to take you away from me." She spoke in a fierce strained
+whisper, kneeling, with her hands spread out before her, and her head
+thrown back.</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't saved me," he said, rising to his feet angrily; "all
+you've done is to place the rope about my neck."</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span>
+<h3>THE HAND IN THE DOORWAY</h3>
+
+<p>He picked up a lantern and, having lighted it, left the shack. Going
+round the out-building of the store, he made his way through the snow
+to the cabin where Spurling was imprisoned. As he placed the key in
+the padlock, he could hear the rattle of the chains of the man inside.
+Having opened the door, he halted on the threshold, afraid and ashamed
+to enter. There was dead silence. Lifting the lantern above his head,
+he could make out the figure of Spurling, crouched like a beast on
+knees and hands, with eyes which watched him doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"They have gone," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Spurling did not answer, but followed his every movement.</p>
+
+<p>"They have gone," he repeated; "but they have not gone to the
+Forbidden River&mdash;they have gone in the direction of God's Voice."</p>
+
+<p>Then Spurling spoke. "Thank God," he said, "for they'll hang you as
+well."</p>
+
+<p>Granger placed the lantern on the floor and sat himself down.
+"Spurling," he said, "we both of us have some old scores to pay off;
+at the present moment, I happen to have the upper hand. But this is
+not the time to settle them. For instance, you have never told me the
+name of the woman whom you shot in the Klondike."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling broke in furiously, saying, "I have told you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span> already, that
+it was not a woman I murdered, but a man."</p>
+
+<p>Granger waved him aside with his hand. "I'm not asking you her name,"
+he said. "We've not got the time to quarrel, for there is still a
+chance of our saving ourselves. It'll take Beorn and Eyelids at least
+four days to reach God's Voice and come back. But I don't think
+they'll touch at God's Voice at all; they'll skirt it and go farther
+south. They won't trust Robert Pilgrim, lest he should claim a part of
+the reward. If I know Eyelids, it's the thousand dollars he's after,
+and he wants it all for himself. Their purpose is to go on until they
+meet the winter patrol, so that they may be able to give direct
+information to the Mounted Police themselves. Now before they do that,
+a good deal of time may be lost, for the winter patrol has hardly
+started as yet, and it may go in a new direction so that they'll miss
+it at first. With the best of luck, they'll have to travel three
+hundred miles, a ten days' journey, before they fall in with it. While
+they're searching for it, we shall be able to slip by them and get
+out. If you'll promise to stand by me I'll release you. If you won't,
+I shall leave you here and go on myself. But I warn you fairly, no
+man, unless he leaves the gold behind him, can make that journey by
+himself with any hope of surviving. Our last chance, whether we want
+to reach El Dorado or merely to save our lives, is to stick together
+and persuade ourselves that we are friends."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll stand by you," Spurling said; "I'm no more anxious to die by the
+rope or starvation than you are yourself. But what are we to do with
+the half-breed woman&mdash;your wife? To leave her behind us, free to go
+where she chooses, would be suicide."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Granger eyed him angrily, for he did not like the sinister whisper in
+which he had asked that question. He might just as well have said,
+"Shall I shoot her while you go outside and scrape out her grave?" But
+to have paid attention to it just then would have brought them to high
+words at the outset; so he said, "We can't take her with us, for she
+is soon to have a child. But I think, when I have explained things to
+her, she'll give us her promise to keep our secret, and we shall be
+able to trust her word."</p>
+
+<p>"Humph! You think that? Well, knock off these chains."</p>
+
+<p>Granger brought the lantern nearer and was stooping to his work, when
+Spurling stopped him, laying his hand upon his shoulder. "Hist! What's
+that?" he said. Granger listened. He could distinctly hear the crunch
+of footsteps on the snow, moving stealthily away from the cabin.
+Running to the door, he caught sight of a woman's skirt, disappearing
+round the corner of the store, and recognised the shadow which was
+flung behind as Peggy's. She must have heard all that they had said.</p>
+
+<p>Spurling waited till his chains were off and he was able to stand
+upright, a free man. Then he asked significantly, "And now what are
+you going to do with her?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is my business," Granger retorted hotly.</p>
+
+<p>"But I think that it is also mine."</p>
+
+<p>He knew that it would be unwise to argue the point, so he led the way
+to Bachelors' Hall, Spurling limping stiffly behind. So cramped had he
+become with the cold, and the position in which he had been chained
+during his confinement, that he could hardly move a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a></span> step without
+groaning. Until he should recover, despite his own weakness, Granger
+knew that he was physically the stronger and still had the upper hand.
+For Peggy's sake he intended to make the best use of his time; he
+began to have fears for her as to what might happen were she left to
+the mercy of Spurling's choice.</p>
+
+<p>"What are we coming here for?" growled Spurling, as they stopped at
+the door of the hall; "why can't we go to the shack? I'm desperately
+cold and there's a fire there."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll light you a fire," said Granger, placing his hands on his
+shoulders and thrusting him inside.</p>
+
+<p>"You're mighty anxious that I shouldn't get near your wife," said
+Spurling; "she must be very valuable."</p>
+
+<p>Granger went off and soon returned with fuel. The stove was damp and
+rusty, and did not draw well at first, so that all the room was filled
+with smoke. Spurling had stumbled over to the shelf and lay there
+complaining. When the wood had caught and was burning brightly,
+Granger fetched him something to eat and then went out to speak with
+Peggy, leaving him alone, promising to return again to spend the
+night.</p>
+
+<p>When he had entered the shack, it appeared to be empty. He called
+Peggy's name, but she did not reply. Listening intently, he heard the
+sound of sobbing which she was endeavouring to stifle. Going over to
+the berth he found her lying there, with face turned to the wall.
+Sitting down beside her, he placed his arms about her, and tried to
+make her turn his way, but she refused to be comforted.</p>
+
+<p>"Peggy," he said, "you heard what we were saying in the cabin? You
+remember how I said that I was able<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span> to trust your word. I want you to
+promise me that you will not tell anyone that we have left, and that
+you will not try to follow until I send to tell you that all is safe,
+so that you can come to me."</p>
+
+<p>"You will never send," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you say that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because that man will quarrel with you and kill you on the way out."</p>
+
+<p>"That's nonsense; you must listen to what I have planned. This summer
+we found gold on the Forbidden River."</p>
+
+<p>"I know that."</p>
+
+<p>"Who told you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Eyelids."</p>
+
+<p>"Why did he tell you?"</p>
+
+<p>"He found it himself in the spring, when father sent him up there
+after Spurling; and he was angry when he knew that you had gone there,
+because he wanted it for himself."</p>
+
+<p>"Did he stop here all summer?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but father went away. I think he must have followed you. He got
+back four days before your return."</p>
+
+<p>"Humph! I suspected that, for I saw something that was very like him
+there. . . . And do you still think that they have gone to tell the
+Mounted Police only in order that Spurling may be arrested?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know; but that's what they said. I chose to believe them
+because that was the only way in which I could keep you for myself."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, listen. No matter what Eyelids and Beorn may intend, if
+the Mounted Police once get hold of me the result will be that I shall
+get hanged. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span> one way in which you can keep me for yourself is to
+help me to escape. I can't take you with me as you are at present; you
+know that. And I can't strike the trail alone; I must have someone to
+help me take the gold out. There's no one but Spurling. Besides, I've
+promised to stick by him; he saved my life once, and I'm paying back
+the debt. When once I've reached Winnipeg, I'll be able to purchase
+friends who will hide me, if need be; but I hope to get there ahead of
+the news of my escape, before the police have my description and are
+on the lookout. I shall strike for the south, and, when the hunt is
+over and I'm given up for dead, I'll send you word where you can join
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"You never will do that."</p>
+
+<p>"And why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because you will be dead."</p>
+
+<p>Granger was losing patience. Whatever reasoning he used, he could not
+move her beyond that one assertion.</p>
+
+<p>"Won't you help me to take the one chance of life that I think I
+have?" he said. "It can't make much difference to you if Spurling does
+kill me on the trail; if I stay here, I shall die a few weeks later,
+more disgracefully."</p>
+
+<p>She stood up and led him over to the window, through which the moon
+was shining, so that he could see her face. She placed her arms about
+his neck, as if she were a white woman. "I will tell you the truth
+now," she said; "I have been keeping something back that I might save
+you from yourself. Since you joined with this man and helped him take
+the gold from the Forbidden River, Eyelids and my father have both
+become your enemies. The factor did send his message that your life
+would be spared if Spurling was given up,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span> but I think he was speaking
+falsely. I have tried to keep you near me because I alone, if need be,
+can stand between you and them. If you set out with Spurling, he will
+kill you; and if you stay here, you will be arrested. But if you will
+come with me into the forest, we can join some Indians of my mother's
+tribe, and they will hide us where you never can be found."</p>
+
+<p>Granger watched her while she was speaking, wondering whether he was
+hearing the very truth this time. "And, if I do as you ask me, what
+will happen to Spurling?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>She drew him nearer to herself. "I hate that man," she whispered; "let
+him die as he deserves."</p>
+
+<p>"And why didn't you tell me everything at first?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because you are not strong enough to make the journey yet; and I
+wanted to keep you resting here, till you had no other choice of
+saving yourself but by following me into the forest. While my father
+was present, I did not dare to tell you&mdash;<i>for his soul is dead</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Granger took his eyes from off her face; she tempted him&mdash;he had been
+so long unused to kindness. He gazed out of the window, far away
+across the frozen forest, and heard the dream of his boyhood calling
+to him to seek the city out of sight. His choice lay between this
+woman and El Dorado, in whose search he had wasted all his life. He
+did not deceive himself, whatever he might say aloud; his hesitancy
+did not arise out of unwillingness to desert Spurling, but from
+unwillingness to abandon the quest while a fragment of hope remained.
+With that stolen gold, if he could slip by the winter patrol and carry
+it out to Winnipeg, he would be able to strike for the south and sail
+up the Great Amana, past the rocks with the forgotten hand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span>writing,
+till he came to the lake of Parima, on whose shores the city is said
+to stand.</p>
+
+<p>She saw that his will was wavering and that his choice was going
+against her. Seizing his hands in her own and pressing them to her
+breast, "I am only a poor half-breed girl," she cried, "but I am soon
+to be the mother of your child; and our child will be nearly all white
+like yourself. You can't think what my life was before you came to me;
+for, though my body is half Indian, my mind has become a white woman's
+since I went to school in Winnipeg. I am so white that I would die for
+you to-morrow, if I could give you life by doing that. I could not
+tell you this before, while my father and brother were present;
+somehow, with their silence they stifled my words, and made me silent.
+But don't judge me by the past months, believe me now."</p>
+
+<p>"Peggy," he said, "what should we do in the forest, if we went there
+and joined your mother's tribe? We should starve, and grow sullen; and
+you would be treated as a squaw, and our child would grow up an
+Indian."</p>
+
+<p>"But I should not mind that if only we were together."</p>
+
+<p>"But we shall be together if my plan works out and I manage to escape.
+Then there's Spurling; however much I hate him, I cannot break my
+promise to him and leave him to die."</p>
+
+<p>She dropped his hands and drew away from him. "You are going to meet
+the white woman," she said; "you had planned to desert me whatever
+happened."</p>
+
+<p>"Who told you that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Your lips told me, when you were sick and they moved of themselves."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"But I promise you now that, when I am safe, I will send you word so
+that you can find me. If I ever did think of deserting you, it was
+before I knew that we were going to have a child."</p>
+
+<p>"You will not send for me," she said; "but I promise that I will do
+nothing to you that will hinder you from going out."</p>
+
+<p>"But what will you do when I am gone, and you yourself will be needing
+help?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shall go, like any other squaw, to the Indian women of my tribe."</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing more to be said; she had given him what he had
+asked. Bidding her good-night, he left the shack.</p>
+
+<p>On returning to the Hall, he found Spurling very restless. "What have
+you been doing all this time?" he asked. "I'd got a good mind to come
+in search of you. I thought you must have struck the trail with your
+squaw, leaving me behind."</p>
+
+<p>Granger pretended not to notice his ill-nature, but told him what he
+had arranged. They talked matters over and determined to make a start
+on the following night. Neither of them were in proper condition to
+travel, but they knew that they had no time to waste. Before they lay
+down to sleep, Spurling altered his position, spreading his furs
+between the stove and the entrance, with his head so near the
+threshold that the door could not be opened wide enough to permit of
+anyone passing out without his being wakened; Granger smiled grimly,
+wondering how long it would take them to quarrel at that rate, when
+one of them thought it necessary to take such precautions. Spurling
+was soon snoring, but Granger could get no rest. The night was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span>
+bitterly cold, and the fire needed constant replenishing. It seemed to
+him that no sooner had he piled on more wood, and wrapped himself in
+his blankets, and laid himself down, than he would feel the
+temperature lowering, and a chill passing over his body like an icy
+hand, beginning at his feet and working up to his head. Shivering and
+with teeth chattering, he would raise himself up on his elbow, only to
+see that the wood was again burnt through and that the fire was going
+out.</p>
+
+<p>At last he determined to give up the attempt to sleep. Pulling a box
+near the stove and using it as a back-rest, he gathered his blankets
+tightly round him and lit his pipe.</p>
+
+<p>Across his shoulders, through the window behind him, fell a shaft of
+moonlight; in front of him, dazzling his eyes, was the redness of the
+glowing charcoal, and the yellow of the jumping flames; within
+hand-stretch to the right lay Spurling, with his feet toward the fire
+and his head within six inches of the threshold. In the great
+stillness which was outside, nothing was to be heard save the rustling
+of the snow as it bound tighter, and the occasional low booming of the
+trees as the frost, acting on the sap, bent their branches.</p>
+
+<p>With his accustomed passion for fairness, he commenced to examine his
+dealings with Peggy and to try to regard his actions from her
+view-point. In his recent conversation with her she had revealed
+qualities the existence of which he had not suspected; he had not
+reckoned her at her true worth. He began to be uncertain even now as
+to whether he was doing right in leaving her. Perhaps she, for all her
+ignorance, was wiser than himself. But of one thing she had made him
+certain, that of all creatures which walked, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span> talked, and ate, and
+drank, upon the earth, she alone stood by him in his crisis for an
+unselfish reason, and loved him for himself. He knew now, though he
+had not realised it until that night, that he loved her in return,
+half-breed though she was, and could not do without her. He was
+willing to own to himself that, in his treatment of her, he had not
+always been just and, because of her race, at times had been
+despising. He'd been more or less of a fool, and had refused a good
+deal of available happiness.</p>
+
+<p>He looked towards the door; if it had not been for the unpleasantness
+of awaking Spurling, he would have gone at once to the shack and said
+to her, "I don't mind who you are, I love you better than any white
+girl, and would prefer you from amongst them all, were I again given
+my choice." Before he set out, he would like to have her believe that
+he was going, at least partly, for her sake.</p>
+
+<p>The smoke from the burning wood made his eyes grow heavy; he began to
+drowse. He dreamt that he had taken Peggy's advice and had gone with
+her into the forest, having joined himself to the people of her tribe.
+It must have happened years ago, for their child was a sturdy boy who
+ran beside them. She was leading the way through a dark wood, holding
+him by the hand. He asked her where she was going, and for answer she
+laid her finger on his lips and only smiled. On and on they went, and
+then, far away in the distance, he began to see a little light. It
+grew brighter and more dazzling as they approached, so that he had to
+close his eyes. Presently she halted and told him to look. He was
+standing on the edge of a precipice, in the side of which steps had
+been hewn out, and far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span> below was a silver lake which he knew to be
+Parima; and far away was a gleaming of domes and spires which he
+recognised. He was about to speak to thank her, when he tottered and
+his feet sank from under him. As he fell, he stared up at her; the
+last thing he saw was the expression of agony that was in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>He awoke with a start, but his instinct warned him not to stir. The
+shaft of moonlight had been blotted out, and he knew that someone,
+standing outside, behind him, was gazing in through the window. It was
+not Spurling, for he lay breathing heavily, fast asleep, over to his
+right. As he crouched there motionless, he ran through the list of all
+possible assailants in his mind. It might be Beorn or Eyelids. It
+might be Robert Pilgrim. It might even be the Mounted Police, arrived
+before their time. It might be only a renegade trapper of the Hudson
+Bay Company, who had come by night, that he might not be discovered,
+to see if the private trader would offer a higher price for his catch
+of furs. Then the darkness was removed, and the light shone in again.
+Quickly turning his head, he looked toward the window, and saw nothing
+there. Very quietly he rose to his feet, tiptoed to the window and
+looked out. At first he could see no one; then he saw the outer edge
+of a figure, pressed close to the wall of the house, standing upright
+beside the door-jamb. He crept back from the panes, so that he should
+not obscure the little light he had. Moving over to the right, he
+halted mid-way between the window and Spurling.</p>
+
+<p>He could hear the muffled breathing of the person outside and could
+almost feel the pressure of his body against the wall on the other
+side. In the few seconds' respite, while nothing happened, he glanced
+round,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span> taking in the situation and trying to forecast the probable
+sequence of action. Since Spurling had lain down, he had altered his
+position, so that now his body stretched across the entrance, with his
+head in the corner where the two walls met, forming an acute angle
+with the threshold so that, though he prevented the door from opening
+more than two or three inches, directly it was opened his person would
+be visible, and exposed to attack.</p>
+
+<p>Gently the latch was raised and, by slow degrees, the door began to
+swing inwards. The slit which it made let in a narrow ray of
+moonlight, which, leaving Spurling's face in shadow, fell slanting
+across his neck. If he had not moved in his sleep, his head would have
+been farther out from the wall, and the light, striking on his eyes
+would have aroused him; as it was, he was undisturbed. Alert with the
+horror of it, Granger watched to see what would follow next. The
+person on the other side, peering through the opening, had been warned
+by the same sight of the exposed bare neck, and, desisting from
+pushing the door wider, was deliberating.</p>
+
+<p>When a short interval had elapsed, he saw a hand thrust through the
+crack; it gripped a trapper's hunting knife, with the blade pointing
+downwards, and was poised about to strike. Granger was unarmed
+himself; there was but one thing that could be done to save his
+comrade's life. Flinging all his weight upon the door, he closed it,
+imprisoning the assailant's hand above the wrist joint. The knife
+clattered to the floor, where it stuck out quivering, grazing
+Spurling's cheek as it fell. The hand tried to wrench itself free, the
+fingers opening and closing convulsively, but there was no sound from
+outside.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[296]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Spurling awoke with a cry, and clapping his hand to his face found it
+wet with blood. He rose to his feet with his fists clenched, and the
+look of a wild beast at bay in his eyes. His lips were working with
+nervousness and desire to fight. "What is it?" he whispered. "Have
+they come to take us?"</p>
+
+<p>Granger signed to him to stand back and keep quiet. Then he followed
+the direction of Granger's eyes, and he also saw the hand. Bending
+down, with his back against the door, Granger examined it. It was
+brown and slim&mdash;far too small for a man's hand, and far too dusky to
+belong to a person who was white. The light, stealing in through the
+aperture, showed it plainly and fell along its length; the fingers had
+ceased to writhe and were extended, as if the thing had died.</p>
+
+<p>While Granger had been looking, Spurling also had seen and had
+surmised. Coming swiftly forward, he stooped to pick up the knife.
+Granger read his purpose and, as he leant forward to pluck it from the
+boards, kicked him heavily in the chest, so that he lost his balance
+and fell sprawling on his back. Before he could recover himself, he
+had opened the door and released the hand. Possessing himself of the
+knife, he set his back against the door again to prevent Spurling from
+following. There was a little cry of gladness, and the sound of
+footsteps rustling the snow as they hurried away.</p>
+
+<p>For the remainder of the long night, he stood guard over the man whom
+he had rescued. When the dawn broke and he visited the shack, he found
+that Peggy had vanished.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[297]</a></span>
+<h3>SPURLING TAKES FRIGHT</h3>
+
+<p>If Spurling had suspected Granger before, he was doubly suspicious of
+him now. Wherever he went, his heavy treacherous eyes followed and
+spied upon him. In one thing only were they united&mdash;in their desire to
+see the last of Murder Point. For the accomplishment of this end, they
+laboured feverishly in sullen silence. On visiting the dog-pen, they
+found that of the eleven huskies which had been there, three were
+missing; of the eight which remained, four were the animals left over
+from the grey team belonging to Spurling, and these were the best.
+This meant that they would be able to harness but four dogs apiece to
+a sled, and would have to leave some of their wealth behind, limiting
+each outfit together with the gold to not more than three hundred
+pounds. On examining his clothing, Granger found that his favourite
+capote was not there; he conjectured that Peggy had taken that also in
+her hurry.</p>
+
+<p>They went to the store and selected their provisions with care, taking
+no flour or canned goods, but tallow and fat bacon, because this food
+is least bulky and affords most nourishment. For the same reason,
+instead of the usual allowance for a husky of two raw white fish a
+day, they took lumps of grease frozen solid. Of the gold they took
+mostly dust, because it packed closer than nuggets. This they divided
+into equal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[298]</a></span> shares and poured into moose-hide sacks, which they lashed
+to the bottom of their sleds, with their outfit above.</p>
+
+<p>They clothed themselves warmly for the journey, for already there were
+forty degrees of frost, and this was but November. They put on three
+flannel shirts apiece and one of duffel, and over them a beaded shirt
+of leather. They swathed their feet in duffel, covering them with high
+moccasins, and encased their legs in several wrappings of duffel
+leggins. Their caps were of fur, the hair of which reached down over
+their foreheads, ears, and necks, giving them protection. Over all
+they flung capotes, which extended to their knees and were caught in
+at the waist with a scarlet sash.</p>
+
+<p>Having fed the huskies, Granger returned to the shack, to run through
+his belongings and destroy whatever he did not wish to be found. He
+turned to Spurling, saying, "You'd better lie down now and get a
+little rest."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling blinked at him, and swallowed once or twice, hesitating. Then
+he said, "It's a pleasant meeting that they'll have, with two of us
+absent."</p>
+
+<p>Granger was sorting out old letters, dated years back&mdash;things which
+brought memories. He did not pay any attention; perhaps he had not
+heard.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a pleasant meeting that they'll have, I say, with two of us
+absent," Spurling repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"What meeting? I don't understand."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, the meeting you promised them on Christmas Eve&mdash;the one you were
+so pressing about."</p>
+
+<p>Granger raised up his head and looked at him. "Don't you be so certain
+of that," he said; "we may not be absent&mdash;we may be caught by Eyelids
+and brought back."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling cursed him under his breath.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[299]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Granger went on sorting out his papers, burning them or putting them
+aside. Some were from his mother; one was from his father, faded with
+age; and some were from girls whose very names had passed from his
+remembrance. Presently he stopped, and turning round again, with a
+different look in his eyes, handed a page to his companion, saying,
+"Read that."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling laughed harshly and took it. It was in his own handwriting.
+"None of your softness," he said. "I've got long past sentiment."</p>
+
+<p>Granger watched him as he scanned its contents, and saw his face grow
+solemn. It had been written seven years back, before they had left
+England, when both their sympathies were fresher, before their souls
+had grown tarnished. It read: "John, I've just seen the unemployed,
+about four battalions of 'em or from two to three thousand
+men&mdash;unemployed, half-clothed, half-fed, and half-men. God! that such
+a sight could be in this world, and here in London; our London,
+wealthy London, the city of luxury and at our own doors. Four
+battalions of men in real want; not a want such as you and I know when
+we run short of our damned tobacco, but a want when the belly is sick
+and empty and has no prospect of being filled&mdash;a want of necessities.
+Four battalions of men in want, and how many children and women does
+that represent? God's hooligans, God's scamps, and God's wrecks! '<i>His
+wrecks</i>,' how can I write such words. How pitiable are their physical
+conditions, their privation and distress of body! But what of their
+souls, the starvation of their minds? Why, I doubt if they could
+subscribe a respectable soul among the whole four battalions.</p>
+
+<p>"Males who might have been men and of some use in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[300]</a></span> the world, if only
+a finger had shown them the road instead of shoving 'em down into
+wrecks and damnation.</p>
+
+<p>"I can write no more. I must go out and walk about."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling gulped down a sob, and without comment crunched the sheet up
+in his hand, and flung it towards the stove; but it fell short and
+rolled to where Granger was standing. He stooped, picked it up and
+smoothed it out. "I'll put it in my pocket," he said, "to remember
+what we were; we may need the reminder on our journey."</p>
+
+<p>"Damn your softness," Spurling broke out. "I want to forget the past,
+and to live like the beast I am. How could I shoot down even an Indian
+to defend myself, if I were to remember things like that! It's gold
+that's changed me; and now that I've got it I intend, at all costs, to
+win out."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it's gold that's changed us," Granger said.</p>
+
+<p>Presently he paused again. "I had intended to keep that to threaten
+you with, but you can have it now," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Spurling rose up from the floor, and coming over to the table took the
+paper from him. It was the warrant for his arrest. His hand shook as
+he read it.</p>
+
+<p>"Granger, how did you get that?" he asked in a low voice. "Was it from
+Strangeways?"</p>
+
+<p>On the spur of the moment, to avoid the direct answering of the
+question and that he might learn the exact truth about something else,
+he drew forth the locket from his breast.</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?" asked Spurling. "Another reminder?"</p>
+
+<p>"Come and look for yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to remember, I tell you."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[301]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"But this has something to do with the answer to your question."</p>
+
+<p>Spurling came behind and looked over his shoulder carelessly, not
+expecting to see anything which was of much concern. Then he started,
+so violently that the portrait fell from Granger's hand. "My God, it
+<i>was</i> a woman!" he moaned. "A woman! A woman!"</p>
+
+<p>Granger turned upon him, willing to be angry; but he saw that he had
+no need of further revenge. The man's body seemed to have shrunk into
+itself, and to have grown smaller. His lower jaw hung down, giving a
+purposeless expression to the face and mouth. The eyes were vacant and
+stared out on space, focussing nothing. Whatever anger he had had was
+turned to pity as he regarded him. So Spurling had not known that
+Mordaunt was a woman! And the body which was found at Forty-Mile had
+not been clothed in a woman's dress! How Strangeways must be laughing
+out there, alone in the coldness, three feet beneath the snow at the
+bend!</p>
+
+<p>Yet, for all his pity, Granger could not bring himself to touch the
+man&mdash;he looked too absorbed in his tragedy. Out of decency he turned
+his back upon him, hurrying his task to an end. Already he had been
+too long about it; they had no time to linger. Peggy's absence might
+have many purposes; when she returned, she might not come
+unaccompanied. Before he made a start, after his night of watching he
+would require rest.</p>
+
+<p>Spurling had drawn away from him and was huddled in a corner,
+whispering to himself. He must say and do something to brace him up,
+and show to him that in his eyes he was still a man. If he didn't
+recover quickly, they would have to postpone their journey. He was a
+fool to have shown him that.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[302]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The last of the papers had been burned; he tied the few which he had
+preserved into a little bundle, and thrust them in his breast. Going
+over to Spurling, he laid his hand on his shoulder and said, "Druce,
+old fellow, I'm very tired. I want to take an hour's sleep before we
+set out. You'd best watch and see that nothing happens. In two hours
+it'll be sunset; wake me before then."</p>
+
+<p>He raised up his haggard face and nodded, but he did not look at him
+squarely. Granger, having made up the fire, laid himself down.</p>
+
+<p>When he awoke, he found that the room was in darkness; it must have
+been night for several hours. It was the coldness which had aroused
+him, for the fire had gone out.</p>
+
+<p>He supposed that Spurling must be sleeping, so he called to him,
+"Spurling, Spurling, are you there?"</p>
+
+<p>There was no answer. He listened for his breathing, but could hear
+nothing. Getting upon his feet as swiftly as the stiffness of his
+muscles would allow, he groped his way over to the corner where he had
+last seen him. He was not there. Then he lit the lamp, and saw that
+the room was empty.</p>
+
+<p>His first thought was that, in his despair, he had gone outside and
+shot himself. Recalling his uncanny horror of the bend, he fancied
+that he could trace madness in all his recent actions; but then he
+remembered that his fear of the bend had been shared. He became
+possessed of a new and more personal dread. What if in giving him the
+warrant and showing him the portrait, he had told him too much&mdash;more
+than his courage and honesty could bear? He rushed to the door of the
+shack, and out to where the sleds and huskies had been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[303]</a></span> left. One of
+the sleds was gone; his own outfit lay scattered on the snow and the
+gold had been taken. But he made a yet worse discovery, for of the
+eight huskies, only two remained; Spurling's four gray dogs and the
+two best of his own team were missing. He looked wildly round on the
+great emptiness. The night pressed down on the earth, as though to
+imprison it; the forest closed in on the river, menacing and silent;
+and the river ran on, a level, untravelled roadway, from the west. He
+shouted, and cursed, and called down God's vengeance on Spurling.
+Then, for a moment he was quiet, and heard his own voice coming back
+to him as an echo from the bend. His voice had tried to escape and was
+returning to him because it could find no way out.</p>
+
+<p>Crazily turning his face down-river, he shouted, "Hey, Strangeways,
+may God damn Spurling."</p>
+
+<p>Muffled, as if the dead man were answering him from underground, the
+cry came back, "Hey, Strangeways, may God damn Spurling."</p>
+
+<p>He covered his face with his hands and sat down in the snow laughing.
+It was all a cruel jest. "Oh, the hypocrite! The hypocrite!" he
+shrieked. "He came here hunted and I helped him with my life. He has
+taken everything, and given me death."</p>
+
+<p>Through his head ran maddeningly the scraps of the conversation he had
+had with Peggy: "I'll strike for the south, and, when the hunt is
+over, I'll send you word where you can join me." "You never will do
+that." "And why not?" "Because you will be dead."</p>
+
+<p>On all his thought, as if she were sitting at his side, her voice
+broke in persistently, drearily and low-pitched reiterating, "Because
+you will be dead. Because you will be dead."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[304]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A hard look came into his eyes; he ceased from his laughing and
+whispering. Turning to the quarter behind his back from which he had
+seemed to hear her speaking last, he said quietly, "But I shan't be
+dead."</p>
+
+<p>Then he rose up and entered the shack.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[305]</a></span>
+<h3>THE MURDER IN THE SKY</h3>
+
+<p>However lightly he travels and however hard the snow may have packed,
+a man who has only two huskies and is handicapped by a body just
+recovered from sickness does not make much speed in winter travelling.</p>
+
+<p>Through the long hours of the dreary November night Granger, with
+hard, set face, had pushed on up the Last Chance River, towards God's
+Voice, following in Spurling's tracks. It was the gold that he
+desired. And if he recaptured it, what then? He was not capable of
+carrying it out to Winnipeg by himself. He knew that his pursuit was
+madness; he had nothing to gain by it but revenge. He was hardly
+likely to gain even that, for the man in front of him had three dogs
+to his one, fuller rations, and a start of several hours; he could
+only hope to overtake him by the happening of some accident.</p>
+
+<p>Yet he knew that he would overtake him, for he felt, beyond reach of
+argument, that Spurling was fated to die by his hand. Both of them had
+striven to avoid it; once he himself had fled that he might not commit
+the crime, and Spurling was now trying to escape that it might not
+come about. No matter what they did, it must happen. Though God should
+"advance a terrible right arm," and pluck them apart, and fling them
+to the opposite extremes of the world, they would surely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[306]</a></span> travel and
+travel, perhaps involuntarily, till they came again together. It would
+have been far better if he had not been interfered with at the
+Shallows and had been permitted to accomplish his enmity there&mdash;so,
+more than three years of futile suffering might have been spared and
+Mordaunt would be still alive.</p>
+
+<p>He was hardly conscious of any anger; his was the unreasoned
+relentless instinct of the pursuing hound. He was savage justice and
+the law of self-preservation personified. He was the will of destiny
+decreeing that Spurling should not reach El Dorado alive.</p>
+
+<p>The dogs struggled on uncomplainingly; this was their first trip of
+the season and they were still comparatively fresh, though the man was
+tired. To the eastward the crescent of a faint old moon hung low in
+the sky. As Granger ran, he turned his head and, watching it, was
+thankful to see that at last the tardy dawn had begun to spread. Over
+the withered stretch of woodland to his right the Aurora swept between
+the stars, like an extinguishing angel, who caused them to flicker
+and, as he beat his wings about them, one by one to go out.</p>
+
+<p>It was a morning of bitter coldness. As the breath left his nostrils,
+he could almost see it congeal and fall to the ground, a filmy sheet
+of ice. The heads of the huskies were clouded with smoke, so that they
+seemed to be on fire as they panted forward dragging on the traces.</p>
+
+<p>The tracks, which he was following, now branched off to the left, and,
+mounting the river-bank, entered into a little hollow at the edge of
+the forest. Here, about the base of a tree, the snow had been recently
+trampled and a fire smouldered. It was Spurling's first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[307]</a></span> camp.
+Granger, having unharnessed and fed his huskies, taking his axe from
+his girdle, cut down a sapling fir and roused the dying embers to a
+blaze. The flames shot up, and, climbing the bark of the tree,
+crackled among the branches overhead. Unpacking his tallow he melted
+it in a cup. Before it was all drunk, the surface was frozen solid.
+Then, lest his muscles should stiffen, he set out again.</p>
+
+<p>The air was full of minute particles of snow, like frozen dew, which
+caused the whole atmosphere, as far as eye could reach, to sparkle in
+the sunshine. The sky was greenish grey and without a cloud. The
+stillness of the world was magical; in the miles of landscape which
+were visible, nothing stirred. The snapping of a twig sounded like the
+crashing ruin of a forest giant. The gliding of the sled across the
+snow, and the padding footsteps of the huskies, thundered down the
+tunnel of the river through the pines like the galloping of heavy
+artillery over gravel. When, at rare intervals, the river cracked,
+perhaps four or five miles away, it reverberated through the
+tree-tops, causing their burden of snow to tremble and glisten, like
+the report of neighbouring cannon. Every whisper was exaggerated to a
+shout, so that the ears were deafened and longed for quiet&mdash;quiet
+which, unlike silence, consisted of a multitude of small sounds
+singing, almost inaudibly, together.</p>
+
+<p>Shortly after noon the light faded, and the blinding whiteness was
+converted into iron grey. Over to the westward the sun was hidden, and
+the horizon became threatening with a leaden bank of cloud. The
+temperature sank lower and the twilight was obliterated; night rushed
+down.</p>
+
+<p>The dogs were now thoroughly worn out; only by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[308]</a></span> continual lashing
+could he keep them to their work. The roughness of the ice had mangled
+their feet; they marked out the trail which they traversed with
+crimson dots of blood. He had hoped to reach Spurling's next
+camping-place before making another halt; but his rate of travelling
+had grown slower, and already the advantage of Spurling's four
+additional huskies was beginning to tell. At last his dogs lay down in
+their traces and refused to budge. He knew that he could force them to
+go no further.</p>
+
+<p>Using the sled as a shovel, he dug out a hollow, throwing up a
+circular mount to protect him from the wind, should it arise.
+Searching along the river-bank, he collected wood for a fire,
+sufficient to last him till morning. He set up his sled on end, like a
+tombstone, for a head rest, and lay himself down with his feet toward
+the blaze. The dogs gathered round him shivering, lying one on either
+side, striving to share the warmth of his body. He beat them off at
+first, but they always crept back; so at last, becoming languidly
+sorry for them, he let them stop there.</p>
+
+<p>He was terribly tired; his bones felt like bars of red-hot iron
+scorching their way through his flesh. The hardness of the ice beneath
+the snow surface had racked his body in every joint. Every now and
+then he would get up and throw some wood on the fire, and lie down
+again, pulling his blanket over his head, folding his arms tightly
+across his chest, and gathering his knees up close to his body to
+conserve whatever heat he had. Though his body slept, never for a
+second did his brain lose consciousness of the cold and of the sense
+of travel. Always he seemed to be pressing on, doggedly, wearily, with
+the forest rushing past him on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[309]</a></span> either hand. Spurling was in sight;
+sometimes he would halt, and jeeringly beckon to him. When he had come
+within speaking distance of him, he would start off again, leaving a
+narrow track of gold behind, for one of the sacks had burst.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually the most fatal feeling that any man can experience in
+northland travel stole upon him&mdash;<i>he felt that he did not care</i>. If
+the fire went out, what matter? He would not get up to relight it. If
+Spurling were standing at his side, he would not disturb himself to
+look at him. If Mordaunt were to come to him, well, he might perhaps
+turn round to look at her.</p>
+
+<p>He began to dream of her as he had seen her in the locket. They were
+both back in the old homeland. He was talking with her in an English
+garden and a thrush was singing overhead. How long it was since he had
+listened to the song of any bird! Why, he had almost forgotten that
+there was such an ecstasy in the world. So exalted was he, that he
+paid more attention to the thrush's song than to the words which
+Mordaunt said. Then she grew angry and shook him; but he sat there
+motionless, looking up into the branches of the tree, away from her,
+watching the sun through the greenness of the leaves, and the
+quivering throat of the bird. She rose up and left him in indignation;
+then darkness fell. He tried to follow her, but had no power to move
+himself. He tried to cry out, but his tongue was joined to the roof of
+his mouth. Making a great effort, he came to himself.</p>
+
+<p>When he pushed up his arms to throw off his covering, they seemed to
+be lifting a weight of surpassing heaviness. He sat upright and tried
+to open his eyes; he was blind&mdash;he could see nothing. He groped to
+feel<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[310]</a></span> his eyeballs with his hands; but his fingers were frozen&mdash;they
+could feel nothing. He rose to his feet in panic and stood there
+swaying, as though he had been set upon a dizzy pedestal which had
+grown to be part of himself, so that he could not move, but could only
+bend.</p>
+
+<p>"I must keep quiet," he told himself; "I must keep quiet. If I get
+frightened, I shall wander away to my death."</p>
+
+<p>When he tried to step forward his feet clapped together like solid
+blocks of ice. Very distantly, it seemed to him, he could make out a
+little glow of red and feel a breath of warmness. Going down on his
+hands and knees, he crawled towards it. It was coming to meet him;
+they had met. He lay down beside the redness and his panic left him.</p>
+
+<p>Then he became conscious that it was hurting him and he commenced to
+hate it. In struggling to get away from it, he found that he could
+move more freely. Sensation had come into his hands; raising them he
+felt his eyes. His great terror was not of death, but that he should
+be forever sightless. He ran his fingers across his eyes and found
+that they were covered with flesh&mdash;that his eyelids were frozen
+together. With his two hands he forced them apart, and gazed about
+him. Wherever he looked there was endless space with nothing to deter
+him, stretching away on every side. The moon, in her last quarter, was
+barely visible&mdash;a mere shadow of silver in the sky; so indistinct was
+his vision, that it seemed to him as though he were looking at the
+image of the firmament reflected in water, rather than at the stars
+themselves. Yet, in the certain renewal of his sight, there came to
+him a gladness which he had not known for many a day.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[311]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When he turned toward the fire, he perceived the cause of his mishap:
+he had overslept himself and it was nearly out. By the way in which it
+was scattered abroad and the smouldering of the fur which was about
+his throat and arms, he guessed that in his blindness and instinctive
+desire for warmth, he had thrown himself upon its ashes. Having
+gathered what remained of it together, he flung on more fuel and set
+to work to chafe his extremities, restoring circulation. He was too
+chilled to think of attempting sleep again that night: so, when his
+limbs were sufficiently thawed out, he renewed his journey.</p>
+
+<p>The atmosphere was wonderfully clear, but there was in the air a sense
+of evil and foreboding. Even the dogs seemed to be aware of it, for as
+they ran, turning their heads from side to side to see which way the
+whip was coming that they might dodge it, there was a look of
+foreknowledge and terror in their eyes which warned Granger.</p>
+
+<p>As the dawn was spreading, he was startled by a long-drawn sigh, which
+travelled from horizon to horizon and died out. The dogs heard it, and
+sitting down abruptly in their tracks nearly overturned the sled.
+Gazing away to the northward, he saw a shadowy cloud arise, whirl and
+drift languidly over the tree-tops and fall back again out of sight.
+He lashed at the huskies, and with difficulty set them going. But the
+sled drew heavily, as though it were being dragged through sand, for
+the snow was gritty as the seashore: so intense was the cold that all
+slipperiness had gone out of it. He fastened a line to the load and
+went on ahead, breaking the trail and hauling with all his strength.</p>
+
+<p>Before long the sigh was heard again; but this time<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[312]</a></span> it came nearer,
+and columns of white smoke rose up and danced in the river-bed. Then
+he knew that he was in for a <i>poudre</i> day&mdash;the day which of all others
+the winter voyageur holds in most dread. While such weather lasts,
+even the hardiest traveller will refuse to leave his fire; for he
+knows that before long every land-mark will be blotted out, that his
+very dogs will refuse to obey him, and that to-morrow, when the wind
+has dropped and the snow has settled, the chances are that the sun
+will find him with a quiet face turned upward to the sky, immobile and
+statuesque as if carved from Parian marble.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving Spurling's trail, he ascended the bank and worked along by the
+forest's edge, that so he might gain shelter. With every fresh puff of
+breath from the north, the coiling snakes of snow grew larger,
+writhing across the tree-tops and pouring tumultuously into the
+river-bed, where they rioted and fought till the day grew dark and it
+was difficult to see the next step. Respiration became painful, but
+Granger was determined not to halt, for this was one of the accidents
+which would help him to come up with Spurling. Feeling his way from
+tree to tree, he struggled on. His head became dizzy with the effort.
+His body, for all its coldness, broke out into a chilly sweat. He was
+invaded by a terrible inertia, so that he was half-minded to lie down
+and go to sleep; but the thought that Spurling had halted somewhere,
+perhaps only twenty miles ahead, and was losing time, drew him on.
+Presently his dogs sat down again, lifting their voices above the
+storm in a dismal wailing.</p>
+
+<p>He cut their traces and went forward, dragging the sled himself. They
+followed him a few paces behind,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[313]</a></span> slinking through the darkness with
+their heads down and their tails between their legs. They reminded him
+of the timber-wolf on the Forbidden River; there were times when,
+catching a partial glimpse of them, he could have sworn that they had
+been joined by a third.</p>
+
+<p>By midday the wind died down, the atmosphere began to clear and the
+snow to settle. Returning to the river he sought in vain for
+Spurling's tracks; either he had passed him in the blackness or they
+had been obliterated. He would know the truth in the next six hours
+for, if he were still ahead, he would come to his abandoned camp.</p>
+
+<p>Towards sunset he halted and lit a fire; he intended to travel through
+the night and was in need of rest. He had fed his huskies and was
+stooping above the flames, cooking himself some bacon, when he raised
+his eyes to the west. For a minute he crouched, gazing with the
+fascination of horror at what he saw taking place apparently not more
+than fifty yards away, but with such clearness that it might not have
+been more than ten paces. Where ten seconds before there had been
+nothing in view but the straight length of river and the snow-capped
+forest, dripping with icicles, there was now, hanging above the trees
+face-downwards, anchored to the sky by crimson threads, the inverted
+image of a portage, leading up from the right-hand bank of a river,
+hedged in on either side with a row of crosses which marked graves of
+bygone voyageurs. Midway in the path was a little cabin, which had
+been set up for the shelter of bestormed travellers by employees of
+the Hudson Bay. Granger recognised the place; it was Dead Rat Portage,
+and must be at least fifteen miles from where he was now standing and
+ten from God's Voice.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[314]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Out of the cabin, on his hands and knees, crawled a man. He was
+evidently badly frost-bitten, for he tried to drag himself upright by
+the door-post, but failed miserably, falling forward along the ground.
+As he lay there, he turned toward Granger a face which was
+expressionless as if it had been covered with a mask of waxen leprosy;
+it was frozen solid, as were his feet and hands. Granger knew, more by
+the clothes than the ghastly features, that the man was Spurling.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed now to have given up hope of standing erect, and began to
+move painfully on all fours across the snow to where a log of rotten
+wood was lying. Having reached it, he tried to raise it, but there was
+not the strength in his hands. He tried to fasten his teeth upon it,
+to drag it back with him; but his jaws seemed paralysed. Then he crept
+back to the cabin.</p>
+
+<p>Soon he came out again, and, having reached the log, commenced to
+light it with a match. At first it refused to ignite, but when he had
+pushed some broken twigs under it, it burst into flame. He bent over
+it hungrily, drawing so near that Granger expected to see his clothing
+catch fire.</p>
+
+<p>Then, as he watched, he saw a second figure. It was that of a man,
+dressed precisely as he himself was dressed, and his back was turned
+towards him so that he could not discern his face; he carried in his
+hand an axe. He moved stealthily on snowshoes, dodging from tree to
+tree, lest he should be discovered by the crouching man. His intention
+was so evidently evil, that Granger cried out a warning to save
+Spurling. Murder, when watched in this way, was so brutal that, though
+he himself had planned to do the deed, his whole<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[315]</a></span> moral nature
+revolted against it now. He cried again, but his warning was not
+heard. He wished that the man with the axe would turn his head, that
+he might see his face.</p>
+
+<p>A horrible, grotesque suspicion was growing up within him; he fancied
+that he knew the man&mdash;that he had seen him before in the Klondike,
+<i>that he was himself</i>. Spurling, quite unaware of his danger, was
+holding out his hands to the flames; it was not until the man was
+close behind him that be heard his footsteps and turned his head. His
+face was frozen; the frost had bound him hand and foot, making him
+defenceless, so that he could hardly stir; the only means of appeal he
+had was the expression in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Granger thought that he saw that expression&mdash;the cornered soul
+gesticulating, shrieking for mercy from the living eyes in the
+half-dead face. When the murderer raised his axe, he saw the soul's
+pitiful cowardice and how it shrank. The axe came crashing down. There
+was no need to strike twice; he fell limply backward, throwing his
+arms out wide&mdash;and there was an end of El Dorado and of all his dreams
+of avarice.</p>
+
+<p>The murderer, as if suddenly afraid of his own handiwork, without
+turning his head, hurried on across the portage through the forest,
+and was quickly lost to sight.</p>
+
+<p>Scenting the blood, the four gray huskies, one by one, came out from
+the cabin, where they seemed to have been asleep, and the others
+followed them. They came slowly over to where their tyrant was lying,
+and sniffed his body. They did it cautiously, for as yet they had not
+lost their fear of him; he might awake and belabour them for
+disturbing his last long rest.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[316]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In falling his legs had shot from under him into the fire, scattering
+the embers, so he lay full length, with the red gash in his forehead,
+his arms spread out like a cross, and his face, in the inverted image,
+turned earthwards, gazing down on Granger and the Last Chance River
+with startled, unseeing eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The mirage began to fade and float cloudwards, drifting up-river above
+the tree-tops higher and higher, till it vanished in the west.</p>
+
+<p>Of all that he had witnessed Granger had heard no sound&mdash;there lay the
+chief terror of it. Like the handwriting on the wall in Babylon, it
+had taken place in silence. The crime which he had so often
+contemplated, and planned, had been transacted before his eyes; the
+person who had done the deed had kept his back turned toward him, but
+in his attire was strangely like himself&mdash;and instead of being
+gratified he was filled with loathing and hatred for the slayer.</p>
+
+<p>In the person of another he had seen the vileness which he had been
+seeking for himself, and was horrified. He knew that, had he had his
+chance, he might have taken Spurling's life in just some such way as
+that&mdash;he had imagined how he would do it many times. And now that it
+was accomplished, he was sick with pity for the murdered man.</p>
+
+<p>To one thing he had instantly made up his mind, that, if this should
+prove to be more than a fancy of delirium&mdash;the miraged portrayal of a
+villainy which had actually occurred&mdash;he would track the assassin as
+he had tracked Spurling, till the last ounce of his strength failed
+him, that Spurling might be avenged. Perhaps, in the avenging he hoped
+to clear himself in his own sight of his imagined share in the crime.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[317]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He felt as though the deed had been the result of his own projected
+hatred, and that he himself was the real murderer. When he remembered
+the appearance of the man whom he now followed, it seemed like going
+in pursuit of his own self.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[318]</a></span>
+<h3>THE BLIZZARD</h3>
+
+<p>Now that he was nearing God's Voice, it was necessary that he should
+travel more cautiously and keep a sharp lookout ahead. At any moment
+he might come in sight of a Company's trapper, either sitting beneath
+the trees by his camp-fire or racing down-river between the tall
+banks, following his sled. He might be recognised, and recognition
+would lead to his arrest. Whatever happened afterwards, he desired his
+freedom for yet a little while, so he went carefully. In the course of
+the night he passed by one wigwam; but the Indian was evidently away,
+for no dog rose up to herald his approach. If the squaw was there, she
+did not rouse; he got by unnoticed.</p>
+
+<p>Hoping against hope, he argued with himself, trying to believe that
+Spurling was alive. He told himself that this had been a vision sent
+to him from God to turn him aside from his crime. He had gazed upon
+himself as he would have become, and his soul had revolted at the
+sight.</p>
+
+<p>As he ran on, swearing at his huskies, urging them forward with the
+lash, he offered up to God many fervid thanks for the mercy which He
+had shown him, hoping that by these means, even though the calamity
+had happened, he might shame his Maker by his gratitude into putting
+back the hands of time, and so restoring<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[319]</a></span> the murdered man to life. At
+last by the constant reiteration of the thing which he desired, he
+began to take it for granted that his prayer was answered. Spurling
+was not dead; he was alive, and he was going to ask his forgiveness
+for the evil which he had thought against him.</p>
+
+<p>He put together the words which he would say to him when they met, and
+the gestures he would use to make his words convincing. He repeated
+them over many times that he might retain them in his memory. Then
+something would happen to take his attention away, one of the dogs
+would be shirking or the sled would have overturned, and, when he came
+back to the words which he had planned, he would be thrown into a
+frenzy, finding that they had slipped his mind.</p>
+
+<p>Though he was desperately in earnest over this game at which he
+played, he was aware all the while of its unreality&mdash;that it was but a
+game. His sanity warned him that what he had seen had truly happened,
+and that the man was dead. This was not the first occasion upon which
+he had seen a mirage when the snow was down and the land was white.
+There had been times before, when, at the moment of daybreak or
+sunset, he had witnessed strange freaks of inverted forest and river
+hovering in the sky. Once he had seen an Indian ten miles away,
+attacking a wolf which had been caught by the leg in a steel trap,
+belonging to another man. So distinctly had he seen his features and
+dress that, at a later day, when he had brought in his winter catch of
+furs to exchange, he had recognised him; and when he had offered him
+the wolf-skin, had accused him of the theft. Moreover, he knew that,
+whether the sight which he had witnessed was mirage or fancy,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[320]</a></span> he did
+not deserve the leniency for which he prayed. He had had his chance
+and warning three times already: once in the Klondike; once after the
+arrival of Spurling, when God wrote upon the ice; and once at the
+bend, when in the company of P&egrave;re Antoine he had mistaken the body of
+Strangeways for that of Spurling.</p>
+
+<p>Then there was the appearance of the murderer to be accounted for, and
+his motive in slaying. He had been smaller in stature than himself, as
+had been the creature at the Shallows, but he had had the same
+peculiarities of clothing and was very much alike. Yet he strove to
+drive down all his doubts and to believe the thing which he
+desired&mdash;that the phenomenon was the result of imagination, and that
+Spurling was not dead.</p>
+
+<p>He made small progress in his travelling, for his body was worn out by
+previous hardships. Sometimes he took over two hours to go three
+miles; it was long past midnight when Dead Rat Portage came in sight.</p>
+
+<p>At this point the river made a large curve to the southward and
+broadened out into rapids; the portage was eight hundred yards in
+length and saved voyageurs six miles, crossing the neck of land by a
+narrow trail and picking up the Last Chance River on the other side.
+In summer time the York boats were unloaded here, and dragged across
+on rollers, the freight being carried on men's backs. As he drew near,
+his hope sank; the place looked so gloomy and forbidding. There were
+stories told about it and of how it had won its name, which might well
+make any man afraid. An old fort, established by the French at the
+time when they disputed the possession of Keewatin with Prince
+Rupert's Company, had once stood there; it was said that some of the
+crosses which fringed the trail marked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[321]</a></span> spots where its defenders lay
+buried. However, it was not the memory of the past, but the knowledge
+of what might now await him, which caused him to hesitate.</p>
+
+<p>On the river's bank, where the portage commenced, was a cleared space,
+from which a path led round the cabin and tunnelled into the forest.
+As he eased his sled out of the river-bed, he caught the smell of
+burning, and, when he had topped the bank, he saw the glow of an
+almost extinguished fire. The overhanging trees, casting their network
+of shadows across the snow, prevented him from distinguishing at that
+distance any object that lay beneath them. While he halted, half
+inclined to wait till daybreak before proceeding further with his
+investigation, he was startled by the sound of footsteps. They came
+toward him very cautiously and there were many of them. He saw the
+glint of eyes in the darkness, shining out and disappearing among the
+crosses. He tried to count them; as far as he could make out there
+were six pairs. Then he called them softly by name, and there came
+toward him Spurling's four grey huskies and the two of his own team,
+which had been taken.</p>
+
+<p>And still he clung desperately to his hope and would not allow himself
+to believe that in the shadow of the trees, a dozen yards from where
+he was standing, the man whom he had set out to kill was lying
+murdered. He whispered his name, not daring to speak louder. When no
+answer was returned, he rallied his retreating faith by saying, "He is
+sleeping. I must approach him gently. If he awakes and hears me, he
+may think I am his enemy and escape me."</p>
+
+<p>Leaving his dogs, he stole toward the sparks of fire.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[322]</a></span> Although he
+still denied the mirage, telling himself that what he had seen was
+fancied, he directed his steps by that which he had witnessed in the
+sky.</p>
+
+<p>Drawing nearer, he made out the smouldering log; cowardice prompted
+him to procrastinate, he crept round behind it. The air was heavy with
+the smell of scorching leather. His eyes growing more accustomed to
+the shadow, he saw the figure of a man, lying on the snow with his
+arms stretched out in the shape of a cross and his moccasined feet
+protruding above the glowing ashes. The last vestige of hope left him;
+he knew that Spurling was dead. With certainty, his power of decision
+returned; he still had a purpose to live for&mdash;to avenge this death.</p>
+
+<p>Having pulled the body aside and heaped branches against the log, he
+rekindled the fire. In the light which it cast he could see the
+blurred trail of Spurling, where he had crawled to and from the cabin;
+also he could see the tracks which the slayer's snowshoes had left as
+he strode away through the forest following the portage. He stooped
+and examined them. By so doing he learnt a new fact&mdash;that the man who
+had done the deed was of Indian blood, for the toes of his footprints
+inclined to turn inwards, and in carrying his feet forward he had kept
+them closer together than does a white man; also he judged that he was
+lightly built, for the snow beneath his steps was not much crushed.</p>
+
+<p>So Beorn was not the culprit, nor was his phantom-self from the
+Klondike. He thought of Eyelids; but Eyelids was a tall man and his
+stride ought to have been longer. That which he had witnessed in the
+mirage led him to believe that the act had been pre<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[323]</a></span>meditated, and
+therefore had some strong motive; either it had been done for the
+reward or for the sake of theft.</p>
+
+<p>He looked round for Spurling's sled and found it in the cabin; it was
+still loaded&mdash;the gold had not been touched. He was puzzled. If theft
+was not the object, why had the body been left? Without its production
+or some part of it that was recognisable, the thousand dollars would
+not be awarded. The best way to solve the mystery was to follow up the
+murderer; and, if he were to do that, there was no time to lose.</p>
+
+<p>Dragging the remains into the cabin, he made fast the door, that the
+wolves might not destroy them; he would care for them on his homeward
+journey&mdash;if he survived to come back. Harnessing the four grey huskies
+into his sled, since they were the freshest, he set out across the
+portage. Turning his head, as he entered the forest, he took one last
+look at the deserted camp. The fire, burning brightly, with no one to
+sit by it, added the final touch to the general aspect of melancholy.
+Wailing through the darkness the huskies wandered; and in the
+background, when the flames shot up, appeared the crosses, bending one
+toward another, which marked the sleeping-places of men who, years
+since, had lived and suffered, and obtained their rest.</p>
+
+<p>Beneath the trees, the gloom was so heavy that he could see nothing;
+but on coming out on to the banks of the river on the other side he
+again picked up the murderer's trail. It led up the Last Chance in a
+south-westerly direction towards God's Voice, which was only ten miles
+distant. He had begun to take it for granted that the man was a Hudson
+Bay employee, hurrying toward the fort to claim the reward, when the
+tracks,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[324]</a></span> branching off to the left, climbed out of the river and
+plunged into a low-lying, thickly wooded wilderness, striking due
+south.</p>
+
+<p>In Keewatin the rivers are the only highways; to leave them even in
+summer time, if you have no guide and are not a man born in the
+district, is extremely dangerous; to do so in winter when, after every
+precaution has been taken, travel remains precarious, is to court
+almost certain death. For a moment Granger hesitated. He examined the
+prints of the snowshoes and saw that they were very recent. The man
+must have waited somewhere, and seen him coming. He must know now that
+he was being followed, and could not be far ahead. "Well, it's death
+whatever happens," thought Granger; "to go on to God's Voice is death;
+to return to Murder Point is death. I'd just as soon die by this man's
+hand, trying to avenge Spurling, as one cold morning in Winnipeg with
+a rope about my neck."</p>
+
+<p>The day rose late and cloudy. The sun did not show itself. The sky
+weighed down upon the tree-tops, as if too heavy to support itself.
+Presently large flakes of snow, the size of feathers, drifted through
+the air, making a gentle rustling as they fell. Granger pressed on
+more hurriedly, for he feared that, if he dropped too far behind, the
+snow would cover up all traces of the man, and so he would escape him.
+Sometimes he fancied that he could hear him going on ahead, for every
+now and then a twig would snap. In the heat of his pursuit he took no
+account of direction.</p>
+
+<p>About midday he halted; of late all sounds had grown rarer and the
+snow had thickened, causing even his own footprints to appear blurred
+a few seconds after<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[325]</a></span> they had been made. Of the trail which he
+followed he could see nothing himself, trusting to his huskies' sense
+of smell to lead him aright.</p>
+
+<p>Soon he grew strangely nervous, for he thought that he heard the
+crunch of snowshoes coming up behind. He persuaded himself that it was
+imagination, until his dogs, swinging round in a half-circle, began to
+travel back in a direction parallel to the route they had already
+traversed. He paused and listened again; behind him he could
+distinctly hear the sound of something stirring. Then he knew that he
+was no longer the pursuer.</p>
+
+<p>His blood froze in his veins, and he began to lose confidence. He
+realised that if the murderer knew the district and was moving in a
+circle purposely, he was doing so in order that he might lure him to
+his death. Abandoning all thought of pursuit, his sole endeavour
+became to regain the river-bed. He lashed his dogs, urging them
+forward to the limit of their strength; but he came to nothing that
+was familiar; and, when he paused for breath, he could always hear the
+snowshoes following.</p>
+
+<p>Then he awoke to the knowledge that he was lost. His first sensation
+was of blank bewilderment, producing in him an utter loss of memory.
+He strove to quiet himself, but his will-power refused to operate. Who
+he was, and why he was there, he could not remember; of two things
+only was he conscious, that he was pursued by something that was evil,
+and that he was lost.</p>
+
+<p>A state of chaos reigned within him, which was soon succeeded by an
+all-pervading terror. He must escape somehow to safety, to a place
+where there were men. He longed to dash on somewhere, on and on; but
+he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[326]</a></span> was paralysed by his utter inability to think consecutively or to
+choose out any particular direction. He began to see horrible
+contorted shapes about him, and to imagine modes of death which were
+still more horrible. He might die of starvation, he might die of
+thirst, he might die of frost; but his worst fear was of something
+which he would never see, which would steal softly up, when he was too
+cold to turn his head, and strike him from behind. He circled round
+and round to avoid the blow; but he felt that, as he moved, the thing
+moved keeping pace with him, so that, for all his alertness, it was
+always behind his back.</p>
+
+<p>In a way in which he had never desired it before, he longed for human
+companionship&mdash;just to look once more upon a living face. And to all
+these fears and yearnings there was the undertow of an added
+horror&mdash;the terror lest he should become insane. He burst into a
+passion of weeping; as the tears fell they froze upon his face. The
+air was thick with snow which the rising wind drifted about, driving
+it into curious and fantastic shapes. Had he been more quiet, he would
+have known that his only wise plan was to lie down until the blizzard
+was past. It would bury him, but as a covering it would act as a
+blanket to keep him warm. The blizzard seemed to him to be hemming him
+in, building up about him a shifting wall through which the pursuer
+could attack him unseen.</p>
+
+<p>Always he was conscious of the pursuer's presence; always he could see
+the picture of Spurling's uplifted face and the pleading that was in
+his eyes as the assailant, with his back turned towards the onlooker,
+poised the axe above his head. That he might not share that fate he
+broke away into the greyness, tripping over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[327]</a></span> snow ridges, falling into
+drifts, and bruising his body against the trunks of trees in the
+madness of his flight. His huskies added to his panic by following
+him.</p>
+
+<p>There were times when he ran so far ahead that he could neither see
+nor hear them; but, when he halted, panting, they would emerge and lay
+themselves down at his side. He hated them; they were sinister in his
+eyes. Had they not brought Spurling from Winnipeg, and had not their
+yellow-faced leader been the cause of Strangeways' death?</p>
+
+<p>The wind, rising higher, shrieked among the branches. He wandered on,
+neither knowing nor caring where he went, for he had lost all sense of
+locality or time. There were intervals during which he must have
+dreamed and slept, for he passed down an endless street of tall
+houses, built in the English fashion, and the blinds were up and it
+was nightfall. On the windows danced the light of fires, burning on
+the hearths inside; and sometimes he could see the faces of children
+looking out at him. He held up his blue hands at them, making signs
+that they should let him in that he might warm himself; but they shook
+their heads mischievously, and ran away and laughed.</p>
+
+<p>After one of these experiences, more real to him than the others, he
+came to himself. Surely that was the sound of music and dancing that
+came to him above the cry of the storm. He waited for a lull and
+listened, then followed the direction of the sound. As he drew nearer,
+he caught the thud of moccasined feet beating time upon a boarded
+floor, and snatches of the tune which the violin was playing.
+Something loomed up out of the darkness to meet him. He held out his
+hands to force it from him, and drove them against a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[328]</a></span> door. Then he
+knew that he had arrived at God's Voice.</p>
+
+<p>He was half inclined to knock; at least they would not threaten him
+and drive him away this time as they had done in the previous winter.
+What was more likely to happen was that the man who opened to him,
+recognising him, would seize him by the throat, drag him inside and
+quickly slam the door. He would push him before him across the square
+till he came to the room where the trappers were dancing, where, in
+all probability, the factor was. And Robert Pilgrim when he saw him,
+wagging his red beard at him, would shout, "Ha, so you heard me
+whistle, and have come like a dog!"</p>
+
+<p>He drew himself upright and stepped back from the gateway. No, he
+could not endure that. Any death was preferable to the price that he
+would have to pay for such shelter.</p>
+
+<p>He worked his way along the wall till he stood beneath the window
+where the fort was assembled. It was a comfort to him to hear again
+the sound of voices. He listened to the fiddling and recognised it as
+that of Sandy McQuean, the half-breed son of a famous Orkney man. He
+had learnt his art from his father. They were all Scotch airs that he
+played. He could sing, when he chose, with a Highland accent, and had
+caught the knack of imbuing what he sang with an intolerable pathos.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[329]</a></span></p><p>The stamping of feet had ceased, but the violinist wandered on.
+Presently a new melody began to emerge from the improvisations, and a
+man's voice rose above the storm. The words he sang were <i>The Flowers
+o' the Forest</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"I've seen the smiling<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of fortune beguiling;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I've felt all its favours, and found its decay;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Sweet was its blessing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Kind its caressing;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But now 'tis fled&mdash;fled far away."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Granger shifted his feet uneasily as he listened, and half-turned to
+go.</p>
+
+<p>As he did so, he found that someone was standing close behind him. He
+did not see his face, but one glance was enough to warn him. He dodged
+and ran to the river. The man was following him again. He took the
+direction which was open to him, and set out down-stream, returning to
+the portage.</p>
+
+<p>The wind was dead against him, blinding his eyes and choking him with
+snow. He bowed his head and struggled on. He made a brave effort, but
+he knew that he was slowly freezing. His flesh was icy and his bones
+seemed heavy, weighing him down. The blood halted, and leapt forward,
+and halted in his veins and arteries, as though there were frequent
+stoppages past which it had to squeeze its way; he could hear it
+surging.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually his physical pain grew less and, as it did so, his mind
+attained an unwonted clearness. He had somewhat the same experience as
+is said to come to drowning men in their last moments of
+consciousness. He was able to review his life as a whole and justly,
+attributing to each separate action its proper importance, and share
+of praise or blame. He realised that his hiding from Robert Pilgrim on
+Huskies' Island, journey to the Forbidden River, and pursuit of
+Spurling, had been one long series of mistakes, each one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[330]</a></span> tending to
+make him appear more guilty of Strangeways' death. He owned that all
+his life had been spent in avoiding his most obvious duties, and in
+setting himself hard tasks in exchange, which were impossible of
+accomplishment. His first duty had been towards his mother, and he had
+abandoned it nominally for the sake of a childish pledge, really for
+the glamour of El Dorado. His more recent duty had been to fulfil his
+obligations to his half-breed wife, especially now that she was about
+to bear him a child; he had forsaken her for his old dream's sake and
+for the sake of a revenge which he had persuaded himself was noble.</p>
+
+<p>Reviewing these facts, he promised himself that, if ever he were given
+again the power of choice, he would return to Murder Point and live
+for her. Another matter became clear in his mind; that, when
+Spurling's body was discovered, if the man who had done the deed did
+not own up, he would be accused of the murder&mdash;and it <i>would</i> be
+murder, for it would be thought that he had killed him not in the
+cause of justice, but out of private spite. Morally he knew that he
+was the culprit and deserved to be hanged, for he had only avoided
+being guilty through the accident of having been forestalled in his
+crime.</p>
+
+<p>He stumbled and fell full length in a drift. He did not try to rise.
+He had no fear of dying; his only desire was to get warm now. He
+pressed nearer to the snow and closed his eyes, and gradually lost
+consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>He was awakened by someone rubbing his face vigorously. He resented
+the interference; he wanted the rest. Once he opened his eyes, and was
+blinded by a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[331]</a></span> roaring fire. As the warmth spread through him and his
+circulation returned, his body became very painful, as though it were
+being pierced by millions of red-hot needles. The agony of it brought
+him to himself.</p>
+
+<p>A man was bending over him, whose face he could not see, for the hood
+was fastened before it, leaving only his eyes visible. By his dress he
+knew that he was his pursuer and Spurling's slayer. Again he was
+impressed with the fancy, not so much by his proportions which were
+smaller, but by his clothing, that he was very like himself. Languidly
+he awaited an opportunity to get another glimpse of his eyes; somehow
+they were familiar, he knew them. Then, because the man, murderer
+though he was, was saving his life, he turned away his head. He would
+not see anything which, in a weaker moment, might tempt him to give
+information in order that he might save himself.</p>
+
+<p>The man, seeing that he was recovered and safe to be left, without a
+word of explanation glided off into the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>Granger sat up and looked after him; he was puzzled by the memory of
+those eyes. He ran through all the list of his acquaintance, and could
+not place them. The blizzard had now subsided, and the stars shone
+overhead. He must have lain unconscious for some time before being
+found. All around him, and as far as eye could reach, the snow lay in
+short choppy waves, which took on the appearance of motion by reason
+of the shadows. As he watched, something lifted up its head above a
+ridge, and he saw that it was one of the huskies. Either his team had
+followed him, or the man had brought them with him. Rising to his
+feet, on the other side of the fire he saw his sled. He felt hungry,
+and going<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[332]</a></span> towards it was about to get out some provisions, when he
+found that that was unnecessary; in the ashes a can of black tea was
+brewing and some bacon had been left, also a bundle of wood sufficient
+to last him till morning. He spent the remainder of the night there,
+and at daybreak continued his journey to the portage.</p>
+
+<p>When he reached the cabin and pushed open the door, he found that it
+was occupied. An Indian, of the Sucker tribe, whom he had previously
+met, was sitting there. Looking round he saw that Spurling's body was
+in the same place and untouched, but that the load upon the sled had
+been rifled.</p>
+
+<p>When he had offered him some tobacco, the Indian, jerking his head in
+the direction of the body, asked, "You kill him?"</p>
+
+<p>Granger signed denial. The Indian looked doubtful. Then he said,
+pointing to the old tracks in the cabin which his snowshoes had left,
+"All the same, those your tracks."</p>
+
+<p>Granger was in no mood for arguing, so he nodded assent. The Indian
+was silent for a while. Presently he rose to his feet and harnessed in
+his team. As he passed out of the door, he said, "You bad man. All the
+same, you kill him."</p>
+
+<p>Granger followed him out and saw him crossing the portage towards
+God's Voice. He scraped a hole in the snow and buried Spurling.</p>
+
+<p>On turning his attention to the sled, he saw that the Indian had taken
+everything except the gold. He poured out the dust and nuggets above
+Spurling's grave; it was the thing which he had loved most in life, as
+some men love goodness and flowers. To both<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[333]</a></span> Spurling and himself it
+was worthless now; but it was the only offering which he had.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving the mound sparkling white and yellow in the sunshine, he
+struck the trail down the Last Chance River, returning to Murder
+Point.</p>
+<br /><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[334]</a></span>
+<h3>THE LAST CHANCE</h3>
+
+<p>Since the middle of November he had been back at the Point: it was now
+the day before Christmas, and Peggy was still absent. During the last
+six weeks he had waited anxiously, always listening, even in his
+sleep, for her returning footstep. It was extraordinary to him to
+notice how, now that he had lost her, every other affection that he
+had ever known became dwarfed and of no acount in comparison with his
+love of her. He no longer thought of Mordaunt or of El Dorado; all his
+anxiety was for the half-breed wife, whom he had once despised. There
+was but one ambition, the fulfilment of which he greatly desired, and
+that was again to see her and to look upon his child. Somewhere
+outside, beneath the grey chaos of white forest and gloomy sky, in the
+wigwam of a trapper, tended by Indian women, she had faced her ordeal
+and had, perhaps, survived. If ever he was to see her it would be
+to-night, when her kinsmen had promised to return.</p>
+
+<p>At first, when he had left Dead Rat Portage, he had feared that he
+would be overtaken by the Mounted Police or Robert Pilgrim before ever
+he reached the Point. For six weeks he had remained there undisturbed
+and solitary.</p>
+
+<p>Watching from his window day by day, he had seen an occasional Indian
+pass, averting his face and, if he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[335]</a></span> were a Catholic, crossing himself
+to avoid the overlooking of the evil eye. When such chance travellers
+approached the bend, he had noticed how they seemed to see something
+there, which he could not see, and climbing out of the river-trail,
+making a wide circuit, hurried their steps to get quickly by. Though
+he had spoken to no one for so long a time, he had not been
+lonely&mdash;watching for Peggy was a continual, if painful, source of
+excitement. And another matter had kept him fully occupied. Being an
+honest man, he knew that since the spring of the year he had not done
+well by his employers; therefore, since he thought it highly probable
+that, at any moment, he might be called away on a longer journey than
+any that he had yet undertaken, he had spent a large part of his
+leisure in making a report of the trade and contents of the store,
+which would be of service to his unlucky successor in the post of
+agent.</p>
+
+<p>His chief cause for disquiet had been the hidden personality of the
+man whom he had seen in the sky, and who had afterwards rescued him
+from the blizzard near God's Voice. The haunting recollection of those
+eyes, of which he had caught but a glimpse as the man bent over him
+and the fire beat up into his shrouded face, had tortured him,
+allowing him rest from thought neither day nor night. For weeks he had
+searched his memory for some forgotten record, which would account for
+their seeming familiarity. Where had he seen them before? Was it
+before he left England, or in the Klondike? Or had their owner once
+come to trade with him at the store?</p>
+
+<p>Ten days ago, when he was sitting half-dozing by the stove, thinking
+of nothing in particular, a face had drifted up from his subconscious
+memory, group<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[336]</a></span>ing its features about the eyes. He had staggered to his
+feet, horrified at the significance which this new knowledge, if true,
+gave to the motive of the crime. Bewildering details, which he had
+noticed in the man's appearance and had not been able to reconcile,
+now built themselves into the chain of evidence and were readily
+explained&mdash;there could be no mistake. He had bowed his head in his
+trembling hands, giving God broken thanks that he had been spared the
+final remorse which would have come to him had he been successful in
+his pursuit of Spurling's murderer. All that night he had prayed,
+aghast and terrified, that God would protect the assailant from
+detection.</p>
+
+<p>And perhaps God had heard him, for the morning found him strangely
+quiet; he thought that he had now discovered a way to go out of life a
+gentleman, though no one but himself and one other would know that his
+gallantry was not disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>The short December daylight wore away and night fell. He spread a meal
+for four people, with fare which was unusually ample. Having lit the
+lamp and built up a roaring fire in the stove, he sat down to await
+the arrival of his guests.</p>
+
+<p>To evade his excitement of anticipation, which was becoming painful,
+he drove his thoughts back to other Christmas Eves, and tried to
+imagine and share in the innocent happiness which the season was
+bringing to children, still illusioned and unwise, all the world over
+that night. He had almost succeeded in beguiling himself into the
+belief that he was again a child, when the huskies commenced to howl,
+giving warning of someone's approach.</p>
+
+<p>Listening acutely, he caught the distant shouting of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[337]</a></span> dog-drivers,
+coming down-river, across the ice. He ran to the window and saw the
+forms of two men, stooping down unharnessing their teams at the Point.
+He recognised them, but did not go outside to make them welcome, since
+he had not yet learnt their purpose. The door opened, and Beorn and
+Eyelids entered.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing altered in Beorn's appearance; but Eyelids looked
+haggard and fatigued with travel.</p>
+
+<p>He came towards Granger with a stealthy tread, yet so slowly that he
+seemed rather to be drawing back. "Where's Peggy?" were the first
+words he uttered. "She's gone away," Granger said. Then, seeing her
+brother's genuine concern, he commenced to explain a little of what
+had taken place in his absence. He was recounting his discovery of
+Spurling's flight, when his listener, taking it for granted that he
+already knew the rest, broke in impatiently, with "You damn fool!
+Why'd you kill him?"</p>
+
+<p>Granger smiled. He was amused at the half-breed's new air of
+domineering boldness and the change which it made in his countenance.
+"Oh, so you know that?" he inquired. Eyelids came over and shook him
+by the arm, as though he thought that he needed awakening.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking rapidly, tumbling over his words, sometimes relapsing into
+the Cree dialect, he commenced to give a hurried account of his own
+actions. There had been a thousand dollars offered for Spurling's
+capture, and he had gone to claim it. It was not covetousness
+altogether which had prompted him to do that; the reward was only an
+incident. His father was determined to be revenged for the trespass of
+the Forbidden River, and he had accompanied his father, hoping, by so
+doing, to save his brother-in-law's life&mdash;the handing over of
+Spurling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[338]</a></span> to justice would have proved him innocent of complicity in
+Strangeway's death.</p>
+
+<p>They had had to go a long way south before they had met with the
+winter patrol and had been able to give their information. They had
+been coming back with Sergeant Shattuck to make the arrest, when they
+had fallen in with an Indian of the Sucker tribe. He had given them
+news that a month ago a man had been murdered at the Dead Rat Portage
+by the agent at the Point, where he believed they had quarrelled,
+though why and what about he could not guess.</p>
+
+<p>Arriving at God's Voice, they had learnt that gold had been found,
+scattered above the grave at the Dead Rat. And now the Mounted Police
+were coming, Eyelids said, to take Granger away to be hanged. He had
+heard Robert Pilgrim and the sergeant arranging it together, and had
+come on ahead to give him warning. He believed that the pursuers were
+not far behind. His quarrel had been with Spurling, not with Granger;
+he was emphatic about that. He would not have accompanied his father,
+had he not gathered from words which he had let fall in his delirium,
+that Granger hated Spurling as much as any of them. He had thought
+that he would understand their purpose in going southward, and would
+be willing to guard Spurling in order that he might be betrayed. And
+now he had come to make him an offer: there was yet time to escape; he
+would hide him so securely in the forest that he never would be
+tracked.</p>
+
+<p>Granger thought that he discovered in Eyelids' vehemence the
+blustering confusion of a repentant Judas.</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head, "No," he answered, "I intend to wait."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[339]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Eyelids pressed him for a reason. "I must see Peggy," he replied: "she
+will certainly be here to-night. Even if she had already arrived and
+were willing to go with me, I should stay."</p>
+
+<p>For a man of Indian training, Eyelids used many words to persuade him.
+When he saw that he had failed, he relapsed into sullen silence. Beorn
+paid no attention, but stared grimly before him with his dead-soul
+eyes, as though he had heard nothing. Granger fancied that he must
+often have worn that same expression when, crouched beneath the
+auriferous ledges of the Fair-haired Annie, he had listened to the
+picks of his enemies drawing nearer, and had waited to deal out
+unhurried and impartial death to the men of the Bloody Thunder Mine.</p>
+
+<p>There was the sound of long striding steps ascending the mound; it was
+not the tread of Peggy. Without the formality of knocking, the latch
+was raised and P&egrave;re Antoine towered in the doorway. His garments were
+frosted and glistened, so that he seemed to be clothed in a vaporous
+incandescence. His face was very stern and sad. He said nothing, but
+gazing full on Granger, he beckoned to him that he should come
+outside.</p>
+
+<p>Casting his capote about him and drawing on his mittens, he obeyed.
+Antoine led the way to the back of the store, till they stood on the
+edge of the clearing, where the forest began. The full moon shining
+down on the country made it appear legendary and ghostlike, a
+veritable Hollow land, such as the Indians believed in, entering into
+which a man might wander on forever, without home-coming, and never
+taste of death. Granger felt that he would scarcely experience
+surprise<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[340]</a></span> were he to witness, drifting on poised wings from an opening
+in the clouds, a flight of shadowy angels, voyaging to some newer
+planet where they should startle other shepherds, singing to them the
+tidings of the Christ.</p>
+
+<p>Antoine recalled him, saying, "I may not be doing right, for I cannot
+guess your motives, but I have come to tell you that I am willing to
+help you to escape."</p>
+
+<p>If he had come to him on any other errand than that of his own
+preservation, Granger knew, as he watched the pity struggling with the
+sternness in his face, that he would have followed him anywhere, to
+peril and to shame. But now, that was impossible.</p>
+
+<p>"Antoine," he replied, "I cannot. Spurling is dead."</p>
+
+<p>Le P&egrave;re surveyed him curiously in silence. "But you&mdash;did you do it?"
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>"You know that I always meant to do it."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you are determined to die?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"For some one else?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pshaw! For me it is no sacrifice. You know that I would have killed
+him, had God given me the time."</p>
+
+<p>Antoine drew off his mitten, and held out to him his bare right hand.
+"You are a noble man," he said; "I will keep your secret."</p>
+
+<p>As they returned to the shack, Eyelids looked up at them inquiringly,
+as though he were about to ask them what preparations he should make
+for their journey. When he saw how, saying nothing, they sat
+themselves down to wait, he shrugged his shoulders desperately.
+Presently, with a false show of indifference, he set about playing the
+moccasin-game, which consists of placing buttons, bullets, and
+anything small which comes handy,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[341]</a></span> into an empty moccasin, shaking
+them up together, and guessing the number which the shoe contains. It
+is a gambling game which, in earlier days, was wont to cause much
+bloodshed and ruin among the buffalo-runners of the plains.</p>
+
+<p>The hours went by and the night grew late. The meal which had been
+spread was still untasted. They did not converse; there seemed so
+little to say, and, moreover, their voices might prevent them from
+hearing the first warning of Peggy's approach. The roaring of the logs
+in the stove, and the monotonous clicking of the buttons and bullets
+one against the other as Eyelids shook them, and again as he emptied
+them upon the floor, like the ominous tapping of muffled hammers at
+work about a coffin, were the only sounds, and these, at last, by
+reason of their regularity, began to grow nerve-racking. Between the
+emptying of the moccasin, and the gathering up and re-shaking of the
+counters, Granger held his breath. It seemed to him that Eyelids was
+gambling with an invisible player, and that the stake which he stood
+to lose or win was his own life. It was inconceivable that any man
+should have sat playing all these hours at a game of hazard, risking
+nothing, having for antagonist himself.</p>
+
+<p>Relief came from without. From far across the river the forest-silence
+was shattered by a piercing cry. It reached him distantly at first,
+but, with each interval that elapsed, it grew nearer. It was like the
+tortured, desperate complaining of a soul in its final agony. Stealing
+to the window, he looked out, and saw upon the farther bank the
+outline of a timber-wolf. He looked at Beorn; he also had heard it,
+for he had pricked up his ears like a husky and was listening. Fearing
+that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[342]</a></span> suspense of these long and silent hours might cause him to
+behave unworthily, he clutched Antoine by the shoulder, and whispered,
+"For God's sake, say something. Tell us one of your tales."</p>
+
+<p>Then Le P&egrave;re thought awhile, and afterwards, in a low sonorous voice,
+commenced to recount the story of the founding of the Huron
+Mission&mdash;one of the noblest histories in the world, of men who have
+died for men. As he progressed, Eyelids looked up from his
+moccasin-game and the little tappings, as of muffled hammers about a
+coffin, ceased for a spell.</p>
+
+<p>He told them of Isaac Jogues, the Jesuit; how he was the most timid of
+men, and how for his love of Christ he became brave.</p>
+
+<p>He told them of his capture, on the second day of August, 1642, by the
+Iroquois, and the patience with which his sufferings were endured. How
+when he was near dying of hunger and thirst, he used the drops of
+rain, which had gathered in an ear of corn which had been thrown him,
+to baptize two dying men. How when the Indians had grown weary of
+torturing him and had cast him out into the March bleakness, he spent
+his days in the forest praying, and carving the name of <i>Jesus</i> on the
+tree-trunks with his lacerated hands.</p>
+
+<p>Then followed the account of his miraculous escape to France and the
+honours which were proffered him by Church and State, no one of which
+he would take, save only permission to return to Canada that, as he
+had lived, so he might die for men, and the Pope's special
+dispensation that he might say the Mass, from which he had been
+debarred by his mutilations.</p>
+
+<p>And he told them the story of Br&eacute;beuf and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[343]</a></span> vision which he had had
+in the winter of 1640, when sojourning among the Neutral Nation. How
+he beheld in the sky the apparition of a great cross, advancing
+towards him from the quarter where lay the Iroquois land. How he had
+spoken to his comrades about it, and they had questioned him, "What is
+it like? How large?" And he had answered them, saying, "It is large
+enough to crucify us all."</p>
+
+<p>Granger interrupted him, smiling grimly to himself and whispering,
+"Yes, and I have seen it in Keewatin&mdash;<i>large enough to crucify us
+all</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Antoine, overhearing his words, replied, "I know you have." After
+which they fell silent. For perhaps an hour they remained thus, and
+the flame of the lamp sank lower and lower as the oil became
+exhausted; no one rose to attend to it.</p>
+
+<p>A panting breath was heard outside. The door flew open and a man stood
+upon the threshold. "They are coming," he gasped in a rasping voice.
+"My God! they are coming."</p>
+
+<p>No one stirred. They did not recognise his tones and it was too dark
+to see his face. They were each one wondering who was this stranger,
+who could find in the death of anyone, save himself, a matter for
+distress.</p>
+
+<p>He closed the door; in so doing, they saw that he carried a bundle,
+like a deformity, strapped across his shoulders. They watched him in
+silence until, cowed by the coldness of their reception, he was
+turning to depart; then Antoine spoke up. "Come nearer the stove, my
+son," he said, "where you can warm yourself, and we can look upon your
+face."</p>
+
+<p>Slowly the man moved forward, casting a long shadow on the wall. And
+now to the four men gazing, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[344]</a></span> shadow which the stranger cast seemed
+to have become of more interest than his face&mdash;for there were two
+shadows, one of which followed ominously behind. While the first umbra
+was dim and blurred, the second was dense and well-defined; moreover
+it stood by itself, as if cast by an unseen presence, and was in every
+way different from that of the stranger. It seemed endowed with a
+separate personality; its actions were independent of those of the man
+and shadow which it followed. In watching it, they felt that there
+were six people in the room instead of five.</p>
+
+<p>Recognition came to them each one at about the same time; they rose to
+their feet fascinated, and stared like men gone mad. The thing stood
+upright, a little way out from the wall it seemed, its head turned
+towards them, as if conscious of their inspection&mdash;<i>and yet it was
+only a shadow</i>. And it was the shadow of a man over six feet in height
+and proportionately broad of chest, who carried his dog-whip
+left-handed. It was the shadow which Spurling would have cast, had he
+been alive. And Spurling had cursed Granger merely for suggesting
+that, despite their preparations for departure, they might all meet
+again at Murder Point on Christmas Eve.</p>
+
+<p>The stranger, being ignorant of what they saw, for whichever way he
+turned the pursuer stole behind him, and growing alarmed at their
+terrified expressions, withdrew from the circle of the lamp and
+firelight, willing to hide himself.</p>
+
+<p>Granger was the first to remove his gaze from the wall and to recover
+from his surprise. He approached the shrinking figure. "Peggy," he
+cried: and as she turned, he saw that her capote was the one which he
+had missed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[345]</a></span> and that the remainder of her man's dress was his own
+borrowed attire.</p>
+
+<p>She came towards him with her arms stretched out and, as she did so,
+his heart was strangely stirred within him by a little puling cry.</p>
+
+<p>"It was the only way to save you," she moaned; "and it has not saved
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"I know, I understand," he whispered. Then he loosed her arms from
+about his neck and unslung the baby from her shoulders. Fear for their
+common safety struggling with the mother's pride and tenderness, she
+followed him to the firelight and allowed him to kneel beside her.
+Their bodies pressing close together, they wondered at and touched
+with a strange reverence the little weakly creature sprawling in her
+lap. It commenced to wail, and she bared to it her breasts. To Antoine
+watching her, she seemed the Madonna of Keewatin, with her stifled
+love, naked passions, and heroic fight for life&mdash;and to-morrow would
+be Christmas night.</p>
+
+<p>In the presence of the child they had all forgotten the shadow,
+hovering there behind her, and the sorrow which it meant. Even
+Eyelids, the Judas of the tragedy, stole nearer and, extending his
+hands, touched shyly this frail body of newborn life, as if by so
+doing he could cleanse them. No one interfered with him; they were too
+glad. The Man with the Dead Soul looked on unmoved; his countenance
+was alone unchanged. He was listening intently.</p>
+
+<p>A wolf-call broke the stillness of the night. Going to the door, he
+stepped out, threw back his head and answered. It was the sign for
+which he had waited. Eyelids snatched up his gun and placed himself
+before<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[346]</a></span> Granger, prepared to defend him; but Granger took the gun from
+his hand. "No. Not that," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Turning about, he saw that Peggy had risen and, with his child in her
+arms, was hurrying toward the threshold. Guessing her purpose, he
+caught her by the waist and drew her back. He led her to that corner
+of the room which was darkest, and, making her sit down, bent above
+her speaking in a low quick voice. For two minutes nothing was heard
+but her sobbing, the hissing of his whispered messages, and the slow,
+deep-drawn breathing of Eyelids and Antoine. They both knew now that
+he was innocent since they had seen the shadow. The air was heavy with
+suspense. There was a crunching of snow which came nearer, ascending
+the mound toward the shack. There was the sound of several footsteps,
+as of men taking up positions about the house. The door burst open and
+Beorn entered, followed by a man who, Granger guessed from his bearing
+and dress, was Sergeant Shattuck. It was his last chance to redeem
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>He rose up, resting his hand on his wife's shoulder to keep her
+seated, and stood in front of her, hiding her from view, so that the
+sergeant should not see that tell-tale shadow behind her. Even while
+he held himself there in breathless silence, taking his first look at
+the man who had travelled all those miles only to carry him southward
+to his death, he smiled grimly, amused at the Homeric justice of
+it&mdash;that Spurling should have killed and been killed by a woman in
+disguise, and that on his head should rest the burden of the shame, he
+who throughout his life had never <i>done</i>, but had only <i>intended</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Then the sergeant spoke. "John Granger, are you there?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[347]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I am."</p>
+
+<p>"I arrest you, John Granger, on the charge of being concerned in the
+death of Corporal Eric Strangeways, and of the wilful murder of one
+Druce Spurling, your accomplice in the latter crime, whom you, well
+knowing that he was a fugitive from justice, assisted to escape from
+the afore-mentioned Eric Strangeways."</p>
+
+<p>Peggy half rose to her feet, with a choking cry, and tried to speak;
+but Granger checked her.</p>
+
+<p>"I plead guilty," he said; "I am ready to come with you. I have only
+one request to make, that you take me away with you at once, setting
+out this night."</p>
+
+<p>The sergeant looked doubtful; he had made a long journey, and he and
+his dogs were tired. But hearing the sound of intolerable sobbing, he
+thought that he understood, and nodded his assent.</p>
+
+<p>They all stepped out, closing the door behind them, and left Granger
+alone with his wife. In five minutes the door opened and he joined
+them. His face was grey and tremulous, but his lips were steady and
+smiling. "Large enough to crucify us all," murmured Antoine when he
+saw him. Granger knew what he meant&mdash;that he was referring to Keewatin
+and to his sacrifice. He shook his head at him; he was not thinking of
+that. He was thinking of Spurling's shadow, made prisoner by its own
+hatred, chained behind the woman weeping in the shack, and of how he
+had cheated it of its pitiful revenge. But it was not yet too late for
+one of his companions, or even Peggy herself, to betray his secret. He
+would not feel that she was safe until Murder Point had been lost to
+sight. Stepping briskly over to Shattuck he inquired, "Any need of
+handcuffs to-night, Sergeant?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not if you pledge me your word," he replied: but he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[348]</a></span> spoke
+absent-mindedly, taking no steps toward departure. Granger grew
+impatient; every moment thus wasted might lose him his chance of
+making a decent exit from life. He had sought for so many things which
+he had not found, that he was now frenziedly covetous of attaining
+this last success.</p>
+
+<p>"Sergeant, you remember your promise to me that . . ."</p>
+
+<p>Before he had finished his sentence, Shattuck broke in on him
+excitedly, exclaiming, "By God, but it's you that it's wanting. Look,
+over there, down-river to the northeast."</p>
+
+<p>Turning quickly about to the direction indicated, his eyes fell upon
+the bend. There, standing a short way out from the bank on the ice, so
+that he could see it clearly, was the figure of a man, <i>with the
+moonlight streaming through him</i>. Granger recognised him by his
+tallness and uprightness. He was waving to him, seeing which he waved
+back. As though he had been waiting for that permission, he began to
+move up-river with incredible swiftness towards the Point. Having come
+within hailing distance he halted, and putting his hands to his mouth
+shouted, "Be brave! Be brave! It is only death."</p>
+
+<p>Had Strangeways stepped out from his grave to taunt him with the
+futility of his own words, which had been spoken to comfort him in his
+distress? The apparition was growing vaguer. Just before it vanished,
+it cried again and waved its hand, "Jesus of Galilee! Jesus Christ!"</p>
+
+<p>The sound reached him faintly as a whisper. He thought that his own
+memory must have spoken till, turning round and scanning the other
+men's faces, he saw that they also had heard.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[349]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What was it that he said?" asked Eyelids.</p>
+
+<p>"Sounded as though he was swearing," Shattuck replied.</p>
+
+<p>But Granger and Antoine knew better; they knew that it was the dead
+lover giving his approval of this last act of the rival who was to die
+for his death.</p>
+
+<p>The sergeant required no further urging to hasten his departure.
+Descending to the river-bed, he harnessed in his huskies and set out
+up the Last Chance, taking with him the independent trader southwards,
+as he had so often desired,&mdash;but to be hanged.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MURDER POINT***</p>
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+</pre>
+</body>
+</html>
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+++ b/29400.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Murder Point, by Coningsby Dawson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Murder Point
+       A Tale of Keewatin
+
+
+Author: Coningsby Dawson
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 13, 2009  [eBook #29400]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
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+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MURDER POINT***
+
+
+E-text prepared by David T. Jones and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Canada Team (http://www.pgdpcanada.net) from
+digital material generously made available by Internet Archive/American
+Libraries (http://www.archive.org/details/americana) and the Google Books
+Library Project (http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/library.html)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive/American Libraries
+      (see http://www.archive.org/details/murderpointatal00dawsgoog)
+      or
+      the Google Books Library Project
+      (see http://books.google.com/books?id=x2omAAAAMAAJ&oe=UTF-8).
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDER POINT
+
+    *    *    *    *    *
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+The House of the Weeping Woman
+          Hodder and Stoughton, London
+
+The Worker and Other Poems
+          The Macmillan Co., New York
+
+    *    *    *    *    *
+
+
+MURDER POINT
+
+A Tale of Keewatin
+
+by
+
+CONINGSBY WILLIAM DAWSON
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Hodder & Stoughton
+New York
+George H. Doran Company
+
+Copyright, 1910, by
+George H. Doran Company
+
+The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                  PAGE
+
+    I. John Granger of Murder Point                         1
+   II. The Unbidden Guest                                  13
+  III. The Devil in the Klondike                           25
+   IV. Spurling's Tale                                     42
+    V. Cities Out of Sight                                 53
+   VI. The Pursuer Arrives                                 74
+  VII. The Corporal Sets Out                               86
+ VIII. The Last of Strangeways                            100
+   IX. The Break-up of the Ice                            112
+    X. A Message from the Dead                            120
+   XI. The Love of Woman                                  144
+  XII. He Reviews His Marriage, and is Put to the Test    162
+ XIII. The Dead Soul Speaks Out                           186
+  XIV. Spurling Makes a Request                           210
+   XV. Manitous and Shades of the Departed                225
+  XVI. In Hiding on Huskies' Island                       240
+ XVII. The Forbidden River                                257
+XVIII. The Betrayal                                       272
+  XIX. The Hand in the Doorway                            283
+   XX. Spurling Takes Fright                              297
+  XXI. The Murder in the Sky                              305
+ XXII. The Blizzard                                       318
+XXIII. The Last Chance                                    334
+
+
+MURDER POINT
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+JOHN GRANGER OF MURDER POINT
+
+
+John Granger, agent on the Last Chance River in the interests of
+Garnier, Parwin, and Wrath, independent traders in the territory of
+Keewatin, sat alone in his store at Murder Point. He sat upon an
+upturned box, with an empty pipe between his lips. In the middle of
+the room stood an iron stove which blazed red hot; through the single
+window, toward which he faced, the gold sun shone, made doubly
+resplendent in its shining by the reflected light cast up by the
+leagues of all-surrounding snow and ice.
+
+Speaking to himself, as is the habit of men who have lived many months
+alone in the aboriginal silence of the North, "Well, and what next?"
+he asked.
+
+He had been reviewing the uses to which he had put his thirty years of
+life, and was feeling far from satisfied. That a man of breeding, who
+had been given the advantages of a classical and university education,
+and was in addition an English barrister, should at the age of thirty
+be conducting an independent trader's store in a distant part of
+northern Canada did not seem right; Granger was conscious of the
+incongruity. During the past two years and a half he had obstinately
+refused to examine his career, had fought against introspection, and
+had striven to forget.
+
+In this he had been wise, for Keewatin is not a good place wherein to
+_remember_ and to balance the ledger of the soul; it is too remote
+from human habitation, too near to God--its vastness has robbed it of
+all standards, so that small misdemeanours may seem huge and
+disastrous as the sin of Cain. Madness lurks in its swampy creeks and
+wanders along the edges of its woodland seas, so that the border-line
+between natural and supernatural is very faintly marked.
+
+But to-day Granger had given way before the wave of emotional memories
+and had permitted his mind to recapitulate all the happiness which he
+had lost; and with this result, that like a child in a darkened house
+he feared to advance and stood still trembling, questioning the
+future, anticipating and dreading that which was next to come. It was
+the second week in April; the break-up of the winter had almost begun;
+the spring was striding up from the south and a cry of travel was in
+the air, both hopeful and melancholy. The world would soon be growing
+young again. Even in this desperate land the scars of the frost would
+soon be obliterated; but to his own life, he was painfully aware, the
+spring had vouchsafed no promise of return. Was it gone forever? he
+asked.
+
+At the present moment he was remembering London and St. James's Park
+with its banks of daffodils and showers of white may-blossom, its
+groups of laughing children at play, its parade of black-coated
+horsemen, with here and there the scarlet flash of a Life-guard as he
+sped trotting by, and for bass accompaniment to this music of the Joy
+of Life the continual low thunder which in the Mall the prancing
+hoofs of countless carriage-horses strummed.
+
+Now it was Piccadilly in which he wandered, returning from the west
+with his back toward the setting sun; the street-lamps had just been
+kindled, and ahead of him, massed above the housetops, the blue-grey
+clouds of evening hung. He watched the faces of the people as they
+passed, some eager, some jaded, some pleasure-seeking, some smug, and
+he strove to conjecture their aim in life. At the Circus he paused
+awhile, breathing deep and filling out his lungs with fragrance of
+violets and narcissi, which flower-girls clamoured for him to
+purchase. He bought a bunch and smiled faintly, contrasting the
+beautiful significance of the name of the vendor's profession with the
+slatternly person to whom it was applied. Then onwards he went to
+Leicester Square where the dazzling lights of music-halls flared and
+quickened, and scarlet-lipped Folly smiled out upon him from street
+corners, and beckoned through the dusk. In the old days it had always
+been when he had attained this point in his advance that the pleasure
+of London had failed, leaving him with a cramped sensation, a frenzied
+desire for escape, and an overwhelming sense of the inherent
+rottenness of western civilisation. It was upon such occasions that he
+saw, or thought he saw, the inevitable tendency of European cities to
+emasculate and corrupt the rugged nobilities of mankind. A revolt
+against artificiality had followed. Immediately, there in the heart of
+the world's greatest city, there had grown up about him the mirage of
+the primeval forest, whose boughs are steeped in silence, borne up by
+tall bare trunks, which lured him on to explore and adventure through
+untried lands, where quiet grows intense and intenser at each new
+step, till he should arrive at that ultimate contentment for which he
+blindly sought.
+
+He laughed at the memory, smiling bitterly at the manner in which that
+former self had been beguiled. As if to give emphasis to his jest he
+arose from his box, lounged over to the window, cleared its panes of
+mist with his hand, and gazed out upon the landscape of his choice. It
+stared back at him with immobile effrontery, with the glazed
+wide-parted eyes of the prostrate prize-fighter who, in his falling,
+has been stunned--eyes in which hatred is the only sign of life. He
+threw back his head and guffawed at the conceit, as though it had been
+conceived by a brain and given utterance to by a voice other than his
+own. Then he paused, drew himself erect, and his face went white; he
+had heard of solitary men in Keewatin who had commenced by laughing to
+themselves, and had ended by committing murder or suicide. Yet, as he
+stood in thought, he acknowledged the truth of the image; his
+existence on the Last Chance River was one long and wearisome struggle
+between himself and the intangible prize-fighter, whoever he might
+be,--Nature, the Elemental Spirit hostile to Creation, Keewatin, the
+Devil, call him what you like. Sometimes he had had the better of the
+combat, in which case days of peace had followed; but for the most
+part he stood at bay or crouched upon his knees, watching for his
+opportunity to rise; at his strongest he had only just sufficed to
+hold his invisible antagonist in check, battling for a victory which
+had been already awarded. He had long despaired of winning; the only
+question which now troubled him was "How long shall I be able to
+fight?"
+
+A certain story current in the district, concerning a Hudson Bay
+factor, flashed through his mind. At the beginning of the frost his
+fort had been stricken with smallpox; one by one his six white
+companions had died and the Indians had fled in terror, leaving him
+alone in the silence. In the unpeopled solitude of the long dark
+winter days and nights which had followed, he had grown strangely
+curious as to the welfare of his soul, and had petitioned God that it
+might be disembodied so that he might gaze upon it with his living
+eyes. After a week of continuous prayer, he had fastened on his
+snowshoes, and gone out upon the ice to seek God's sign. He had not
+travelled far before he had come to the mound where his six companions
+lay buried. There against the dusky sky-line he had seen a famished
+wolf standing over a scooped-out grave. So the factor had had his
+sign, and had looked upon his disembodied soul with his own eyes.
+
+When the ice broke up and the first canoe of half-breed voyageurs
+swept up to the fort, they had been met by a man who crawled upon
+hands and knees, and snarled like a husky or a coyote.
+
+Granger shrugged his shoulders and shuddered. He thanked his God that
+the spring was near by. Upon one thing he was determined, that
+whatever happened, though he should have to die--by his own hand, he
+would not grovel into Eternity upon his hands and knees as had that
+factor of the Hudson Bay.
+
+For relief from the turbulence of his thoughts he turned his attention
+to the frozen quiet of the world without. Not a feature in the
+landscape had changed throughout all the past five months. He had
+nothing new to learn about it: he had even committed to memory where
+each separate shadow would fall at each particular hour of the day.
+Straight out of the west the river ran so far as eye could reach,
+until it came to Murder Point. At close of day it seemed a molten
+pathway which led, without a waver, from Granger's store directly to
+the heart of the sun. Having arrived at the Point, the Last Chance
+River swept round to the northeast, and then to the north, until in
+many curves it poured its waters into the distant Hudson Bay. Its
+banks, in the open season, which lasted from May to October, were low
+and muddy; the country through which it flowed, known as the barren
+lands, was for the most part flat and densely wooded with a stunted
+growth of black spruce, jackpine, tamarack, poplar, willow, and birch.
+The river was the only highway: much of the forest which lay back from
+its banks was entirely unexplored on account of its swamps and the
+closeness of its underbrush. There were places within three miles of
+Murder Point where a white man had never travelled, and some where not
+even the Indians could penetrate. Partly for this reason the district
+was rich in game: the caribou, moose, lynx, bear, wolf, beaver,--
+wolverine, and all the smaller fur-bearing animals of the North
+abounded there. Seventy miles to the southwestward lay the nearest
+point of white habitation, where stood the Hudson Bay Company's Fort
+of God's Voice. Between Murder Point and the coast, for two hundred
+and fifty miles, there was no white settlement until the river's mouth
+was reached, where the Company's House of the Crooked Creek had been
+erected on the shores of the Bay. With his nearest neighbours, seventy
+miles distant at God's Voice, Granger had no intercourse, for he was
+regarded by them as an outcast inasmuch as he was an independent
+trader. Once was the time when Prince Rupert's _Company of Adventurers
+of England trading in the Hudson's Bay_ had held the monopoly of the
+fur trade over all this territory, from the Atlantic seaboard to the
+Pacific Coast; then to have been caught trapping or trading privately
+had meant almost certain death to the trespasser. Now that the powers
+of the Company had been curtailed, the only manner in which a Hudson
+Bay factor could show his displeasure toward the interloper was by
+ignoring his presence--a very real penalty in a land of loneliness,
+where, at the best, men can only hope to meet once or twice a
+year--and by rendering his existence as unbearable and silent as
+possible in every lawful and private way. In the art of ostracising,
+Robert Pilgrim, the factor at God's Voice, was a past master; during
+the two and a half years that Granger had been in Keewatin he had had
+direct communication with no one of the Company's white employees. On
+occasions certain of its Cree Indians and half-breed trappers had come
+to him stealthily, at dead of night, to see whether he would not offer
+them better terms for their season's catch of furs, or to inquire
+whether he would not give them liquor in exchange, the selling of
+which to an Indian in Keewatin is a punishable offence. These were
+usually loose characters who, being heavily in debt to the Company,
+were trying to postpone payment by selling to Granger on the sly; yet,
+even these men, when day had dawned, would pass him on the river
+without recognition, as if he were a stick or a block of ice. However,
+only by dealing with such renegades could he hope to pick up any
+profit for the proprietors of his store. His every gain was a loss to
+the factor, and _vice versa_; therefore by Robert Pilgrim he was not
+greatly beloved.
+
+Pilgrim was a man of conservative principles, who looked back with
+longing to the days when a factor was supreme in his own domain,
+holding discretionary powers over all his people's lives, who, after
+the giving of a third warning to an independent trader found poaching
+in his district, could dispose of him more or less barbarously
+according to his choice. Now that every man, whatever his company, had
+an equal right to gather furs in the Canadian North, he considered
+that he and his employers were being robbed; wherefore he made it his
+business to see that no friendship existed between any of his
+subordinates and the man at Murder Point. Hence it happened that in
+summer when the canoes and York boats, and in winter when the
+dog-teams and runners from God's Voice, went up and down river by the
+free-trading store of Garnier, Parwin and Wrath, no head was turned,
+and no sign given that anyone was aware that a white man, yearning for
+a handshake and the sound of spoken words, was regarding them with
+sorrowful eyes from the wind-swept spit of land.
+
+Two years and a half ago, on his first arrival, Granger had laughed at
+the factor's petty persecution and had pretended not to mind. Since
+then, as his isolation had grown on him, his temper had changed, his
+pride had given way, until, in the January of the present year, he had
+journeyed down to the Company's fort, and had implored them to speak
+to him, if only to curse him, that his reason might be saved. The
+gates of the fort had been clanged in his face, and he had been
+silently threatened with a loaded rifle, till resurrected shame had
+driven him away.
+
+He had since heard that Pilgrim had said on that occasion, "I knew
+that he would come and that this would happen sooner or later. I've
+been waiting for it; but he's held out longer than the last one."
+
+This remark explained to Granger how it was that, when he had arrived
+in Winnipeg, having just returned from the Klondike, and had applied
+to his acquaintance Wrath for employment, his request had been so
+readily granted. He had marvelled at the time that he, who had had
+next to no experience in Indian trading, should have met with
+immediate engagement, and have been given sole charge of an outpost.
+Now he knew the reason; he had been given his job because his
+employers could get no one else to take it. From the first day of his
+coming to Murder Point strange stories had reached his ears concerning
+the diverse and sudden ways in which its bygone agents had departed
+this life: some by committing murder against themselves; some by
+committing murder against others; some, having gone mad, by wandering
+off into the winter wilderness to die; others, who were reckoned sane,
+by attempting to make the six hundred and eighty mile journey back to
+civilisation alone across the snow and ice. These rumours he had not
+credited at first, supposing them to be fictions invented by Pilgrim
+for the purpose of shattering his confidence, and thus inducing him to
+leave at once. The last remark of the factor, however, inasmuch as it
+had been reported to him by an honest man, the Jesuit priest Pere
+Antoine, had proved to him that they were not all lies. When he had
+questioned Pere Antoine himself, the kindly old man had shaken his
+head, refusing to answer, and had departed on his way. This had
+happened shortly after the occurrence in January; since then Granger
+had been less than ever happy in his mind.
+
+Luckily for him, about this time Beorn Ericsen, the Man with the Dead
+Soul, as he was named, the only white Company trapper in the district,
+had quarrelled with the factor over the price which had been offered
+him for a silver fox; in revenge he had betaken himself to Granger,
+bringing with him his half-breed daughter, Peggy, and his son,
+Eyelids. Their chance coming had saved his sanity; moreover it had
+furnished him with something to think about, besides himself, namely
+Peggy. His courtship of her had been short and informal, as is the way
+of white men when dealing with women of a darker shade: within a week
+he had taken her to himself. But Peggy had had ideas of her own upon
+the nebulous question of morals, ideas which she had gained in the two
+years during which she had attended a Catholic school in Winnipeg; she
+had refused to be regarded as a squaw, since the blood which flowed in
+her veins was fully half white, and, after staying with him for a
+fortnight, had taken herself off, joining her father on a hunting
+trip, giving Granger clearly to understand that she would not live
+with him again until Pere Antoine should have come that way and united
+them according to the rites of the Roman Church.
+
+As he stood by the window looking out across the frost-bound land
+which once, years since, in Leicester Square, he in his ignorance had
+so much desired, he re-pondered these events and, "Well, and what
+next?" he asked.
+
+The touch of spring in the air, recalling him to England and the old
+days, had made him realise among other things what this marriage with
+a half-breed girl, supposing he consented, must entail. It would
+exile him forever. No matter howsoever well he might prosper, or rich
+he might become, or whatsoever stroke of good fortune might visit him,
+he could never return to his English mother and English friends,
+bringing with him a half-breed wife and children who had Indian blood.
+If he married her, he would become what Pilgrim had named him--an
+outcast. If he did not marry her, she would refuse to live with him,
+and he would be left lonely as before and would probably become
+insane. Since he was never likely to become either prosperous, or
+rich, or fortunate, would it not be better for him to provide for his
+immediate happiness, he asked, and let the future take care of itself?
+Even while he asked the question another woman intruded her face: she
+was slim, and fair, and delicately made, and was disguised in the male
+attire of a Yukon placer-miner. She seemed to be asking him to
+remember her.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, as if defying Fate: turning
+away from the window, he reseated himself upon the upturned box by the
+red-hot stove.
+
+Pooh! he'd been a fool to give way to retrospection. He was no
+exception to the general rule; most men mismanaged their careers--more
+or less. Still, he was bound to confess that he had done so rather
+more than less. Oh well, he would settle down to his fate. As for that
+other girl in the Yukon miner's dress, who would keep intruding
+herself, she also must be forgotten.
+
+But at that point, perversely enough, he began to think about her.
+What was she doing at the present time? Where was she? Did she still
+remember him? Had she made her fortune up there out of their last big
+strike? How had she construed his sudden and unexplained departure? He
+swore softly to himself, and rising, went over to the window again.
+Then he pressed closer as if to make certain of something, gazing up
+the long glimmering stretch of frozen river to the west.
+
+There was a strange man coming down; strange to those parts, at any
+rate, though Granger seemed to recognise something familiar in his
+stride. He was driving his dogs furiously, lashing them on with
+frenzied brutality, coming on apace, turning his head ever and again
+from side to side, peering across his shoulder and looking behind, as
+if he feared a thing which followed him--which was out of sight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE UNBIDDEN GUEST
+
+
+Granger, having withdrawn himself to one side of the window so that he
+might not be observed from the outside, watched the stranger's
+approach in anxious silence. Nearer and nearer he came, till in that
+still air it was possible to hear the panting of his huskies as they
+lunged forward in the traces, jerking their bodies to right and left
+as they desperately strove to escape the descending lash of the
+punishing whip. The man himself tottered as he ran, stubbing the toes
+of his snowshoes every now and then as he took a new step. Once from
+sheer weakness he nearly fell, whereupon the dogs came to a sudden
+halt, sat down on their haunches, and gazed wistfully round; in a
+second he had recovered himself, with an angry oath had straightened
+out his team in their traces, and was once more speeding toward
+Granger's shack. The impression which his mode of travelling conveyed
+was that of flight; but from whom and whither can a man flee in
+Keewatin? Both he and his animals were evidently exhausted; they must
+have journeyed continuously through the previous day and night, and
+still they were in haste. "Well, all the better for me," thought the
+watcher, "for if he is so weary he cannot choose but stay; and if he
+stays with me, though he be a Company man, he will have to speak."
+
+Then fear seized hold of Granger lest Robert Pilgrim's discipline, or
+the enmity of the man himself, might be such that, though he
+endangered his life by the procedure, he would refuse the hospitality
+of a hated private trader. "Nonsense," said the voice of hope, "to
+where can he be travelling at this season of the year unless to Murder
+Point? Before ever he gets to the coast and Crooked Creek the winter
+will have broken up, and northwards there is nowhere else to go."
+
+So, as is the way with men who have exhausted this world's resources
+for rendering them aid, he began to pray; not decorously, with
+reverent, well-chosen words, but fiercely, with repetition, and below
+his breath. "My God, don't let him pass," he said; "make him stop
+here. Make him stop here, and spend with me at least one night." Then,
+when he had petitioned God, thinking perhaps that He would not hear
+him, he commenced to call upon Lord Jesus Christ. He clenched his
+hands in his excitement till the nails broke into the flesh. There was
+a God in Keewatin after all, there must be, since He had sent to him
+this stranger.
+
+All the while that he was praying and exclaiming thus, he was trying
+to judge of the man's errand from his dress. He was clad in the
+regulation capote of the Hudson Bay Company's employee; it was of a
+dark material, probably duffel, which reached to the knees. On his
+head was a fur-skin cap, over which he had drawn the hood of his
+capote so far down that his features could not be discerned. About his
+waist went a sash of scarlet, such as is worn by the Northwest
+_metis_. His legs were swathed in duffel leggings, so that they
+appeared to be of enormous size. On his feet he wore moose-hide
+moccasins which extended part way up his legs, and to these his
+five-foot snowshoes were attached. His whip he carried in his left
+hand. About this last there was something familiar. Who was it that he
+had known in the past who had driven his dogs left-handed, and had had
+that swinging, plunging stride? The memory refused to concentrate, so
+he strove to guess at the man's identity by the process of
+elimination. He could not be a Hudson Bay mail-carrier bringing him a
+letter, for the factor refused to deliver all missives addressed to
+Murder Point. It was not probable that he was an express messenger of
+Gamier, Parwin, and Wrath, sent up post-haste from Winnipeg; they
+could have nothing of such importance to say to him that it could not
+wait for the open season, when travelling is less expensive. Nor was
+he a trapper bound on a friendly or business visit to the store; for,
+in the first place, this man was no Indian (he could tell that by the
+way in which he lifted his feet in running), and, in the second, he
+had no friend, nor any man in the district, save Ericsen, who would be
+seen with him in the open daylight. A foolish, strangling expectancy
+rose up within him. Might he not be the bearer of important and good
+news from the homeland? What news? Oh, anything! That his father, the
+visionary explorer of Guiana, who twenty years ago had set out on his
+last mad search for El Dorado, the fabled city of the Incas, and who
+for many years had been given up for dead, had returned at length with
+gold, successful from his quest--or, at the least, that his mother had
+relented and wanted him back. Speedily his hope turned to agonising
+suspense. Perhaps he was coming to tell him that his mother in England
+was dead. Then he laughed hysterically, remembering that Mr. Wrath was
+not the sort of man to regard any death as serious, unless it were
+his own.
+
+By this time the stranger had covered the intervening two miles of
+river and was within thirty yards of the Point. He was slowing down.
+He had halted. His exhausted dogs were already curling themselves up
+beneath a snow-bank, wisely snatching a moment's rest as soon as it
+was offered them. Careless of their welfare, leaving them as they were
+to tangle up their traces, he was commencing to ascend the mound
+towards the store. Despite the clamour of welcome which raged within
+him, Granger did not stir; the influence of the North Land was upon
+him, compelling him to self-repression, making him stern and
+forbidding in his manner as was the appearance of the world without.
+From his hiding by the window he watched the man; as he did so a vague
+sense of fear and loathing took the place of gladness.
+
+His approach was slow and hesitating; continually he paused to gaze
+back along the river as if in search of a pursuer, then suddenly
+forward toward the shack as if for spying eyes which were reading his
+secret. Before he had come near enough to be recognised, he had pulled
+the hood still further forward, holding it together above his mouth
+with his right hand, so that of his face only his eyes were visible.
+With his left hand he fumbled in his breast, and Granger knew that he
+grasped a loaded weapon. "Does he mean to kill me?" he wondered; yet
+he made no effort to bar the door, or to reach for the rifle which
+hung on the wall above his head. He only smiled whimsically; amused
+that anyone should waste so much care over robbing a man of a
+possession which he himself so little valued--his life. Personally
+he would welcome so easy a method of departure from Keewatin--one
+which was quite respectable, and would attach no responsibility to
+himself. When all has been said, there remain but two qualities of
+fear: the fear of life, and the fear of death. Granger was only
+conscious of the first, therefore he could afford to be amazingly
+daring under the present circumstances. Now he could no longer see the
+man, for he was standing beneath the walls of the shack; but he could
+hear that he was listening, and could hear him gasp for breath. One,
+two, three slow footsteps, and the latch was raised and the door flung
+wide. He waited for his guest to enter, and then, because he delayed,
+"Come inside," he cried; "confound you, you're letting in the cold
+air."
+
+He heard the snowshoes lifted across the threshold and rose to greet
+the stranger who, so soon as he had entered, made fast the door and
+confronted him without a word, still hiding his face from sight. He
+was a tall man, well over six feet and proportionately broad of chest;
+he had to stoop his head as he stood in the store, since the roof was
+none too high.
+
+After some seconds spent in silent gazing, "Well, and what d'you
+want?" asked the trader. The man made no reply, but tossed him a screw
+of paper which, when he had unfolded it and smoothed it out, read,
+_"Do all that is in your power to help the bearer. I am responsible.
+Destroy this so soon as it is read."_ The note was unsigned, but it
+was in the handwriting of Wrath. Granger slid back the door of the
+grate and watched the scrap of paper vanish in a little spurt of
+flame. Then he looked up, and seeing that the man still stood
+regarding him and had removed none of his garments, not even his
+snowshoes from which the crusted ice was already melting, "All right,"
+he said; "I'll do my best. You must be tired, and have come a long
+journey."
+
+"I have," said the stranger, throwing back his hood, and for the first
+time displaying his face.
+
+Granger sprang forward with a startled cry, and seized the newcomer by
+his mittened hand. "By God, it's Spurling!"
+
+In a flash all the winter had thawed out of his nature and the spring,
+which he had despaired of, had returned. Once more he was an emotional
+living creature, with a throbbing heart and brain, instead of a
+carcass which walked, and was erect, and muttered occasional words
+with its mouth as if it were alive, and was in reality a dead thing to
+which burial had been denied.
+
+"Yes, it's Spurling," replied the traveller in a hoarse, uneager
+voice; then, "Has anyone been here before me?"
+
+Granger shook his head, and instinctively stood back a pace from this
+leaden-eyed, unresponsive stranger, who had been his friend.
+
+Spurling was quick to notice the revulsion. "And are you going to
+desert me and turn me out?"
+
+"Desert you! If you knew how lonely I have been you wouldn't ask that
+question."
+
+"I ought to know," he answered, and going over to the window looked
+out, turning his head from side to side in that furtive manner which
+Granger had noted in him when he had first seen him advancing across
+the ice.
+
+Facing about suddenly, he asked, "Is there any way out of here, except
+down there?" pointing to the river frozen in its bed, stretching away
+interminably to the west, through groves of icicles, and marble
+forest, like a granite roadway hewn out and levelled by a giant,
+vanished race.
+
+"There is no other," Granger replied, "unless you include the way out
+which is trodden by the dead."
+
+Spurling started almost angrily at the mention of this last pathway of
+escape, and scowled. It was evident that the fear which made his life
+a burden was the fear of death--which was proof to Granger that he had
+not been long in Keewatin. However, he controlled himself and
+murmured, "Six hundred and eighty miles is a long journey, and it's
+all that to Winnipeg. Within a fortnight the ice will break, and then
+for almost a month the only way will be impassable. Thank God for
+that!" Addressing himself to Granger, "And what lies ahead?" he asked.
+
+"The forest and three hundred odd miles of this Last Chance River till
+you come to the Hudson Bay and the House of the Crooked Creek."
+
+"Is there nothing in between?"
+
+"Only the Forbidden River, which neither white man nor Indian ever
+travels; it joins the Last Chance a hundred miles ahead."
+
+"Ah, the Forbidden River! And no one ever travels there! Why not? Is
+it shallow or rapid? But then there is the winter; it cannot be that
+there's anything that doesn't freeze up here."
+
+"Oh, it freezes right enough."
+
+"Then?"
+
+"The Indians are afraid to travel it."
+
+"Of what are they afraid?"
+
+"Manitous, and shades of the departed."
+
+For the first time Spurling's face relaxed, the hunted expression
+went out of his eyes; he almost smiled. "Well, I'm not afraid of
+them," he said.
+
+He commenced to unfasten his snowshoes and to take off the heavier
+portions of his dress. Granger stood by and watched him; he was
+puzzled by the man's manner, and heartsick with disappointment. What
+was the reason for the change which had crept over him in the three
+years since they had parted, and why had he made this journey at this
+season of the year, in haste, without warning? Six hundred and eighty
+miles seemed a long way to travel in winter, through a desolate land,
+only to tell your most intimate friend that you are not afraid of
+manitous and shades of the departed.
+
+He recalled the man whom he had known, so generous and open-hearted,
+who had walked with him at night beneath the London gas-lamps, sharing
+and comprehending those dreams and enthusiasms which others had
+derided, or compassionated as delusions of the mad. This was the man
+who had given him what might have been his chance, had he only been
+able to use it aright. Like a tawdry curtain drawn up at a Christmas
+pantomime on a dazzling transformation scene, so, at the memory, the
+veil of the present was instantly removed, revealing only the flashing
+splendours of past things, which lay behind. This same body which now
+crouched basely here before him had belonged to a hero once--to the
+man who, five long years since, had pushed on in spite of defeat,
+carrying with him by his courage his despairing companion over the
+deadly Skaguay trail. The Skaguay, where bodies of horses lay
+unburied, spreading pestilence abroad every hundred yards of the way;
+where the army of gold-seekers turning back was as great as the army
+pressing on; and those of the attack had momentarily to stand aside,
+so narrow was the path, for the wounded and spent of the retreat, who
+passed them by with ashen faces, some of them with death in their
+eyes, bidding them, "Turn back! Turn back! You will never get through
+alive."
+
+Many a time when his shoulders were bruised and broken, and he ached
+in every limb, and his clothes were sodden with rain, which he knew
+must shortly become stiff as boards when night had fallen and it had
+begun to freeze, and perhaps another horse had fallen and been left
+beside the trail, he also would have joined the retreat right gladly,
+unashamed of his cowardice, had not Spurling picked up his load with a
+laugh and dragged him on. What a fine brave fellow he had been in
+those early Yukon days! Why, it was he who, when they had reached the
+summit of that heart-breaking pass, had rescued young Mordaunt. Jervis
+Mordaunt, with a single horse, had packed his entire outfit
+single-handed to the topmost point of the trail, and then, when the
+hardest part of his journey had been accomplished and his goal was
+already in sight, his horse had given out and died. When they had come
+up with him, his beast had been dead three days, and, because he could
+not afford a new one, he had been packing his stuff on his own narrow
+shoulders into Bennett, whence the start by water for Dawson had to be
+made--a hopeless task, for Mordaunt was not a strong fellow, but slim
+and extraordinarily girlish in frame. Many of the travellers who had
+already attained the summit were flinging away their outfits and
+turning back in panic, terrified by stories which they had heard of
+winter and starvation in the Klondike; those who still trudged
+doggedly forward were too selfishly preoccupied with visions of gold,
+and their own concerns, and fears lest the rivers and lakes should
+close up, to render him aid. Not so Spurling; in those days he was
+never too busy to lend an unfortunate a helping hand; besides, like
+most brave men, the thing which he valued highest was courage, and he
+was taken with the young chap's pluck. "I'm fairly broad," he had
+said, "and before the river freezes there's plenty of time for all
+three of us to get drowned. So look sharp, my girl, and hand your
+bundles up." From the first day he had nicknamed Mordaunt "The Girl,"
+because he was so surpassingly modest and had no beard to shave. So he
+and Spurling had shouldered Mordaunt's burden, and had made him their
+partner, and had carried him through to the gold-fields alive.
+
+Where was Jervis now? he wondered; then his thoughts returned to the
+panorama of that eventful journey. He remembered how in the mouth of
+the Windy Arm on Tagish Lake, when the sail swung round and sent him
+spinning overboard, he would most certainly have perished in those
+chill waters had not Spurling jumped in and held him up till the boat
+put back. It was Spurling's hand which had kept the boat steady in the
+boiling rapids of the White Horse, when he and Mordaunt had lost their
+nerve--yes, that same hand which was now plucking restlessly at the
+untrimmed beard which fringed that crafty, sullen face. How incredible
+it seemed that this body should contain the same man, and that the
+change should have taken place in five years! He contrasted that
+big-shouldered, song-singing fellow who had given them of his endless
+store of courage when their own was spent, compelling them to go
+through the mush ice at Five Fingers, and the drift ice at Fort
+Selkirk, and had landed them safely at Dawson almost against their
+will, the last boat through before the Klondike froze up, with this
+secretive hang-dog individual who slunk through an unpeopled
+wilderness, twisting his neck from side to side, as though he already
+felt the halter there--like a Seven Dials assassin, fearful of arrest.
+There he sat by the window, with eyes fixed uncannily on the west,
+watching for the follower whom he could not see, but only felt.
+
+He turned round uncomfortably, feeling that Granger's eyes were upon
+him; then rose up abruptly, saying, "Ha, I was forgetting! My dogs
+must be fed."
+
+Granger watched him go out, and was glad of relief from his presence.
+If anyone had come to him a week ago and had said, "Druce Spurling
+will be here this day or next," his joy would have surpassed all
+bounds. Now he realised that there is a worse evil than solitude--the
+compulsory companionship of a man who once was, and is no longer, your
+friend. "Ach!" he muttered shivering, "I feel as if I had been sitting
+with my feet in an open grave." Then remorsefully he added, "The poor
+chap's in trouble. He was good to me in days gone by: I'll do my best
+to help him. Perhaps that's the kind of offal that I appeared to
+Robert Pilgrim when I made my journey to God's Voice last January, and
+he threatened to shoot me; yet, God forbid that I ever looked like
+that. Maybe that which I seem to see in Spurling is only the reflected
+change in myself. Christ pity us lonely men!"
+
+From the window he could see how Spurling was gathering his dogs
+around him, leading them past the Point northward to a bend where they
+could not be seen by a man approaching from up-river. What was the
+meaning of such precaution? Why had he been so urgently requested to
+help the one man in the world whom he was most likely to help without
+urging, since he had been his closest friend? Why had he been ordered
+to destroy the note immediately when read? And why had Spurling, whom
+he had thought to be in Klondike making his pile, or having taken
+advantage of the secret knowledge which he had unwisely shared with
+him, to be in Guiana, sailing up the Great Amana seeking El Dorado,
+travelled these thousands of miles by sea and land only to visit him
+here in Keewatin thus surlily? Was it to hide? Well, if that was his
+purpose, there wasn't much chance of his being followed, or if
+followed, found.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE DEVIL IN THE KLONDIKE
+
+
+Spurling, having returned from feeding his dogs, had reseated himself
+by the window, but he had not again spoken. When Granger had informed
+him that a meal was ready, and had called to him to come and partake,
+he had only shaken his head. When, however, it had been brought to
+him, he had eaten hungrily, bolting his food like a famished husky,
+yet never looking at what he ate, for his eyes were directed along the
+river-bed. He used neither fork nor spoon, carrying whatever was set
+before him hastily to his mouth in his hands. His whole attitude was
+one of hurry; he rested in haste, as if begrudging the moments which
+were lost from travel.
+
+Had he been the foremost runner in some great race, who had fallen at
+the last lap, and, waiting to recover himself before making the final
+dash toward the tape, watched anxiously lest his next rival should
+round the bend, and surprise him before he was up on his feet again,
+he could not have been more tensely excited. His breath came in gasps
+and spasms; his body jerked and trembled even while he sat. He began
+to do things, and did not finish them. He opened his mouth to speak,
+and was silent. He half rose to his feet, and fell back again. He
+turned his head to look at Granger, then thought better of it, and
+continued staring into the west. Granger watched him, and wondered
+what might be the secret which he was hesitating to impart. Was his
+mind a blank through weariness? Was he arguing out some dreadful
+problem within himself? Or was he only mad?
+
+What frail and isolated creatures we are!--when once our power of
+communicating thought is gone, though we breathe and move above the
+earth, we are more distant one from another than if we were truly
+dead; for, when a soul has totally forsaken its body, and the body has
+ceased to express, we, who live, can at least imagine that the thing
+departed sometimes returns and hovers within ourselves. To live and be
+silent is a remoter banishment from Life than the irrevocable exile
+decreed by Death.
+
+Granger could now see that the change which he had noted in Spurling
+might quite well have been the work of a month or two months, and was
+due to trouble and neglect. The man was unwashed and unfed, and for
+many nights he had not slept. His eyes were ringed and bloodshot with
+fatigue, and with incipient snow-blindness. His cheeks were sunken and
+cadaverous with too much travel; his body was limp with over-work.
+Should the cause of his excitement be suddenly removed, he would
+collapse; it was nervous courage which upheld him. And there, despite
+all these alterations for the worse, he could still discern the old
+Spurling--the man whom he had loved. The brows retained their old
+frown of impudent defiance, and the mouth its good-humoured, reckless
+contempt. These had been overlaid by some baser passion, it was true;
+but they remained, showed through, and seemed recoverable. As he
+looked, the memory flashed through his mind of Spurling at his
+proudest--on that night at the Mascot dance-hall, when they had
+carried into Dawson City the news of the great bonanza they had struck
+at Drunkman's Shallows. He was standing on a table, surrounded by a
+group of miners, leading the singing, roaring out the doggerel chorus
+of a local mining ballad:
+
+    "Oh, we'll be there with our bags of gold
+      When the Judgment trumpets blare,
+    When the stars drop dead and the moon stands cold,
+      Tell the angels we'll be there."
+
+Ha, the power of the man and his consciousness of conquest!
+
+Half to himself he began to hum the tune, beating time on the bare
+boards with his moccasined feet. In a moment Spurling had jumped up,
+"For God's sake, stop! I can't endure that," he cried. "Oh, to think
+of it, that I am come to this, and that it is like this we meet after
+all these years!" He covered his face with his hands, and, sinking
+weakly back in the chair, commenced to sob. Granger went towards him,
+and bending over him, flung an arm around his neck. For the moment the
+body before him was forgotten; the noble spirit of the man who had
+once stood by and helped him, was alone remembered. "Druce, tell me
+all," he said.
+
+"I can't; you would shun me."
+
+"Then why did you come if you could not trust me?"
+
+"There was nowhere else to go--no other way of escape. They were all
+around me."
+
+"Who were all around you?"
+
+"Those who had come to take me to be hanged."
+
+Granger gasped, and shrank aside. Then his worst conjecture was
+correct--it was as bad as that! murder had been done.
+
+Spurling drew himself up suddenly, throwing back his hands and
+uncovering a face of ghastly paleness. One might have supposed that he
+had been the startled witness to the confession, instead of the man
+who had made it.
+
+"What was that I said just now?" he asked. "You must not believe it.
+It is not true; I am tired and overstrained. They've hunted me so long
+that I myself have come almost to believe their squalid accusations.
+Don't look at me like that; I tell you I am innocent. . . . Oh well,
+perhaps I did fire the shot; but, if I did, it was an accident. I
+didn't know that the rifle had gone off until I saw him drop . . . and
+when I laid my hand on him to lift him up, I found that he was dead.
+Ugh! Then I hid him in a hole in the ice, and, because he had been my
+friend, I thought he would lie quiet forever there and never tell."
+
+While these words had been in the saying, Granger had drawn nearer and
+nearer, so that now the two men stood face to face, almost touching,
+staring into one another's eyes. Who was this friend who had been
+shot? Could it have been Mordaunt? He seized hold of Spurling by the
+throat with both hands, and shook him violently, crying, "What was her
+name? Will you tell me that?"
+
+Spurling wrenched himself free and his eyes blazed threateningly. "It
+wasn't a woman," he said; "thank God, I haven't sunk to that." Then
+more slowly, gazing fixedly on Granger as if to calculate how far it
+was safe to confide, "and he wasn't a friend of yours," he added.
+
+Granger turned away from the window that the murderer might not see
+his countenance; his lips moved as if he prayed. He passed his hand
+before his eyes as a man does who has been temporarily blinded by a
+sudden flash. He had become terribly aware how near he had been to
+committing the crime for which this man was hunted. The knowledge of
+that fact gave him sympathy, a lack of which is always based on
+ignorance. The compassionate man is invariably one who has been
+greatly tempted. In those few seconds whilst he withdrew himself, the
+whole portentous problem was argued out, "By how much is this man who
+intends, better than that man who accomplishes his crime?" He
+concluded that the difference was not one of virtue, but only of
+opportunity--which entailed no credit on himself. He had passed
+through Spurling's temptation scatheless, therefore he could afford
+him tenderness.
+
+"Druce," he said, speaking tremblingly, "it is terrible how far two
+men can drift apart in the passage of three short years."
+
+"Then why did you leave me?" asked Spurling sulkily, not yet reassured
+of his safety, nor recovered from his rough usage.
+
+"I left you because I feared that I might do the deed for which you
+are now in flight."
+
+Spurling sat up astonished. "Lord!" he exclaimed, "have all men felt
+like that? I've often wondered why it was that you went away that
+night, leaving no message and abandoning your claim. Pray, who were
+you fearful of murdering?"
+
+"Listen. If I tell you, it may make it easier for you to believe me,
+in spite of what has just happened, when I say that I sincerely want
+to help you."
+
+He was interrupted. "I suppose you know," said Spurling with a
+shocking attempt at merriment, "that you are losing the thousand
+dollars which has been offered for my capture alive or dead? It's only
+fair to tell you that. If any man is to make a profit by my hanging,
+I'd rather that the man should be a friend."
+
+It was as though one should make an indecent jest in the presence of a
+woman newly dead.
+
+"I deserved that you should say that," Granger replied. "But listen to
+me this once, for we may never meet again; who knows, in this land of
+death? I want to explain to you how it was that I behaved as I did,
+and to ask your forgiveness."
+
+"Then make haste," said Spurling, as he drew his chair nearer the
+window, and returned his gaze to the west.
+
+Without the dark was falling, though the sky was still faintly stained
+with red. It was thus he sat in the unlighted room as they talked
+together through the night, a shadowy outline against the misty panes
+which never stirred, but stared far away across the frozen quiet of
+the land.
+
+Granger spoke again. "You know with what hopes we set out on our
+journey to Dawson; how we went there not for the greed of gold, but
+for the sake of that other and more secret adventure which, as a boy,
+I promised my father I would undertake when I grew to be a man--an
+adventure which the Yukon gold could make possible and could purchase.
+That was my frame of mind throughout all the time that we were poor up
+there. That first winter in the Klondike, when we were nearly starved,
+and our money gave out because our grub was exhausted and the price of
+provisions ran so high, when we were thankful to work for almost any
+wages on Wrath's diggings if only we might get food and keep warm, we
+still kept our faith in one another and our purpose in sight. You'll
+remember how we used to talk together throughout those long dark days
+when, from November to February, we scarcely ever saw the sun and the
+thermometer sometimes stood at fifty below, and how we would plan for
+our great expedition to El Dorado, when our fortunes should be made,
+comforting ourselves for our present privations with thoughts of the
+land which Raleigh described. Those, despite their misery, were my
+best days--I had hope then. Little Mordaunt would sit beside us, with
+his face in his hands and his eyes opened wide with wonder, listening
+to what we said; when we had finished he would beg us to take him
+also, offering as his share, if he should be first to make his pile,
+to pay the way for all of us. It was then that we three made the
+compact which should be binding, that whenever our joint fortunes,
+whether owned by one alone, or two, or in equal proportions by all
+together, should amount to fifty thousand dollars, we would regard it
+as common to us all, and, throwing up our workings, would leave the
+Yukon for Guiana, in search of El Dorado. We were good comrades then,
+and did not calculate what ruin the avarice of gain may bring about in
+men.
+
+"When spring came, we set out to seek the gold which should redeem us,
+which lay just underground. All that summer we travelled and found
+only pay-dirt or colours, and at times not even that, till we came to
+the Sleeping River and pitched our camp at what was afterwards
+Drunkman's Shallows. How discouraged we were! We talked of turning
+back, saying that nothing of worth had ever been found in the Sleeping
+River. We called ourselves fools for having wasted our time up there.
+Then, on what we had determined should be the last night of our camp,
+when we had made up our minds to return next day, Eric Petersen came
+by and joined us. He also had found nothing; worse still, had spent
+all he had, and, being down in the mouth, got drunk--not decently, but
+gloriously intoxicated. Somewhere about midnight, when, after twenty
+hours of shining, the sun had disappeared and the world was still
+bright as day, and we were all sleeping, he got up and went down to
+the river to bathe his aching head, and stumbled on the banks and,
+falling in, was nearly drowned. You heard him cry and, waking, ran
+down to the water's edge. As you stooped to pull him out, you saw
+that, where his foot had stumbled on the bank, it had kicked up a
+nugget. Then you roused us and, when we had prospected and found that
+gold was really there, we each staked a claim, and you an extra one as
+discoverer, and set off that same night on the run to register.
+
+"It was on the evening of the day we recorded that you had your great
+time at the Mascot, leading the singing, and being toasted all round.
+It seemed to me I had reached El Dorado that night,--and now I know
+that I never shall. So, after the fun was over, we went back to work
+our claims, and toiled day and night till the river froze up. The
+stampede had followed us, and every yard of likely land was staked for
+miles below and above. My claim yielded next to nothing, and
+Mordaunt's soon pinched out; but your two were the richest on the
+Shallows.
+
+"I was soon compelled to work for you for wages. Mordaunt, when he had
+taken ten thousand dollars out of his claim, agreed to do likewise.
+We should both have left you at that time and gone away to prospect
+afresh, had it not been for our early understanding that whatever we
+earned was owned conjointly. Just before the winter closed down upon
+us, we had taken out nearly fifty thousand dollars, the figure at
+which we had agreed to quit the Yukon; I had one, Mordaunt ten, and
+you had thirty-five thousand dollars--forty-six thousand in all.
+Mordaunt and I talked to you about selling out and starting on our
+greater quest, but you held us to the fifty-thousand limit, saying
+that six months' postponement more or less would make no difference,
+and that we had better have too much than too little capital in hand
+before our start was made. We yielded to your judgment inasmuch as you
+were the richest man, never suspecting that you were already
+contemplating going back on your bargain to share and share alike with
+us.
+
+"But after the burning had commenced, and the winter had settled down
+for good, and the days had grown short and gloomy, we noticed a change
+in your manner--one of which you, perhaps, were not fully conscious.
+Your conversation became masterful and abrupt; you made us feel that
+we were your hired men, and were no longer partners in a future and
+nobler enterprise. Gradually the certainty dawned upon us that you had
+repudiated your compact, and did not include us in your plans. Gold
+for its own sake I had never cared about as you had; I only valued it
+for the power it had to forward me in the quest of which I had dreamed
+since I was a child--the following in my father's footsteps and
+discovering of the city of the Incas, and, perhaps, of my father
+himself.
+
+"When I had seen you growing rich whilst I remained a poor man, I had
+felt no jealousy; for I trusted in the promise we had exchanged and
+relied on your honesty in keeping your word. But, when I had perceived
+your new intention, something went wrong inside my brain, so that I
+began to construe all your former good as bad. I thought that from the
+first you had never intended to keep your word, and had brought me
+into the Klondike to get me out of the way, so that, possessed of the
+secret information which I had given you, you might steal a march on
+me, and set out for El Dorado by yourself. Whether that was your
+purpose I do not know; but, for doubting you, you can scarcely blame
+me. So, day by day, as I descended the shaft to the bed-rock, and
+piled up billets of wood, and kindled them, throwing out the muck,
+drifting with the streak, sending up nuggets to the surface, and dirt
+which often averaged ten dollars to the pan, I said to myself, 'Every
+shovelful you dig out, and every fire you light, and every billet you
+stack, is helping Spurling to betray you the earlier.'
+
+"At first I would not believe my own judgment, but drove my anger down
+by replying, 'He is no traitor; he is my friend.' But at night when I
+came up, and you spoke to me pityingly about my hard luck and your own
+increasing wealth, I knew what you meant. Mordaunt didn't seem to
+mind; he had ten thousand dollars of his own, so he only said, 'Give
+him time. He's all right. He'll remember and come round. His head's
+turned for the moment by his fortune and he's lost his standards of
+what is just. I daresay if this happened to you or me, we should have
+been as bad.'
+
+"But that did not comfort me much, for I thought, 'A man who can
+betray and lie to you once, can always lie and betray.' I could not
+sleep at night for thinking about it and I brooded over it all the
+day; there was ever before my eyes the vision of you, sailing up the
+Great Amana without me.
+
+"If nothing else had happened and it had remained at that, I suppose I
+should have finished my winter's contract with you and have gone out
+again in the spring, either with Mordaunt or alone, prospecting for
+myself. As it was, I began to argue with myself. 'What better right
+has Spurling to this gold than I?' I said. 'If I had chosen this
+claim, as I might have done, all the wealth which is now his would
+have been mine. Had that been the case, I should have held to my
+bargain and have dealt squarely by him. Since he refuses to allow me
+the share which he promised me, I have a right to take it.'
+
+"You know what followed, how I hid some nuggets in my shirt, and you
+accused me and discovered them. You called me a thief, and threatened
+to expose me to the law of the mining camp. I told you that, since we
+had made that agreement to share conjointly whatever we found, I had
+as big a right to take charge of some of the gold as you yourself.
+Then you laughed in my face and struck me, asking if that was the
+usual way in which a labourer spoke to his employer. That blow drove
+me mad. I made no reply, for I had become suddenly crafty; I awaited a
+revenge that was certain and from which there could be no rebound.
+From that day forward the lust to kill was upon me; wherever I looked
+I saw you dead, and was glad. When the Northern Lights shot up they
+seemed to me, instead of green or yellow, to be always crimson, the
+bloodcolour. When they crept and rustled through the snow along the
+mountain heights, I fancied that they were a band of murderers who
+fled from their crime, and turned, and beckoned, and pointed to me,
+and whispered 'Come.' As my imagination wrought within me I grew
+silent; not even Mordaunt could rouse me. But he guessed what was
+happening, and would often come to me and say, 'Don't get
+down-hearted. Whatever Spurling does, I still hold to my promise. You
+and I are partners with a common fund. We have eleven thousand dollars
+already, so cheer up.'
+
+"But it wasn't envy of your wealth had driven me mad; it was fear lest
+you should go off and leave me behind, and should get to Guiana and to
+El Dorado first. I couldn't shake off my hallucination however much I
+tried--which wasn't much; always and everywhere I could see you dead.
+You know that the Klondike with its few hours of winter daylight, its
+interminable nights, its pale-green moon which seems to shine forever
+in a steely cloudless sky, and its three long months when men rarely
+see the sun, is not a much better place than Keewatin in which to heal
+a crippled mind. So, with the passage of time, there was worse to
+come.
+
+"One morning as I came to the shaft, I found a stranger waiting there.
+It was dark, I could not see his face; since he said nothing, I passed
+him and, descending to the bed-rock, commenced to scatter the last
+night's burning that I might get at the thawed-out muck. Presently I
+heard the sound of someone following, and the creak of the rope as he
+let himself down in the bucket. I thought it was you, so I did not
+turn, but sulkily went on with my work. The footsteps came after me
+wherever I went, standing behind me. At last I swung round in anger,
+supposing that you had come to torment me; at that moment I had it in
+my heart to strike you dead. In the light of the scattered fire, I
+discovered that it was not you, but instead a man of about my height
+and breadth. 'What d'you want?' I asked him. He did not answer. 'Who
+sent you here?' I said. He was silent. Then I grew frightened; seizing
+a smouldering brand, having puffed it to a blaze, I thrust it before
+his face--and saw _myself_.
+
+"I was down there all alone and underground; no one could have heard
+me had I cried for help. In my terror I grew foolish and laughed
+aloud; _it seemed to me so odd that I should have such fear of
+myself_. When I had grown quiet, 'Who sent you here?' I asked again.
+
+"At last he answered, 'You called me.'
+
+"'What have you come for?' I questioned.
+
+"'To murder Spurling,' he replied.
+
+"Then in a choking whisper I muttered, 'Who are you?'
+
+"And he answered me, 'Your baser self.'
+
+"I looked for a way of escape, but he stood between me and the mouth
+of the shaft; to get out I would have had to pass him. I tried to make
+him speak with me again that I might draw him aside, and so might slip
+past him and get above ground; but he refused to stir. Then I grew
+fascinated, and went near him, and peered into his face. He was like
+me, yet unlike; he was more evil--what I might become at my worst. He
+was to me what you were, when you just now arrived, to the man whom I
+loved in London, and who saved my life in Tagish Lake. Having studied
+his body and his face I loathed him, and drew myself away to the
+farthest hiding-place. There I crouched beside the gold streak for
+ten hours until the last glow of fire had died out, and I was left in
+darkness. Then, though I could not see him, I knew that he was there.
+
+"At last Mordaunt came and called to me. I begged him to come down.
+Thinking I was wounded, he lit a lantern and descended in haste. As he
+approached, I looked to see where _myself_ had been standing; but,
+though I had felt him there the moment before, directly Mordaunt came
+he vanished. In my horror I told Mordaunt everything--and what do you
+think the little fellow did? Instead of laughing at me, or fleeing
+from me for his life because I was mad, he set down his lamp and,
+throwing his arms about me, knelt down there on the bed-rock and
+prayed. If it hadn't been for Mordaunt I should certainly have killed
+you in the days which followed. Whenever I was alone or in your
+company, that thing, which was my baser self, was there. He would
+stand behind you, so that you could not see him, with his hand
+upraised as if about to strike. He would beckon to me that I also
+should get behind you, and when you spoke to me contemptuously or
+harshly the evil of his face would reflect a like passion in me
+against you. But whenever Mordaunt was present he vanished, and I had
+rest from temptation; therefore I say that Mordaunt saved you.
+
+"I kept on hoping that when spring came I would be able to leave, and
+thus rid myself of my evil dread; but the longer I stayed the greater
+grew my peril. At length the crisis came.
+
+"You had been down river across the ice to Dawson on the spree and to
+arrange for the carriage of your bullion to Seattle. It was night, and
+I was just returning from the shaft, where I had been giving a last
+look to the burning. I had a rifle in my hand, and, as I arrived at
+the door of the cabin, raising my eyes, saw you coming up-stream with
+your dogs, with your head bent low as if you were tired. Also I saw in
+the moonlight that _that other_ was noiselessly following you, stride
+by stride, stealing up behind. I saw him waving his arms to me,
+gesticulating madly and signing to me to kneel down and fire.
+
+"Suddenly all power of resistance left me; with my eyes upon his face,
+the memory of all the wrongs which you had dealt me, and my hatred of
+you, swam uppermost in my mind. I knelt down in the snow to take
+steadier aim and had my finger on the trigger, when the gun was
+snatched from behind. I turned fiercely round and found Mordaunt
+standing there. 'Quick,' he said, 'come inside.' He thrust the rifle
+beneath a pile of furs, and bade me tumble into my bunk and pretend
+sleep. Shortly after, I heard you come in and say that one of your
+dogs had been shot dead; but I did not stir. You came over and gazed
+down suspiciously at me, but seemed satisfied with Mordaunt's account
+of how I had been lying there for the past two hours wearied out with
+the day's work. Next day I could not look you in the eyes; also the
+memory of a woman I had loved had come suddenly back and changed me,
+making me ashamed. So two nights later I gathered together the few
+things I had and, abandoning my claim, fled.
+
+"If I could not trust myself with you, I could not trust myself in the
+Yukon. Every miner travelling with gold seemed to me a possible victim
+for my crime. I went about in fear lest I should see that evil thing,
+which called himself _myself_, returning to keep me company through
+life. I fled to escape him and, hoping to leave him behind me in the
+Klondike, went over the winter trail to Skaguay, the route by which
+two years earlier we had fought our way up, took steamer to Vancouver
+and came on thence to Winnipeg. My money was all but exhausted when I
+got there, I was broken in spirit and at my wit's end. By chance I met
+with Wrath, on whose claim in our first winter we had worked. He had
+gone back to his independent trading, and, at my request for
+employment, sent me up here to look after his interests at Murder
+Point. I was glad to come; after my experience on the Sleeping River,
+I was distrustful of myself in the company of men, never knowing when
+that _foreshadowing of my evil desires_ might not return to hound me
+on to fresh villainies and despair. For one who wished to be alone,
+Heaven knows, I chose well. You're not burdened with too much society
+in Keewatin--that isn't the complaint which is most often heard."
+
+Outside the night had long since settled down--a night which with snow
+and starlight was not dark, but shadowy and ghostlike, making the
+interval between two days a long-protracted dusk beneath which it was
+possible to see for miles. Far away in the forest a timber-wolf howled
+dismally; the huskies in the river-bed, seated on their haunches,
+lifted up their heads and echoed his complaint. Then all was still
+again, nothing was audible except the occasional low booming of the
+ice, when a crack rent its path across the surface and far below the
+river shook its gyves, as though clapping its hands in expectation of
+the freedom of the spring to come.
+
+Against the window the silhouette of Spurling loomed up, with the
+drifting dimness of the starlight for background, and the square of
+surrounding darkness for a frame of sombre plush; he seemed a
+man-portrait whom some painter had condemned forever to motionlessness
+and silence with the magic of his brush, and had nailed on a
+stretcher, and had hung up for ornament.
+
+At last he turned his head and stared into the blackness of the room,
+searching with his eyes for Granger. "So the deed which you feared to
+do, I have done," he said. "And here we sit together again, now that
+three years have passed; I, the man whom you hoped to murder and the
+man who has committed your crime; you, the man who stole from me,
+fired on me, missed aim, and ran away, and yet who at this present
+time are my judge. It is very strange! One would have supposed that
+with the breadth of a continent between us, you in Keewatin, I in
+Yukon, we need never have met. There is a meaning in this happening;
+God intends that you should help me to escape."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+SPURLING'S TALE
+
+
+Granger from his place beside the red-hot stove said nothing, but
+bowed his head. Spurling saw his action through the darkness and took
+courage.
+
+"There is not much to tell," he said. "After you left us, my luck
+seemed to vanish. My great bonanza pinched out, as Mordaunt's had
+done. I spent the spring and summer in washing out the gold from my
+winter's dump, and in sinking shafts to locate another streak which I
+might follow in the winter to come. I found none, but at first I did
+not lose confidence. I had plenty of capital and could well afford to
+spend some of it in exploration. I was quite sure that my two claims
+contained a hundred times as much gold as I had taken out--all I had
+to do was to find its location.
+
+"What Mordaunt said to you about me was true--my sudden good fortune
+had turned my head; I flung my earnings right and left, spending them
+on the most foolish extravagances, and still remained avaricious. I
+developed a mania for asserting my power and getting myself talked
+about. You know that in those days a new 'millionaire' in the Klondike
+was expected to do some of that; if, when he came to Dawson, he was
+sparing, and refused to treat the town to half-dollar drinks till
+everyone was drunk, they'd take him by his legs and arms and batter
+him against a wall until he gave in and cried, 'Yes.' Why, I've seen
+men set to and pan out from the sawdust on the floor of a saloon the
+gold which I had scattered. I performed such follies as made
+Swiftwater Bill famous when, after he had squabbled with his
+'lady-friend,' and he saw her ordering eggs, of which she happened to
+be fond, he bought up every egg in town at a dollar a piece, nine
+hundred in all, and smashed them, to spite her, against the side of
+her house. I was a confounded fool; if I hadn't been, I shouldn't have
+quarrelled with you, and we shouldn't have been here now--we might
+have been in El Dorado, perhaps.
+
+"Well, when I'd blown a good part of my money over stupidities for
+which I scarcely received even pleasure in return, I awoke to the fact
+that my workings had ceased to bear. Already the Sleeping River had
+got a bad name and was deserted; it was a commonplace that 'Drunkman's
+Shallows was played out.' I wouldn't acknowledge it. I took pride in
+the Shallows because I had discovered them; I wasted the remainder of
+my money in buying up other men's useless claims, and in engaging men
+to work them. Towards the end, even I had to own to myself that the
+streaks had pinched out and the Shallows were barren; but out of
+desperate bravado I kept on until my money was at an end. Then, when I
+was clean broke, I chose out a partner and went prospecting once
+again.
+
+"At first we found nothing, for, as I say, when you left me my luck
+departed. For months we wandered, finding only pay and colours, till
+we entered the Squaw River and discovered what we wanted at Gold Bug
+Bend. We stayed there working and testing the dirt till well into
+January; then one day we drifted into a streak which panned out
+twenty dollars to the pan, and so we knew at last that we had struck
+it. We eyed one another suspiciously, for we each of us remembered how
+you had been treated, and we began to talk about the necessity of
+recording our claims and discovery. Neither of us would trust the
+other to go alone, for we both wanted the claim on which we had been
+working, where the rich streak had been located, so we set out
+together. At first we travelled leisurely, speaking to one another;
+but soon we grew silent, and began to race. My partner was a lighter
+built man than I, and had the better team of dogs, and carried no gun.
+Very soon he began to draw away from me; but I relied on my superior
+strength to catch him up, for the journey was long. Then, somehow, as
+he ran farther and farther ahead, the belief grew up within me, that,
+whatever I might do, God meant him to get there first as a punishment
+to me for what I had done to you. At that thought all my lust after
+power, and the memory of the mastery which I had lost, came back, and
+I said, 'I will outwit God this time, however.'
+
+"Mechanically, almost without thinking, I levelled my gun and
+fired--and saw my partner drop. When I came up with him, he was lying
+face-downwards, with his arms stretched out before him along the
+ground. I turned him over and called on him to rouse. I kicked him
+with the toe of my snowshoe, and tried to get angry, pretending to
+myself that he was shamming. Then I knelt down beside him and covered
+him with a robe, deceiving myself that he had fainted and would
+presently awake. After I had waited for what seemed to be ages, I
+called him by name, and, when he did not stir, I laid my finger on his
+eyeballs--and so I knew that he was dead. When I knew that, fear got
+hold upon me; at every crack of the ice I persuaded myself that
+someone was coming up or down the frozen river, or had already seen
+me, and lay hidden behind a snow-ridge, watching all my doings. So I
+took up my comrade, and thrust him upright into a hole in the ice,
+trusting that because he had been my friend he would understand, and
+never tell. But his arms, which he had extended in falling, stuck out
+above the surface, as if signing my secret to all the world. They had
+grown stiff and frozen, and I could not bend them, so I knocked off,
+and piled up around and above them, blocks of ice.
+
+"Then, because I was fearful lest my coming alone without my partner
+into Dawson to record a claim might arouse suspicion, I turned back to
+the Gold Bug Bend. There I stayed and drifted with the streak for
+three months, and thawed out at least sixty thousand dollars' worth of
+muck. I had time to think things over. I came to the conclusion that I
+could not record my claim, since that might bring the miners up who
+would notice that my partner was missing; neither could I take down my
+dust to Dawson to express it to the outside, since that also would
+lead to questions being asked as to where I'd got it, seeing that it
+was so great in amount. So I determined to lie quiet until the summer
+time, and then to wash out only so much gold as I could carry about
+myself.
+
+"There was little chance of my being discovered on the Squaw River,
+for it is seldom travelled, and I calculated that in four months' time
+when the spring had come, the river would float the body far away to
+where it never would be found, or if found, then at a time when it
+would be unrecognisable. But in my first calculation I had not
+reckoned with my loneliness, and the horror which comes of knowledge
+of hidden crime. By the end of March I could stand it no longer and
+set out for Dawson, where there were men in whose company I could
+forget.
+
+"Soon after I got there the winter broke up and, by the first of May,
+though the Klondike itself was still frozen solid to its river-bed,
+the snow and ice from the country and rivers to the south, which had
+been exposed to the rays of the sun, had thawed and, draining into it,
+had created a shallow torrent which, running between the banks above
+the ground-ice, gave an appearance of the Klondike in full flood. Very
+soon the water over-flowed, so that houses were deluged and men had to
+take to boats and the roofs of their cabins for safety; it looked as
+though Dawson would be washed away. The drifting ice commenced to pack
+and pile against the bridge above the town; unless the jam could be
+broken before the ground-ice loosened, the bridge must collapse. Some
+men volunteered to blow it up with dynamite. In so doing they caused
+the ground-ice to tear itself free from the bottom so that, the water
+getting underneath, it floated up and pressed the pack against the
+floor of the bridge, forming, for a half-minute, an impassable barrier
+against the torrent rushing down. The flood rose behind it like a
+tidal wave, tossing on its crest a gigantic floe, standing waist-deep
+in which I saw, for the second during which it flashed in the sun, a
+frozen man, whom I recognised, who gazed upright towards me with his
+arms upstretched--only for a second, then the bridge went down and the
+water leapt over it, driving timbers, and floe, and man below the
+surface, carrying them northwards passed the city, out of sight.
+
+"The thing had been so sudden that only a few of those who were
+watching had realised what had happened; of these still fewer had seen
+the man; and of these only one had known and recognised my partner, as
+I had done. None of them could say for certain whether the man they
+had seen upon the floe had been alive or dead. In the confusion which
+followed the catastrophe this rumour was at first regarded as an idle
+tale to which no one paid much attention. But, when that one man who
+had seen and recognised came to me and inquired as to my partner's
+whereabouts, and I could give him no satisfactory answers, curiosity
+was aroused.
+
+"The Mounted Police instituted a search for the body, but as yet it
+was not found.
+
+"I was half-minded to leave the country and go outside. Would to God I
+had! But I was afraid that such conduct, following immediately upon
+this occurrence, would attract attention. I returned to the Squaw
+River and spent the half of another year up there. Then one day in
+November an Indian, who was passing up-river, stepped into my cabin
+and told me that the Mounted Police were searching for me. When I
+asked him why, he said that the English friends of my partner had been
+inquiring for him, and that I was known to have been the last man to
+be seen in his company. When that had been said, I knew the meaning of
+the sight I had witnessed when the bridge gave--my partner had sent
+his body down river on the first of the flood to warn me of my danger,
+as if he would say, '_Escape while you can; it will soon be
+discovered_.'
+
+"I gathered together what gold I could carry and, travelling by night
+only that I might not be noticed (and you know how long November
+nights can be in the Yukon), I struck the trail for Skaguay--the route
+by which two and a half years before you had fled. I got out
+undetected, as I thought, and arrived at Vancouver. There I read in a
+paper that at Forty-Mile the body had been found. I was seized with
+panic and hurried on to Winnipeg; on the way I was alarmed to find
+that I was being shadowed. I escaped my follower on my arrival there
+and sought out Wrath, the only man I knew in town. I was sure that I
+could trust him if he were sufficiently heavily bribed; so I gave him
+all the gold I had, and told him the truth, and offered to furnish him
+with such information as would enable him to go up and stake the rich
+bonanza which I had left behind on the Squaw River--all this if he
+would only help me to escape. He agreed to accept my terms, despite
+the risks he was taking in helping to conceal a criminal. He told me
+that you were up here, and said that it was no good going East, or
+striking down to the States, since all the railroads would be watched,
+and that my only chance lay in making a dash due north for Keewatin.
+He gave me a guide for the first three hundred miles of the journey,
+and the swiftest team of huskies he had. He smuggled me out to
+Selkirk, and gave me introductions to such men as could be trusted on
+the way. Before I left, I heard that they had made me an outlaw by
+placing a thousand dollars on my head.
+
+"I've travelled day and night since then, only halting when my
+strength gave out, or when I had to hide till darkness came that I
+might pass unobserved by a Company's outpost.
+
+"And I'm followed; I know that. I have not seen him, but I can feel
+that he is drawing nearer, and now is not far behind. I knew that if
+I could reach you, in spite of what has happened between us, you would
+save me. Granger, you must save me, if not for the sake of what I am,
+then because of what I once was to you in our London days. I know that
+I've deteriorated and have become bad; but it was more the fault of
+the country than of the man. You know what happens to a fellow who
+lives up there, how greedy and gloomy he gets, always feeling that the
+gold is underground and that he must get to it even at the expense of
+his honour and his life. You've felt it, you came near doing what I
+have done. If Mordaunt hadn't stopped you, you would have stood where
+I now stand."
+
+Granger broke in upon the frenzy of his appeal, asking abruptly,
+"Where is Mordaunt now?"
+
+If his face had not been in the shadow, Granger would have seen how
+Spurling's lips tightened as to withstand sudden pain, and his body
+shuddered at that question. "Oh, Mordaunt is all right," he said. "He
+left the Yukon soon after you left--he said that the fun was spoilt
+without you. I daresay he's seeking for El Dorado or else is married."
+
+"You are sure of that?" asked Granger.
+
+"Sure of what? All I know is that he quarrelled with me over your
+affair because he thought that I had not used you justly; shortly
+afterwards we broke up our partnership, and I was told that he had
+gone out through Alaska, via Michael to Seattle."
+
+When the man at the back of the room said nothing, Spurling asked in a
+tone of horror, "Why, you don't think that I killed him too, do
+you,--just because I have owned to shooting one man?"
+
+"I don't know what to think," replied Granger, speaking slowly; "no,
+certainly I do not think that you killed him, _too_."
+
+"Then, what?"
+
+"Never mind, since the matter's in doubt I will help you. What do you
+propose to do?"
+
+"Go on till I come to the Forbidden River, and hide there till the
+hunt for me is over, and they think that I am dead."
+
+"And then, if you survive?"
+
+"Creep back into the world and begin life all afresh."
+
+"And how can I help you?"
+
+"By lending me a fresh team, for mine is all tired out, and giving me
+provisions for my journey, and delaying my pursuer when he arrives."
+
+"How shall I delay him!"
+
+"Oh, you will know when you see him--there are many ways, some of
+which are very effectual." Spurling played with the butt of his
+revolver as he said these words, and looked at Granger tentatively,
+then looked aside. "For instance, the winter is breaking up and he
+might fall through the ice; or while he is staying here several of his
+dogs might die; or, at the least, you can tell him that you have not
+seen me and persuade him that he has passed me by. If he refuses to
+believe that, you can suggest that I have left the river and gone into
+the forest, and so put him off my track--anything to give me time."
+
+"He would scarcely believe the last," said Granger, "for on the Last
+Chance there is only one trail--by the river up and down. And I want
+you to understand Spurling, that if I do help you it will be by clean
+means; I intend to play fair all round."
+
+"Play fair! Do you call it fair play when a nation sets out to hunt
+one man? I have only done what thousands have thought and intended.
+What better is the man who effects my capture, and gets the thousand
+dollars which they have set upon my head, and sends me to the
+scaffold, than I myself who without premeditation shot a man. You're a
+nice one to talk about playing fair to the fellow who gave you your
+chance, and was your friend, and whom you tried to murder! Which of
+us, do you suppose, is the cleaner man?"
+
+Granger did not answer; through the last few hours he had been asking
+himself that same question. Spurling, thinking he had offended, began
+to plead afresh. "Oh, John, if you knew all that I have suffered you
+would pity me. God knows I've repented for what I did with drops of
+blood. If I'd only thought before I acted, I might have known that I
+stood to gain nothing by it. What good was the gold to me when I got
+it? I could only hide it, and wealth is not wealth when you have to
+keep it secret to yourself."
+
+He paused exhausted, and fell back drooping in his chair. Granger's
+pity had been aroused. "Druce," he said, "I have promised that I will
+help you; you must be content with that."
+
+Spurting clutched at his hand and pressed it to his lips. "And there
+are things which you need not tell him?" he questioned. "Say that
+there are things that you will not tell."
+
+"There are things that I will not tell," Granger repeated. "I will not
+tell him that I have seen you, and will refuse to give him help."
+
+Spurling's eyes had again sought out the west and the intervening
+stretch of sky, where from the east the reflected light of dawn had
+already begun to spread.
+
+"I don't like the look of it," he muttered; "I can feel that he is not
+far behind. Every time I look up-river I expect to see him, a dull
+brown shadow, hurrying down between the banks of white. I must be
+going; while I stay I cannot rest."
+
+So, when all had been got ready and Granger had supplied him with a
+new outfit and an untired team of dogs, he accompanied him out on to
+the Point where the dawn was breaking. Then he told him of a cache
+which Beorn had made at the mouth of the Forbidden River, which he
+might open, and from which he could get supplies if his own ran short.
+He went with him a mile down the ice, that he might guide him round a
+part of the trail which was rotten and unsafe to travel. At parting,
+Spurling grasped his hand; pointing back to the danger spot he
+whispered, "That is one of the things which you need not tell." Before
+he could answer him, he had lashed up his dogs and was on his way
+northwards. It was then that the thought of a final test flashed
+through Granger's mind. "Spurling, Spurling," he called, "did you know
+that Mordaunt was a woman and not a man?"
+
+Whether he had heard Granger could not tell, for he did not halt or
+turn his head; driving yet more furiously, urging his huskies forward
+with the whip and shouting them on, he vanished round the bend.
+
+Granger stood gazing after him, listening to the last faint echo of
+his cries; then he turned slowly and walked through the half-light
+back to his lonely store. Over to his right, above the horizon the red
+sun leapt. He did not raise his eyes; but, as he walked, he whispered
+over and over to himself words which seemed incredible, "And, if it
+had not been for her, _I_ should have been like that."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+CITIES OUT OF SIGHT
+
+
+In Keewatin the human intellect stands forever at a halt, awed in the
+presence of a limitless serenity for which it can find no better name
+than God, since, of all things which are incalculable, He seems most
+infinite.
+
+In this land of rivers and solitude Man is unnecessary, disregarded,
+and plays no part; if, after two hundred odd years of white, and many
+centuries of Indian habitation, Man were to withdraw himself
+to-morrow, he would leave no permanent record of his sojourn
+there--only a few outposts and forts, several far-scattered
+independent traders' stores, one or two missions and fishing-stations,
+all of them built of wood, which within a decade would have crumbled
+to decay, over which the tangled forest would silently close up.
+Instinctively he knows himself for an impudent intruder on something
+which is sacred; he hears continually what Adam heard when he stole of
+the fruit which was forbidden, God walking in the garden in the cool
+of the day--the accusing footsteps of God. His brain is staggered by
+an unchartered immensity in which he has no portion, which he can only
+watch. His individual worth to the universe is dwarfed by the
+imminence of the All: so nothing seems very serious which is only
+personal and, since all things which we apprehend must become in some
+sense personal, nothing is very important. The procession of human
+effort becomes a spectacle at sight of which Homeric laughter may
+sometimes be permissible, but tears never. If a man once gives way to
+weeping in Keewatin, he will weep always. Only by the exercise of a
+self-restraint which at first seems brutal can life be endured there.
+
+Granger, as he walked toward his store under the shadow of the dawn,
+was conscious of all this. The land was wrapped in the intensest
+quiet; the very crunch of his snowshoes seemed a profanation, though
+he trod lightly. When he had ascended the Point, he paused and gazed
+back. Already the thaw had commenced; down the still white face of the
+country, which lay at his feet like a shrouded corpse, the tears had
+begun to trinkle, though the eyes were tranquil and fast shut; the
+sight was as astounding to him as if a man six months dead should be
+seen to stir within his coffin of glass. Here and there in the expanse
+of forest he could see flashes of green and brown, of tree-tops from
+which the snow had fallen. The river-banks, which yesterday had seemed
+chiselled out of solid marble, were to-day tunnelled and scarred with
+tiny rills and watercourses which groped their way feebly riverwards.
+As he stood in silence meditating, he was startled by the whirr of
+wings, and looking southward descried the advance-guard of the first
+flock of ducks. "Ha, the spring has come," he cried; but immediately
+he checked his ecstasy, for his eyes had again caught sight of the
+emotionless expression on that great white face with its closed eyes
+turned toward the sun. Though no voice spoke it seemed to him to say,
+making by its silence its meaning plain, "There is nothing of which
+the importance is so great that we should forsake our calm."
+
+He felt rebuked for vulgarity, as though he had been found shouting in
+a cathedral-nave where priests were praying for the peace of souls of
+the departed. He desired to hide himself; entering his shack, he
+pushed to the door. He was tired; his brain ached with thought, and
+his thought was disjointed. He could not believe that Spurling had
+ever come; it was all an hallucination. Thinking about the past had
+made him imagine all that, or else he had dreamed it in the night. He
+went over detail by detail all that had seemed to him to happen; and
+even then, when it fitted reasonably together, he could not be
+certain. It was too monstrous that Spurling should have become like
+that! He would not believe it. Then his anxiety for Mordaunt sprang up
+and commenced to craze him. The terrible question throbbed through his
+mind, "Is Mordaunt dead?"
+
+The mania for questions grew upon him. Three separate voices spoke
+clamorously at once: "Is Mordaunt dead?"
+
+"Did Spurling murder him?"
+
+"Am I mad?"
+
+He stumbled to the far end of the room and flung himself down in his
+bunk, burying his face in its coverings that he might shut out the
+light and gain a moment's rest. But his imaginings followed and knelt
+beside him.
+
+"Well, if I must think," he whispered, "I will think of that which is
+best." He beckoned from out the shadows his memory of Mordaunt's face,
+and gave himself over to recalling all that it once had meant. They
+had nicknamed him "The Girl" because of his shyness and modesty, and
+had not always been particular in the jokes which they had made at his
+expense. Yes, and he had had a woman's ways from first to last.
+Nothing that had happened had been able to coarsen him; he had never
+given way to loose talk or brutal jests, and in the presence of
+suffering had invariably been full of tenderness.
+
+Good heavens! pass on to the crisis--to that day when he had come to
+the top of the shaft and called down to him! He had answered his call,
+praying him in an agonized voice to descend and rescue him. He could
+see him now approaching hurriedly, yet cautiously, through the
+darkness, lifting high up his swinging lamp so that its rays fell
+across his face. He could still remember how absurd it had seemed to
+suppose that a creature, so small and fragile, could save him from
+_that other_. Yet he had; and after that, because of the relief he
+felt, he had confessed. Then, in a moment of compassionate
+self-forgetfulness, Mordaunt had placed his arms about him and had
+drawn down his head upon his breast--an action of which no man in
+dealing with another man was ever capable; the mother-instinct was
+manifested there. In the flickering lamplight, with his head pressed
+close to his companion's breast, feeling its rise and fall at each
+struggling intake of the breath, crouching underground upon the
+bed-rock, he had guessed the secret--_that Mordaunt was not a man_.
+From that hour he had loved her. She had never known that he shared
+her secret. Thank God, he had remained so much a gentleman that he had
+not told her that! Who she was, why she had come to the Klondike, what
+was her proper name, he had not permitted himself to inquire; for him
+it had been sufficient that she was a woman, and that he loved her,
+and that he was unworthy of her love. After she had seen him shoot at
+Spurling he had avoided her, lest by contact with him she should be
+defiled. He had vaguely hoped at the time of leaving that the day
+might come, after he had cleansed himself and proved himself a man,
+when he might seek her out and ask her to be his wife. Through the
+last three years he had lived for that. To have asked her then would
+have been an insult, an act of cowardice. How would an upright woman
+answer a man whom she had just saved from homicide? How would she
+regard a man who had discovered the secret of her sex in such a
+manner, because of her compassion, and had not had the decency to keep
+that knowledge secret even from herself? So he had fled from the
+Shallows for a double reason; that he might not do violence to
+Spurling, and that he might not betray himself to her. He had left her
+without a hint of his going, or a word of explanation.
+
+What had she thought of him? He had often wondered that. Had she also
+loved him, and not dared to speak about it? He half-suspected that. If
+she had loved him and had spoken out, he would not have married her at
+that time, when even he despised himself; to have done so would have
+been to drag her down. Still, he could not help speculating as to what
+she had said and thought on that morning when she awoke in the winter
+dreariness, and, gazing round the cabin, found that he had vanished.
+Had she regretted him, and had she sometimes, when Spurling had become
+intolerable, gone aside and wept? After three years, though he had
+loved her, he could only recall her by her man's name, and picture her
+in her man's dress.
+
+Then, while he thought with closed eyes, that awful question came
+again, "Is Mordaunt dead?"
+
+Whilst she was in the world it had been possible for him to strive to
+be straightforward and courageous; but, _if she was dead_ . . .! If
+Spurling had murdered her, if he had lied to him and _she_ was his
+partner, what then? Well, that all depended on whether Spurling had
+known her sex. If not, what a revenge he would take when he should
+confront him, and inform him that he had murdered a woman, and not a
+man! He knew Spurling; for him the public ignominy of being hanged
+would be as nothing compared with such private knowledge--it would
+thrust him into Hell in this life.
+
+Ah, but that could not be; God would not allow it! Spurling himself
+had said that he had not sunk so low as that. Yet, in case it might be
+so, he would keep his word and help him to escape--from the Mounted
+Police, but not from himself. He would be the executioner if there
+must be one. The law should not rob him of his revenge. He would save
+Spurling's life in case he might need to take it.
+
+Then, unbidden and against his will, there rose up the image of the
+man who had saved his life in Tagish Lake. Spurling had forestalled
+him, bribed him beforehand, by restoring him his own life in exchange
+for the life which he was doomed to take. Did that not make amends?
+Also he had rescued Mordaunt from disaster on the Skaguay trail, where
+he would certainly have perished had he been left. He had done
+unconsciously that which Granger proposed to do of set purpose--saved
+a life that he might take it. Did not that in some measure make
+amends? The problem was too complicated; it must work itself out in
+its own way. Yet, it would be a bitter irony if, after he had
+travelled a continent to avoid this deed, he should be forced to kill
+Spurling in the end--Spurling, who had come to him of his own accord.
+Still more burlesque would it be if, after Spurling was at rest, he
+should be hanged in his stead.
+
+But perhaps Mordaunt was not dead.
+
+To rid himself of these morbid questionings, he would give his remoter
+memory the reins to-day, at whatever cost; it was pleasanter to
+remember bygone unpleasantness than to live with the ills which
+threatened his present life. He recollected how some one had once
+asked Carlyle, "Why does the Past always seem so much happier than the
+Present?" And Carlyle's stern reply, "Because the fear has gone out of
+it." How odd it seemed to him that he should be recalling Carlyle up
+there in Keewatin! Yet, because that answer was true, he took up the
+thread of his London life again, that so, with the drug of memory, he
+might lay to rest his immediate misfortunes. He was a little boy again
+in the old red house on Clapton Common. One by one he entered its
+homely rooms with their ancient furniture, quaint wall-paper, and
+general look of substantial comfort. Once more he leant out of the
+bow-window at the back and gazed beyond the hill, upon which the house
+was built, up which gardens climbed, divided by creeper-covered walls
+of crumbling brick, down to where at its foot the river ran through
+flats and marshes. Far away, a little to the right, old Woodford
+raised its head; to the left Chingford, as yet unmodernized, showed
+up; and straight ahead, at a distance of seven miles, the steeple of
+High Beech, in the kindly habitable forest of Epping, was in sight.
+This was the house in which he had first dreamed the dream by the
+glamour of which he had been led astray. His father had dreamed the
+same dream, and his grandfather before him; it seemed to be a part of
+the walls and masonry, so interwoven was it with his memories of that
+house. It had been the first faery-story which he had ever listened
+to, and had been told to him for the most part in that back room with
+the bow-window, as he had sat on his grand-father's knee on winters'
+nights.
+
+The first time that he had heard it he could not have been more than
+five, and his father was absent, so his grandfather said, pursuing the
+dream on the other side of the world. This was the story as he
+remembered it. "In the land of Guiana there is a golden city named
+Manoa, but El Dorado in the Spanish language, which stands on the
+shores of a vast inland lake whose waters are salt, which is called
+Parima, and which is two hundred leagues in length. Juan Martinez was
+the first white man to visit it, and he did so through no fault of his
+own! When he was with the Spanish army at the port of Morequito, the
+store of powder, of which he had charge, caught fire and was
+destroyed. His commander, Diego Ordas, was so enraged that he
+sentenced him to death; but being appealed to by the soldiery with
+whom Martinez was a favourite, he commuted his punishment to
+this--that he should be set in a canoe alone, without any victual,
+only with his arms, and so turned loose on the great river. By the
+grace of God he floated down stream and was captured by certain
+Indians, who, never having seen a European before or anyone of that
+colour, carried him into a land to be wondered at, and so from town to
+town, until he came to the golden city of Manoa of which Inca was
+emperor. Now the emperor, when he beheld him, knew him to be a
+Christian, for not long since his brethren had been vanquished by the
+Spaniards in Peru; therefore he had him lodged in his palace and
+ordered that he should be respectfully entertained. There Martinez
+lived for seven months, and all that while was not allowed to wander
+beyond the city's walls lest he should discover the country's secrets,
+for he had been brought thither blindfold and had been fifteen days in
+the passage. When, years later, he came to die, he confessed to a
+priest that he had entered Manoa at high noon and that then his
+captors had uncovered his eyes, and that he had travelled all that day
+till nightfall through its streets and all the next, from the rising
+to the setting of the sun, of so great extent was it, until he arrived
+at the palace. It was Martinez who had given to Manoa its name of El
+Dorado, because its roadways were paved with gold, and there was so
+great an abundance of that metal there that, before the emperor would
+carouse with his captains, all those who were to pledge him were
+stripped naked, and their bodies anointed with white balsam, over
+which through hollow canes was blown by slaves the dust of fine gold,
+so that when his guests sat down to drink with him, they glistened
+yellow in the sun like gilded statues.
+
+"When Martinez had obtained his freedom and returned to Trinidad, and
+told his story, many other adventurers set out in quest of Manoa; but
+none so much as saw it save only Pedro de Urra. He, after incredible
+labours, at length arrived at a mountain peak whence, looking down,
+far away in the distance he could just descry the shining roofs of
+palaces and golden domes of Inca temples, wherein, he was told, were
+stored gold images of women and children more beautiful than God had
+yet wrought into flesh and blood. But his strength was spent and his
+troops were famished, also the Incas' armies were moving forward to
+check his advance; therefore he had to retreat, and to return to the
+seacoast, where he fretted away his life in dreaming of the
+splendours of which he had only just had sight. Fifty years later
+Berreo, governor of Trinidad, set out from Nuevo Reyno with seven
+hundred horse and slaves, and descended the Cassanar river, bound upon
+the same errand. What with fever and poisonous water he lost many of
+his men and cattle, so that, when he reached the Province of Amapaia,
+he had but one hundred and twenty soldiers left, and these were sick
+and dying; and so he also was forced to abandon his search. And this
+man Raleigh captured, and from him extorted his secrets, when he
+sailed to discover and conquer El Dorado for Queen Elizabeth, having
+in his company Jacob Whiddon, the English pirate, and George Gifford
+who was captain of the Lion's Whelp.
+
+"All the way across the ocean they studied the records of the
+adventurers who had sought before them, till they had them all by
+memory; for they hoped to find those same wonders which Lopez says
+that Pizarro found in the first home of the Incas: 'A royal city where
+all the vessels of the emperor's house, table, and kitchen, were of
+gold and silver, and the meanest of silver and copper for strength and
+hardness of metal. He had in his wardrobe hollow statues of gold which
+seemed giants, and the figures in proportion and bigness of all the
+beasts, birds, trees, and herbs that earth produceth; and of all the
+fishes that the sea or waters of his kingdom breedeth. He had also
+ropes, budgets, chests, and troughs of gold and silver, heaps of
+billets of gold, that seemed wood marked out to burn. Finally, there
+was nothing in his country whereof he had not the counterfeit in gold.
+Yea, and they say, that the Incas had a garden of pleasure in an
+island near Puna, where they went to recreate themselves when they
+would take the air of the sea, which had all kinds of garden-herbs,
+flowers, and trees of gold and silver, an invention and magnificence
+till then never seen. Besides all this, he had an infinite quantity of
+silver and gold unwrought in Cuzco.' The counterpart of all these
+marvels Raleigh hoped to find, when he had sailed up the Orinoco to
+its watershed.
+
+"So, when he had gathered all the information which he could from
+Berreo, he departed and rowed up the river in the galego boat of the
+Lion's Whelp, till on the fourth day he dropped into the waters of the
+Great Amana. Up the Great Amana he travelled, always getting news of
+his city, always being told that it was farther inland. On the banks
+of this river grew diverse sorts of fruit good to eat, flowers and
+trees of such variety as were 'sufficient to make ten books of
+herbals.' And everywhere he saw multitudes of birds of all colours,
+some carnation, some crimson, some orange-tawny, purple, watchet, and
+of all other sorts, so that, as he himself has said, 'It was unto us a
+great good passing of the time to behold them, besides the relief we
+found in killing some store of them; and still as we rowed, the deer
+came down feeding by the water's side, as if they had been used to the
+keeper's call.'
+
+"Lured on by these delights, he journeyed farther inland until at last
+he came to the first great silver mine; but here the Orinoco and all
+the other rivers had risen from four to five feet in height, so that
+it was not possible by the strength of man or with any boat whatsoever
+to row into the river against the stream. However, before his return,
+one day as it drew towards sunset, he had sight of a crystal mountain,
+which was said to be studded with diamonds and precious stones, which
+shone afar off, the appearance of which was like to that of a white
+church tower of exceeding height. Over the summit rushed a mighty
+river, which touched no part of the mountainside, and fell with a
+great clamour as if a thousand bells were knocked together; so, though
+he did not find El Dorado, he was somewhat comforted by the marvel of
+this sight. Also, before he left he saw _El Madre del Oro_, the mother
+of gold, which proved that treasure lay not far underground."
+
+So, hour after hour, and night after night, the old man had told his
+magic story of the search for El Dorado to the little boy. And
+sometimes he would vary it with other tales and legends of men who had
+gone upon quests equally wild; of Ponce de Leon, who had sought for
+the Bimini Isle, where arose a fountain whose waters could cause men
+to grow young again; of the Sieur D'Ottigny, who set sail for the
+Unknown in search of wealth, singing songs as if bound for a bridal
+feast; and of Vasseur, who first brought news of the distant
+Appalachian Mountains, whose slopes teem with precious metals and with
+gems beyond price. But always the narration would return to El Dorado
+on the shores of Parima. Then the little boy would ask, "But, Grandpa,
+is it true, or is it only a faery-tale? Was there ever such a city,
+and does it exist to-day?" Whereupon the old gentleman would grow very
+serious and would reply, "Certainly there is such a city, my dear; for
+when I was young I went in search of it, and your father is out there
+finding it to-day."
+
+After which answer he would get out maps, and show the child the red
+lines, which were his own journeys, and the exact spot in the
+watershed of the Orinoco where he believed the city to stand. Then
+they would reason about it together, bending low beneath the lamp,
+tracing out the various routes of past explorers, until his mother
+came in and, seeing what they were so busy about, carried him off to
+bed. At an early age he discovered that his mother approved neither of
+the grand-father's stories, nor of her husband's absence. She was
+often at pains to tell him that there was no such city, that the
+stories were all fables, and that his grandpapa had wasted his fortune
+and talents in its search. But the boy believed in the fables, for he
+liked to think of his father as sailing up the Great Amana, where the
+deer feed along the banks, until at last he came to the golden city
+where the men are like gilded statues. He was sure that his papa would
+return rich one day, bringing with him an Inca princess for his son to
+marry.
+
+But, when his father did return, he brought back with him only a
+fever-shattered body for his wife to nurse, and a plucky belief that
+he would succeed next time. Ah, but those were good days which he had
+spent by his father's bedside, when he had gazed on that fair-haired,
+soldierly man who had trodden in Raleigh's footsteps! He remembered
+how his father had laughed when he had asked in awe-struck tones
+whether he might be allowed to kiss his hands, and how he had said,
+"If I do not find, you will seek for it some day"--and then he had
+felt proud. How eagerly he had listened when the two explorers, father
+and son, had sat together and had talked over their various travels!
+And how he could remember his father's account of his latest journey!
+His mother had been out at the time when it was related; they never
+mentioned these matters in her presence because they pained her;
+moreover, if she was near by when they were talked about, she would
+contrive some excuse for snatching the boy away. They had watched
+their opportunity, however, and his father had told him.
+
+He had set out in a canvas sailing boat, and had ascended the Orinoco
+for twenty days. Every now and then he had come to rapids, where he
+had had to go ashore to carry his boat, or to marshes, where he had
+had to wade. As he travelled farther from the mainland, his Indian
+guides had deserted him till there was none left, and he had had to go
+on alone. Day by day he had passed by great rocks, on which there was
+writing engraved, which, perhaps, contained directions for travellers
+who, ages since, had been bound for that same city; but they were now
+of no use to him, because they were written in a forgotten language
+and in an alphabet which not even the Indians could understand. So he
+had gone on until at last he came to the crystal mountain, and the
+waterfall which Raleigh had described; and after that he had travelled
+further than even great Raleigh himself, or any other white man. It
+was at this point that the boy had gasped and asked to be allowed to
+kiss his father's hands.
+
+Then his father had told him how beyond the mountain there had seemed
+to be nothing but tangled wood and swamp, and how he had caught fever
+and wandered on in delirium until, when he came to himself, he had
+found himself standing on the shores of what had once been a vast
+inland lake, but which had now become partially dry, through which it
+was only possible to wade. So he left his boat and waded on, sometimes
+shoulders high, for four days; for, though he was racked with pains,
+he would not give up because he believed the lake to be Parima. On
+the evening of the fourth day, when his strength was almost spent and
+he was ready to sink with faintness, he came to an island and saw in
+the distance, in the light of the setting sun, golden spires and the
+roofs of houses many miles away, which he knew to be El Dorado. But by
+this time he had only two days' provisions left and dared not venture
+further; so he, like Pedro de Urra, having come within sight of his
+desire, had been compelled to turn back. Of his return journey he said
+nothing; Granger learnt that from his mother in later years. It had
+been made in agonies of hunger and thirst, which had nearly robbed him
+of his life. Nevertheless, his father had told him that, so soon as he
+got well again, he was going back, and that he would reach El Dorado
+this time. True to his word, when his fever had left him, he had bade
+them all good-bye, making his son secretly promise that, if he should
+not come back, when he became a man, he would follow him in the quest.
+Then had come the two years of anxious waiting in which they had had
+no news of him, and the final acceptance of the belief that he was
+dead. But his grandfather would not lose faith; he himself had once
+been missing for five years. He said that his son had reached the
+city, and was pushing homeward through the Andes on to the Pacific
+side. Night by night, in that back room with the bow-window, he had
+collected his records and studied them beneath the lamp. "He must be
+about here by now," he would say, pointing to a certain place. But the
+boy's mother had only smiled sadly, saying, "Is he not yet
+undeceived?" Then one evening they had left him in his chair, and had
+not heard him come up to bed, and in the morning had found him sitting
+stiff and silent in the sunshine, with the map of Guiana spread out
+before him and his finger on the spot where he had written EL DORADO,
+the magic word.
+
+The child had never forgotten that sight, its impression had sunk deep
+into his nature; somehow it had become symbolic for him of loyalty to
+one's chosen purpose in life. As he had once asked permission to kiss
+his father's hands, so, when there was no one in the room to watch
+him, he had stolen up and smoothed his hands with reverence against
+the cushions of the chair where the old grey head had last rested--but
+he had never sat there. After the old man's death, all things in that
+room became objects for his veneration. It was just this capacity in
+the small boy for hero-worship which his mother never tried to
+understand; so he kept his secret, and thus began the breach which was
+presently to widen. From that day Granger had pledged himself, when he
+should become a man, to go in search of his father and to inherit his
+quest; and to such a nature as Granger's that childish pledge was
+binding. He could never be persuaded that his father was dead; he
+always spoke and thought of him as a soldierly fair-haired man, living
+in a desirable land hard by a garden, like to that of the isle near
+Puna, which had herbs and flowers and trees of gold and silver, one
+who was an honoured guest in the emperor's house where the meanest
+utensils were of silver and copper for strength. At first, when only
+he and his mother were left, he had spoken to her of these fancies;
+but she had shown herself more and more averse to their mention, so he
+had learnt to keep his longings to himself.
+
+His mother was a practical woman, born of a race of lawyers and
+diplomatists. Hence she coveted above all things for her son, as she
+had done for his father before him, the certainties of life--social
+recognition and a banking-account; she had no sympathy with theories,
+however heroic, or with any kind of success which was not obvious and
+within hand-stretch. She was one of those safe people who always
+choose to-day's salary, if it be promptly paid, in preference to the
+more generous triumph of a to-morrow which may never come. She was
+wisely parsimonious in all things and, daring nothing herself, had no
+patience with natures which were more courageous. Much of her own
+money, and all of her husband's, had been spent by him in his
+fruitless explorations of Guiana. Now that he was gone, she discreetly
+invested what was left of her fortune, and deprived herself of all
+luxuries, so that when the time should come, her boy should have his
+chance in life unembarrassed by his father's previous reckless
+expenditures. She was proud of her son, for he was handsome; but she
+never realised that half a day of spoken love and sympathy can
+purchase more friendship than twenty years of benefits punctually and
+dutifully conferred--still less did she recognise the necessity for a
+mother consciously to cultivate a friendship with her boy. Not that
+she was ungentle; she craved his affection, but she made the mistake
+of demanding it as her right--all of which is the same as saying that
+she was mentally insensitive, and was unaware that with thoughtful
+people the road to the heart must first lead through the mind; of
+people's minds she was incurious. She gave her son the kind of
+education which befits men to inherit rather than to earn. His wishes
+were never consulted; nor even when he went to university was he given
+any choice. Like a dumb brute beast he was goaded forward without
+knowledge of his destination, and was expected to be grateful to the
+hand which kept him moving, and prevented him from turning aside.
+
+He permitted this well-intentioned despotism not through any lack of
+spirit, but partly because it was well-intentioned, and mostly because
+his immediate present seemed of little consequence to him. He felt
+himself to be an embryo prophet who awaited his hour; when that should
+strike, he would concentrate. Not until he was twenty-two years of age
+did he expostulate, and by that time it was too late; his training had
+made him dependent upon money for success. His mother had the money,
+and she selected the Bar as a suitable profession for him; then it was
+that he broke his twelve years' silence, and scandalised her with the
+information that his great ambition was to follow in his father's
+footsteps, and to find both him and El Dorado, fulfilling the promise
+which he had given as a child. Startled by this unexpected confession,
+she had charged him with disloyalty and ingratitude to herself; to
+avoid complications and a breach which he foresaw would become
+irreparable, he had accepted her choice and studied for a barrister.
+This utterance of his secret, however, had only served to make him
+aware of the intensity of his own desire. He could not work, he could
+not rest, he could not apply his mind; always he saw before him the
+tropic river with its multitude of carnation, crimson, and
+orange-tawny birds, its low green banks where the deer come down to
+graze, and far ahead and visionary the swampy lake, built on whose
+shore the golden city raises up its head. So books, and law, and
+London became for him the custodians of his captivity--things to be
+hated and despised.
+
+In the three years which followed he had made one friend, a mining
+engineer, by name Druce Spurling. In him he had confided, and Spurling
+had responded with a sympathy which did him credit, kindling to the
+romance of the story. He had tested with his expert knowledge the
+evidence which Granger had laid before him for the belief that such a
+city as El Dorado had existed, and he had been satisfied--or, at any
+rate, had been made certain that in the watershed of the Orinoco gold
+was yet to be found in great quantities, as in the Spaniard's time. He
+had promised that, so soon as he had the capital, he would help him in
+his quest. Granger coveted the journey for its adventure, and the
+opportunity of fulfilling his promise to his father; Spurling only for
+its possibilities of attaining wealth. In their community of ambition
+this difference of purpose was lost to sight. Then, when Granger was
+twenty-five and had just completed his course of reading for the Bar,
+his great chance came. It was the year of the Klondike gold-rush and
+Spurling was going out; he wanted a partner, and offered to take
+Granger with him if he, in return, would promise to give him one third
+of all the gold he mined. Their idea was that, with the money thus
+earned, they would be able to provide funds for the following up of
+their dream of El Dorado. Granger accepted the offer at once, partly
+influenced by his desire to prove to his mother that he _could_ do
+something by himself. After a painful farewell, he had departed to
+seek his fortune in the North World.
+
+Ah, how his mother had cried when he went away! He recalled all that
+to-day, now that he was in Keewatin, and gazed back incredulously upon
+that mistaken former self, wondering whether he could have been really
+like that. London, indeed! What would he not give to be in London
+to-day; to stand in Fleet Street, listening to the roar of the passing
+traffic and brushing shoulders with living, companionable men? Ah
+well, what good purpose would it serve to think about it! He had
+chosen his own fate. Here he was at Murder Point, and he would soon be
+married to Peggy, after which, no matter what avalanche of good luck
+befell him, there would be no return. What would his proud old mother
+say to a little half-breed grandchild? The mere thought made him
+smile. In cynical self-derision, he pictured himself accompanied by
+his Indian tribe, knocking at the door of the old red house on Clapton
+Common--and his reception there. He gave a name to his picture, and it
+was "_The Return of the Ne'er-do-well_."
+
+    *    *    *    *    *
+
+His brain was getting cloudy; he could not tell whether he was asleep
+or awake. He felt as if he had been bound hand and foot so that he
+could not stir, and had been raised aloft to a dizzy height. He knew
+that he was far above the earth, for he was very cold and was
+conscious of mists which drifted across his face and left it damp.
+Suddenly he discovered that he could open his eyes. Looking down, he
+saw with supernatural distinctness the entire course of the frozen
+river-bed. Far to the north he could descry Spurling, plodding
+desperately on across the thawing ice. A few miles to the west,
+perhaps an hour's journey from Murder Point, he could see a second
+figure, tall, soldierly, erect, which approached with swift clean
+strides, through the solitude, inevitably as Fate--the symbol of
+Justice in pursuit of Crime. He watched with fascination how the
+distance between the hunter and the hunted narrowed; only one thing
+could save the criminal from capture--the intervention of Murder
+Point.
+
+And then the cloud rolled back again; he closed his eyes, and lost
+consciousness in untroubled forgetfulness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE PURSUER ARRIVES
+
+
+He was awakened by a man bending over him and holding a lighted match
+to his face. Careless as usual of preserving his life, he did not
+attempt to rise or defend himself, but simply gazed back indifferent
+and a little bewildered. He did not recognise the man; he was an utter
+stranger. As if wearied with an inspection which did not interest him,
+he turned his eyes away, and found that the room had become dark. How
+many hours he had slept, he could not calculate; perhaps nine or ten.
+He wondered what had made the night return so quickly. He looked
+toward the window, and saw that it was blinded with snow; and, as he
+listened, could hear the roaring of the wind, and, in the lull which
+followed, the rustling and settling down of the flakes. Then the match
+went out, and neither of them could perceive the other's face. Granger
+arose and pushed back the shutter of the stove, that so they might get
+a little light. "I needn't ask you to make yourself at home," he said;
+"you've done that already."
+
+The stranger did not reply, but surveyed him closely all the while.
+
+"You must have had good company out there to be so silent now that you
+have arrived."
+
+Then the man spoke. "What's your name?" he asked abruptly. "Is it
+Granger?"
+
+"I was always told so, and have as yet found no good reason for
+believing otherwise."
+
+"Then this is the store of Garnier, Parwin, and Wrath, to which I was
+directed by Robert Pilgrim of God's Voice?"
+
+"That is right, but I don't often have the pleasure of entertaining
+guests from God's Voice."
+
+The stranger paused in doubt, as though choosing the best words to
+say; then he blurted out, "But you're a gentleman?"
+
+"I hope so."
+
+"An Oxford man?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What college?"
+
+"Corpus."
+
+"Did you row in the Eight?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I thought so. At what time?"
+
+"When Corpus went up five places and bumped the House on the last
+night."
+
+"I was stroke in the 'Varsity boat that year, and rowed at six in the
+Christ Church Eight that night."
+
+"Then you must be Strangeways?"
+
+"Yes, Corporal Strangeways of the Northwest Mounted Police, but
+Strangeways of the Oxford boat at one time. I fancied I knew you; you
+rowed at seven for Corpus, and it was you who won that race."
+
+"I and seven others," laughed Granger; "but what brings you up here at
+this time?"
+
+"We'll talk about that later. At present I'm hungry; I've hardly had a
+meal since I left God's Voice."
+
+"Then you're travelling in haste?"
+
+"Yes, in haste."
+
+Granger set to work to prepare a meal, while Strangeways talked to him
+of the Cornmarket, the Turl, and the Hinkseys, running over the
+familiar geography for the sheer pleasure of recalling kindly Oxford
+names. Presently he asked him if he remembered the little maid who had
+served in the river-inn of the King's Arms at Sanford. Granger had had
+a summer love-affair with that same maid, as had many a young
+water-man before and after him. One quiet Sunday evening, when her
+fickle passion had reached its short-lived height, he had even been
+allowed the felicity of accompanying her to vespers at the quaint old
+Norman Church, which lay snuggled away in woods behind the Thames.
+They had returned to the inn by a roundabout way, through the meadows
+beneath the twilight, speaking all manner of intense things, and, very
+wonderfully, believing both themselves and their sayings to be
+sincere. When he had entered his skiff and pushed out from the bank,
+she had called him back and royally permitted him to give her his
+first and, as it proved, only kiss. But he had not known that, and had
+rowed elated Oxfordwards between the hayfields, dreaming his ecstasy
+on into the future--when it had already achieved its climax, and
+slipped out of his life. Since then it had come to seem very simple
+and absurd, as do all love affairs, however august, which are lived
+down--for no love affair was ever outlived. So, because he had been
+fond of her, he was glad to listen to Strangeways, even when he
+related her newer conquests over more recent undergrads, and her later
+romantic history. By all accounts she was a modern Helen of Troy,
+uncontaminate, forever fair and forever juvenile.
+
+And all the while he was listening, Granger was planning by what
+means he might detain Strangeways, and hazarding what progress
+Spurling had made by this time in his escape. "A life for a life," he
+thought; "and Spurling once saved my life. Until I have cancelled that
+debt, even though Mordaunt has been slain, I will stand by him."
+
+Throughout the winter months all meals were the same at Murder Point,
+consisting of black tea, salt bacon, and bannocks, which are a kind of
+hard biscuit, made of flour and water mixed to a thick paste and then
+baked. This diet becomes pretty monotonous, but is the traveller's
+universal fare in Keewatin. In those far regions men are not
+particular how or what they eat; of necessity they abandon the
+refinements of civilisation as needless and cumbrous. To-day, however,
+partly to protract his stay and so give Spurling time, partly to
+assert his waning gentility, the memory of which in its heyday
+Strangeways shared, he attempted to be lavish, to set a table, and to
+entertain. For cloth he spread a dress-length of gaudy muslin, such as
+Indians purchase for their squaws. He opened some tins of canned goods
+that he might provide his guest with more than one course. He built up
+his fire, and commenced to cook. All this used up time; and the
+expending of time was what he most desired.
+
+When the meal was finished Strangeways rose up restlessly, as though
+he had just remembered his errand, and went to the door to see what
+progress the storm had made. The moment the door was opened the wind
+swept in, driving a fall of snow before it.
+
+"It seems to me," said Granger, "that you're going to be snow-bound
+for a time. This'll make travelling dangerous, for the thaw has
+already weakened the ice in places and now the snow'll cover them
+over, making them appear safe. It's strange, for blizzards don't often
+happen so late as this."
+
+"Well, there's one comfort," said Strangeways, "it's the same for all
+alike; if I'm delayed, so is someone else."
+
+Granger turned his back on him, and walked over to the window where he
+stood tapping on the glass, attempting to dislodge the snow which had
+spread itself out like a blanket across the panes. "Poor devil," he
+said, "I pity him, whoever he is. He can find no place of shelter in
+all the three hundred and twenty miles which stretch between God's
+Voice and Crooked Creek, unless he comes here or falls in with some
+trapper's camp."
+
+"Then you have had no one here lately?"
+
+"No, I haven't seen an Indian for over a month. They don't visit me so
+late in the winter as this; they wait for the open season, when they
+can bring in their furs by water."
+
+"But the man I'm speaking of is white. He drives a team of five grey
+huskies, the leader of which has a yellow face and a patch of
+brindled-brown upon its right hindquarters. Haven't you seen such an
+one go by within the last twenty-four hours?"
+
+Granger shook his head; "Perhaps you've passed him on the way," he
+suggested; "if he knew that you were following him, he may have dodged
+you purposely and doubled back."
+
+"He knew all right; it was because he knew that I was following that
+he fled. I can hardly have passed him, for he was seen by a half-breed
+ten miles from God's Voice, and I've travelled slowly and kept a
+careful watch between there and here. Besides I tracked his trail to
+within an hour's journey of the Point, until the snow came down and
+obliterated it. He was going weakly at the last; both man and dogs
+must have been spent."
+
+"Then he must be somewhere to the westward, between the spot where you
+lost his trail and here."
+
+"Perhaps, but the argument against that is that his trail was at least
+twelve hours old. Anyhow, I shall have to wait until this blizzard is
+over. During that time he may struggle in from the west, or, if he has
+gone by, may be driven back here for shelter by the gale."
+
+Granger had not thought of that contingency, that Spurling might be
+driven back by the weather, might push open the door at any moment and
+give him the lie before Strangeways. Perhaps a look of fear passed
+across his face, which betrayed him. At any rate, the next thing he
+heard was Strangeways, saying to him in a careless voice, "Of course,
+between gentlemen it is scarcely necessary to ask you whether you are
+telling the truth!"
+
+"It is scarcely necessary."
+
+"Then I beg your pardon for asking."
+
+"You needn't. You've got to do your duty irrespective of caste;
+whatever I once was, you can see for yourself what I am."
+
+"Yes, a gentleman down on his luck; but still a gentleman. Strange how
+one gets knocked about by life, isn't it? I little thought when I
+caught a glimpse of you, leaning on your oar exhausted at the end of
+that race, that the next time we should meet would be up here. It's
+curious the things a fellow remembers. Our boats were alongside, just
+off the Merton barge; the first thing I saw when I recovered and sat
+up on my slide was your face, deadly pale, almost within hand-stretch.
+I don't recall ever to have seen you again until I struck that match
+an hour ago and held it to you, and you opened your eyes; then it all
+came back. When you were sleeping you looked haggard, just about the
+same as you did then. If I'd seen you awake, I don't suppose I should
+have remembered. . . . I didn't even know where Keewatin was in those
+days. If anyone had told me that it was a village near Jericho I
+should have believed him. I daresay you were nearly as ignorant; and
+now we're here in your shack."
+
+Granger, anxious to keep Strangeway's attention from his pursuit, and
+his own thoughts occupied, inquired, "And what brought you into the
+Northwest Territories?"
+
+"Oh, the usual thing--a girl. She was ward to my father, and was to
+inherit a considerable property when she came of age. I was in love
+with her, and my father was keen that I should marry her; there was
+only one hindrance, that her opinion didn't coincide with ours. I
+found out that my father was trying to break her spirit, and force her
+to his will. I couldn't allow that; so, having nothing better to do, I
+left home and came to Canada for a while. Mind you, I'm not condemning
+my father; he thought that he was doing the best for both our sakes.
+But I wish he'd left us alone; if he had, I daresay it would have come
+out all right. She was one of those girls of whom the physiognomists
+say, 'Can be led by kindness, but cannot be driven.' The moment she
+was ordered to do a thing, which in the ordinary course of events she
+might have chosen to do of her own free will, she refused and hated
+it.
+
+"When I got to Montreal I was confronted by that stupid superstition
+of the Canadians, that every young Englishman who has had a better
+education than themselves, and is possessed of a private income from
+the old country, must be a remittance-man and a ne'er-do-well--that
+he's been sent out because he wasn't wanted by his family. I tried to
+get employment; not that I needed it, but because I wanted to work.
+The moment I opened my lips and didn't speak dialect or slang, and
+displayed hands which were not workman's hands, I was shown out. So I
+drifted west to Calgary and, after doing a little ranching there,
+enlisted in the Mounted Police."
+
+"Do you like it?"
+
+"Oh, yes, it's rather a lark, arresting the people who at first
+affected to despise you. I can always keep myself cheerful by the
+humour of that. If you've lost your sense of the ridiculous, you'd
+better join the Northwest Mounted Police--for an Englishman the cure's
+certain."
+
+"And how about the girl?"
+
+"She did a Gilbert and Sullivan trick. After I'd left home my father
+guessed the reason of my departure, and instead of giving her a rest,
+redoubled his efforts to make her marry me, that so he might bring me
+back. He was fond of both of us; we'd been brought up together, and he
+couldn't bear the idea of either of us being separated from himself.
+He made an awful mess of things, poor old gentleman; he persecuted her
+with his arguments to such an extent that one morning he woke up and
+found that she had vanished. He made all sorts of inquiries, but to
+the day of his death could never get any news of her whereabouts."
+
+Strangeways paused and commenced to light his pipe. Granger, who had
+become interested in the story, waited a minute for him to proceed,
+but when he had kindled his tobacco and still sat smoking in silence,
+"Well, and what next?" he asked.
+
+"That is all," said Strangeways; "now tell me about yourself."
+
+"I went into the Klondike with the gold-rush of nearly five years ago.
+I travelled with a man named Spurling, and a young chap named Jervis
+Mordaunt, whom we chummed up with in our passage over the Skaguay." He
+was conscious that Strangeways had jerked out his foot and was looking
+hard at him. He paid no attention to that, but proceeded leisurely
+with his tale. He conceived that it would answer his purpose better,
+in order that he might make the corporal unsuspicious of his share in
+Spurling's escape, to speak of him in a hostile manner, and to mention
+all the small and private faults which he could place to his
+discredit. He told a story of personal disputes between himself and
+his partners over the working of claims, which left the impression
+that Spurling and Mordaunt had always sided together against himself,
+and that finally he, getting sick of the climate, and quarrellings,
+and his continuous bad luck, had come outside, travelled to Winnipeg,
+and taken service with Garnier, Parwin, and Wrath, because he was in
+danger of starving. Of El Dorado, or his real reason for leaving the
+Yukon, he said nothing.
+
+When he had ended, Strangeways, who had never for a second removed his
+gaze, inquired in a hoarse, strained voice, "And this man Mordaunt,
+what was he like?"
+
+"Oh, he was a slim little fellow; we nicknamed him 'The Girl' because
+of his ways, and because he was so slight."
+
+"How old was he?"
+
+"He couldn't have been more than eighteen when we first met him, for
+he never had to shave."
+
+"Did he ever tell you anything about himself, where he came from, who
+were his family, or anything like that?"
+
+"Not that I remember; he was always very close about himself. But what
+makes you ask these questions? Do you think that you recognise him?"
+
+Strangeways rose up and paced the room, betraying his agitation, but
+when he spoke his voice was level and restrained. "By God, I hope
+not," he said.
+
+Every moment Granger dreaded that he would hear him say that Mordaunt
+was dead, and yet he wanted certainty. He watched Strangeways pacing
+up and down, and longed to question him, yet was fearful that in so
+doing he would betray his own secret. At last he could bear the
+suspense no longer; that regular walking to and fro tortured him, it
+was like the constant swinging of a pendulum and made him giddy to
+look at. When he spoke, it was in a voice so shrill that it surprised
+himself.
+
+"Tell me once and for all," he cried, "has anything happened to him?
+Is he dead?"
+
+Strangeways halted, and regarded him with a look half-stern,
+half-compassionate.
+
+"As for Spurling, you hated him, did you not?" he inquired.
+
+Granger clenched his hands and his voice trembled. "I hated him so
+much," he said, "that there were times when I would gladly have struck
+him dead."
+
+"Then, why didn't you?"
+
+Granger started; the question was spoken so fiercely, and was so
+searching and direct. It aroused him to a sense of his danger, and
+helped him to recover himself.
+
+"In the first place you would have hanged me, and in the second there
+was Mordaunt." As soon as he had said it, he knew that he had made a
+slip.
+
+"And why Mordaunt?"
+
+He hesitated a minute, gathering himself together. He could feel the
+scrutiny of Strangeways' eyes and was conscious that he was breathing
+hard.
+
+The question was repeated, "And why Mordaunt?"
+
+"Because Mordaunt was such a clean fellow that I couldn't do anything
+shabby in his presence," he said.
+
+"How clean?" Strangeways persisted.
+
+"Why, in every way; he was so honourable."
+
+"But I thought you said just now that he always sided with Spurling
+when it came to a dispute?"
+
+"So he did in a sense. He never seemed to think that the thing we
+quarrelled about was worth while, and treated it all with a well-bred
+contempt. Spurling was usually the one who was unjust, and I the one
+who complained; so I was usually the one to start the wrangle.
+Therefore, though he despised Spurling, he always seemed to blame me
+for my pettiness."
+
+Strangeways turned on him his honest, manly gaze, as if he were about
+to ask again, "Is that the truth?" But he did not say it. Granger felt
+a cur for lying, but he was determined to fight for Spurling's life,
+and, if that were necessary, for his own revenge.
+
+"And you have not seen Spurling go by the Point?" asked Strangeways.
+
+"No." He said it quite ordinarily, as if he were answering a
+commonplace. Then he realised that he had been caught in a trap and
+had not manifested enough surprise. He slowly raised up his eyes,
+shame-facedly, like a schoolboy detected cribbing, when the master
+steals up behind.
+
+"I'm afraid, after all, that you are not a gentleman," was all that
+Strangeways said.
+
+Granger shrank back and flushed as if he had been struck across the
+face; he did not attempt to defend himself or expostulate. The wind
+had died down outside; it was evident that the storm had spent itself.
+In the silence which followed he could hear the padding steps of the
+huskies going round the house, and the sound of them sniffing about
+the door. Strangeways, who had been fastening on his snowshoes
+preparatory to departure, walked across the room and raised the latch.
+He stepped out, leaving the door open behind him. A bar of moonlight
+leapt instantly inside, as it had been a fugitive who had been kept
+long waiting. Then he heard the voice of Strangeways calling,
+"Granger, Granger."
+
+He rose up hurriedly, thinking that perhaps Spurling had been driven
+back by the blizzard and was returning to his danger. When he reached
+the threshold he saw only this--the moon tossing restlessly in a
+cloudy sky, shining above a shadowy land of white; Strangeways
+standing twenty paces distant with his back towards him; and, seated
+on their haunches between Strangeways and the threshold, five lank
+grey huskies, one of which had a patch of brindled-brown upon its
+right hindquarters and a yellow face.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE CORPORAL SETS OUT
+
+
+It would have been easy to shoot Strangeways at that time, and he must
+have known it; yet, he was so much a gentleman that he accepted the
+risk, and had the decency to turn his back when circumstances
+compelled him to give a man the lie. Granger wondered whether courtesy
+was the motive; or whether he was only testing him out of curiosity,
+to see of what fresh vulgarity of deceit he was capable.
+
+As he stood in the doorway, his gaze wandered from the broad shoulders
+of Corporal Strangeways, late stroke of the 'Varsity Eight, to the
+treacherous eyes of the gaunt grey beast before him which, by reason
+of its unusual markings and untimely appearance, had once and forever
+thrown Spurling's game away. There was something Satanic and
+suggestive of evil about those green and jasper eyes, and the manner
+in which they blinked out upon him from the furious yellow head. Were
+they prompting him to crime, saying, "Why don't you fire? He can't
+defend himself; see, his back is turned?" No, not that. He
+half-believed that the brute was endowed with human intelligence, and
+had betrayed his late master of set purpose--perhaps, in revenge for
+the many beatings he had received on the trail from Selkirk to Murder
+Point. There was a vileness in the creature's look that was degrading
+and stirred up hatred--and surely, the lowest kind of enmity which
+can be entertained by man is toward a unit of the dumb creation. That
+he should feel so, humiliated and angered Granger. Was there not
+enough of ignominy for him to endure without that? He drew his
+revolver, took aim at this yellow devil--but could not fire. The beast
+did not cringe and run away, zigzagging to avoid the bullets, stooping
+low on its legs, as is the habit of huskies when firearms are pointed
+at them; it sat there patiently blinking, a little in advance of its
+four grey comrades, with a mingled expression of amusement and boredom
+in its attitude, like a sleepy old bachelor uncle at a Christmas
+entertainment when Clown and Harlequin commence their threadbare jests
+and fooleries. He might have been yawning and saying to himself, "Hang
+it all! Why do I stay? I know the confounded rubbish by heart--all
+that these fellows will do and say."
+
+Granger's hand dropped to his side; this wolf-dog looked so far from
+ignorant--so much wiser than himself. Could it be that he also was
+playing in the game? Was it possible that he also was intent on
+helping Spurling? Well, then, he should have his chance.
+
+For himself the season for deception was at an end; he had lied to
+gain time for the fugitive, now let him see what truth could effect.
+He waded through the snow to Strangeways, tapped him on the shoulder,
+and was made painfully aware of the opinion held of him by the way in
+which the corporal screwed his shoulder aside.
+
+"I suppose I seem to you a pretty mean kind of a beast?"
+
+"I suppose you do."
+
+"I seem so to myself; but I have an excuse to make--that this man once
+saved my life."
+
+"So you're a hero in disguise?"
+
+"No, but I couldn't go back on a man who had done that."
+
+"I fail to see that that is a reason why you should have lied."
+
+"I called it an excuse."
+
+"In this case the words mean the same."
+
+"Well, then, I had a reason: if the person whom Spurling murdered is
+the person whom I . . ."
+
+"Indeed! So you knew that much, did you?" At mention of the word
+"murdered," Strangeways had swung fiercely round and confronted
+Granger.
+
+"Yes, I know that much. And if the man whom Spurling murdered is the
+man whom I suspect him to be, I had intended to dispense with law and
+to exact the penalty slowly, up here whence there is no escape,
+myself."
+
+"Then you'll be sorry to hear that you've lied to no purpose. The
+person whom Spurling murdered was not a man, you damned scoundrel."
+
+Strangeways turned sharply away from him, and, moving as briskly on
+his snowshoes as the unpacked state of the snow would allow, commenced
+methodically to go about the store in ever widening circles. He
+evidently suspected that the fugitive was still in hiding there, or
+had been at the time of his arrival, and had since escaped, in which
+case the snow would bear traces of his flight. When he had searched
+the mound in vain, he turned his attention to the river-bed where his
+team of dogs was stationed. Granger, watching him from above, saw that
+he had halted suddenly and was bending down. Then he heard him
+calling his dogs together and saw him harnessing them quickly into his
+sledge. Panic seized him lest Strangeways should drive away without
+telling him the name of _this thing, which was not a man_, which
+Spurling had murdered, and _whether the deed had been done in the
+Klondike_. Also he was curious to see for himself what it was that he
+had found in the snow down there, which made him so eager to set out.
+He ploughed his way down the hillside, breaking through the surface
+and slipping as he ran, till he arrived out of breath at the
+river-bank. Then he saw the meaning of this haste; approaching the
+Point from the northward was a muffled track, partially obliterated by
+the snow which had since fallen, which, on reaching Murder Point,
+doubled back, returning northward whence the traveller had come. It
+meant to Granger that, while he and Strangeways had been seated
+together recalling old times in the store, Spurling had come back. For
+what reason? No man would fight his way through a blizzard without
+good purpose; he would lie down where he was till the storm had spent
+itself, lest he should wander from his trail. This man had everything
+to lose by turning back. Then he discovered that the snow was speckled
+with dots of black, and, stooping down, discerned that they were drops
+of blood. Some of the blood-marks were fresh; the tracks themselves
+had been made, perhaps, within the last three hours. Spurling must
+have met with an accident, and, returning to the Point for help, had
+seen the stranger's dogs and sledge, and turning northwards again had
+fled. So thought Granger.
+
+Strangeways, in the meanwhile, was examining the feet of his leader.
+Presently he stood erect, and asked in a low voice, "Did you do
+that?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Look for yourself."
+
+Granger looked, and saw that the balls of the leader's forefeet had
+been gashed several times with a knife.
+
+"How should I have done it?" he replied. "I've been in your company
+every minute since you arrived."
+
+"Who did it, then?"
+
+"You know as well as I."
+
+"And what do you think of a man who could do that?"
+
+"That he was very desperate."
+
+"I should call him a Gadarene swine."
+
+Strangeways stood in angry thought for a few seconds; then he jerked
+up his head, and asked, "Can you lend me another team of huskies? Be
+careful when you answer that you tell me the truth this time."
+
+Granger smiled at the childishness of such threatening.
+
+"You will gain nothing by speaking like that," he said. "Unfortunately
+for you, unlike Spurling, I am not afraid of death--I should welcome
+it. Yet, while I live, I am curious; therefore I will promise you help
+on one condition, that you tell me who has been murdered, and where."
+
+Strangeways lifted his eyes and surveyed Granger, asking himself, "And
+is this statement also a lie?" But, when he spoke there were the
+beginnings of a new respect in his voice. "So you are not afraid of
+death?" he said. "Well, then, I owe you an apology for what I have
+called you, for I am; I am horribly afraid. I am afraid that I shall
+die before I have avenged this death."
+
+"Tell me, who was it that was killed?" cried Granger, impatiently.
+"Was it a girl? There was a girl whom I loved in the Klondike; you
+don't know how you make me suffer."
+
+"Don't I?" replied Strangeways, grimly; and then with affected
+indifference, "There are a good many girls in the Klondike; the body
+of this one was found washed ashore near Forty-Mile."
+
+"What's her name?"
+
+"That's what I'm here to find out."
+
+"Did Spurling know that she was a woman when he shot her?"
+
+"So you know that also--that he shot her? Whether he knew, I don't
+care; the fact remains that she is dead and that he is suspected."
+
+"Only suspected?"
+
+"Well, . . ."
+
+"By God!" cried Granger, bringing down his fist in Strangeways' face,
+"but you shall tell me! Was her name Mordaunt, and was she his
+partner, and did she wear a man's disguise?"
+
+Strangeways turned his head and dodged aside so that the blow fell
+lightly; drawing his revolver, he covered his opponent. Granger
+advanced close up, until the barrel of the revolver touched his face;
+then he halted and waited.
+
+Strangeways watched him; looked into his eyes amazed; then lowered his
+weapon and laughed nervously. "Oh," he said, "I remember, you are not
+afraid of death."
+
+"But I am of madness and suspense."
+
+Strangeways did not reply at once. Perhaps a sudden understanding had
+dawned on him, pity and a vision of what it meant to live through the
+eternal Now at Murder Point. He may have been asking himself, "For the
+lack of one small untruth, shall I thrust this man into Hell?" At any
+rate, when he answered he spoke gently. "No," he said, "she wore a
+woman's dress; be sure of it, your girl-friend is safe up there."
+
+Granger looked at him steadily, wondering why he should have lied;
+than he took his hand and pressed it in the English manner, "I believe
+you," he said. Yet, at the back of his mind a voice was persistently
+questioning, "Do I believe him? But can I believe that?"
+
+He was interrupted in his thoughts by Strangeways saying, "It's a pity
+that that poor brute should suffer; he's certain to die."
+
+The corporal went near, levelled his revolver and shot the leader
+between the eyes. The bullet did its work; the dog shivered, and
+tottered, rolled over on its side, tried to rise again, then stretched
+itself out wearily as if for sleep at the end of a hard day's travel.
+
+"You can do that for a mere husky," said Granger bitterly; "but you
+refuse to do it for a man."
+
+"The husky had a harsh time of it in this world and has no other
+life."
+
+"If that's so, he's to be congratulated; but there was the more reason
+why he should have been allowed to live his one life out. We wretched
+men are never done with life; if I were sure that there was only one
+existence and no reproaches in a future world, I could be brave to the
+end. It's this repetition of mortality, which men call immortality,
+that staggers my intellect, making me afraid--afraid lest there is no
+death."
+
+Strangeways shrugged his shoulders and scowled. He did not like the
+subject--it caused him discomfort; there was so much left for him in
+life. He planned, when he had captured Spurling and seen him safely
+hanged, to buy himself out of the Mounted Police, return to England,
+and there live pleasantly at his club in London and as squire on his
+estate. He would marry, he told himself; and though not the girl whom
+he had most desired, for he believed her to be dead, yet, like a
+sensible man, some other girl, who would be his friend, and bear his
+children, and make him happy. If once he could get out of Keewatin,
+having performed his duty honourably, he would do all that--when
+Spurling had been captured alive or dead.
+
+Therefore he broke in on Granger roughly, inquiring, "Where are those
+huskies which you are going to lend me?"
+
+"They are Spurling's huskies which he left behind when I lent him
+mine."
+
+"How long ago was that?--If they're Spurling's, they must be pretty
+well played out."
+
+"They are. They've rested for thirty hours more or less; but I don't
+think you'll manage to catch him up with them."
+
+"Perhaps not, but I'll try; he can't be more than three hours ahead."
+
+"Three hours with a fresh team is as good as three days."
+
+"You forget the difference between the two men."
+
+"No, I don't, for the one has the memory of his crime."
+
+"It's the memory of his crime that'll wear him out, and that same
+memory that'll give me strength."
+
+"Why? What makes you hate him so? Supposing he did kill a woman, it
+may have been an accident. She may even have felt grateful for the
+bullet, as I should have done just now had you shot me dead. It's
+horrible to kill anyone, but then the poor devil's fleeing for his
+life and he's suffering a thousand times more pain than he
+inflicted."
+
+"Is he? Does he suffer the pain of the man who follows behind?
+Supposing a certain man had loved that woman and had lost her, and had
+planned all his life on the off-chance of meeting her again, dreaming
+of her day and night, and then had suddenly learnt that she was
+brutally dead by Spurling's hand on some God-forsaken Yukon River,
+where the ground was hard like iron so that no grave could be dug by
+the murderer, and her body froze to marble and lay exposed all winter
+through the long dark days, with the bullet wound red in her forehead,
+and her grey face looking up toward the frosty sky, till the spring
+came and the water washed her body under and threw it up in a creek
+near Forty-Mile, where a year later it was discovered mutilated and
+defiled, do you think that her lover would be glad of that? Do you
+think that he would pity the black-guard who could do such a
+scoundrelly deed as that?"
+
+Strangeways was speaking wildly, his voice was trembling and his face
+was haggard and lined; he was crying like a child. "The man who could
+do a deed like that," he shouted, menacing the stars with his clenched
+hand, "the man who could do a deed like that is so corrupt that even
+God would search for good in him in vain. It's the duty of every clean
+man to hound him off the earth. While we allow him to live, we each
+one share his taint. I'll pray God every day of my life that Spurling
+may be damned throughout the ages--eternally and pitilessly damned."
+
+When Granger could make his voice heard, "You don't mean that she was
+Mordaunt?" he cried. All this talk about a woman who had been lost and
+loved paralleled his own case--he took it as applied to himself.
+
+Strangeways recovered himself with an effort, "No, no," he said
+huskily. "Mordaunt, you have told me, was a man. I was only supposing
+all that."
+
+"But Mordaunt was not a man, but a woman in man's clothing."
+
+Strangeways closed his lips tightly together, refusing to take notice,
+pretending that he had not heard. Granger spoke again. "Mordaunt was
+not a man," he said.
+
+"In that case," answered Strangeways, "you know what the man suffers
+who is following behind. I will tell you no more than that."
+
+"You've told me enough and I will help you; only pledge me once more
+on your sacred word that this body was found in a woman's dress."
+
+Strangeways hesitated; then his eyes caught again the bleakness of the
+land and his imagination pictured the awful loneliness of life up
+there. Looking full on Granger he said, "On my most sacred word as a
+brother-gentleman, the body that was found was clothed in a woman's
+dress."
+
+"Then, thank God, she was not Mordaunt!" said Granger; "but because he
+knew her to be a woman at the time when he killed her, I will help you
+none the less."
+
+Having called together Spurling's huskies, they found them to be too
+weak for travel, with the exception of the leader, therefore they
+harnessed in the corporal's remaining four dogs, putting the
+yellow-faced stranger at their head. No sooner had they turned their
+backs and gone inside the store to bring out the necessary provisions,
+than the four old dogs, jealous of their new leader, hurled themselves
+upon him, burying their fangs in his shaggy hair, intent on tearing
+him to death--an old-timer husky can stand a good deal of that. He
+strained on the traces, exposing to them only his hindquarters,
+running well ahead, and keeping his throat safe. Not until the two men
+had clubbed them nearly senseless did they subside into sullen
+quietness; and then only so long as they were watched. Once a back was
+turned, the four hind dogs piled on to their leader and the fight
+recommenced.
+
+"You won't go far with them," said Granger. He did not notice the look
+of reawakened suspicion which flickered in Strangeways' eyes. "You
+won't go far with them; the moment you camp and that yellow-faced
+beast gets his chance, he'll chew your four dogs to pieces. That's
+what he's there for, it's my belief--he's playing Spurling's game.
+He'll take you fifty or a hundred miles from Murder Point, and there
+leave you stranded."
+
+"What would you advise?" This was spoken in a quiet voice.
+
+"I would advise you to wait here till the summer has come, and then to
+proceed by water."
+
+"But on snow I can follow his trail, whereas travel by water leaves no
+traces."
+
+"What does that matter? Instead of following him, let him return to
+you, as he did to-night. You've driven him up a blind alley on this
+Last Chance River; he can only go to the blank wall of the Bay, and
+then come back."
+
+"He can reach the House of the Crooked Creek."
+
+"And if he does, what of that? He'll be touching the blank wall then.
+They won't want him. The first question that they'll ask him will be,
+'And what have you come here for?' If he can't give a satisfactory
+account of himself, they'll place him under arrest. When you get news
+of that, you can go up there and fetch him."
+
+"And if he doesn't get so far as that?"
+
+"You can set out by canoe and drive him back, and back, till you come
+to the Bay, and he can go no further."
+
+"He might hide, and I might pass him on the way--what then?"
+
+"In that case he'd double back and come past Murder Point, trying to
+get out."
+
+"In the meanwhile I should be a hundred, two hundred miles to the
+northwards, travelling towards the Bay on my fool's errand, and who
+would be here to capture him?"
+
+"Why, I should."
+
+"Precisely."
+
+Granger started; the way in which that last word had been spoken had
+made Strangeways' meaning manifest. He blushed like a girl at the
+shame of it. "Surely you don't still distrust me? You don't think me
+such a sneak that, having got you out of the way, I'd let him slip by
+and out?"
+
+"It looks like it."
+
+"But, man, don't you realise that our interests are the same?"
+
+"Since when?"
+
+"Since you told me of a woman who was done to death on a Yukon river,
+and lay unburied all winter till the thaw came, and her body was
+washed down to a creek near Forty-Mile, where it lay through the
+summer naked, gazed upon, uncovered, and defiled."
+
+"I fancy you knew all that when you helped Spurling to escape."
+
+"Yes, but I didn't know that it was a woman, and I didn't know her
+name."
+
+"And you don't know her name now."
+
+"I do; it was Jervis Mordaunt who wore a man's disguise."
+
+"I told you that she wore a woman's dress."
+
+"I know. I know."
+
+"Then do you mean to tell me that I lied?"
+
+"Perhaps, but not to accuse you. You said it out of kindness, and that
+was partly true which you said. You meant that the body was naked when
+it was found."
+
+"If you dare to speak of her like that again, I'll choke you, and run
+the risk of getting hanged myself. The land has debased you, as the
+Yukon debased your friend. I can read you; you're still half-minded to
+play his game, and that's why you want to turn me back."
+
+"Yes, I want to turn you back. Spurling's a hard-pressed man and he's
+dangerous. You can judge of what he is capable by what has just
+happened. He's cunning and, in his way, he's brave; he wouldn't
+scruple to take your life. Your best policy is to wait--either here or
+at God's Voice, as you think best. The ice will soon be unsafe to
+travel; already a mile from here, where the river flows rapidly round
+from the south-west, the part on the inside bend is rotten. I had to
+guide Spurling round that. At first, before I saw you and knew who you
+were, I was tempted not to warn you, to let you take your own chance
+and go on by yourself, and, perhaps, get drowned; but now, after I
+have seen you and after what you have told me, I can't do that."
+
+"So you were tempted to let me drown myself, and now you are
+repentant?"
+
+Granger bowed his head.
+
+"Then I tell you that if the ice were as rotten as your soul or
+Spurling's, I would still follow him, though I had to follow him to
+Hell. If I've got to die, I'll die game--and you shan't turn me back."
+
+Granger ran out after him, calling him to stay, offering to guide him
+round the danger spot in his trail. But suspicion and untruthfulness
+had done their work. Only once did he turn his head, when at the crack
+of the whip the yellow-faced leader leapt forward in his traces. Then
+he answered him and cried, "He killed the woman I loved, and he shall
+pay the price though I follow him to Hell."
+
+So far as is known, these were the last words which Strangeways ever
+said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE LAST OF STRANGEWAYS
+
+
+Granger returned to his shack and, closing the door, sat down beside
+the stove in his accustomed place. He commenced to fill his pipe
+slowly, stretching out his legs as if he were preparing for a long
+night of late hours and thoughtfulness. But he could not rest, his
+whole sensitiveness was listening and alert; the muscles of his body
+twitched, as if rebuking him for the delay which he imposed on them.
+He was expecting to hear a cry; whose cry, and called forth by what
+agony, he did not dare to surmise, only he must get there before it
+was too late. Somewhere between his shack and the Forbidden River he
+must get before the agony began. He rose up, and putting on his capote
+and snowshoes hurriedly, went out following Strangeways' trail. He had
+no time to realise the folly of his action--this leaving of his store
+unguarded and setting forth without an outfit at a season of the year
+when, perhaps, within a week the ice would break. He did not consider
+how far he might have to follow before he could hope to come up with
+Strangeways; nor what Strangeways would think of and do with him if,
+turning on a sudden his head, he should see the man who had lied to
+him coming swiftly up behind. He would probably shoot him; but Granger
+in his frenzy to save Strangeways' life did not think of that. His
+brain was throbbing with this one thought, that if he did not catch
+him up before he reached the Forbidden River, he would have seen the
+last of him alive which any man would ever see in this world, unless
+that man were Spurling.
+
+So now there were three men spread out across the ice, two of whom
+followed in the other's steps. The first man was racing to preserve
+his own life, the second was pursuing to take it, and the third was
+following with all his strength that he might save the pursuer's life
+from danger. Of these three the last man alone had no fear of death.
+The other two were so eager to live, and one of them took such delight
+in life! Yet, Strangeways was rushing to his destruction as fast as
+that evil yellow-faced beast, tugging at the traces with might and
+main, could take him--to where beneath the ice, or in some forest
+ambush, lay crouched the hidden death. And if he should die, whose
+fault would that be? Granger was man enough to answer, "The fault
+would be mine. I told him untruth till he could not believe me when I
+spoke the truth which would save his life."
+
+Now that he was left solitary again, he resumed that old habit of
+lonely men of arguing with himself. Between each hurrying stride, he
+panted out within his brain his unspoken words, his thoughts gasping
+one behind the other as if his very mind was out of breath. Why had
+Spurling come back? Why hadn't he killed all ten huskies outright, and
+so prevented Strangeways from pursuing farther until the break-up of
+the ice? He would have gained a month by that. His deed bore about it
+signs of the ineffectual cunning of the maniac; it had been only worth
+the doing if carried out bitterly to the end. Yet Spurling had not
+gone mad; he was too careful of his life and future happiness to
+permit himself to do that. Then he must have done it for a threat,
+hoping by the daring and grim humour of his brutality to strike terror
+into Strangeways and warn him back. Perhaps this was only one of many
+such experiences which had occurred all along the trail from Selkirk,
+and the pursuer had recognised both the motive and the challenge.
+Well, if you're compelled to play the game of life-taking, you may as
+well keep your temper, and set about it sportsmanly with a jest. Even
+in this horrid revelation of character there was some of the old
+Spurling left.
+
+Then his thoughts turned to Strangeways. He wondered, had he lied or
+told the truth when he asserted that the body was not Mordaunt's which
+was found at Forty-Mile? He hoped for the best, but he doubted. His
+manner had been against it, and so had Spurling's; they had both been
+keeping something back. Perhaps he had lied out of jealousy, because
+he could not endure to think that this girl, for whom he had been
+searching, who now was dead, had been loved by another man--and not a
+worthy man either, but one whom he despised.
+
+(Granger knew that he also would have felt like that. The mere denial
+of such a fact would have seemed somehow to reserve her more entirely
+for himself.)
+
+He had not been able to bear the thought that, now that she was beyond
+reach of all men's search, her memory should be shared with him by
+another man with an equal quality of affection--it had seemed to him
+like her hand stretched out from the grave to strip him of the few
+mementoes of her which he had. For these reasons he might even have
+lied truthfully, being self-persuaded that this Jervis Mordaunt was a
+different girl.
+
+Granger heartily hoped that his suspicions might be mistaken, but
+. . . Whatever happened he must come up with him, and ask him that
+question once again. Maybe last time he had not spoken plainly;
+Strangeways had not grasped what he meant. He could not remember how
+his question had been phrased, but this time it should be worded with
+such brutal frankness that there could be no chance of error. He would
+lay hold of him strongly, and clasp him about the knees so that he
+could not escape. He would never release his hold till his doubts had
+been set at rest. He would say to him quite clearly, "I loved a girl
+in the Klondike who called herself Jervis Mordaunt; she passed for a
+man, and was clothed in a Yukon placer-miner's dress. She did not know
+that I loved her; so you need not grieve if this murdered girl whom
+you loved, and the one whom I call Mordaunt, were one and the same. I
+fled from the Shallows where we worked together, partly in order that
+she might not know that. Now will you tell me, once and for all, was
+this girl, whom Spurling murdered, called Mordaunt? If you love God,
+tell me the truth and speak out. I can bear the truth, but I cannot
+endure this suspense."
+
+With the careful precision of a mind uncertain of its own sanity, he
+repeated and re-balanced his phrases, distrusting his own exactness,
+fearful lest he had not chosen such words as would make his meaning
+plain. Ah, but by his gestures, if language failed him, he would cause
+him to understand. For such news, even though it should be bad news,
+he would pledge his honour to help Strangeways in his search for
+Spurling. He would even volunteer to go single-handed and capture him
+himself--bring him down to Murder Point by guile, where Strangeways
+would be waiting to take him. The best and worst which he himself
+could derive from such a promise would be only that he should meet
+with death--but he should have thought of that offer earlier, and made
+it while Strangeways was with him.
+
+At that word _death_ the purpose of his present errand flared vividly
+in his mind, and he hurried his pace.
+
+Looking back across his shoulder through the darkness, for the moon
+was under cloud, he could just make out where his store pinnacled the
+mound at the Point; he had left the door open in the haste of his
+departure and, over the threshold slantwise across the snow, the fire
+from the stove threw an angry glare. It was only a mile from the Point
+to the bend, yet he seemed to have been journeying for hours. The
+surface of the river was difficult to travel because the snow which
+had fallen was wet; it shrank away from the feet at every stride. For
+this season of the year in Keewatin the night was mild; there was a
+damp rawness, but scarcely any frost in the air. If the ice had been
+rotten in the morning at the bend, it would be doubly treacherous now.
+Ah, but he had warned Strangeways! Surely he would be sufficiently
+cautious to half-believe him at least in that. When he came to where
+the river turned northwards, he would forsake the short-cut of the old
+trail and swing out into the middle stream, or work safely round along
+the bank. If he couldn't scent danger for himself, his huskies would
+choose their own path and save him, unless--unless, feeling the
+smoothness of the old trail beneath the snow, they should lazily
+choose that, or unless that leader of Spurling's should wilfully lead
+them astray; but surely the four hind-dogs would have sense not to
+follow him, and would hang back.
+
+He kept his eyes on the darkness before him, but to the northeast all
+was shadowy; he could discern nothing. Yes, there was something moving
+over there. He judged that he had already traversed three-quarters of
+that interminable mile; surely he would be able to catch up with him
+now. The recent blizzard had wiped out the old trail, but he could
+still feel it firm beneath the snow; he was following in Strangeways'
+tracks--Strangeways' which had been Spurling's. Then he came to a
+point where the staler tracks, which were Spurling's, had branched out
+into mid-stream to round the bend; but he saw to his horror that
+Strangeways' had kept on to the left by the winter trail, toward the
+spot of which he had warned him--he had even suspected that that final
+warning was a trap.
+
+Ah, there he was straight ahead of him; he could see him distinctly
+now. The moon, rising clear of cloud, made his figure plain. He called
+to him, and it seemed that he half-turned his head. He was keeping
+perilously near in to the bend. He called to him again, and signed to
+him with his arms to drive out. Then once more a cloud passed before
+the moon, making the land seem dead.
+
+He advanced cautiously, moving slowly, testing the strength of the ice
+at each fresh step before trusting it with his weight. Underneath he
+could hear the lapping of the current as it rushed rapidly round the
+bend, and could feel the trembling of the crust beneath his feet, as a
+man does the vibration of an Atlantic liner when the engines are
+working at full pressure, and every plank and bolt begins to shake and
+speak. When he had come to where Strangeways had been standing, he
+stood still and listened. He could hear no sound of travel, no
+cursing a man's voice, urging his dogs forward, or cracking of a whip.
+Then he felt the ice sagging from under him, and the cold touch of
+water creeping round his moccasins. From a rift in the cloud, a
+segment of the moon looked out. Before and behind him lay the frozen
+expanse of river, with its piled-up banks on either hand, and its
+heavy blanketing of snow, smooth and level, making its passage seem
+safe. Far over to the right stretched the trail of Spurling, showing
+ugly and black against the white, where his steps and the steps of his
+dogs had punctured the surface. Just before him, three yards distant,
+the ice had broken open, leaving a gaping hole over whose jagged edges
+the water climbed, and whimpered, and fell back, like a fretful child
+in its cot, which has wakened too early and is trying to clamber out.
+
+As Granger watched, heedless of his own safety, a hand pushed out
+above the current, the hooked fingers of which searched gropingly for
+something to which they might make fast. Granger, throwing himself
+flat in the snow, so as to distribute his weight, crawled towards it.
+The hand rose higher, and then the arm, followed at last by the head
+and eyes of Strangeways, but not the mouth. He had caught hold of a
+point of ice and was trying to pull himself up by that; but something
+(was it the swiftness of the current?) was dragging his body away from
+under him so that the water was still above his nose and mouth.
+Granger wormed his way to within arm-stretch and clasped his hand; but
+the moment he commenced to pull, the weight became terrific--more than
+the weight of one man--and he himself began to slide slowly forward
+till his head and shoulders were above the water. Something was
+tugging at Strangeways from below the river, so that his body jerked
+and quivered like a fisherman's line when a well-hooked salmon is
+endeavouring to make a rush at the other end.
+
+Granger was leaning far out now, the surface was curving from under
+him and his chest had left the ice. Then he realised what had
+happened: the loaded sledge had sunk to the bottom of the river-bed,
+and was holding down the four rear-dogs by their traces; but the
+leader, by struggling, had fought his way to within a few inches of
+the outer air, and, clinging on to Strangeways' throat and breast, was
+fiercely striving to climb up him with his teeth to where breathing
+might be found, in somewhat the same manner as Archbishop Salviati did
+in Florence to Francesco Pazzi, when the Gonfalonier hurled them both
+out of the Palazzo window, each with a rope about his neck.
+
+(Strange what men will think of at a crisis! Granger was grimly
+amused, and half-disgusted with himself. How absurd that of all things
+at such a time he should have remembered that!)
+
+The weight of the four rear-dogs and the loaded sledge were gradually
+dragging the leader down, and, with him, Strangeways. He held on
+desperately; now and then, as he made a fresh effort, his yellow snout
+would appear above the water or the top of his yellow head--except for
+that, he might not have been there. But Granger was intent on
+Strangeways; staring into his eyes, which were distant the length of
+his arm out-stretched, he was appalled at the consternation they
+reflected, and the evident terror of the end. If he could only get at
+his knife, he might be able to effect something; but his knife was
+beneath his capote, in his belt, and both his hands were occupied,
+the one with supporting the drowning man, the other with preventing
+himself from slipping further.
+
+He wanted to speak to Strangeways, but he could not think of any words
+which were not so trivial as to sound blasphemous on such an occasion.
+The man was growing weaker and heavier to hold; his eyes were losing
+their vision, and the water rose in bubbles from his mouth. There was
+only one last chance, that if he could support him long enough for the
+husky at his throat to release his grip and die first, he might be
+able to drag him out.
+
+Though all this had been the work of only a few seconds, his arm was
+becoming numb and intolerably painful. Whatever it might cost him, he
+promised himself that he would not let go till hope was at an end. He
+was slipping forward again; he would soon overbalance. But what did
+that matter to one who did not fear death? After all, an honourable
+out-going is the best El Dorado which any man can hope to find as
+reward for his long life's search. If he were to die for and with
+Strangeways, he would at least prove to him that he was not entirely
+worthless.
+
+Then, before it was too late, he found his words. "Be brave," he
+shouted hoarsely, "be brave! It is only death."
+
+It would have seemed a preposterous supposition yesterday that the
+private trader at Murder Point should ever be in a position to bid the
+veriest scum among cowards to be brave. As he spoke, the intelligence
+came back to Strangeways' eyes, the fear went out from them and the
+features, losing their agony, straightened into an expression which
+was almost grave. His hand became small in Granger's palm, as though
+it were offering to slip away.
+
+Some deep instinct stirred in Granger; he suddenly loved this man for
+the self-denial which that act betrayed. If there was to be a denial
+of self, however, he was emphatic that his should be the sacrifice.
+Was it this thought of sacrifice which brought religion to his
+mind--some haunting, quick remembrance of those wise words about
+"dying for one's friend"?
+
+Quite irrationally and without connection with anything which had
+previously occurred, leaning yet further out at his own immediate
+peril, shifting his grip to Strangeways' wrist that he might hold him
+more firmly, he whispered, "Jesus of Galilee! Jesus Christ!"
+
+The face of the drowning man took on an awful serenity, a look of
+holiness, as if at sight of something which stood behind Granger,
+which he had only just discerned. He even smiled. Suddenly, with the
+determination of one who had concluded and conquered an old
+temptation, he wrenched away his hand. Granger made one last effort to
+reach him, but the tugging of the beast below the surface, or its dead
+weight, had drifted him out of arm-stretch. He sank lower. The water
+rose, almost leisurely it seemed as if now certain of the one thing it
+had desired, higher and higher up his face till it had reached his
+eyes, quenched them, and nothing was left but a few bubbles which
+floated to the surface and broke, sparkling in the moonlight. Granger
+did not stir; as he had been paralysed, he lay there rigid with the
+black waters washing about his face and hands. Then very slowly, as
+though reluctant not to die, he drew himself back. When he had reached
+safety, rising up, he gazed around; the land looked more desolate
+than ever. The first words which he said were spoken sacredly, with
+bated breath. "And that man told me," he muttered, "that he was afraid
+of death. . . . To prefer to die at such a time, rather than risk my
+life, was the act of a man who was very brave." And next he said, "I
+wonder what were his last words when he crashed through the ice? I
+expect he said, 'Damn.' Well, that was as good as any other word to
+say; after all, all swearing, taken in a certain sense, is a form of
+prayer--a bluff assertion of belief in the divine."
+
+Granger turned slowly about, and commenced to make his way back to the
+Point. At first he spoke aloud to himself as a thought occurred. "I
+distrusted that yellow beast of Spurling's from the first." "Now at
+any rate Spurling is safe." "I haven't yet discovered whether Mordaunt
+is dead,"--and so on. Then he ceased to speak with his lips, and his
+thoughts were uttered in the silence of his brain. They had all to do
+with Strangeways.
+
+He wondered what vision had been his, causing him to smile as he sank.
+Did he think of that girl, and that he was going to meet her? Or of
+the old home in England? Or of his school-days? Or was it the Thames
+he thought about--of Oxford with its many towers, and the cry of the
+coach along the tow-path as the eight swings homeward up-stream, in
+the grey of a winter afternoon, to the regular click of the rowlocks
+as the men pluck their blades from the water, feather and come forward
+for the next stroke, making ready to drive back their slides as one
+man with their legs? He was certain that whatever happened, and
+however he should go out of life, did God spare him a moment's
+consciousness, it would be the vision of Oxford with its domes and
+spires, its austere and romantic quiet, its echoing cloisters and
+passages, its rivers with their sedges of silver and of grey, which
+would float before his dying eyes,--or would he think of Christ? Had
+Christ been the vision which this man had seen?
+
+Strange thoughts for Keewatin! But death is always strange.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE BREAK-UP OF THE ICE
+
+
+Nearly a month had gone by since the night on which Strangeways died.
+Not that time mattered much to Granger, for, like the immortals, men
+in Keewatin have dispensed with time: they have accepted as true the
+lesson which philosophers have been striving to teach the world ever
+since the human intellect first commenced to philosophise--that there
+are no such ontological facts as Time and Space. Among the men of this
+vast northern territory the outward expression of religion is rare;
+they do not often speak, and then only of such interests as are
+superficial to their lives. Yet here, in their fine neglect of the two
+sternest of self-imposed, human limitations, the religious instinct is
+manifest. As it would be sacrilege to count God's breaths, were that
+possible, so to them it seems a kind of blasphemy to number the
+recurrence of their own small perceptions when the Divine Perceived
+seems so entirely unconscious of their very existence. Hence it
+happens that one does not often hear a traveller speak of having
+journeyed so many days or miles; his division is more casual, and
+embraces only his own immediate actions--he has travelled so many
+"sleeps," nothing more.
+
+As a rule, Indians are utterly deficient in the time-sense and can
+give no intelligent account of their age. Their calendar is enshrined,
+if they have one, in symbols which they use as decorations, painted
+on the inside of their finest skins. They make their reckoning of the
+years from some event which was once important to themselves, or to
+their tribe. Thus, stars falling from the top to the bottom of a robe
+represent the year of 1833, and an etching of an Indian with a broken
+leg and a horn on his head stands for the year in which Hay-waujina,
+One Horn, had his leg "killed." Back of that which is comparatively
+immediate to their own experience, they have ceased to count or to be
+inquisitive.
+
+    "Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass
+     Their pleasures in a long immortal dream."
+
+So with both the joys and sorrows of these Northland men; hurry is not
+necessary where time is unrecognised, and turbulence of emotion,
+whether of grief or gladness, is felt to be out of place in a
+_dream-being_, whose sole reality is its unreality. Their personal
+unimportance to the Universe, and remoteness from the Market-place of
+Life allow them to dawdle. Their experiences have no sharp edges, no
+abrupt precipices, no divisive gulfs, no defined beginnings and
+endings. The book of their sojourn in this world has neither chapters
+nor headings; the page runs on without hindrance from tragedy to
+comedy, comedy to farce, farce to melodrama, and thence to tragedy
+again--always it returns to tragedy. They stride round the Circle of
+the Emotions without halting, merging from joy into sorrow without
+preface, till one day the feet grow wearier and lag, the eyes grow
+clear and, almost without knowing it, as did Strangeways, their dream
+going from them, they awake--motionlessly pass out of life, and enter
+into _What_?
+
+If smoothness of passage and apparent endlessness be the two main
+qualities of the divine existence, then the lives of men in Keewatin
+are both divine and real; only we, of the outside world, would call
+this same smoothness dulness, and its endlessness its most torturing
+agony.
+
+The past month had dragged by with Granger as would a century with
+normal men, except that in the entire span of those hundred years
+there had been no summer. In them he had lived through and remembered
+every emotion which had ever come to him. His brain was confused with
+remembering, fevered with anguish of regret for things lost, which
+would never come again. He had nearly succumbed to that most unmanly
+of all spiritual assailants, the coward of Self-Pity--would have
+succumbed, had not Self-Scorn rendered him aid.
+
+From sunrise to sunset the winter had slowly thawed: the trees had
+uncovered their greens and browns, thrusting themselves forth from
+beneath the rain-washed greyness of the melting snow; the river,
+reluctantly at first, had cracked and swayed, and become engraved by
+miniature streams which ate their way, as acid on metal, across its
+surface. Strange messages those narrow streams of water wrote; strange
+they seemed at least to Granger as he watched them day by day.
+Sometimes they seemed to be writing words, and sometimes drawing
+faces. The words he could not always decipher; when he did they were
+mostly proper names, STRANGEWAYS, SPURLING, MORDAUNT, EL DORADO. The
+faces were more easy to recognise, and three of them corresponded to
+the first three names. There was one morning when he awoke, having
+dreamed of the horrible revenge which he would take, and going to the
+window was appalled to see a new face scrawled upon the ice--his own,
+yet not his own; the evil likeness to the self which had come to him
+in the Klondike. He was puzzled, and set to work to discover the
+reason for these signs. Then a verse which he had once learnt as a
+child came back to him, "Jesus stooped down and wrote with his finger
+on the ground, _as though he heard them not_. And _they which heard
+it_, being convicted by _their own_ conscience, went out one by one,
+beginning at the eldest, even unto the last; and Jesus was left alone,
+_and the woman_."
+
+So he knew that it was God's hand which had etched that warning
+likeness overnight, which his own conscience had discerned, accusing
+him. Also, in gazing upon that drawing he heard a voice, which was his
+own voice, used as a medium for another mind, saying, "Now that thou
+hast seen what thou art like, go out, that I may be left alone _and
+Spurling_." So Granger had agreed with God that day that he would
+cease from his dreams of human vengeance, and leave Him alone with
+Spurling. He did not dare to tell God all his thoughts, but he felt
+certain that, had Spurling's opinions been consulted, he would have
+preferred to be left alone with John Granger. It was terrible enough
+to have to dwell between God's footsteps, as all men must who live in
+Keewatin, when His eyes were averted, and He Himself walked by
+seemingly unconscious of your presence; but to have to live there when
+He had noticed your presence, and His face was lifted up, while His
+gaze was bent upon you, with no hope of escape, a fugitive from human
+justice, alone in an empty land with your own conscience and Him as
+your accuser, that was to protract the shamefaced confusion of the
+Last Judgment through every day of your life. Granger felt that in
+making that compact he had done his worst by Druce Spurling.
+
+In the middle hours of the night which followed this agreement, which
+he chose to think of as his compromise with Deity, he was awakened by
+a thunderous sound, and jumping from his bunk saw that the river had
+broken up and the ice was going out, as though God, having finished
+His argument which He had written there, were rubbing out His words.
+Flinging wide the door, he ran down the mound to the bank, shouting
+like a boy. As he went he had a panoramic vision of all the other men,
+both white and red, along the six hundred miles of river which
+stretched from the great lake to the Hudson Bay, who had been awakened
+as he had been, and now, or sometime that night, would be doing what
+he was doing, rushing half-clad beneath the stars down to the
+river-bank calling on the loneliness to rejoice--the loneliness, which
+throughout the frozen months had listened so faithfully to all that
+they had had to say, blasphemous or otherwise, and had made no reply.
+But this night both silence and loneliness were violated, and cried
+aloud with rage protestingly; whereat the river only clapped its hands
+and squeezed its passage, and huddled between its ruined
+winter-barriers ever northward to the freedom of the Bay.
+
+This was the one night in all the year when revolt was permitted, and
+the Bastile of Keewatin fell. Fell! Yes, soon the summer would raise
+it up again in a newer form, only a little less intolerable; and
+afterwards the winter, that master-builder, would return as a king
+from his exile. But no one thought of such catastrophe to-night. For
+the moment it seemed that the reign of tyranny was ended and the
+millennium had begun--chaos, which men mistake for millennium.
+
+Granger stood above the bank repeating to himself over and over, "The
+ice is going out! The ice is going out!" as if it were a fact
+incredible. Every moment the air vibrated with a roar, and the earth
+was shaken as some new horseman of the ice was overthrown and hurried
+by in flight, only to halt presently, ranged side by side with some of
+his fellows, to make yet another stand. Certainly it was a battle
+which was being fought, and one which must be lost.
+
+As far as sound could travel, from the west and from the north, he
+could hear the cannonade, and what seemed like the clatter of hoofs,
+and the clash of thrown-away swords. It was possible to imagine
+anything when Nature was making a change so titanic. Now the water was
+the black horse of Revelation, with a sable rider on his back who
+carried "a balance in his hand,"--and he was in pursuit. And the ice
+was the pale horse, and he that sat upon him, his name was Death, and
+Hades followed with him,--and he was in flight. And now, when some
+great floe jammed in its passage round the Point, and the ice piled
+up, it became for Granger a magician's silver palace in Aragon, which
+a dark-mailed knight of Christendom had travelled leagues to demolish.
+Outside it shone resplendent and crystal in the starlight; but within
+it was full of uncleanness, and by day it would vanish.
+
+He amused himself with these fancies, and followed them to their
+furthest length. He could see the faces of the beleaguered, now evil
+with terror, peering out from the casements, and the stern old
+enchanter in the turret, over whose ledges flowed down his snow-white
+beard. He could hear the hoarse-throated clamour of the knight as he
+led his company about the walls, and rammed in the castle's gateway,
+shouting, "For Christ! For Christ!" The structure trembled and the
+turret commenced to wave in the air, as it had been a banner. The
+sorcerer looked out, his eyes were filled with dismay--he could not
+withstand that name of 'Christ'; he plunged from the height, spreading
+abroad his arms, and was lost in the blackness of the underground. The
+dark host swept over the palace still shouting, "For Christ! For
+Christ!" In the twinkling of an eye, both the evil one and the
+avenging host were gone--all was resolved into turbid water and
+submerged, groaning ice.
+
+So he watched the break-up of the ice, and the travelling of the river
+which, slipping by at his feet, going forth to wander the world, left
+him stationary. Perhaps some drops of this Last Chance River would
+some day be washed up in a wave on the tropic shores of Ceylon, or,
+having spent a winter in the Arctic, would be carried down in a berg
+and, having melted, flow on round Cape Horn to the Pacific till they
+came to Polynesia, where they would be parted by the swimming hands of
+dusky, slender girls. He grew jealous at the thought, and bending down
+baled out some of the water in his palms, and threw it on the ground,
+saying angrily, "You at least shall stay." Then he laughed at his
+folly and was comforted by thinking, "When my body is dead, it also
+will journey forth. I must be patient like the river, and wait. In
+God's good time I also shall wander round the world."
+
+"But shall I know? Shall I be conscious of that?" the spirit of
+discontent inquired.
+
+Granger shook his head irritably, as if by so doing he could throw off
+these troublesome imaginations. Since the death of Strangeways, he had
+not recovered his poise of soul. Ah, and Strangeways! Was Strangeways
+conscious of his body's release, and the permission which death had
+given him to wander forth? How odd to think that that body, which had
+been born of a woman in England and tended by her hands, which had
+strolled through English lanes and over Oxford meadows, gesticulating
+and talking, doing good and evil, which even in its life had brought
+the man who inhabited it so many miles from home, now that the soul
+had departed from it, should be hurrying away alone to hide itself in
+Arctic fastnesses! Did Strangeways know that? Was he conscious of this
+new adventure? Well, if God was so anxious to take care of Spurling,
+He could be trusted to look after Strangeways--if anything of him
+survived.
+
+The melting of the ice had chilled the air. The coldness of his yet
+living body awoke him to a realisation of the petty suffering of that
+small part of his universe which was explored and known. Taking one
+last look at the ruin which the one night's thaw had worked, the
+pinnacles, and beauty, and whiteness which it had destroyed,
+"Courage!" he said, "for this is life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+A MESSAGE FROM THE DEAD
+
+
+The sun was shining down; the spring rains had ceased; within less
+than a month winter had vanished, and summer had swept through
+Keewatin with a burst of gladness. The land was riotously green;
+through the heart of it wandered the river, newly released, a streak
+of azure, or of gilded splendour where smitten by the sun. Although
+its waters were running freely, many memories of the frozen quiet
+still remained in the shape of ice piled up along its banks, sometimes
+to the height of fifteen feet, and of snow in the more shady hollows
+of the forest, which glimmered distantly between leaves and branches
+hinting at secret woodland lakes. Even the most backward among the
+trees had commenced to unfold their buds. All day long, and through
+the major portion of the night, the frogs continued to whistle in the
+marshes and along the river's edges. Flock after flock of duck
+arrived, flashing their wings against the sky, dropping from under a
+cloud suddenly, and coming to rest in the water with a shower of
+spray, where they rode at ease side by side, like painted, anchored
+merchantmen returned in safety from the earth's end. Now the wild
+swan, teal, or goose would go by with a whirr of wings, crying
+hoarsely. To make the world seem yet more wide an occasional gull
+would heave in sight, drifting without effort in silent flight
+majestically. In the forest Granger was conscious of a commotion at
+the cause of which he could only guess. Love was at work in the
+shadows, or what among the dumb creation passes for love. There was a
+continual stirring of leaves, the rustle of branches forced aside, the
+scattering of birds, those spies and betrayers of the four-footed
+animal, and the grievous low wail of the wolf. Sometimes a fish would
+leap in the river, flash silvery and dripping in the sunlight, on its
+bridal journey from the ocean. Was it an act of gallantry, he
+wondered, which some deep-sea female witnessed from beneath the ripple
+of the stream, or was it a terrified effort to escape from love. He
+knew what that best of all passions could mean to the forest animal,
+and how cruel it might become. Often in the fall of the year he had
+watched a doe, seen her dash down the river bank, stand quivering,
+leap in and swim, made fearless of man because she knew that her
+lover, the stag, was not far behind.
+
+This frenzy of passion set him thinking, and made him long for the
+return of Peggy Ericsen. He knew that his love for her was not of the
+highest, was little more than physical, not much nobler than forest
+love; but what was a man to do, and how guide his conduct when all the
+world was a-mating? On occasions he had a clearer vision, and realised
+with a sense of sudden shame to how low a level he had sunk. Then he
+would strive to throw off this attraction for a half-breed girl by
+recalling the faces of all the other women whom he had admired and
+loved. Yet this also was dangerous, for it caused him to remember
+Mordaunt, thoughts of whom roused up anger within him against
+Spurling. He had agreed to leave him to God, and could not go back on
+his word; therefore he must forget Mordaunt and, if his mind must be
+haunted by womankind, think only of Peggy. Peggy! Well, she was not a
+bad little sort. Pretty? Yes. But between her and himself there could
+be no community of mind. He knew that for hundreds of years it had
+been the custom of traders and white trappers to take to themselves a
+squaw from a tribe of friendly Indians, sometimes for the sake of
+commercial advantages, sometimes for defence, sometimes for domestic
+convenience, rarely for love. But there his education, which would
+have served him well in an older land, stood in his way, as it had so
+often done, making him over-delicate.
+
+He could find it in his heart to wish himself more ignorant and less
+refined. That glamour of intellectual gentility, which England sets
+such store by, had made him unfit for the outdoor brutalities of
+northern life. In his catastrophe he knew that he was not single,
+though there was small consolation in that; all through Canada he had
+encountered younger sons, drawing-room bred young gentlemen, who
+worked in lumber camps, on railroads, and in mines by day, and spelt
+out their Horace from ragged texts by brushwood fires, beneath the
+stars, or in verminous shacks by night. Their power to construe a dead
+language served to differentiate them from their associates, and,
+rather foolishly if heroically, to bolster up their pride.
+
+But, to return to Peggy, what a pity it was that she had insisted on
+the marriage ceremony! Yet, he respected her for that. _But_, and
+there was always a but in Granger's reasonings, suppose he should get
+his chance to return to England one day! And this would certainly
+happen to him on his mother's death. And suppose, when he had
+tethered himself to this half-breed wife, he should get word that
+Mordaunt was still alive! Granger was always at a loss when the moment
+for decision presented itself; he was too moderate, too far-sighted
+and philosophic to act immediately. It takes an abrupt, coarse-grained
+man, or a prophet, to handle a crisis efficiently; your man who is
+only endowed just beyond the average sees too far--and not far enough.
+The insolent infringement of personality which he had suffered as man
+and child from his mother's unwise interference had caused him to
+become a chronic hesitator. As usual, in this case as in all others,
+he determined to let matters slide, to give circumstance an unfettered
+opportunity to evolve its own event. He was content to remain the
+spectator of his own career, allowing Chance to be the only doer of
+the deeds which went to make up the record of his life. And what would
+Chance do next? The Man with the Dead Soul might return at any hour
+from his winter's hunt, bringing with him his daughter, in which case
+most surely his book of life would commence to write out its latest
+chapter of disgrace.
+
+Beorn had cached a canoe at the mouth of the Forbidden River, and
+therefore would reach the Point up-stream from the northward. Granger
+found excitement in the thought that any minute, looking out from his
+window, he might discover the approach of his future wife. The more he
+allowed his fancy to dwell upon her, the more pleasant her image
+became for him. After all, there is always something of romance, at
+first at any rate, in marrying out of your blood heritage. Pizarro
+must have felt that when he took to himself Inez Huayllas Nusta, the
+Inca princess. The havoc of affection which was being enacted
+secretly beneath the shadow of the forest trees urged him on, crying,
+"Take your pleasure while it is yours, winter will return. Short views
+of life are best." Having listened to that advice for several days, he
+allowed himself to be persuaded. It seemed to him, when he remembered
+how they had parted, that it would be a gallant and reconciling act to
+set forth to meet her. Moreover, though the mind that was in him stood
+aside from the project in disdain, the body cried, "Forward! Forward!"
+in chorus with the song of the wild-wood.
+
+Early one morning he carried down his canoe to the water's edge,
+loaded it with a week's provisions, padlocked his store and set out.
+As the prow drove forward down-stream, exultation entered into him. He
+was playing at saying good-bye to his long exile; miles ahead lay the
+Hudson Bay, and beyond that England. If his boat were not so frail and
+his arms were stronger, by pressing on and onward he could escape.
+These were scarcely the thoughts with which a man should set out to
+meet his bride. Desires to meet and avoid her alternated even now,
+when with each fresh thrust of the paddle he approached her nearer
+presence. Yet, even to his way of thinking, there was something epic
+in the situation--that this girl of an alien tradition and a savage
+race, with her copper skin, and blue-black hair, and timid eyes,
+should be threading her passage up her native river, through the early
+summer, toward her western lover who was hastening down the self-same
+primeval highroad to meet her. Oh, he would be very happy with Peggy!
+Thus imagining himself on through the labyrinth of passionate fancy,
+he floated down stream, shrouded in the morning mist. He had to go
+slowly, for he could not see far ahead, and travel by water was still
+treacherous by reason of belated floes of ice. Over to the eastward
+the sun winked down on him with a dissipated bloodshot eye, knowingly,
+with the cruel misanthropic humour of a tired man of the world who,
+regarding idealism as a jest, had guessed at the purpose of his errand
+and was eager to declare his own shrewd cleverness.
+
+And if the sun is a cynic, who can blame him? He alone of created
+things has an intimate knowledge of all live things' love affairs,
+from when Eve shook back her hair and lifted up her lips, to the last
+girl kissed in Japan. The canoe drifting out of a scarf of mist
+brought Granger in sight of the bend, where Strangeways had been
+drowned. He plunged his paddle deeper in the water, thrusting it
+forward to stay the progress of the prow, and glanced from side to
+side, then straight ahead. He had caught the smell of burning. On the
+northern side of the bend, curling above the trees, he could detect
+the rise of smoke. Someone had lit a fire and was camping there. But
+who? Was it Beorn and Peggy? No, they would not camp so near their
+destination; they would have pushed on to the store for rest. Nor
+could it be men from the Crooked Creek coming up to God's Voice; the
+season was as yet too early for them to be expected. Then, was it
+Spurling?
+
+Paddling out into the middle stream, he stole beneath the farther
+bank, and, rounding the bend, came in sight of two men, the one seated
+upright before the fire cooking his bannocks, the other stretched out
+twenty paces distant at the edge of the underbrush, completely covered
+with a robe, motionless as if he slept. The man who was awake looked
+up, shaded his eyes, then rising to his feet came down to the water's
+edge and waved his hand.
+
+Granger recognised in him his friend Pere Antoine, the gaunt old
+Jesuit of Keewatin. No one could remember, not even the Indians, at
+what time he had first come into the district; he seemed to have been
+there always and was of a great age. Yet, despite his many years, he
+could travel miracles of journeys in the name of Mary's son. It was
+said of him that he was always to be seen mounting the sky-line in
+times of crisis and temptation; that he knew by instinct where men
+were in spiritual peril, as the caribou scents water; that he had
+often broken out of the forest unexpectedly in time to prevent murder.
+There were Indians to be found who would circumstantially assert that
+they had met with Pere Antoine, five hundred miles distant from the
+spot where he had last been seen, walking in the wilderness radiantly,
+wearing the countenance of Jesus Christ.
+
+Granger recalled these legends as he gazed toward the camp; he watched
+the figure of the sleeping man--and he thought of Spurling. Was this
+Spurling? He tried to make out the man's identity by his figure's
+outline, but the robes which were piled above him forbade that. Yet
+within himself he was sure that his guess was correct. What was more
+likely than that Antoine should have met the fugitive wandering up the
+Forbidden River, perhaps sick and starving, should have taken his
+confession and compassionately have brought him back? Probably it was
+Antoine's purpose that they two should be reconciled. He might even
+have converted Spurling and have brought back God into his life, so
+that now he was willing to return to Winnipeg to give himself up, and
+to take his chance of death.
+
+Having run his canoe aground between the bank-ice, he stepped out and
+grasped the Jesuit's hand.
+
+"God has arrived before you this time, Pere Antoine," he said, jerking
+his head in the direction of the sleeping man; "he has already done
+your work. I have promised Him that I will do no harm to your
+companion, so you have arrived too late."
+
+"If it was God who arrived," he said, "I am content."
+
+He spoke significantly, hinting at a further knowledge of which he
+supposed Granger to be possessed.
+
+"If it was not God, then who else?"
+
+"Ah, who else?"
+
+Granger, in common with most white men of the district, had fallen
+into the Indian superstition that Pere Antoine was omniscient; it came
+to him as a shock that he might be unaware of how God had written on
+the ice. Usually in talking with the priest he took short-cuts in his
+methods of communication, leaving many things understood but
+unmentioned, as a man is wont to do when conversing with himself.
+
+"There is no doubt that it was God," he said; "He did not want me to
+murder this man. He wished that I should leave him alone, to be judged
+in the forest by Himself. Therefore, if you have brought him here with
+you to make us friends, I will not do that; but I will promise you, as
+I have promised God, that I will not be his enemy."
+
+Antoine tapped him on the arm gently, looking him full in the face
+with his grave, penetrating eyes: "And did not God Himself arrive too
+late?" he asked.
+
+Granger flushed hotly, for he thought that he detected an under-tone
+of accusation in the way in which those words were uttered. "Tell me,
+is he dead?" he asked abruptly.
+
+"He is dead."
+
+"Is it . . . is that his body over there?"
+
+"You should know best."
+
+Involuntarily Granger sank his voice, now that he knew that that
+sleeping man was dead. He pressed closer to the priest and commenced
+to whisper, now that he knew that no noise of his, however loud, could
+disturb the rest of this man who would never wake. Sometimes, when in
+the hurry of his speech his voice had been by accident a little
+raised, he would cease speaking, lift up his head, and peer furtively
+from side to side, then over to where the dead man lay, to make
+certain that he had not stirred,--all this lest someone in that great
+silence should have heard what he had said. Thus does the presence of
+the dead accuse living men, as if by our mere retention of life we did
+them injury. Wheresoever we encounter them, whether in the hired pride
+of the vulgar city hearse, or in the pitiful disarray of bleached
+bones and tattered raiment strewn on a mountainside, they make even
+those of us who are remotest from blame feel guilty men.
+
+"But, Pere Antoine, I did not kill him," Granger was saying. "I was
+gravely tempted, but God wrote upon the ice and stayed my hand. This
+man was once my friend, and is now again--now that he is dead. Let me
+uncover and look upon his face."
+
+But the priest withheld him. "Not yet--not yet," he said. "Let us
+first talk together awhile, that I may hear what has happened, and get
+to understand."
+
+So there in the quiet of the early morning, with nothing to break the
+stillness save the crackling of the fire, and the flowing of the
+river, and the occasional flight of a bird, Granger told the priest
+all his story, from his first dream of El Dorado to the thoughts of
+escape and of Peggy Ericsen which he had had, as drifting down-stream,
+he had caught the smell of burning and come in sight of the bend. It
+was a true confession; nothing to his own discredit was left out.
+
+When he came to an end the mist had lifted, and the sun rode high in
+the heavens disentangled of cloud. All the time that he had been
+speaking the priest had sat motionless, with his head bent forward
+listening, his knees drawn up and his arms about them. Now that the
+tale was over, he slowly turned his head; and then it was for the
+first time that Granger knew what the Indians meant when they said
+that they had met with Pere Antoine in the wilderness, walking
+radiantly, wearing the countenance of Jesus Christ. There was such a
+brightness about him that he could not bear his gaze, but trembling
+with a kind of fearful joy fell forward on his face, covering his eyes
+with his hands. And still the priest said nothing, not trusting
+himself to speak, perhaps, so great was his compassion.
+
+But it was not long before Granger was conscious of a hand, hard and
+horny and ungentle, as far as outward circumstance could make it so,
+which rested on his head. At last he spoke. "I think I understand," he
+said, and then, after a pause, "but you will never help yourself or
+the world by merely being sad. No man ever has."
+
+When Granger answered nothing nor lifted up his head, he spoke again.
+"Does that seem a strange judgment to pass on you here in Keewatin?
+Does it sound too much like the speech of a city man? Nevertheless, it
+is because of your flight from sadness that you have met with all your
+dangers. All your life you have spent in striving to escape from
+things which are sad. Why did you dream of El Dorado when you were in
+London? Because, as you yourself have told me, exquisiteness of dress
+did not reassure you of another's happiness; you were always
+remembering that a decent coat may sometimes cover cancer. You are one
+of those who suffer more because of the sores of Lazarus than Lazarus
+himself. That is well and Christlike, if you suffer gladly--which you
+do not. So you left London and travelled half across the world to
+Yukon, only to find a greater wretchedness; for your misery growing
+vicious pursued you, and goaded you on to crime. Once more to escape
+you left Yukon and came to Winnipeg, and came up here, and still you
+are sad. Will I tell you why? Always, always you have depended on
+yourself for escape and rest. That is useless, for your sadness does
+not belong to any city, or any land; it is within yourself. Wherever
+you have travelled you have carried it with you. You must look for
+help from outside yourself."
+
+Again he paused, but Granger did not stir. Then he repeated, speaking
+yet more gently, "I am an old man and have lived in Keewatin the
+length of most men's lives, yet I have not always lived up here. I was
+not always happy, and I say to you, you must look for help from
+outside yourself."
+
+Then Granger answered him, keeping his head still bowed.
+
+"Where, where must I look for help?"
+
+"Lift up your head."
+
+He obeyed, and the first sight he saw was the face of Pere Antoine
+bent above him. Again he was struck with its likeness to the
+traditional face of Christ--but the face was that of a Jesus who had
+grown grey in suffering and had been often crucified, who was very
+ancient and had not yet attained his death. Then he thought he knew
+what le Pere had meant by saying that he must look for help from
+outside himself. He turned his eyes away and gazed into the sunshine,
+and on the greenness of the awakened country. Somehow it all looked
+very happy and changed from what it had been before they two had met.
+He vaguely wondered whether already he might not be now experiencing
+that help. But, as had always happened to him after tasting of a
+momentary joy, in turning his head he found a new grief awaiting him,
+for there, twenty paces distant, stretched out at the edge of the
+underbrush, covered with a robe, he caught sight of that recumbent
+figure, lying motionless as if it slept. He shuddered, and seizing the
+priest by the arm, speaking hoarsely with suppressed excitement,
+exclaimed, "Where did he come from? But where did you find him?"
+
+"I found him stretched out on the bank-ice, awaiting me as I paddled
+up-stream toward the bend."
+
+"Then he was coming back. God must have met him down there on the
+Forbidden River and have spoken with him face to face; he could not
+endure His voice, so he fled. Oh, to come back at such a season, when
+the river was in flood, he must have been terribly afraid. He must
+have clambered his way up-stream, all those hundred miles, running by
+the bank. Pere Antoine, you know many things, what kind of words were
+those, do you suppose, that God spoke to Spurling?"
+
+"The kind of words which God always speaks to men; He told him the
+truth about himself."
+
+"The truth about himself? There are few who could endure to hear
+that."
+
+"Yes, He would accuse him with a question, I think."
+
+"What makes you say that?"
+
+"Because that is the way in which God usually speaks to men. He asked
+Adam a question, and Adam hid himself; he asked Cain a question, and
+Cain became a vagabond in the earth."
+
+They sat in silence awhile, and then Granger said, "And if God were to
+speak to me, what question would He ask?"
+
+"I think he would say, 'John Granger, by how much are you better than
+Spurling, whom you condemn?'"
+
+"You are right; yes, I think He would say that. Even I have asked
+myself that question before to-day."
+
+"You did not ask yourself; it was God's voice."
+
+"And I could give no answer to what He said. Pere Antoine, before we
+met, I had often wondered what I would say to Spurling should we meet
+again. I had planned all manner of kindly phrases to make him again my
+friend; but I had thought of him as coming to me prosperous, with the
+approval of the world. When he came to me in poverty, asking help, in
+peril of his life for a sin which had been almost mine, I turned him
+away. He had chosen me out from among all men between Winnipeg and the
+Klondike, as the only one to whom he could safely go for help; and I
+turned him away. I see it clearly now; God sent to me this man whom I
+had wished to murder, when he had performed my crime, that, by
+endangering my life for his, I might cleanse myself. When all men had
+failed him, he and God expected that I, at least, would understand.
+But for Mordaunt, I might have had to flee as he fled, changed by the
+raising of a gun and hasty pulling of a trigger into a Judas to all
+that is best; I might have had to support within me his utter
+solitariness and agony of mind, and have been compelled to see myself
+as debased throughout and forever by a single, momentary act. How he
+must have suffered! I shall fear to die now; till now I have been
+afraid only of life."
+
+"Why will you fear to die?"
+
+"Because I shall meet with Spurling, and then I shall hear God's
+question and His accusing voice."
+
+The priest laid a hand upon his shoulder gently. "Ah, my child, but
+you forget," he said; "in the country where Spurling has gone he will
+have learnt how to understand."
+
+That thought was new to Granger, that of the two faults his own was
+the greater and that forgiveness belonged to Spurling. He sat
+motionless for a long time arguing it out; he wanted to be exactly
+just to both Spurling and himself. The fire died down and Pere Antoine
+threw on more brushwood; the sun grew tall in the heavens and a rain
+cloud gathered in the west; the floe-ice caught in its passage round
+the bend, gasped and whined and, tearing itself free again, vanished
+down river out of sight. The arithmetic of the problem stood thus:
+Spurling's sin had been the result of a sudden violence, his own of a
+conscious and premeditated uncharitableness. Which sin was morally the
+worse, to shoot a fellow creature in a fit of passionate desperation,
+or to turn your back upon a bygone benefactor who comes to you in
+distress, comes to you when his heart is breaking, because he can
+trust himself with no one else? "My sin is the greater," Granger told
+himself, "I am more wrongful than wronged against"; his thoughts going
+back to what le Pere had said, he added, "I am Cain, and yet I judged
+Spurling as if I had been God Himself."
+
+He was roused from his meditation by a dull thudding sound which had
+commenced behind his back; turning his head, he saw that Pere Antoine
+was already digging a grave. Rising without a word, he began to lend a
+hand. They had not gone far when they found that the ground was hard
+as granite, that it had not yet thawed out; then they commenced to
+look for stones to pile upon the body so that, since the grave would
+be shallow, they might raise a mound above it to prevent the wolves
+from getting the body out.
+
+By the time they had completed their preparations the rain was falling
+in large and heavy drops, and the storm was blowing in great gusts
+through the forest, causing the young leaves to shudder and whisper
+together, and to turn their backs to the wind. The priest and the
+trader stood upright from their work and gazed at one another. Already
+the narrow hole, which they had scooped out, was filling with water;
+there was no time to lose; yet neither seemed inclined to hurry. At
+last Pere Antoine said, "So you are sure that you did not do it?"
+
+"I cannot be sure of that."
+
+"Ah, but you did not do it in the way I mean? You did not kill him
+with the strength of your hands?"
+
+They went together to the edge of the underbrush where the dead man's
+body lay, and carried it, without disturbing the coverings, to the
+side of the grave; there they set it down.
+
+"I cannot bear that he should lie in that dampness," Granger broke
+out; "I remember when we were in London, how he used to hate the wet.
+Coldness he could put up with or the hottest sunshine, but he could
+not endure the damp. He said it made him feel as though the world was
+crying, like a dreary woman because her youngest child was dead. We
+can't drop him into that puddle and leave him there."
+
+He commenced to strip off his clothes, and to fold them along the
+floor of the grave. When he had apparently made all ready, he stooped
+down again and smoothed out a ruck, lest its discomfort should irk the
+dead.
+
+"Now," he said, "let me see his face for the last time, for he was my
+friend."
+
+Le Pere bent down, and drew the coverings back to the waist, while
+Granger leant over him in his eagerness. The body, having lain upon
+the ice, had been well preserved, no feature had been disturbed; but
+it was not the body of a man who was newly dead, nor was it the face
+of Spurling. So absorbed had Granger been by thoughts of the comrade
+whom he had treated harshly, and by the mysterious meaning of the
+writing which he had seen upon the ice, that the likelier solution of
+the problem of this man's identity had not entered into his head, that
+the body might be that of Strangeways, thrown up by the back-rush of
+the current around the bend.
+
+"Strangeways," he muttered, "it is Strangeways." And with those words
+his charity towards Spurling began to ebb.
+
+Pere Antoine, when he heard it, realising that these were the remains
+of an officer of justice, for whom, when he did not return, search
+would be made, and not of an escaped murderer with a price upon his
+head, at news of whose death Authority would be glad, went down on his
+hands and knees and began to examine the clothing of the dead for
+proofs of his identity, which could be sent in to headquarters for the
+establishing of his death. He foresaw that there was need for care;
+when the matter came to be investigated, it would be discovered that
+Granger had been Spurling's partner in the Klondike; questions would
+certainly be asked of Robert Pilgrim, as Hudson Bay factor and head
+man of the district, concerning Granger's conduct in Keewatin, and no
+good word could be looked for from that quarter. That which would tell
+most heavily against him would be this fact, that two men, separated
+by a few hours, were known to have passed God's Voice en route for the
+independent store of Garnier, Parwin, and Wrath, the first a hunted
+criminal, the second an officer of justice--the criminal had escaped
+and the officer was dead. Presumably both pursued and pursuer had
+arrived at Murder Point, for the body of Strangeways, the follower,
+had been found a mile down-river below the Point. Then where was
+Spurling? And how had he managed to escape, if he had not been helped?
+Who could have helped him save Granger? And why was Strangeways dead?
+
+These were some of the many questions which avenging justice would be
+sure to ask, and, however skilfully they might be answered, the priest
+knew well that it would be difficult to prevent suspicion from
+attaching to a hated independent trader, especially when it became
+known that he had once been the fugitive's friend. Why, he himself had
+suspected Granger at first!
+
+His present purpose was, if possible, to gather such proofs from the
+dead man's clothing as would exclude the doubt of foul play, and
+establish as a fact Granger's assertion that the corporal had arrived
+at his death by the accident of drowning.
+
+In the meanwhile, he was not meeting with much success in his search,
+for the right arm of the dead man was pressed so rigidly across his
+breast that it could not be moved without breaking; the hand was
+concealed and the fingers tangled in the folds of his dress, as if
+even in the last moments of life he had been conscious that he kept a
+secret hidden there. Only with violence could it be forced aside, and
+to this the priest was averse; he commenced to cut away the clothing,
+above downwards from the neck, below upwards from the belt. The cloth
+ripped easily, having become rotten with the wet, but the trimmings of
+fur were tough and obstinate to separate. When he had slit the capote
+and under-garments above and below the arm in two big flaps, he rolled
+them back, laying bare the breast, where he discovered a silver chain
+which went about the neck, the pendant to which, wrapped in the
+portion of the dress that had covered it, was clutched in the icy
+hand. He now cut away the stuff from around the hand, and, with a
+severity which seemed both profane and cruel, bent back the fingers
+one by one, compelling them to release their hold, so that the bones
+were heard to crack.
+
+"What are you doing?" cried Granger, angrily, being roused by the
+sound from an unsatisfactory examination of the mixed feelings which
+had arisen within him on discovering that Spurling, whom he had just
+been regretting, was not dead. "Why must we torture him? Why can't we
+leave him alone, and lay him decently in his grave?"
+
+"Perhaps in order that we may prevent you from being hanged."
+
+"From being hanged! You mistake me for Spurling, Pere Antoine; your
+memory must be failing. What have I done to deserve such courtesy at
+the hands of Fate? Why should men want to hang me?"
+
+"For the murder of Strangeways."
+
+Granger stood back, and drew himself erect, as if by asserting his
+physical cleanness and manhood he could refute the accusation. He
+lifted up his head and gazed with a fixed stare on the landscape,
+seeing nothing. Yes, it was true, they could make that accusation;
+there was sufficient evidence for suspecting him and, with the aid of
+a few lies and inaccurate statements on the part of his
+enemies--Robert Pilgrim, for instance, and Indians whom he had
+offended--sufficient evidence might be got together to bring him to
+the gallows. A fitting ending that for the son of the ambitious mother
+who had stinted herself and planned for his success, and a most
+appropriate sequel to the example of reckless bravery set by the last
+two generations of his father's house!
+
+Dimly, slowly, as he stood there in the northern icy drizzle, with his
+eyes on the muddy river hurrying toward its freedom between jagged
+banks, he came very wretchedly to realise that there was only one way
+in which he could save himself, a way, albeit, which both his loyalty
+and honour forbade, by becoming ardent in the pursuit and effecting
+the capture of Spurling, that so he might prove his innocence. An
+emotion of shame and self-disgust throbbed through him that it should
+have been possible for him, even for a moment, to entertain such a
+coward's thought as that. He shook himself free from temptation and
+looked about. What was Pere Antoine doing? What had he meant by saying
+that he was perhaps preventing him from being hanged? Did he still
+believe him to be guilty, as he had evidently done at first?
+
+Pere Antoine was intent upon his undertaking; when asked, he only
+shook his head, saying, "If I believed you guilty, why should I
+endeavour to find the signs which will prove you innocent? Would I do
+that, do you think, if I believed you to be a guilty man?"
+
+Granger was softened by those words; they meant a great deal to him at
+such a time, spoken as they were curtly by one who was so eager to
+rehabilitate his character before all the world that he had no moments
+to waste in argument. They were far more convincing to him of the true
+opinion which le Pere held of him than an hour consumed in apology,
+which would have been an hour spent in idleness. He came and knelt
+down by the side of the priest, and gazed on the results of his work.
+He saw the cold white face of Strangeways with the eyes set wide,
+staring upwards at the clouds. Their gaze did not seem to concentrate
+as in life, but like that of a well-painted portrait, while the eyes
+themselves remained fixed, wandered everywhere. Yet, when he settled
+his attention upon them, they seemed to look at him alone as if, since
+the lips were silent, they were trying to speak those words which the
+body had come to utter; if he turned his head away for a moment and
+then looked back, they seemed themselves to have changed their
+direction and to be staring again incuriously out on space, having
+abandoned hope of delivering their message. And he saw the naked
+throat and neck, and the marks where the teeth of the yellow-faced
+husky had clashed and met; last of all he saw the silver chain and the
+pendant attached, which Pere Antoine had at that moment succeeded in
+freeing from the cold clenched hand.
+
+"What have you there?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know yet. Lift up the head, so that we can slip the chain
+over and find out."
+
+Granger did as he was bidden; but, as he stooped to his task, he was
+horribly conscious that the dead man's eyes were intently fixed upon
+him, as if they knew and lived on, though every other part of the
+motionless body was dead and ignorant.
+
+"Well, here it is. It's a locket."
+
+Granger started up from the ground trembling. "Pere Antoine, do you
+think we ought to look at it?" he said.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Look at the eyes of that dead man."
+
+"They seem to me to be saying 'yes.'"
+
+Granger looked again, went near, bent down and looked carefully; then
+he turned his head. "You are right," he said; "I also think they are
+saying 'yes.'"
+
+The priest put the locket in his hand. "It is for you to open it," he
+said.
+
+It was of gold and studded with turquoise, a woman's trinket and
+old-fashioned, the chasing being worn flat in places; the silver chain
+was common and strong, and had evidently not at first belonged to it,
+being of modern manufacture--probably a comparatively recent
+purchase. Granger looked it over critically, but could get no hint of
+its contents from the outside. On the front was engraved a monogram J.
+M., and on the back a coat-of-arms. The lines of the monogram were
+distinct and sharp to the touch, they must have been cut many years
+after the locket itself was made, but the coat-of-arms seemed
+contemporary with the rest of the chasing. He tried to open it, but
+the dampness had caused it to stick, so that he broke his nails upon
+the fastening. He took out his knife and attempted to lever its edges
+apart with the blade. At last, growing impatient, he set it on its
+hinges upon a rock and commenced to hammer it with a stone. At the
+third blow the fastening gave, and the sides fell apart. He could see
+that it contained a miniature, and, on the other side, a lock of hair;
+but the glasses which shut them in were mist-covered. He rubbed them
+clean on the lining of his coat and looked again.
+
+The portrait was that of a young girl, fresh and innocent, about
+eighteen years of age; her hair, worn loose, all blown about, fell
+upon her neck and shoulders in long curls; her eyes were blue and
+intensely bright; her face was animated, with a certain dash of
+generous spirit and healthy defiance in it, which were chiefly denoted
+by the full firm lips and arching brows--and the face was the face of
+Mordaunt. For the first time, he saw the woman whom he had loved, in
+her rightful woman's guise. He had often longed that he might do that;
+it had made him feel that he shared so small a portion of her life
+that he should know her only by her man's name and remember her only
+in her Yukon placer-miner's dress. He would have stooped to kiss her
+lips at that time, had it not been for the presence of the dead, who
+had also loved her and from whom he had stolen his treasure. Would his
+body be able to rest in the grave when thus robbed of the symbol of
+the passion which had caused its blood to pulsate most fiercely in its
+life?
+
+Then he fell to thinking other thoughts--of how strangely this
+knowledge had come to him, from all across the world, by the hand of a
+rejected lover who was dead. Had this been the secret which the
+corporal had waited to tell him, thrown up on the ice, lying silent
+and deserted throughout that month at the bend; had he been waiting
+only to say, "I hold the knowledge which you most desire in my
+clenched right hand. Here is her woman's likeness. I require it no
+longer, now that I am dead?" No, surely he had not delayed for that.
+Then suddenly he realised that this must mean that the woman herself
+was dead. He remembered distinctly those last words which Strangeways
+had spoken, even as though he were now repeating them again aloud, "I
+tell you if the ice were as rotten as your soul or Spurling's, I would
+still follow him, though I had to follow him to Hell." And his last
+utterance had been a reiteration of that promise, "He killed the woman
+I loved, and he shall pay the price though I follow him to Hell."
+
+This was the fulfilment of that promise; though he himself was dead,
+he had delayed his body near Murder Point that, with his pale and
+silent lips and the portrait which hung about his neck, he might urge
+his rival on in their common cause of vengeance. "I will pray God
+every day of my life that Spurling may be damned throughout the
+ages--eternally and pitilessly damned," he had said, and now that the
+days of his life were over his body had tarried behind to continue
+that errand, so far as was possible, into the days of his death. When
+they had parted that night, a month ago outside the shack, he had told
+a lie; he had denied that the woman was Mordaunt who had been
+murdered, and had tried to prove his words by asserting that the body
+which was found in the creek near Forty-Mile had worn a woman's dress.
+Now he had come back to silently refute his own statement, and to
+declare the truth which would stir up anger and give him an inheritor
+of his revenge.
+
+Here, then, was a new reason why he should become ardent in the
+pursuit and effect the capture of Spurling, that by so doing he would
+be behaving honourably by a man who was dead. He saw in it at present,
+with his cynic's eye for self-scorn and self-depreciation, only an
+added excuse and more subtle temptation for the saving of himself.
+"No, I cannot do it," he said. And yet, somewhere at the back of his
+brain, the monotonous and oracular voice of a wise self-knowledge kept
+answering, "But you will do it, when you have had leisure to be
+lonely, and have tortured yourself with memories of her."
+
+It seemed to Granger as though Strangeways himself were the speaker of
+those words; but when he turned round hotly, prepared for argument, he
+found that the eyes had become glazed and vacant, and that at last the
+body was truly dead. It had no need to live longer--it had delivered
+its message.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE LOVE OF WOMAN
+
+
+It was past noon before they had completed Strangeways' burial at the
+bend. When they had finished, the skies had cleared themselves of
+storm and cloud, and the sun shone out again. The air was full of
+earth-fragrance, and the landscape was cool and fresh. Nothing of
+disorder remained, no sign that a man was dead, save only a mound of
+piled-up stones and sod, surmounted by a little cross of branches
+bound together with twisted grass.
+
+Pere Antoine had searched the body with scant results, for he had
+found no more than the warrant for Spurling's detection and arrest,
+and the fragments of two torn and well-nigh obliterated letters, at
+which latter he had only glanced up to the present. Nor had he seen
+the contents of the locket as yet, for when he had asked Granger what
+was its secret, he had received as answer, "Oh, nothing, only a young
+girl's face." So he had been foiled in his endeavour to gather
+materials for the establishing of Granger's innocence, should that be
+assailed, and had discovered nothing which might be of use in his
+defence. All he could contribute was his own personal evidence that
+the appearance of the body, as he had seen it, bore out Granger's
+account in every detail as to the manner in which Strangeways'
+catastrophe had occurred, and that his deportment, when he had
+charged him with murder, had proved conclusively to himself that there
+was no ground for such an accusation.
+
+When they had returned to the store and had had supper together,
+Granger sat for a long while with the locket open before him, gazing
+intently on the portrait. Suddenly he looked up. "Have you seen
+Beorn?" he asked. "Do you know whether he is on his way back?"
+
+"I have not seen him."
+
+"Antoine, you must stay here with me until he returns."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I was on my way to meet Peggy when you met and stopped me; I want you
+to marry us."
+
+"But why now and at once?"
+
+"Because if we're not married she won't live with me,--and I must do
+something to break down my loneliness by getting a new interest into
+my life. If I don't, I shall be always thinking of what has happened,
+and shall go mad,--in which case it will be the worse for Spurling. I
+don't want to kill him--at least, not until he has had his chance to
+explain himself. I'm sure now that it was Mordaunt whom he murdered,
+but I'm still uncertain as to whether he knew that she was a woman, at
+the time when he killed her--he may not know even yet. If he did it
+mistaking her for a man, I might be able to forgive him; anyhow, I can
+say so now, while you are with me. What I should do and think if I
+were left here miserably alone, I dare not tell. Yet, if what
+Strangeways said to me is true, that her body was found at Forty-Mile
+in a woman's dress, which would mean that Spurling killed her,
+well-knowing that she was a girl, why then I would go in search of
+him, and tell him what I thought about him, and shoot him carefully,
+and be glad when he was dead."
+
+"But you have promised God to leave him alone with Himself."
+
+"And shall I be the first man who has gone back on his prayers and
+promises? There's nothing to be gained by talking about it; fate must
+work itself out. But if you want to understand what Strangeways felt,
+and what I am still feeling, then look at that."
+
+He handed him the locket. Pere Antoine took it and bent above it. At
+last he said, "Why, she's only a girl . . . and he killed _her_!"
+
+"Yes, and he killed her when her back was turned. Now do you
+understand?"
+
+"May God help you!" was all that Antoine said. Granger went over to
+where he sat and, from above his shoulder, gazed down upon the
+portrait. The face had in it so little that was tragic that it seemed
+impossible to realise that its owner should have encountered such a
+death. When the smile upon the painted lips seemed so fresh and
+imperishable, it seemed incredible that the lips themselves should be
+now silent and underground.
+
+"I wonder where she lived and what sort of a girlhood she had,"
+Granger said.
+
+"I have here two letters which I found upon Strangeways; perhaps they
+may tell us something about her."
+
+Pere Antoine produced the letters from an oilskin pouch. They were in
+a pointed feminine hand, and the ink was faded. Granger lit the lamp,
+for the twilight without was deepening into darkness; spreading out
+the crumpled sheets on his knees before him, he read their contents
+aloud. Across the top, left-hand corner of the uppermost page was
+scrawled in a rude, boyish writing, "_The first letter she ever wrote
+me_"; the letter itself had been evidently penned by a young girl's
+hand. It bore the address of a school in London, and ran as follows:--
+
+     DEAR ERIC.
+
+     I am very miserable hear and sometimes wonder why I was
+     ever brought into the world. Your Papa was very kind to
+     me once, but why has he scent me away from you? You did
+     not want me to be scent, and so I can tell you all
+     about myself. I am very home-sick hear. I say
+     home-sick, though I have no home; I have always been a
+     stranger in your Papa's house. I suppose I am reely
+     home-sick for you. I think it is because you and I are
+     seperated that I am sorry. The girls hear are not
+     always kind; they say that I look as though I had been
+     crying, and then of course I do cry when they say that.
+     But if my eyes are red, I don't care. I want you badly
+     and I'm writting to tell you that. Don't forget to feed
+     my rabbits.
+
+                    Your loving little friend,
+                                             J. M.
+
+The second was marked in the same way, but in a manlier hand, "_Her
+last letter to me_."
+
+     DEAREST ERIC.
+
+     I am so sorry that I am the cause of all this trouble,
+     and that I cannot love you in the way that you and your
+     father so much desire. I would do anything to make you
+     happy save that--play the coward, and say that I love
+     you as a woman should whom you were going to marry,
+     when I do not. I have always been used to think of you
+     as a brother, which is natural, seeing that from our
+     earliest childhood we have grown up together. I thought
+     that you would be content with that; no other kind of
+     affection for you has ever entered into my heart or
+     head.
+
+     Your father was very angry with me last night after you
+     went out. He said that I, by my conduct, had led you on
+     to _expect_; believe me, I never meant to do that. It
+     never occurred to me that there was any need to be
+     careful in your presence. The truth is, I have always
+     been an interloper in your home; you will remember how,
+     long years since, when first I went to boarding-school,
+     I told you that . . . (four lines were here
+     undecipherable, being faded and rubbed out). When I
+     look back, I see that in all my life you have been my
+     only friend--which makes me the more unhappy that this
+     has happened. Mind, I don't mean to accuse your family
+     of unkindness; I only say that I, perhaps naturally,
+     was never one of them. If I thought that you would be
+     willing, knowing how I feel toward you, to make me your
+     wife, for the sake of your peace I might consent even
+     to that. But you are not such a man. (Three lines were
+     here obliterated.) Let there be no bitterness between
+     us by reason of harsh words which others have spoken;
+     what has happened must make a difference, but I want to
+     remain still your friend. This recent occurrence seems
+     to make it necessary that one of us should go
+     away--there will never be any quiet in your father's
+     house while we both live there. Don't be alarmed or
+     surprised if you get word shortly that I have vanished.
+
+                    Yours as ever,
+                                 J. M.
+
+To this letter was added a note in Strangeways' hand at the bottom of
+the page, "_She was not to blame; it was I who left_."
+
+"We have not learnt very much about her from those two letters, have
+we?" said Pere Antoine. "They are ordinary, and leave many questions,
+which we wanted to ask, unanswered."
+
+"Yes, they do little more than confirm Strangeways' own statements,
+and yet. . . ."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"They tell us that her true initials were J. M., the same as those of
+her assumed name, and the same as those of the monogram on the locket;
+and they tell us of her great loneliness."
+
+"But I can't see how a knowledge of that one fact--her great
+loneliness--will help us; it does not reconstruct for us the details
+of her life so that we can imagine her to ourselves, nor does it
+contribute anything towards your defence."
+
+"Bother my defence. I don't much care if I am hanged; that would at
+least be a final solution, so far as I am concerned, to this problem
+of living. What troubles me at present is, how is this woman feeling
+about my marriage with a half-breed girl? Now these letters help me;
+they make me certain that whatever I may be compelled to do at any
+future time by reason of my isolation, she will not be hard upon me,
+but will understand. This marriage with Peggy, for instance, looks
+like a betrayal of her. And though she is dead, I should hate to
+grieve her in the other world."
+
+Granger paused, and then he added fiercely, "And I'm glad of that last
+letter for another reason, because it states so clearly that she never
+loved the other man."
+
+"That can make no difference now."
+
+"But it can," said Granger, rising to his feet, and speaking in a
+strained whisper, with clenched hands, "I tell you it can. If I
+thought that she had ever really cared for him, I would shoot myself
+here and now, that I might be beside her to get between him and her.
+The thought that he was there with her all alone in the vastness, free
+to do and to say just whatever he pleased, and that I was shut out,
+would drive me crazy. Do you think that, if I supposed that he had got
+his arms around her over there, I could ever rest--if I thought that
+she would allow him? One little pull of a trigger, the report of a
+revolver, which I probably shouldn't hear and in any case shouldn't
+care about, and the journey would be accomplished and I could be
+bending over her. It sounds very tempting. But I'm prepared to live
+out my life like a man, now that I know that she understands. If she
+hadn't known what loneliness meant, she might misjudge my motives in
+taking up with Peggy, and might, out of revenge, instead of waiting
+for me, herself take up with Strangeways before my arrival there."
+
+Pere Antoine watched him gravely for some seconds after he had
+finished speaking; then he said, "I don't think that Heaven is quite
+like that; but none of us can be certain, perhaps your views are as
+correct as those of anyone else. When I was a young man, before I came
+to Keewatin, I should have been angry with any man who had said to
+me a thing like that--but we come to hold strange opinions in this
+land where all things, judged by our former standards of sanity,
+even God Himself, seem mad. At that time I longed to be dogmatic
+and definite in all my beliefs on religion, and this life, and the
+after-world--that was why I became a Jesuit, that I might exchange
+despair for certainty. Now, priest though I am, like you I see one
+gigantic interrogation mark written over sky and earth--and because of
+it I am grateful. I have learnt that the whole attraction of religion
+for the human mind, and the entire majesty of God depend on His
+mystery and silence, and the things which He does not care to tell. If
+all our questions were answered, we might lose our God-sense. If we
+knew everything, we should cease to be curious and to strive. Of one
+thing only are we certain, that Jesus lived and died, and that though
+we live in the uttermost parts of the earth, it is our duty to be like
+Him."
+
+"And Spurling--if Spurling dwells near us in the uttermost parts of
+the earth?"
+
+"He also is God's child."
+
+"It is easy for you to talk, Pere Antoine; you are an old man, and,
+being a priest, have never loved a woman yourself."
+
+The stern, grey features of the Jesuit relaxed; he hesitated, then he
+said, "My child, don't be too sure of that. Perhaps I may be
+attempting to live this life well only in order that I may make sure
+of meeting and being worthy of one such woman in the after-world. If
+that were so, it would be great shame to me, for I ought to be
+striving to live this life well solely for the love of Christ."
+
+He fell silent, sitting with his head bent forward, his gnarled hands
+folded on his knees before him. A far-away look had come into his
+eyes, a fixed expression of calmness, as though they slept with the
+lids parted. Granger watched the hands, mutilated and ruined, with
+three fingers missing from the right, and two from the left; and yet,
+despite their brokenness, he thought how beautiful they were. There
+was scarcely a part of the priest's body that had not been at some
+time shattered with service. It had never occurred to Granger that
+Pere Antoine, like most other men in the district, had a past which
+did not belong to Keewatin--memories of a happier time to which he
+might sometimes look back with the painfulness of regret. Antoine had
+been there so long that there was no man who remembered the day when
+first he arrived. He seemed as natural to the landscape as the Last
+Chance River itself. And now suddenly, in an electric moment of
+sympathy, his past had revealed itself.
+
+Granger watched and waited, hoping that presently he would explain. It
+occurred to him as a discovery that he had no knowledge of the
+priest's real name or of his family. At his nationality he could only
+guess, supposing him to be a Frenchman or a French-Canadian. How
+incurious he had been! And, in this case, lack of curiosity had meant
+lack of kindness; he blamed himself. He, like all Keewatin, was ready
+in time of crisis to draw upon the old man's strength, but beyond that
+he had never shown him real friendship--he had never been conscious of
+any desire to hear about the man himself. And now he had learned that
+this man also had a tragedy, and, like himself, had loved a woman who
+was now long since dead. He wanted to ask him questions, that so he
+might make up for omitted kindnesses; but he was restrained when he
+looked upon the grey dreamy countenance, for it was evident that le
+Pere was wandering in the idealised meadows of a bygone
+pleasantness--a country which was known only to himself. So Granger
+returned his eyes to the portrait which he had taken from the dead
+man's hand, and, gazing upon it, tried his best to fill in the blanks
+in his little knowledge of the woman he had loved.
+
+He constructed for himself a picture of an ivied manor-house, terraced
+and with an old-world garden lying round about it, where her childhood
+had been spent and where she had grown to girlhood. He told himself
+that there must have been a river somewhere near, and he imagined her
+as stretched upon its banks in the summer shadows. And he thought of
+the schoolhouse in London, and the little heart-weary child who had
+penned that letter there. He re-read it, and then once again re-read
+it, suffering the same agony of longing for things irrecoverable which
+this small creature had suffered years ago, who was now beyond all
+knowledge of pain. What a mystery it was that across that expanse of
+space and years her letter should have drifted down to him, from
+London to Keewatin, carried over the last few yards of its journey in
+the breast of a man who was already dead. It made him feel less of an
+exile that a miracle like that could happen--it was almost as though
+she herself had appealed to him from the hidden world. It made him ask
+himself that question, which so many had asked before him, "_And are
+we really ever dead_?"
+
+Pere Antoine stirred, rose up and walked over to the window, where he
+stood in the shadow, outside the circle of the lamp's rays, with his
+back turned toward the younger man. There was something which he
+wanted to say, but which he found difficult to express. Granger
+guessed that, and so he said, "Antoine, you are thinking of _her_
+to-night. She must have lived very long ago. Was she anything like the
+portrait of this young girl?"
+
+There was silence. Then, still gazing away from him, his long lean
+figure blocking out the moonlight, the priest returned, "All white
+women seem alike to one who has lived long in Keewatin. Yet that face
+did seem very like to hers; but it is many years ago now, and I may
+not remember her well. She died; and she was everything that was of
+worth to me in this world. I begin to fear that she is all that I
+count of highest value in the next."
+
+"But why fear? I should not fear that."
+
+"Because, being a missionary, with me it should be otherwise. I became
+a Jesuit through distrust of myself. I knew, when she had been taken
+from me, that because of my despair, if I did not bind myself strongly
+to that which was highest, I should sink to that which was worst. And
+I knew that if I sank to that which was worst, she would be lost to me
+throughout all eternity. So, in order that God might give her to me
+again in a future world, I strove to bribe Him; I asked that I might
+be sent to this hardest of all fields of missionary labour, hoping
+that thus I might acquire merit. Since then a new doubt has come to
+haunt me, has been with me half a century; the fear lest the life
+which I have led may count for nothing, may be regarded as only
+sinfulness, because I have done God's work for her sake rather than
+for the sake of His Christ, and that therefore as a punishment to me
+she may still be withheld. Ah, I have fought against her memory,
+trying to cling only to God! That has been useless. So I have gone on
+doing my best for my fellow-men, hoping that He may overlook the
+motive, and judging only by the work, may give me my reward in the
+end,--may allow me to be with her."
+
+"Antoine, I am a sinful man and one who is little qualified to judge
+of God's purposes, but I think that He will grant you your request.
+But if you, with all your goodness, are banished from her whom you
+loved most on earth, how can I hope for success?"
+
+Then the Jesuit turned round and faced him. "It was because I feared
+for your success that I mentioned my own trouble," he said. "You are
+planning to do a thing which is right in marrying this half-breed
+girl--you owe it to her and to God, inasmuch as you have lived with
+her. But you will be doing her a greater wrong than if you were to
+leave her unmarried, if, when you have made her your wife, you think
+only of the dead white woman. When the turmoil of living is over, you
+want to meet and be worthy of the woman who wrote those letters, you
+tell me; your best chance of success in that desire is in trying to
+forget her in this world, by giving all your affection to the woman
+who is your wife, and trusting to God's goodness to give you the
+rewards which He knows that you covet after death. Don't make my
+mistake--it means torture in this life, and, perhaps, disappointment
+in the next. Be true to the choice which you have made, and leave the
+rest to God's mercy. I have not been strong enough to do all that I
+advise, for, though I love Christ, I am shamed into owning, old man
+though I am, that I more often do His work in the hope of re-meeting
+with a woman who is dead than out of loyalty to Christ Himself."
+
+"Pere Antoine, you do not judge kindly of your own actions as Christ
+would judge of them; you Catholics, in making Christ God, forget that
+He also was a lonely man. I think it is not as a God, but as a peasant
+that He will judge us, having knowledge of what we have suffered--if
+He judges us at all. It is more likely that He will just be sorry for
+us, that we ever thought that He would judge us."
+
+"Whether I judge kindly or not, will you try to take my advice? I have
+told you a secret to-night which never, since I came to Keewatin, have
+I told to any man. And I have told you that I may save you. Believe
+me, if you cannot love your daily companions for their own sake in
+this world, whoever and wherever they are, you will fail to find love
+for your own sake in the next--and to love well, whatever you love you
+must love for itself, and not for any future and mercenary end."
+
+Granger moved restlessly, but remained silent; then he sat still and
+thought. Pere Antoine also said nothing, for he knew that the man
+before him was reasoning his way toward a decision upon which all his
+happiness must depend.
+
+But to Granger the problem appeared quite otherwise; it seemed to him
+that he was being asked to abandon another pleasantness for the sake
+of Peggy, a half-breed girl, for whom he had been prepared already to
+sacrifice his career. To be sure, his career was not of much value at
+present, and didn't seem a large thing to sacrifice; but then, when it
+comes to giving anything away, even the most thorough-paced pessimist
+is capable of turning optimist about its worth.
+
+Since he had become certain of Mordaunt's death, he had vaguely
+planned out for himself a course of spiritual debauchery, though he
+would not have applied to it such a word. He had expected to marry
+Peggy Ericsen, and to live with the memory of the woman for whom he
+had really cared. His wife was to have been the servant of his comfort
+and desires, and the dead woman the companion of his mind and daily
+round. So he hoped, by keeping Mordaunt near him in his thoughts, to
+qualify himself for attaining her after death, and to atone for his
+apostasy in marrying a different woman while yet on earth. Throughout
+all his reasoning ran a streak of madness, of which he himself was
+totally unaware. And now, when he had completed arrangements to his
+own satisfaction, here came this Jesuit telling him that such a course
+of action savoured of adultery, and would probably end in the eternal
+separation of Mordaunt from himself.
+
+Presently he heard a sound of moving. He looked up. Antoine was
+standing before him, on the outer edge of the light which was thrown
+by the lamp, appearing huge and prophetic against the background of
+dwarfed shadows which crawled over wall and ceiling, crowding behind
+him. His awe for the office of the man returned to him, blotting out
+the equality which the past few hours of confession had brought about.
+Once more he recalled how it was said that le Pere had been seen
+walking in the wilderness, wearing the countenance of Jesus Christ. He
+looked like that now. Granger, made conscious of his own premeditated
+wrong-doing, shrank back before him. Yet the words which Pere Antoine
+uttered were very simple: "I am an old man, and I knew what I was
+saying," was all he said.
+
+Granger rose to his feet. "I'm going out," he said. "I'll return in a
+little while and give you my decision."
+
+He passed out from the close stale air of the shack into the
+starlight; he could be nearer God there. A low, leisurely wind was
+journeying over the forest, crooning softly to itself as it went.
+Dominant over all other sounds, as was ever the case at Murder Point,
+the wash of the ongoing river was to be heard--even in winter, when
+every other live thing had ceased to stir, it was not silent. But now,
+in the early summer of the northern year, it laughed uproariously and
+clapped its hands against the banks in its passage, as if the water
+were calling to the land, "Good-bye, old fellow; you won't see me
+again for many a century. It was the end of the ice age when last we
+parted." To Granger the shouting of the river was for all the world
+like that of a troop-ship departing for a distant country. "Farewell,
+farewell," it cried. The sound of its going made him weary with a
+sense of world-wideness; if he was left behind to-day, when once he
+had joined himself to a daughter of that country, he would be forever
+left behind. But he had come outside not to reargue his way over the
+old ground, but to decide. To do that he must be alone, quite
+solitary; and there, just outside the shack, he was all too conscious
+of Pere Antoine's eyes.
+
+Slowly he commenced to descend the Point toward the river-bank. As he
+went, a new desire sprang up within him--to speak with Strangeways; if
+possible to make a compact and extort some approving sign from that
+dead man. Stepping into the canoe, he pushed off lightly and set out
+for the bend. The nearer he drew, the sterner his face became; he was
+thinking of what he should say, and one has to be careful in what he
+says in speaking with a man who is dead. Soon he came in sight of the
+flimsy little cross which they had raised, and saw the stones which
+they had piled above the body, shining white and grey in the
+moonlight; then with a twist of the paddle his canoe shot in toward
+the bank and the prow grated on the ice. Granger stepped out and
+beached his craft above the water's edge. With slow deliberate steps
+he went forward till he stood above the grave. There, with his hands
+clasped behind him and his head bowed, he waited for a few minutes
+listening, half expecting that something would happen. When nothing
+stirred, he went upon his knees, as if he prayed, placing his lips so
+near to the grave that sometimes they touched the stones and mould;
+and so he began to speak to the man imprisoned beneath the ground.
+
+"Strangeways," he said, "you know everything about me now, and you
+ought to understand. I want to act fairly by you. I didn't do that in
+your lifetime; if I had, you might not now be dead. I ought to have
+warned you about the ice at first, and I ought to have told you the
+truth about Spurling; then you might have believed me. But I did try
+my best to save you in the end. Pere Antoine says that I may get
+hanged for your death; but I don't mind that so very much, if I can
+only act fairly by you now."
+
+He paused to hear whether there was any sound of movement underground;
+when he heard none, he knew that the dead man was listening and
+waiting eagerly for what would come next. Crouching still nearer, so
+that he might narrow the space between them, "Strangeways, are you
+listening?" he said. "We both loved her, and neither of us won her in
+this world; but because you are dead, you are nearer to her now than I
+am. I want you to promise me to do nothing till I have come."
+
+And still when he halted, waiting for his answer, nothing stirred.
+Presently he spoke again. "I have a reason for asking which, if you
+remember anything of what you suffered in this life, you should
+understand. To save myself from madness, I must have a companion, and
+so I am going to marry a woman of this country. In order that I may
+live well with her, and even in order to marry her, I must pledge my
+word to forget Mordaunt while I am in this world. Now do you
+understand? I cannot pledge my word until you have promised me that
+you will do nothing until I am also dead." He fell forward over the
+grave and lay there silent. His brain had become numb; he could
+fashion no more words--perhaps in the interval which elapsed he
+slept. Then it seemed to him that the chambers within his brain were
+lighted up, so that pressing his face against the crannies and between
+the stones he could look right down, and see distinctly the narrow bed
+of the grave whereon the body of Strangeways rested. The eyes of the
+body were open and the lips were working, trying to say something. By
+watching the lips he discovered that they kept on repeating, over and
+over, one word; then he read that that word was _revenge_. "I cannot,
+I cannot," he whispered. "I have promised God that I will not; and,
+moreover, to take revenge on Spurling would be to remember her."
+
+Was it that he moved as he slept, or did the thing which he thought he
+saw actually occur! Some stones slipped from off the mound and, to his
+eyes looking down into the grave, it seemed that Strangeways' hand
+began to grope frantically after the locket which had been about his
+neck, and that, finding it missing, his face became angry and he
+strove to rise, causing the stones to fall and the ground to tremble.
+
+Granger jumped up, and stood there shaking with his hands clenched and
+his head thrown back, prepared.
+
+"Will you answer me?" he cried in despair. "Don't you know how I
+suffer? If you consent to what I have asked of you, give me a sign? If
+nothing happens, I shall know that you are cruel and do not care."
+
+When he had waited in vain some seconds, he lost his nerve and his
+courage. Kneeling beside the grave he commenced to weep, smoothing the
+stones with his hands coaxingly like a child, and whispering, "Give me
+a sign. Give me a sign. Give me a sign."
+
+Suddenly he paused in his pleading. The rustling of water against a
+travelling prow, and sound of paddles thrust in, forced back, and
+withdrawn, struck upon his ears. He threw himself full length along
+the ground; he did not want to be discovered there. Stealing up-stream
+from the northward, creeping close in to the opposite bank to avoid
+the current, came a canoe, sitting deep in the water, heavily laden
+with furs; the stern-paddle was held by a tall and thickly bearded
+man, and in the prow, even at that distance and in that shadowy light,
+it was possible to make out that the second figure was that of a girl.
+Granger recognised them immediately, and knew that the Man with the
+Dead Soul and his daughter had returned. He also noticed that Eyelids
+was not there. They did not see him, but quickly vanished round the
+bend.
+
+When all was silent and lonely again, Granger arose. "It is a sign,"
+he said. Standing above the grave, before departing he spoke once more
+with the man who lay buried there. "Strangeways, you may rest quiet
+now," he said. "Though I cannot revenge her as you have desired, we
+can both, in our separate ways, be true to her."
+
+He delayed a moment to have what he had said confirmed; but this time
+no token either of dissent or approval was vouchsafed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+HE REVIEWS HIS MARRIAGE, AND IS PUT TO THE TEST
+
+
+It was the first week in June; for a fortnight John Granger had been a
+married man. He was now removed a sufficiently just distance from his
+bachelor-hood to be able to estimate the value of the change which
+this new step had wrought in his career.
+
+Its true worth to him had been that it had converted him from a
+Londoner in Keewatin into a man of the Northland. This might mean,
+though it need not, that he had retrograded to a lower type; at all
+events it meant that he was robbed of his excuse for considering
+himself an exile, bearing himself rebelliously toward his environment,
+and being unhappy. By joining himself to Peggy by the rites of the
+Roman Church, he had made an irrevocable choice, had slammed the door
+of opportunity and return to civilisation in his own face, and had
+adopted as his country a land where no one has any use for money or
+for time, and where nothing could ever again be of very much
+importance. He had not realised all that a fortnight ago when, at the
+bidding of the Jesuit, he had made this girl his wife; but since he
+had lived in her company he had come to realise. Mercifully there is
+no situation, however bad, which may not develop the peculiar virtue
+whereby it can be endured. He had learnt his virtue by observing
+Peggy, an Indian virtue at that--stolidity. In a great lonely
+territory, where men say good-bye to one another for twelve months at
+a stretch, and sometimes forever, they arrive at a philosophy of life
+which consists in waiting very patiently and unambitiously for the
+next thing which the good God may send. To attain this sort of
+quietness a man must be quite hopeless, for so long as he hopes he is
+liable to disappointment. Also he must live each day as though it were
+his first, for to remember things past is to court regret. He must
+permit himself to know none of the extremes of emotion, either of joy
+or of sadness; to this end he must consider himself as a non-partisan
+in life, a careless spectator before whose eyes the groping shadows
+pass. The traffic of words is a labour, and a more frequent cause of
+misunderstanding than of interpretation--therefore it is wiser, if
+peace be desired, to keep always silent. Where a gesture will do the
+work of a word, let a gesture suffice.
+
+All this Granger had learnt during the fortnight which he had lived
+with his wife; in watching her, he had studied to forego his former
+turbulence of mind as a thing most foolish, and had determined to sink
+down into the dull acceptance of a destiny against which it was
+profitless to contend--a kind of resigned contentment. If he was to be
+hanged to-morrow for Strangeways' death, that was no reason why he
+should disturb himself to-day; if that was to happen, it would come to
+pass in any case,--nothing that he might do or say could prevent it.
+The momentary pain of dying is usually much less intense than the
+hours of cowardly suffering which men bring upon themselves by
+prevising the anguish of their last departure, so he told himself. So
+to-day he sat outside his store in the sunshine and smoked his pipe,
+the freest and silentest man in all Keewatin, and, he would have had
+himself believe, the most stably contented.
+
+That night, when he had left Pere Antoine and had gone to consult the
+dead man at the bend, had been the turning-point in his frenzy. It
+seemed to him, as he looked back, to have happened long ago when he
+was little more than a child, at a time before his enlightenment, when
+he had supposed very foolishly that he was of importance to God and to
+his fellow-men. Now he had come to know that he was of no importance
+even to himself. He blew out a cloud of smoke and watched it vanish in
+the air; in other days he would have smiled, but it was not worth the
+effort now. The relation of that whiff of tobacco-smoke to the
+unplumbed space, throughout which it would be dispersed, was about the
+same as that of his present existence to the rest of the world.
+
+When, having said good-bye to Strangeways, he had followed the Man
+with the Dead Soul back to the store, he had made up his mind to the
+inevitable, and had been prepared to greet Peggy with a certain
+display of joy. Before ever he could put his thought into action, his
+intention had been repelled. As he had drawn nearer to the crazy
+wooden pier which ran out from Murder Point, he had seen the shadowy
+shapes of the trapper and his daughter, bending down, unloading their
+canoe, moving slowly hither and thither through the night. As he had
+come up, he had hailed them. To his call Beorn had made no reply, had
+only turned his head and nodded, while Peggy, stooping over a pile of
+furs, had thrown him the customary salutation of the Cree Indian to
+the white man, used both on arrival and departure, "Watchee"--which is
+a corruption of "What cheer." No other words of greeting had passed
+between them, and he, when he had landed, had set to work at once to
+help them with their unlading. When that was finished and the furs had
+been carried up to the store, they had raised their tent, kindled
+their fire, brewed their black tea, cooked their bacon, and gone to
+rest. Granger had so far intruded on their reserve as to ask them to
+spend the night in his store, but his invitation had been ungraciously
+refused with a shake of the head.
+
+Next day Pere Antoine had married them, after which he had departed,
+promising, however, to return before the summer was out. Granger had
+said nothing more to him either concerning Spurling or the death of
+Strangeways, except to insist that the warrant for the arrest,
+together with the letters and locket which had been found, should be
+left with himself; nevertheless, he had been well aware that these
+things were largely responsible for the hurry of the priest's
+departure. At first he had not been surprised at the silence of Peggy,
+for he had grown accustomed to the shy modesty of women who are
+Indian-bred. The women of Keewatin accept it as their fate that they
+are born to be subservient to men--to be their burden-bearers. But at
+the end of a few days, when her demeanour had shown no sign of change,
+he had become a little curious. In the early part of the year the
+white blood that was in her had been more manifest, and because of it
+she had been proud. When she had insisted that he should marry her, if
+he would live with her, the reason she had given him for her demand
+had been _because her blood was white_. Since then she had journeyed
+into the winter-wilderness with the menfolk of her family, like any
+other Indian or half-breed girl, and in the primeval solitariness of
+the land the red blood of her mother had asserted itself; the hand of
+her native deity had been laid upon her mouth, staying her flow of
+words, the shyness of the forest-gods had entered into her eyes, and
+the Lord God of Women had stooped her shoulders, causing her to carry
+her head less bravely, binding the hereditary burden of the red woman
+upon her back. She had unlearned in those few months all the conceits
+of self-respect which she had been taught in the school at Winnipeg,
+and had reverted to the ancient type from which she was sprung,--the
+river Indian. Granger, as he watched her, guessed all this, for had
+not he himself been parted from his old traditions?--and he had not
+known Keewatin till he was a grown man. Well, these people had lived
+there longer than he had! They should know what was best suited to
+their circumstance, he told himself; and so, without questioning or
+combatting their social methods, he resigned himself to accept their
+modes of life.
+
+It was a strange wedding that he had had--very different from the kind
+he had planned for himself in the heat of his passion, when he was a
+younger man. And this was a strange woman whom he must call his
+wife--one who worked for him tirelessly with her head and hands, but
+who appeared to crave for none of his affection, and with whom he
+could have not a moment's conversation; the exchange of a few
+monosyllables and signs in the course of a day seemed to be the most
+that he might expect. Yet, because of her meekness and faithfulness,
+and her ready willingness to serve, he was conscious of a growing
+protective quality of love for her. If he could prevent himself from
+adopting her reticence, he promised himself that he would gather her
+whole heart into his own by and by.
+
+He did not as yet realise that the mere fact that he could feel thus
+towards her, when no speech had passed between them, was an indication
+that she was communicating herself in a more vigorous and sincerer
+language than that of words. This difference between them, that he
+expected her to use her lips to explain her personality, and that she,
+far from imagining that she was silent, believed herself to be in her
+deeds most eloquent, was one of the few traits remaining to him of the
+street-born man.
+
+As an example of their reservedness was the fact that, though Eyelids,
+Peggy's brother, had set out on the winter hunt and had not returned,
+no explanation of his delay had been forthcoming, nor had Granger
+summoned up the energy to inquire for himself. On their first arrival
+he had felt distinctly curious as to his whereabouts. Had he come
+across traces of Spurling and gone in pursuit of him? Had he heard
+from some stray Indian that Spurling was an outlaw, with a price upon
+his head? Had Beorn, having found that his cache at the Forbidden
+River had been broken into, dispatched his son to follow up the thief
+and exact revenge? Or was Spurling dead, and had Eyelids killed him,
+for which reason he was afraid to come back?
+
+For the first few days after his marriage these questions and answers
+had been continually running through his head; but since he had learnt
+the lesson that nothing was of much importance, he had almost ceased
+to care. Why should he trouble to inquire? If he did, he might get no
+reply; and if he was answered, the probability was that his only gain
+would be something fresh to worry about. The unreturning of Eyelids
+was one small detail of the total unreality, the dream which he had
+once taken so seriously, which in former times he had called life; and
+of that dream the arrival and flight of Spurling were the nightmare.
+No one of all these happenings had ever been--they were unactual: and
+the chances were that even he himself was no reality.
+
+Beorn Ericsen, the Man with the Dead Soul as he was called, was a
+fitting tutor to a pupil of this philosophy. Compared with him, his
+daughter was a whirlwind of words; the lesson of silence, which she
+taught by her behaviour, she had first learnt from her father on the
+winter trail--in the presence of his stern taciturnity she appeared a
+garrulous amateur.
+
+Whence he had originally come, no one had ever persuaded him to tell.
+On his first arrival in the district, which was reported to have taken
+place nearly forty years ago, for the first two years he was said to
+have conducted himself more or less like a normal man. At that time he
+must have been near mid-life, for he was now well past seventy to
+judge by his appearance. Even then, on his first coming, something had
+happened, which he did not care to talk about, which made him glad of
+the dreary seclusion of Keewatin. It had been generally supposed that
+he was badly wanted by Justice, for having shot his man in a border
+hold-up, or for deeds of violence in some kindred escapade.
+
+At any rate, he had set about his living in Keewatin in earnest, as
+though he had determined to stay there. Having attached himself to the
+Hudson Bay Company, he soon proved himself to be an expert trapper,
+and a man who, for his reckless courage, was to be valued. Promotion
+seemed certain for him and, despite the fact that he had joined the
+Company late in life, the likelihood of his attaining a factorship in
+the end was not improbable. It was then, after he had won the
+confidence of his employers, that he had taken that journey to the
+North, through an unexplored country, from which he had come back
+dazed and dreary-eyed, so that it seemed as though he must have met
+with some dire calamity in the winter desolation, one from which few
+men would have escaped alive, which had robbed him of his reason. When
+they had asked him where he had journeyed, "Far, far," was all he
+would reply. And when, hoping to satisfy their curiosity by a less
+direct method, they had questioned him, "What did you see up there?"
+"Blackness--it was dark," was the most that he would answer them.
+
+Because of these answers there were some who supposed that, emulating
+Thomas Simpson, he had penetrated into the Arctic Circle and had gazed
+upon the frozen quiet of an undiscovered ocean. He had wrested from
+God the secret which He was anxious to withhold, they said, and God in
+vengeance had condemned him to be always silent. But the Indians
+explained his condition more readily, speaking in whispers about him
+around camp-fires among themselves. The last place at which he had
+been seen by anyone on that journey was at the mouth of the Forbidden
+River, along whose banks it was commonly believed stretched the
+villages and homes of manitous, and souls of the departed. The Crees
+asserted that this was not the first man who, to their knowledge, had
+wandered up that river and had thus returned. Some few of their
+boldest hunters had from time to time set out and, roving further
+afield than their brethren, had likewise trespassed all unaware within
+the confines of the spirit-land. So they said that Beorn had been to
+the Land of Shadows, and that, by reason of his surpassing strength,
+he had contrived to escape; but that he had left his soul behind him
+there, and it was only his body which had come back.
+
+From that day he had been known as _The Man with the Dead Soul_.
+Gradually, as the years went by, the deathly vacancy had gone out of
+his eyes, but he had remained a man separated from living men. He
+rarely spoke, but from the first his peculiarities had made no
+difference to his expertness as a trapper--he was more skilful, white
+man though he was, than many of the Crees themselves. All the strength
+which should have been spent upon his soul seemed to have gone to
+preserving the perfection of his body. For a man of his years, he was
+surprisingly vigorous and erect--no labour could tire him. This, said
+the Indians, was the usual sign of bodies which lived on when their
+souls were dead. He was much feared, and his influence in the district
+was great; in gaining him as a partisan, Granger had achieved a
+triumph over Robert Pilgrim, and had improved his status among the
+native trappers more than could have been possible by any other single
+act.
+
+Beorn was reverenced as a kind of minor deity; no wish of his, however
+silently expressed, was ever denied by an Indian. When he had chosen
+Peggy's mother to be his wife, it had been done merely by the raising
+of his hand. Straightway the girl's father had driven her
+panic-stricken forth from his camp, compelling her to go to this
+strange bridegroom, lest a curse should fall upon his tribe. To her,
+if absence of cruelty is kindness, he had been uniformly kind. Love is
+not necessary to an Indian marriage, so she had not been too unhappy.
+At Peggy's birth, having first borne him a son, she had died. The
+little girl had been brought up and cared for by the silent man; the
+shy tenderness she expressed for him went far to prove that she, at
+least, had discovered something more vital within him than could be
+expected to reside in the body of a man whose soul was dead. His
+sending of her to the school in Winnipeg had shown that he was not so
+forgetful as he seemed to be of the outside world which he had left.
+This last act had come as a great surprise to all who knew him; but
+they had contrived to retain their old opinion of him by asserting
+that this was the doing of Pere Antoine.
+
+Only on rare occasions had Beorn let any of his secrets out; when he
+got drunk he recovered his power of speech, or, as the Indians said,
+for a little space his soul returned. This had happened less and less
+frequently of recent years. It was well remembered by old-timers at
+God's Voice how once, in the early morning in Bachelors' Hall, at the
+end of a night's carousal, when the trappers and traders from the
+distant outposts had made their yearly pilgrimage to the fort bringing
+in their twelve months' catch of furs, Beorn, under the influence of
+rum, had risen uninvited, and, to the consternation of his intoxicated
+companions, had trolled forth a verse from a fighting mining ballad.
+As well might the statue of Lord Nelson climb down from its monument
+in Trafalgar Square and, with the voice of a living man, commence to
+address a London crowd. The verse which he sang ran as follows; to the
+few who were aware, it solved the mystery of an important portion of
+his hidden early history:
+
+    "The Ophir on the Comstock
+      Was rich as bread and honey;
+    The Gould and Curry, farther south,
+      Was raking out the money;
+    The Savage and the others
+      Had machinery all complete,
+    When in came the Groshes
+      And nipped all our feet."
+
+When he had completed the verse, he had slowly gazed round and caught
+the look of amaze which had dawned in the countenances of his drunken
+associates. He had come to himself and grown sober. Suddenly an
+expression of intense fear and hatred had shot into his eyes; without
+saying another word, he had turned his back on the company and gone
+out into the early morning, floated his canoe, and fled as one who was
+pursued for his life. That verse had explained many of Beorn's
+eccentricities to one of those who had heard it, and he had told the
+rest. Its singing had meant that, sometime in the early sixties, Beorn
+had taken part in the gold-rush to the Comstock, and had worked and
+prospected in the Nevada mines.
+
+This was his solitary glaring indiscretion in all the course of his
+forty years spent in Keewatin. Though he had had many opportunities
+since then to repeat the event when under the influence of liquor, he
+had allowed nothing more of any importance to escape his lips. He had
+never spent much time at God's Voice, only turning up at the end of
+his hunt to dispose of his catch of furs, after which he would vanish
+into the wilderness again. He avoided on every occasion and was
+restless in the company of men. Very rarely was he encountered on his
+hunting-trips by any of the Indians or trappers. When once he had set
+out, he was not seen again until he returned of his own choice. The
+few times that he had been met, he was far to the northward, about
+the point where the Last Chance and Forbidden Rivers join, whence they
+flow on together till they tumble their crowded waters into the
+freedom of the Hudson Bay. Because it was always in this locality that
+he had been met, a rumour got abroad that, when his body was not
+dwelling among living men, it journeyed up the Forbidden River, to
+reunite with his exiled soul in the habitations of the dead.
+
+Granger had listened to all these reports from time to time, but he
+had paid small heed to them; he was certain in his own mind that,
+should he live solitarily in Keewatin for forty years, as Beorn had
+done, a similar web of legend would be woven about himself. The man's
+conduct was to him self-explanatory; in his early manhood he had
+committed some passionate wrong, and had fled into the wilderness to
+escape the penalty, only to find that the executioner was there before
+him--the Silence, and that the enduring of loneliness was a more cruel
+punishment than any that an earthly judge could have measured out. The
+boat was one and the same which carried Beorn, Spurling, and himself.
+He promised himself that, by and by, as in the case of Peggy, he would
+break through Beorn's silence, get to know the man, plunge deep down
+till he held his heart in his hand.
+
+So he sat outside his store in the June sunlight, oblivious of himself
+and the passage of Time, lifted high above the strife, and
+impartially, like an ancient deity, reviewed the lives of men.
+
+On the boarded floor of the shack he could hear the moccasined feet of
+Peggy moving busily to and fro, as she prepared the meal. They had
+netted some white-fish over night, so their larder was freshly
+supplied. On the edge of the pier, which ran out from the Point,
+Beorn sat, mending one of his traps. Along the top of the roof perched
+a row of whisky-jacks, most impertinent of birds, who, when a man has
+carried his food almost to his mouth, will flash down, light on his
+hand, and, before he knows that they have arrived, filch away the
+morsel. Somewhere across the river a whippoorwill kept on uttering its
+plaintive cry, as it were Beorn's lost soul come back, pleading
+insistently for permission to take up its residence in his body once
+again. And over against the farther bank a brood of yellow ducklings
+swam in and out among the rushes, hidden behind which their mother
+watched and waited. The noon came on apace, the shadows shortened, and
+everything grew silent; over forest and river a restful stillness
+settled down. If the Last Chance would always look like that it would
+be almost habitable. Had it been placed in any country where there
+were men, it would be considered beautiful just now. Ah, well, after
+he had been married a few years, he would have his children running
+hither and thither, laughing and chattering, about the Point; then it
+would be in his own choice to make of his environment what he liked.
+Gazing whimsically forward to such a time he could conceive that, were
+he given the opportunity to return to civilisation, by some curious
+turn of the wheel of fortune, he might prefer to stay; that such an
+opportunity might be possible, it would first be necessary that he
+should have been acquitted from all suspicion concerning the death of
+Strangeways.
+
+It was easy to be optimistic on such a day; there was a cleanness of
+youth about the appearance of this newly awakened world which reacted
+on the watcher's mind.
+
+Peggy had come out from the shack and was seated on the threshold;
+even she was conscious of a certain elation, for she was humming to
+herself one of those endless, tuneless, barbaric Indian airs which
+only take on the pretence of music when they are assisted by the
+stamping of many feet, and the clapping of many hands. When Granger
+turned his head in her direction, she lowered her eyes, and her
+singing ceased. He had not meant that she should do that; he was
+merely wondering whether she was really a pretty girl and whether, if
+he were to take her back with him to England, she would be seen as
+beautiful by London eyes. London eyes! What had they ever seen that
+was essentially beautiful and free? They could judge of the latest
+fashion in hats, and of the proper size of the laced-in waist; but
+what had they ever seen of the naked, sinuous grace of the human body
+as God made it and had meant that it should be seen? Of nakedness and
+simplicity, and all things genuine, the civilised man had been taught
+to be ashamed. No, no, to-day, in the sunshine, he felt sure that he
+would not return to the insincerity, artificiality, and the
+blinkered-eyes of the town, were he given his choice. He wanted to
+breathe cleanness, and to see God's hand at work, and to be _a man_;
+in London, or any other city, individuality and all these things would
+be denied. He could be very happy now, he believed; now that he was
+not lonely any longer, because he had a wife. He wished that he could
+find a language in which to tell her these things. But he feared to
+speak; he knew that as yet, just returned from the winter-trail, she
+would not understand.
+
+While he had been thinking, she had slowly raised her eyes; she was
+not looking at him, but northeast, down-river, toward the bend.
+Turning suddenly, he caught the direction of her gaze. Glancing down
+to the pier, he discovered that Beorn's eyes were also turned that
+way. What were they waiting for? What were they anticipating? Was it
+the return of Eyelids that made them so expectant? During the past
+fourteen days he had often caught them thus waiting and gazing, as
+though stoically prepared for news of whatever kind. He suspected that
+they had some secret which they were not willing to share with
+him--this would account to an extent for Peggy's reticence. But what
+secrets of importance could they have, dwelling as they did on the
+Last Chance? Probably Eyelids' delay was only a matter of traps and
+furs which had been cached. Then, as he watched Peggy, he saw a look
+partly of fear, partly of bewilderment, spread over her face. She
+glanced down to her father; he was still gazing in the same direction,
+towards the bend, and she, seeing him rise to his feet and wave his
+hand, following his example, also rose up and waved. Granger was on
+his feet immediately, that so he might see more clearly; turning his
+eyes down-river, he watched steadfastly in the direction in which the
+father and daughter gazed. He saw nothing that was not customary; it
+seemed to him that he must have looked too late.
+
+"What is it, Peggy?" he broke out.
+
+She swung round slowly, giving herself time to make her face
+expressionless; it was evident that she had forgotten his presence in
+her excitement.
+
+"Nothing," she said, and turning about, passed into the darkness of
+the house.
+
+Granger did not like it. When there are only three of you, one of whom
+is your wife, to whom you have been married only a fortnight, it is
+not pleasant to be the one left out. He had thought at first that they
+might be on the lookout for York boats, which might soon be expected
+to pass by on their way from the House of the Crooked Creek to God's
+Voice. But one does not wave his hand to a York boat which is not yet
+in sight. It seemed certain to him now that Eyelids was in the
+vicinity, signalling to them secret information, which they were eager
+to keep from himself. Had they stumbled across the grave of
+Strangeways, and wondered what it meant? A grave more or less in
+Keewatin does not usually trouble a living man; nevertheless, he ought
+to have told them about it and have explained about Spurling. He would
+tell them his secret presently, and get them to tell him theirs in
+exchange. In the meanwhile, he would watch the bend.
+
+There was no sound of footsteps in the shack. Turning his head very
+slowly, so that it could hardly be seen to turn, he could perceive the
+shadow of Peggy out of the tail of his eye from where he sat; she was
+standing behind the window, a little way back from the panes so that
+he might not discover her, and she was also watching. If this system
+of spying were to go on for long, there would soon be an end to his
+dreams of freedom and marital peace at Murder Point. Already he was
+inclined to revise his opinion as to what he would do, were he given
+the opportunity for escape to a becitied and more populous land. The
+more he thought about it, the more certain he became that he would
+choose to escape. A half-breed girl who was almost pure Indian in her
+manners--and Peggy seemed that to him now--could never be a fitting
+companion for an educated white man. He'd been something more than a
+fool to marry her. The entire business was a farce, from start to
+finish; and then he remembered that nearly every farce ends in
+someone's tragedy.
+
+He was interrupted in his bitterness by a shout from up-river. While
+they had been all engaged in watching the northeast, a swift canoe,
+carrying two men, had stolen in from the west. It was approaching the
+pier; before he had time to get down, its occupants had landed and
+were shaking hands with Beorn effusively, emitting low, hoarse cries
+of "Watchee. Watchee."
+
+As he descended the mound, he scanned their travelling outfit, that he
+might guess their errand. They carried no cargo, nor was their canoe
+the broad-built, slate-coloured conveyance of the Hudson Bay Company;
+it was birch-bark, constructed for speed, and carried in the bow a
+miniature sail. They must be the bearers of a letter, or of important
+verbal tidings.
+
+He shook hands with them in silence, nor did he ask them at once to
+deliver to him their message, well knowing from unhappy experience
+that to attempt to hurry an Indian is to cause him to delay. Instead,
+he set about doing them favours, that so they might be the more
+willing to oblige him. He led the way up to his store and, displaying
+to them his wares, told them to choose themselves each a present.
+There were gaudy shawls, beflowered muslin dress-lengths, rifles,
+watches, clocks, suits of clothing and city head-gear, probably
+misfits or the refuse of a bankrupt's stock which Wrath had bought
+cheap, all of them long since out of date; there were even battered
+dolls and children's toys lying about mixed up with canned goods and
+groceries--a miscellaneous array. Arranged along one wall were all the
+implements of the trapper's trade and the articles of common use,
+such as kettles, pans, enamel cups and plates, coils of rope, etc.
+With the inborn thriftlessness of the Indian, at the articles of
+essential worth they only glanced, after which they turned aside from
+them. Not until an hour had passed did one of the men make up his mind
+to take a top-hat for his present, broad-brimmed and dusty, from off
+which most of the silk was worn--a relic, perhaps, of the outside
+respectability with which one of the Winnipeg partners had been wont
+to clothe himself years since, when he went to church and still had
+hopes that one day he might live to see himself an honest man. But the
+second visitor could find nothing that met with his approval; now that
+his companion was owner of the top-hat, he felt that of all things,
+sacks of flour, rifles, sails, knives, that was the one and only
+present which he would have chosen. Granger was losing patience,
+though he did not dare to show it. There were so many tidings which
+that letter, if letter it was, might contain--news concerning
+Spurling, Strangeways, his mother, Mordaunt. To cut his suspense short
+by a few minutes he was willing to pay almost any price. Still the
+Indian procrastinated and seemed to be more and more inclined to
+become obstinate and offended. Transgressing the usual rule of a
+trading-store, he had seated himself on a pile of nets and was
+striking a match to light his pipe.
+
+Granger gazed round his stock in desperation, endeavouring to discover
+something, whatever its value, which would be acceptable.
+
+A sudden inspiration came to him. Reaching up to a shelf, he took down
+an oblong box, about nine inches in length, adjusted several parts of
+it on the inside, wound it up with a key which was in the back, and
+set it on the counter. A whirring, coughing noise was heard, as though
+a creature hidden inside was clearing its throat to prevent itself
+from choking; after a few seconds of this, a voice, so thin and
+whispering that it seemed impossible that it should ever have come
+from a person who owned a chest, commenced to sing with an atrocious
+perversion of the vowels,
+
+    "Sife in the h'arms of Jesus,
+      Sife on 'is gentle breast,
+    There by 'is love o'ershadowed
+      Sweetly my soul shall rest."
+
+He cut it short at the end of one verse, for he could endure no more
+of that--the tears were in his eyes. Ugly as the dialect was in itself
+and often as it had revolted him in former days, there was something
+hauntingly pathetic about it when combined with religion, and sung in
+Keewatin by that weakling voice; the London voice, shut up in the
+mildewed box, was an exile like himself. When he was a child, he had
+heard his mother sing those words, and that was at a time when he
+believed in the faith which they expressed. For him there was now no
+overshadowing God--only a careless, and perhaps unconscious, tyrant.
+
+But he had accomplished his purpose, for the Indian was won over and
+beaming with pleasure. Gramo-phones had not been long introduced into
+the district as articles of trade; as yet only the chiefs and most
+successful trappers could purchase them. To own one was equivalent to
+keeping a butler in civilisation. Seeing the greed in the man's eyes,
+he told him that he could have it so soon as he had declared his
+business and delivered his message.
+
+This promise caused the oracle to work. Diving his hand beneath his
+shirt, the Indian drew forth a pouch which was slung about his neck,
+and, opening it, produced from it a letter. Then snatching up his
+play-thing, he and his companion, proud in his top-hat, went outside
+to build their fire, and to make their camp, leaving the trader to
+himself.
+
+Granger rose up and made fast the door behind them, so that he might
+be undisturbed. Now that he held within his hand the solution to the
+problem of their visit, he was willing to postpone the fuller
+knowledge lest it should make him sad. Sitting himself down on the
+edge of the counter he drew forth his pipe and filled it slowly; and
+when that was done, still more slowly commenced searching for a match,
+found it at last and kindled the tobacco. He looked at the address; it
+was in Wrath's handwriting, but the envelope bore no stamp--it had
+evidently been sent up by him in haste over the entire six hundred and
+eighty miles by private carrier. That meant that the news was
+important, for such means of transit were expensive. Breaking the
+seal, he found a letter enclosed, which had been addressed to him in
+care of Wrath; it also was unstamped, but it bore in the left-hand
+corner the name of his mother's firm of London solicitors. About it
+was folded a note from Wrath himself, which read:
+
+     DEAR GRANGER,
+
+     The enclosed letter arrived here by yesterday's mail.
+     It was accompanied by a letter to myself from some
+     London lawyers, urging me to deliver it into your hands
+     in the quickest possible time, regardless of expense.
+     Carrying out my instructions, I am sending it up to
+     you by private messengers; heaven knows how long it
+     would take to get to you, were I to send it any other
+     way. Of course I shall dock the cost of its transit
+     from your salary, which means that if you don't have a
+     good year's trade, I sha'n't have much to pay you.
+
+                    Yours,
+                          CHARLES E. WRATH.
+
+His mother's lawyers! That meant that his mother had relented, and was
+anxious to have him home again. His heart leapt at the thought--and
+then he remembered that there were Peggy and the death of Strangeways
+as obstacles to his return.
+
+He undid the wrapping of the lawyer's letter and, as he read, the
+blood went from his face. It was to tell him, in formal language, that
+his mother was dead, and that, if he would fulfil certain conditions,
+he was to become heir to the property which she had left. The estate
+was valued at fifteen thousand pounds. The conditions were, that he
+was to return to England within four months from the writing of this
+letter, and take up his permanent residence there. If for any reason
+he should be unwilling or unable to agree to these terms, the money
+was to be divided among certain charities which his mother had named
+in her will. That was all. So the chance for which he had waited had
+come at last, and he was unable to take it--and his mother was dead!
+
+He sat very still and motionless. The flies drummed against the
+panes--they also were captives. Outside, across the river, the
+whippoorwill continued to cry, demanding entrance into Beorn's body
+because it was his soul. Peggy came to the door, tried to open it,
+rattled the latch and announced that the meal was ready: he took no
+notice of her, and presently she went away. For hours he sat like a
+man of stone, making no pretence at thinking; of one fact only was he
+aware, that with both hands, for the want of a little patience, he had
+thrown away all his chances of return. He was lost--lost--lost.
+
+As the hours dragged by the flies grew tired of trying to escape, and
+the whippoorwill of calling; the whole world fell silent. He wished
+that the darkness might come, so that he might hide himself; but in
+June time, on the Last Chance River, it is never utterly night. When
+the sun has sunk from the sky the sunset lingers, gradually working
+round toward the dawn; through the summer months, as if to make amends
+for the long dark winter days, it always leaves a little torch of
+promise burning somewhere along the horizon. The perpetual brightness
+of the world outside seemed to jeer him; it was as careless in its way
+as the winter had been of the solitariness of his soul.
+
+But at last the shadows lengthened in the store, and through the
+dusty, cobwebbed window he could see that the sky had grown indigo and
+grey. So his mother was dead, and he would never look on her again.
+They had not understood one another, and now, with whatever longing he
+might desire it, he could never explain. He had abandoned her for the
+sake of his father's quest, that he might seek out El Dorado--and this
+was the wage of his sacrifice, thirty, perhaps forty long years of
+life at Murder Point, shared in the company of a squaw, a hurried
+burial one day, and an unnoticed grave.
+
+He could not accept the conditions set forth in the lawyer's letter
+and return to London in the two months which remained--there were the
+Mounted Police to prevent him, and there was Peggy. He had chosen his
+own path in life, and he must follow it without complaint to the
+bitter end. He tried to think himself back into the opinion of the
+morning, when he had fancied that he preferred the Last Chance River
+to any other place. He could not think that now; he knew that it was
+no more than a consoling lie. Then he ceased to think and grew drowsy.
+
+He was aroused by the faint and far-away sound of singing. The dusk
+had gathered and it must be nearing midnight. He was stiff from
+sitting so long in a cramped position; he rose to his feet and rubbed
+his eyes. The window was ruddy with the shifting light of the Indians'
+camp-fire; occasionally, when the flame shot up, its brightness stole
+across the ceiling and illumined the walls of the store. He listened;
+the tune that was sung seemed to him familiar and puzzled him, for he
+was not fully awake. Drifting through the stillness of the northern
+twilight, at an hour when even the beasts of the forests held their
+breath because of God's nearness and His solemnity, there reached his
+ears the vulgar strutting tones of a music-hall singer's voice:
+
+    "As I walked through Leicester Square
+    With my most magnificent air,
+    You should hear the girls declare
+    'Why, he's a millionaire;'
+    And they turn around and sigh,
+    And they wink the other eye,
+    'He's the man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo.'"
+
+The coarse suggestiveness of the words, the cheap passions which they
+implied, the leer and pomposity with which they had been uttered by
+the comedian, the unhealthy, narrow-chested, pavement-bred audience
+by which the effort had been greeted with applause, the total
+uncleanness and unnaturalness of city-life, came vividly home to him.
+
+He did not stop to reason, or to trace his repugnance to its
+source--to his native hostility to the impurity and strengthlessness
+of multitudes of creatures who arrogantly boast that they are
+civilised--he was too angry for that. He was only conscious that a
+vain and impertinent echo of the town had, by his instrumentality,
+found its way into and vilified the secret refuge of God's austerity.
+Tearing back the bolts from the storehouse door and lifting the latch,
+he rushed out into the cool half-light.
+
+Half-way between himself and the pier he saw the Indians' camp-fire,
+with four figures squatting round, two of which were Peggy's and
+Beorn's. Running down the descent, he burst into their midst, seized
+the offending gramophone and crushed it down with his heel into the
+flames. His foot was scorched, but he did not care for that. When his
+work was accomplished, turning savagely upon his spectators he said,
+"I'll teach you to offend God's silence," and strode away, leaving
+them staring after him through the shadows, terrified and amazed.
+Suddenly he returned; there was a gentler look upon his face. Going up
+to where Peggy sat, he took her by the hand, and, without a word, led
+her out of the circle of firelight towards the shack.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE DEAD SOUL SPEAKS OUT
+
+
+The Man with the Dead Soul was drunk, heartily and shamelessly drunk;
+Granger, the contriver of his condition, sat facing him, impatiently
+waiting to see whether that was true which the Indians said, that,
+when drink had subdued his body, his soul returned for a little space.
+
+The nominal occasion of the carousal was the home-coming of Eyelids
+and, as Granger had subtly put it, "the celebration of his own
+entrance into the family of Ericsen." However, in a country from which
+there is no means of escape, save through the magic doors of
+imagination, and where men get so bored with themselves, and their
+environment, and one another, that they are willing to seek a
+temporary release by drinking such noxious drugs as pain-killer,
+essence of ginger, of peppermint, etc., for the sake of the alcohol
+which they contain, the only excuse necessary for intoxication is
+opportunity. Spirits of any kind are strictly forbidden in Keewatin,
+that the Indians may be protected from intemperance; nevertheless,
+despite all precautions of the Mounted Police, a certain quantity
+finds its way up in disguised forms, or smuggled in sacks of flour and
+bales of traders' merchandise.
+
+Granger, being well aware that the fool says with his lips what the
+wise man knows in his heart, had determined that both the menfolk of
+his adopted house should play the fool that night. Whatever Beorn and
+Eyelids might do or say, and however intoxicated they might become, he
+had planned for himself that he would keep quite sober, with his wits
+about him, that he might recall next day what they had done and said
+when thus taken off their guard. There were two problems which he was
+anxious to solve; the first, the reason for his brother-in-law's long
+delay; the second, what it was that they watched for with such
+eagerness, and waved to at the bend.
+
+The latter problem had become still more perplexing since Eyelids'
+return that morning, for in the afternoon, when they were sitting
+together outside the shack, he also had seen something down-river,
+and, following his father's and sister's example, had risen to his
+feet, commenced to wave, and, when it had disappeared, had inquired,
+"Who was that fellow?" Straightway Beorn had scowled him into silence,
+and Peggy, leaning over, had whispered some words in a Cree-dialect,
+which Granger did not understand; whereupon an expression of fear and
+wonder had come into Eyelids' face. When Granger, having taken him
+apart, had asked him for an explanation, he had only shaken his head
+stupidly, saying that he must have been mistaken, and that there was
+nothing there. This was manifestly false, for during all the remaining
+portion of the daylight his eyes had kept continually furtively
+returning down-river towards the bend.
+
+The fact that he also had seen something, did away with Granger's
+supposition that it was to her brother, lurking in the vicinity, that
+Peggy had signalled with her hand--and made him the more curious to
+know the real cause. Could it be Spurling, he wondered, who had made
+a compact with them and lay in hiding there? If that was so, then what
+had been the reason of Eyelids' delay,--for he had not stayed to
+collect any caches of furs, but had come back empty-handed, walking by
+the river-bank. He had watched to see whether anyone had put out from
+the store to leave provisions at the bend; but no one had been there,
+unless at a time when he slept. His passion to share the secret had
+become all-consuming, as curiosity must when it works in the mind of a
+lonely man. To this end he had shadowed Eyelids all that day, giving
+him no opportunity for private talk with his family, and, finally, had
+prepared this trap of a drinking-bout, hoping that someone might
+commit himself. As yet he had this to his advantage, that the
+half-breed, though he had witnessed the signals, was almost as
+ignorant as himself as to their real purport, and was therefore,
+probably, just as curious.
+
+They were sitting in a room, empty and comfortless, which was built on
+to the end of the oblong which comprised the store. Its walls were
+damp, and the news-papers, with which they had been covered, sagged
+down from the boards like monstrous goitres. It had one window, which
+looked riverwards, across whose panes, dust and cobweb smirched, a
+muslin curtain had been hung by a previous agent, who was reputed to
+have drunk himself to death. This was its only attempt at decoration,
+save for a faded photo of a girl attired in early Victorian dress,
+across the right-hand corner of which was scrawled, "Yours, with love,
+from Gertrude." She looked a good girl, and Granger felt sorry for her
+because, by the ordinary laws of nature, she had probably been dead
+for many years; and he also felt sorry for her because he was certain
+that the man who had placed her picture there had gone away and
+disappointed her in her love.
+
+Perhaps he had been the agent who, sitting there night after night,
+gazing upon her portrait, torturing himself with memories of the
+happiness which he had lost, had drunk himself to death. If that was
+so, she had had her revenge. Going closer, he saw that the
+photographer's name was recorded there, "Joseph Dean, New Bedford,
+Mass." So she had been a New Englander, and her lover, whoever he was,
+had probably started life as a sailor in the whaling fleet which at
+that time set out annually from New Bedford for the North. In Keewatin
+the memories of men for their neighbours, especially if they happen to
+be private traders, are very short.
+
+The room contained little furniture. There was a wooden shelf, knocked
+together out of packing-cases, which ran along one side of the wall
+and had probably done service as a bed. There was an upturned box, on
+which a man might seat himself; and a low three-legged stool which
+would serve as a table--that was all. In imitation of the no more
+lavish accommodation set apart for single men at the Hudson Bay
+Company's forts, the room was commonly known as Bachelors' Hall. The
+door was fast-shut; the curtain was half-drawn before the window,
+shutting out the long-tarrying June twilight; the three men had been
+there together for four hours, and as yet nothing of importance had
+transpired, and no word had been spoken.
+
+Eyelids, with his lashless lids (hence his sobriquet) half-closed,
+squatted on the floor, Indian fashion, directing his pipe to his mouth
+with uncertain hand. The other hand fumbled continually in his
+breast, as if he kept something hidden there. Granger wondered what it
+was.
+
+Beorn sprawled his great length of legs along the shelf, his back and
+head resting against the wall. His eyes were very bright, and a long
+and ugly scar, which extended from the right of his forehead to his
+lower jaw, and which Granger did not remember to have noticed before,
+showed swollen and red through the tangled mass of his grey beard. His
+pipe also was in his mouth, but his hand was still steady. Under the
+influence of drink a new intentness had come into his face, all his
+features seemed to be more keen and pointed. Every now and again he
+would remove his pipe, as if he were about to break into speech; then,
+either through laziness or from the tyranny of his habitual caution,
+he would replace it and, as it seemed to Granger, relapse into
+memories. He watched him closely, and he thought he saw the elation of
+old successes, and emotions of forgotten defeats, flit across his
+countenance. Granger himself was quite sober, having only pretended to
+drink; if he sat a trifle huddled on his box and lurched unsteadily,
+it was only that he might keep his companions unsuspicious.
+
+On the crazy little stool between them stood a candle from which the
+wax occasionally dripped, so that for a moment the flame would die
+down, causing the shadows to shorten. A jam-jar did service as a
+tumbler; there was one between the three of them, which meant that
+they had to drink quickly in order not to keep the next man waiting.
+Granger served out the whisky, and he served it neat--when men are
+intent on getting drunk they do not procrastinate by adding water.
+
+Eyelids was getting more and more peaceful and foolish, smiling first
+to himself and then slily to Granger, as though he had some very happy
+knowledge which he was burning to communicate. At last he pulled out
+his hand from his shirt, and there was something in it. Beorn, raised
+three feet from the floor on his shelf, could not see what his son was
+doing, nor did he care; he was reliving the past, when there was no
+Eyelids.
+
+But Granger watched; the fingers opened a trifle and revealed the
+shining of something yellow. Quick as thought, before the fingers
+could close over it again, he pretended to lose his balance, and,
+shooting out his foot as if to save himself, sent the yellow lump
+flying from the half-breed's palm. It shot into the air, fell with a
+thud, and rolled scintillating into the darkness across the boarded
+floor. Before he could be detained, Granger had sprung after it and
+held it in his hand. He faced round, ready to defend himself; but
+there was no necessity. Eyelids, having attempted to rise and having
+found that his legs would not carry him, had sunk back to his
+squatting position on the floor, where he was smiling foolishly and
+nodding his head as much as to say, "I've been telling you all
+evening, but you would not believe me; now I have proved my word!"
+
+Beorn was sitting upright on his shelf, looking at him keenly. As
+Granger approached, he held out his hand; Granger placed the yellow
+lump in it.
+
+"Gold," he cried, and his eyes flashed; "a river nugget!" Then
+weighing it carefully, "Three ounces," he said; "it's worth about
+forty dollars."
+
+"How do you know that?" asked Granger. "Was it river gold that you
+found on the Comstock? I thought that it was quartz."
+
+"It was quartz afterwards, but nuggets and dust first." Then,
+remembering himself, he asked suspiciously, "But what d'you know about
+it?"
+
+"I ought to know something," Granger replied, speaking thickly and
+shamming intoxication; "I ought to know something; I was one of the
+first men in on the Klondike gold-rush."
+
+"Damn it! So you were one of the Klondike men? Tell me about it."
+
+Granger had intended to spin him a yarn about great bonanzas in Yukon,
+which he had discovered. It was to have been a hard-luck tale of
+claims which had been stolen, and claims which had been jumped, and
+claims which had been given away for a few pounds of flour or slices
+of bacon in crises of starvation; but in the presence of the old man's
+eagerness, and with the shining nugget of temptation between them, he
+drifted unconsciously into straight talk and told him his own true
+story.
+
+At first, while he was feeling his way, he gave the history of Bobbie
+Henderson, and Siwash George, and Skookum Jim, the real discoverers of
+the Klondike; and of how Bobbie Henderson was done out of his share,
+so that he still remained a poor man and prospector when others, who
+had come into the Yukon years later, had worked their claims, grown
+wealthy, and departed. Then he recited the Iliad of the stampede from
+Forty-Mile, when the rumour had spread abroad that Siwash George had
+found two-dollars-fifty to the pan at the creek which he had named
+"Bonanza"; how drunken men were thrown into open boats, and men who
+refused to credit the report were bound hand and foot with ropes by
+their friends and compelled to go along, lest they should lose the
+chance of a lifetime; and how, where to-day Forty-Mile had been a
+noisy town, to-morrow it was silent and deserted, with none left save
+a few old men and sickly women to tell the story.
+
+To all of this Beorn listened with small attention, for he kept
+muttering to himself, "But how did he know that there was gold there?
+How did he discover it?" Granger wondered to whom he was referring--to
+his own son, to Siwash George, or to someone else; but he dared not
+ask him a leading question lest his suspicion should be aroused. He
+went on with his narration feverishly, forgetting in his excitement
+his resolution to keep sober, emptying the tumbler of whisky
+recklessly, turn and turn about with his companion, waiting and
+watching to see whether, in the Indian phrase, the dead soul would
+return. When he commenced to speak of himself, of his passage from
+Skaguay to Dawson, of the wealth which he found and lost at Drunkman's
+Shallows, and of his flight, Beorn became interested; his eyes blazed
+and every few seconds he would give him encouragement, ejaculating
+hoarsely, "Go on. Go on."
+
+So he carried his history to an end with a rush, for now he knew that
+the dead soul had come back. He finished with the sentence, "And then
+I went to Wrath, for I was nearly starving. 'For God's sake, man, give
+me some employment,' I said. 'I can't steal; they'd put me in gaol for
+that, and so I should disgrace my mother. And I can't cut throats for
+bread, for then I should get hanged. But, if I have to endure this
+agony much longer, I shall do both.' And his reply was to send me up
+here, to this ice-cold hell of snow and silence, to mind his store and
+watch the Last Chance River flowing on and on, until the day of my
+death. God curse the reptile and his charity."
+
+The Man with the Dead Soul turned his head aside and there was silence
+for a moment. Then, bending down and having assured himself that
+Eyelids was asleep. "I've known all that," he said; "but, unlike you,
+I did more 'an intend--I killed my man. I guess you an' I are o' one
+family now, so there's no harm in tellin'. I don't just remember who
+you are, nor how we happen to be here this night; but you placed that
+gold in my hand, so I reckon you're all right. You ain't a Mormon, are
+you?" he asked abruptly.
+
+Granger, taken aback by the question, smiled slowly and shook his
+head.
+
+"Well, then, I'd have you to know," Beorn continued, "that I was
+brought up in the Mormon faith. One o' the earliest memories I have is
+o' the massacre o' the Latter-Day Saints at Gallatin, when Governor
+Boggs issued his order that we should be exterminated an' driven out.
+I can still see the soldiery ridin' up an' down, pillagin' our city,
+insultin' our womenfolk, an' cuttin' down our men. I can just remember
+the misery o' the winter through which we fled, an' the tightness o'
+my mother's arms about me as we crossed the Mississippi, goin' into
+Illinois for safety. From my earliest childhood my mind has bin made
+accustomed to travellin's, an' privations, an' deeds o' blood. That's
+the sort o' man I am.
+
+"It was six years after the Gallatin affair, when our city o' Nauvoo
+had been founded, that the mob once more rose agin us an' murdered our
+prophets, an' placed our lives in danger. Again we fled, crossin' the
+Mississippi on the ice, till we gained a breathin' space at Council
+Bluffs. A year after that, under Brigham Young, we passed through the
+Rockies to the Great Salt Lake an' came to rest. All this persecootion
+caused our people to become a hard an' bitter race; but I'd have been
+true to 'em if it hadn't bin for my mother, an' the manner o' her
+death. How did she die? Don't ask me, for I can't tell you. She was a
+Swede, a kind o' white slave, who was kept with several other women by
+my father. She went out one day, an' never came back. I believe she'd
+got heartsick, an' was plannin' t' escape with a feller o' her own
+nationality, a newcomer. Anyhow, when I asked my father about her, he
+threatened me into silence. He was a priest o' the order o'
+Melchizedek, a powerful man among the prophets. From that hour I hated
+Mormonism, an' determined t' escape whenever my chance occurred. It
+came sooner 'an I expected.
+
+"The Californian gold-rush had robbed the Saints o' the seaboard to
+which they was hopin' to lay claim. They began to get nervous lest the
+southern territories, from Salt Lake to the Mexican frontier, might
+also be lost to 'em if they didn't do something so they organised the
+State of Deseret, an' sent out expeditions to take it up before it
+could fall into the Gentiles' hands. My father, I believe, had grown
+'fraid o' me, lest I should take his life; so he had me included in
+the first expedition, which consisted o' eighty men, an' was sent to
+garrison a Mormon station in Carson Valley, Nevada.
+
+"I've allaws had a nose for gold, an' we hadn't bin there a month
+before I'd discovered an' washed out a little dust from a neighbourin'
+gulch. I kept my secret to myself, an' when I'd gathered enough,
+bought provisions, stole a horse, an' ran away, escapin' over the
+Sierras into California, where I hoped that the Mormons, an'
+especially my father, would lose all trace o' me an' give me up for
+dead. For eight years I drifted along the coast from camp to camp,
+but didn't have much luck. I even went so far south as Mexico, where I
+laboured in the silver mines an' learned the Mexican method o'
+crushin' quartz with arrastras.
+
+"All this time I was haunted by the memory o' the gold which I'd
+washed out in Carson Valley; the more I thought about it, the more
+certain I was that untold riches lay buried there. However, I was
+fearful to return, lest I should fall into the clutches o' the
+priesthood o' Melchizedek or o' the spies o' Brigham Young. I was an
+apostate, an' my father was my enemy; I knew that, should I once be
+recovered by the Mormons, no mercy would be shown me. At last the news
+came that the struggle o' the Saints for possession o' Nevada had been
+given up, an' that messengers had bin sent out from Salt Lake biddin'
+all emigrants return. For eight years I'd bin unmolested; I thought
+that I'd bin forgotten, an' that it was safe to turn my steps
+eastward.
+
+"I travelled day an' night to get back to my first discovery; I was
+tortured wi' the thought that before I got there someone might have
+rediscovered it, an' have staked it out. I'd crossed the Sierras, an'
+was within a two-days' journey o' my destination, when I came to a
+lonely valley as the sun was settin', an' there I camped. The place
+looked God-forsaken; there was nothin' in sight but rocks, an' sand,
+an' sage-brush. I lit my fire, an' tethered my horse, an', being
+dog-tired, was soon asleep. Suddenly I woke up, an' was conscious o'
+footsteps goin' stealthily, away from me into the darkness. I jumped
+to my feet an' seized my gun; but my eyes were dazed with sleep an'
+firelight so that I could see nothin'. I ran out into the shadows,
+followin' the footsteps, but, before I could come up with 'em, their
+sound had changed to that o' a horse, gallopin' northward, growin'
+fainter and fainter.
+
+"I returned to my camp an' examined my baggage; nothin' was missin',
+not even the gold which I'd carried--all seemed safe. I sat up an'
+watched till daybreak, an', havin' snatched a hasty breakfast,
+commenced t' pack my animal. Then it was that I discovered, slipped
+beneath a strap o' my saddle, a sheet o' paper. Unfoldin' it, I saw
+that it was scrawled over in a rude an' almost unreadable hand. This
+was what it said, 'This demand of ours shall remain uncancelled, an'
+shall be to you as was the Ark o' God among the Philistines. Unless
+you return to your father's house an' to the people o' your father's
+faith, you shall be visited by the Lord o' Hosts wi' thunder an' wi'
+earthquakes, wi' floods, wi' pestilence, wi' famine, an' wi'
+bloodshed, until the day of your death, when your name shall not be
+known among men.'
+
+"I was seized with panic, for then I knew that the spies o' Mormon had
+traced me. But I wouldn't turn back, for I knew that the treasure for
+which I had waited, as Jacob waited for Rachel, lay straight ahead. So
+I rode forward, tremblin' as I went, carryin' my gun in my hand. At
+the end o' the second day I came t' Johntown, an' found that many
+things had changed since I had left. There were a dozen shanties in
+the town; these were occupied wi' gamblers, storekeepers, an'
+liquor-sellers, includin' two white women an' Sarah Winnemucca, the
+Piute princess. But the placer-miners had been at work, an' the
+gulches were dotted with the tents an' dugouts o' men who had
+discovered my secret for themselves. Thomas Paige Comstock was in the
+gang, the man who gave his name to the first great strike. They
+called 'im Old Pancake, 'cause he was too busy searchin' for gold to
+bake bread. Even at that time, as wi' spoon in hand he stirred the
+pancake batter, he kept his eyes on the crest o' some distant peak,
+an' was lost in dreams o' avarice.
+
+"I hadn't bin there long before I took up wi' a feller named Peter
+O'Riley, an' we became pards. We determined to try our luck in the
+Walker River Mountains, where some new placers had bin started; but we
+hadn't got the money, so we agreed t' work a claim in Six-Mile Canon
+till we'd taken out enough dust t' pay for an outfit. We dug a trench
+straight up the hillside, by Old Man Caldwell's Spring, through blue
+clay an' a yellowish kind o' gravel. But the spring wasted down the
+slope, so we stopped work on the trench an' commenced to sink a pit to
+collect the water an' make a reservoir. We hadn't sunk more 'an four
+feet when we struck a darker an' heavier soil, which sparkled as we
+shovelled it above ground. We washed out a panful, an' found that the
+bottom was fairly covered in gold. This was the top o' the famous
+Ophir, had we only known it. We jumped to our feet an' shouted, for it
+was the richest placer that had as yet bin found. We gave up our
+notion o' the Walker River, an' I began to laugh int' myself at the
+Mormon threat, that I should suffer from all the plagues o' Egypt, an'
+die an unknown man. We were rich--rich--rich.
+
+"Just as we were finishin' our day's work, Old Pancake rides up. He'd
+bin lookin' for a mustang that he'd lost, an' came gallopin' over the
+ridge, with his long legs brushin' the sage tops. We tried to hide our
+discovery, but his eyes were too sharp for that. He saw the gold from
+our last clean-up glistenin' in the bottom o' the pan, as the sunset
+lit on it. 'You've struck it, boys,' he cried.
+
+"Jumpin' from his horse, he went down into the pit t' examine for
+hisself. He stayed down there some time; when he come up his face was
+grave. He'd done a lot of thinkin' in a very short while. He sat down
+on the hillside, an' was silent for so long that we began to suspect
+there was somethin' up.
+
+"At last he said, 'Now, see here, boys, this spring was old man
+Caldwell's. I an' Manny Penrod bought his claim last winter, an' we
+sold a tenth to Old Virginia th' other day. If you two fellers'll let
+Manny an' myself in on equal shares, it's all right; if not, it's all
+wrong.'
+
+"We were a bit afraid o' Old Pancake; he'd bin longer in the district
+'an we had. We didn't think to doubt his word, though, as we
+afterwards discovered, every word that he spoke was false. Anyhow,
+after a lot 'o argiment, we agreed to let him an' Manny Penrod in on
+the terms which he'd suggested. That was the beginnin' o' the Johntown
+gold-rush, an' I, for the second time, was one o' the discoverers. At
+first we named the place Pleasant Hill Camp, an' I can tell you it was
+mighty pleasant to be takin' out a thousand dollars a day per man. But
+later, when a city commenced t' spring up, it was necessary t' find
+some other name. We quarrelled a good deal about what we'd call it;
+but one night, when Old Virginia was goin' home with the boys drunk,
+carryin' a bottle o' whisky in 'is hand, he stumbled as he reached his
+cabin, an' the bottle fell an' was broke. Risin' to his knees, with
+the neck o' the bottle held fast in 'is hand, he coughed out, 'I
+baptise this ground Virginia town.' An' so Virginia town, which was
+afterwards changed t' city, the handful o' shanties was named.
+
+"For all that my prospects were lookin' so rosy, I was really havin'
+bad luck. Day after day, I was throwin' away wagon-loads o' 'blue
+stuff,' as all th' other miners were doin', an' as those who had gone
+before us had done--we damned it, an' didn't know its value. A month
+after I'd sold out, a feller had some o' it assayed, an' it was found
+to be worth nearly seven thousand dollars in gold an' silver per ton.
+
+"I guess that curse o' the Mormons was more powerful 'an it seemed at
+first sight--it's followed me through life an' ruined all the men with
+whom I've come in touch. Old Virginia was thrown from his horse, an'
+killed while drunk. O'Riley sold out his share for forty thousand
+dollars, the bulk o' which he spent in wildcat speculations, so that,
+what wi' disappointment an' loss, he finished out his days in a
+madhouse. Penrod sold for eight thousand, an' soon spent everything he
+had. Old Pancake sold for eleven thousand, an' lost every dollar.
+Then, gettin' sick o' seein' other fellers grow rich out o' what had
+bin his, he wandered off prospecting an' blew out his brains wi' his
+own gun in the mountains o' Montana. A chap named Hansard, one o' our
+first millionaires, died a pauper an' was buried at the public
+expense. As for myself, you can see what I've become--the Man wi' the
+Dead Soul."
+
+He paused, and looked round at Granger. "_The Man wi' the Dead Soul_,"
+he repeated, "that's what I am. When I die, my name will not be known
+among men."
+
+"I don't suppose there's any of us'll be remembered long," said
+Granger. "There's a man out there on the bend; I was at Oxford with
+him. He was one of the finest oars that England ever had. The papers
+were full of him once. A sporting edition never came out but . . ."
+
+He was interrupted. "Pass the whisky," Beorn said; "if we're goin' to
+be forgot, it don't much matter what we do or have done; an' we may as
+well forget."
+
+He swallowed the spirit greedily at one quick gulp. "Where'd I got to?
+Oh, yes, I'd sold out my claim for money down, an' made a fool o'
+myself. You see I thought that my find was a gash-vein an' would soon
+peter out, an' that I was doin' somethin' mighty clever to sell at
+all. Instead o' which, I'd only skimmed the surface an' hadn't gone
+deep enough. The men who bought from us sank down till they came to
+the main lode, an' then there was the discovery o' what that 'blue
+stuff,' which we'd bin throwin' away, was really worth; from them two
+causes came the Washoe gold-rush. You never saw anythin' like that,
+not even in the Klondike. It was maddenin' for me to stand by an'
+watch these men, who'd come from a thousand miles east an' west, just
+t' handle the pickin's o' the wealth which I had once possessed an'
+hadn't had the sense to know about. They lived in tents, an' huts, an'
+holes in the hillsides, an' paid seventy-five cents for a pound o'
+flour, in the hopes that, when the summer 'ad come, they might get a
+chance to prospect.
+
+"Before winter 'ad gone, they was leadin' strings o' mules across the
+mountains, on blankets spread above the snow, that they might get
+provisions in an' prevent us from starvin'. An' I, the feller as
+they'd come to rob, had to sit still an' watch it all.
+
+"Before the roads were fit for travel, all the world was journeyin'
+towards us. There were Irishmen, pushin' wheelbarrows; an' Mexicans
+with burros; an' German miners, an' French, an' English, an' Swedes,
+ploddin' through the mud across the Sierras with their tools upon
+their backs; there were organ-grinders an' Jew pedlars, an' women
+dressed as men, all comin' to Virginia City to claim the gold which I
+'ad lost. I sat every day idly watchin' their approach, an' I hated
+them. I'd begun to believe in the Mormon's curse, an' to let things
+slide. There didn't seem to be much sense in stakin' out a new
+claim--if I made another fortune, I felt certain that I'd surely lose
+it all.
+
+"Along wi' the adventurers an' prospectors came desperadoes, who
+intended to make their fortune at the gun's point, by shootin'
+straight! There was the Tombstone Terror, an' the Bad Man from Bodie,
+an' Sam Brown, the greatest bully o' them all. One night a half-witted
+feller asked him how many men he'd chopped. 'Ninety-nine,' says Sam,
+'an' you're the hundredth.' He seizes him by the neck an' rips him to
+pieces wi' his bowie-knife. Then he lay down an' went to sleep on the
+billiard table, while the father gathered up what remained o' his son
+from the floor.
+
+"An' there was El Dorado Johnny, who, whenever he was goin' to shoot a
+man, bought a new suit o' clothes an' had a shave, an' got his hair
+cut an' his boots polished so that, in case there was any mistake, he
+might make a handsome corpse. These were some o' the men that I lived
+among, an', like God, I said nothin' to any of 'em, but watched an'
+was interested in 'em all.
+
+"I suppose I enjoyed myself, for I couldn't help laughin' quietly at
+their expense. 'What went ye out for to seek?' I would ask as, sittin'
+by the outskirts o' the town, I saw this army o' men an' women
+struggle in from the mountain trail. An' then I'd answer myself, 'We
+have come that we may dig out gold, that others may take it from us.
+We have come to exchange our health an' hope for disease an'
+disappointment. We have come to gain all the world, which we shall not
+gain--an' to lose our own souls.'
+
+"I tell you, it's mighty strange to think o' where all the gold, which
+those brave chaps o' the Old Virginia days dug out, has gone. Some o'
+it's been made into a necklace t' hang about a lady's throat; and some
+o' it's gone to Rome t' gild a cross; and some o' it's been made into
+a weddin' ring that a young girl might get married. I don't suppose
+the folk in the old lands ever think of how far the gold which they
+wear has travelled, nor how many have died in its gettin'. Some, which
+'as bin made into a watch and goes to the city every day, may have
+come from King Solomon's mines in ships o' Tarshish; an' the king may
+have worn it hisself in his temple, or have given it away to the
+dark-skinned girl that he wrote that song about.
+
+"When I thought o' these things in Old Virginia, it made me sort o'
+happy, so that I didn't mind what the Mormons 'ad said. Time seemed so
+endless, an' life so short, that I didn't seem called on to worry
+myself--only t' watch. If I found a new claim which panned out rich, I
+didn't work it myself; for I knew that, though I seemed lucky, I
+should end unlucky. An' I didn't tell anyone else about it; an' if
+they found it out for theirselves, I was angry. I'd found the Ophir,
+an' hadn't made anythin' out o' it--that was a big enough present for
+one man to make to his world.
+
+"So I just looked on, an' saw the fools rushin' in who expected to
+pile up fortunes. And I saw the camels comin' in an' out, carryin'
+salt to Virginia from the desert. They'd bin brought from Asia, an' I
+could see that they felt as I felt, an' despised the greed an' hurry
+o' what was goin' on. Later some of 'em got so disgusted that they
+escaped from their drivers--at that time they was bein' used in
+Arizona t' carry ore. I've often smiled when I've fancied the terror
+o' some lone prospector, should one o' them long-legged brutes poke up
+his nose above a ridge where gold had just been found, and sniff
+scornfully down on the feller. Some o' them camels may be still livin'
+an' doin' it at this very minute."
+
+Beorn opened his jaws wide and laughed. Granger had never heard him
+laugh before, and the sound was not pleasant. There was nothing of
+mirth about the man or in anything that he said--there was only
+disappointment and scorn. His bitterness became horrible when he
+pretended to be merry. "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh;
+the Lord shall have them in derision." It was like the thunderous
+scoffing of the Lord God of the Hebrews.
+
+The candle had gone out, and the eerie light of the northland dawn,
+drifting into the room through the little space of window that was
+uncovered, made him and his companion look old and comfortless. But he
+was anxious to hear the last of the story before the soul departed, so
+he said, "And how was it that you left the Comstock Mines and came
+into Keewatin?"
+
+"I told you that I'd done what you intended, that I killed a man. I
+did more 'an that, I killed many. You see, at that time there was no
+proper minin' law in America; so when men got t'quarrellin', they
+soon took t' fightin'. So long as the Comstock was only
+placer-minin', we knew what we were about, an' there was no
+trespassin', but when we took t' tunnelling', it wasn't long before we
+was borin' under one another's ledges. The Comstock veins, startin'
+near the surface, dipped toward the west, an' therefore the first
+great conflict came with the nearest line o' claims t' the westward.
+The ledges here were very rich an' almost perpendicular, an' so the
+slopin' shafts o' the Ophir, Mexican, etc., soon ran int' the vertical
+shafts on the 'middle lead.'
+
+"The earliest case t' be tried, which I remember, was that o' the
+Ophir against McCall. The court met in a stable, an' each side come
+armed. One witness was shot at several times as he was ridin'
+homeward, down a ravine at nightfall. Party spirit ran too high, an'
+the danger o' bringin' in a unanimous verdict was too great for any
+jury t' risk their lives by comin' to an agreement. There was no
+justice; so there was nothin' left but to fight it out, the same as
+when nations go to war. An' what were they goin' to fight about? A
+metal which was only val'able because o' its rarity--which had no
+value in itself, an' couldn't help men t' godliness; one which you
+couldn't make an engine out o', nor a plough, nor even a sword,
+because it was too soft. But in order to possess it, they was goin' to
+take each other's lives. I, an' every other man in that town, had
+thrown away or were throwin' away our souls for a thing which was
+truly worthless.
+
+"One night as I slept, I heard a voice callin' to me an' sayin', 'I
+will make a man more precious than gold; even a man than the golden
+wedge o' Ophir. Therefore I will shake the heavens, an' the earth
+shall remove out o' her place, in th' wrath o' the Lord o' Hosts, an'
+in the day o' his fierce anger.' I heard that voice callin' to me not
+once, but several times; an' when I woke up, an' walked through the
+town, an' saw the men o' the Ophir preparin' to shoot down the men o'
+the McCall, I could still hear the voice repeating, 'Even a man than
+the golden wedge o' Ophir.'
+
+"I went back to my shanty, an' found my Bible, an' read it many days,
+never stirrin' out. I remember there was one passage that seemed to
+accuse myself, an' to explain my own failure--'If I have made gold my
+hope, or have said to the fine gold, "Thou art my confidence"; if I
+rejoiced because my wealth was great, an' because mine hand had gotten
+much; if I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walkin' in
+brightness, an' my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath
+kissed my hand: this also were an iniquity to be punished by the
+judge, for I should have denied the God that is above.'
+
+"I'd done all that. When I'd looked at the sun, I'd seen gold; when
+I'd looked at the moon, I'd thought of silver; an' when I'd found both
+the silver an' the gold in the Ophir, by Old Man Caldwell's Spring, my
+mouth had kissed my own hand--an' not God's. An' what I'd done, every
+one else was doin' in Virginia City; an' the Lord o' Hosts was angry,
+an' that was why men were killin' one another. So, when I'd sat still
+an' figured it all out, I said, 'God spoke to me because I'm the one
+man on the Comstock who, when he's found gold, tries to bury it; an'
+He spoke to me because He wants me to join with Him, an' help Him to
+shake the heavens.' So out I walked, day after day, an' watched things
+growin' from bad to worse; an' when I'd seen all I wanted, I come
+home an' read my Bible--I knew that when God had need o' me He would
+send His messenger.
+
+"One night a miner come to my cabin, an' he said, 'Are you ready to
+fight for the Fair-Haired Annie?'
+
+"'I'm ready,' I said, 'but what's it all about?'
+
+"'From a drift, a hundred feet down,' said he, 'that we're workin' on
+at present, we can hear the picks o' the Bloody Thunder drawin' nearer
+an' nearer; they'll break through to-morrer into one o' our ledges.'
+
+"'What then?' I asked.
+
+"'We're goin' to have a band o' men waitin' for 'em in the dark on our
+side o' the ledge, an' everyone o' those men is goin' to be armed. The
+moment that the picks o' the Bloody Thunder drive through an' the wall
+goes down, the men o' the Fair-Haired Annie are goin' to fire.'
+
+"'All right,' I said. 'I'm wi' you. I'll be there.'
+
+"So next day I, an' twenty other men, were lowered down the shaft; an'
+before we saw daylight again, the Fair-Haired Annie an' the Bloody
+Thunder had gone to war. That was the first o' the underground fights
+which took place on the Comstock. I picked my men, and paid 'em ten
+dollars a day, an' called my gang 'The Avengers o' the Lord.' No one
+'cept myself knew what that meant, but they learnt t' fear us, for we
+fought to the death. Often when I was waitin' in the dark, listenin'
+to the sound o' the rival miners comin' nearer, I would repeat to
+myself the words, 'I will make a man more precious 'an gold; even a
+man than the golden wedge o' Ophir.' An' when a poor chap lay dyin', I
+would say to him those words."
+
+"So you were sorry for the men you killed?"
+
+"Oh, I was sorry, though that did small good to 'em. When the Lord's
+bent on destroyin', He don't take much account o' persons. When the
+first born o' Egypt were slain, He killed the evil wi' the
+good--served 'em all alike. But it's heart-breakin' work to be made an
+avenger o' the Lord."
+
+"But I don't understand. What was there to avenge?"
+
+"What was there to avenge? Why, the sinfulness o' those men, who was
+diggin' out the power an' temptation to sin from the place where God
+had hidden it. He meant that it should stay there forever; but now
+it'll be handed down from generation to generation, as is King
+Solomon's gold, temptin' our sons' sons to lose their souls as ours
+were lost."
+
+"And when all the fighting was done, did the soldiers get after you?"
+asked Granger. But Beorn's eyes were closing, and the soul was
+departing as day returned. Already the sun was leaping above the
+horizon, and the sigh of the waking forest was heard. Granger seized
+him by the arm and shook him--he had learnt only the least part of
+that which he desired to know. "Was it for that crime that you fled,
+till you came at last to Keewatin for safety?" he shouted. "Quick,
+Beorn, tell me. Why did you go to the Forbidden River?"
+
+The eyes did not open; but, as if the soul were answering him with a
+last warning as it passed out of the door of the body, the lips
+stirred, "Ay, man, it's terrible--the things men give for gold."
+
+The face had become so ashy pale that Granger bent above it, painfully
+listening for the intake of the breath, to assure himself that Beorn
+was not dead. His clamour had aroused Eyelids; looking down towards
+him, he saw that his eyes were wide and motionless, gazing towards
+the window with an expression of drunken terror.
+
+"What's the matter?" he asked sharply.
+
+The half-breed did not reply, but crouched and pointed with his hand.
+
+Granger, turning his head and following the direction indicated,
+looked towards the triangle of uncovered window-pane, and there saw
+the face of a man, gazing hungrily in upon him--yet, not upon him, but
+upon the nugget which lay sparkling by Beorn's side upon the shelf. It
+was a face that seemed dimly familiar, but thinner and more haggard.
+At first it seemed to be his own face--the face of that _self_ from
+which he had fled. Then he recognized, and knew that Spurling had
+returned.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+SPURLING MAKES A REQUEST
+
+
+There had been a time when Granger had desired to kill Spurling, and,
+though latterly he had not consciously wished that he were dead, yet
+he resented his reappearance; his presence broke in as a
+storm-influence on the stoical quiet which he had attained. This man
+stood for so many things which had been sinful and passionate in the
+past--things which it had cost him so much even to attempt to forget;
+things which he had promised himself that he would forget for Peggy's
+sake. And now, because he had chosen to return, it seemed necessary
+that he should call to mind the entire tragedy by asking the question,
+"When you shot that woman in the Klondike, did you know that she was
+not a man? And was she clothed in a woman's dress?"
+
+Even though he kept silence, any hour Spurling himself might reopen
+the subject by inquiring after Strangeways, as to whether he had
+pursued farther, as to how he had fared, as to where he was at
+present. Granger was by no means certain that he did not already know
+that the corporal was dead. He shrank from the discomfort of playing
+the accuser again; he shrank still more from making the ugly
+confession that he himself was likely to be suspected of having
+committed a kindred crime,--a confession which would tend to degrade
+him to the level of this man whom he affected to despise. So, from
+day to day, he postponed his questions and, in the meanwhile, watched
+Spurling narrowly.
+
+His conduct had been very curious since that morning of his arrival,
+when he had announced himself by playing the spy, through the window
+of Bachelors' Hall, on the inhabitants of the Point. How long he had
+been there, and how much he had heard of what the Man with the Dead
+Soul had had to say, kneeling outside in the semi-darkness with his
+ear pressed against the pane, Granger had no means of discovering. But
+from the first it was clear to him that Spurling and Eyelids were
+possessed of a common knowledge, which made them enemies. Perhaps they
+had met before near the Forbidden River, and this had been the cause
+of Eyelids' delay.
+
+Under ordinary circumstances, the mystery would soon have been swept
+aside by the putting of a single interrogation; but men on the Last
+Chance River get out of the habit of asking leading questions; in
+their parsimony over words, they prefer to watch and to wait the
+reading of the minds of their fellows, and the secreting of their own
+motives, is almost their only pastime. So Granger watched and waited.
+
+In Spurling, so soon as he had been fed and cared for, he was quick to
+discover a change. He had become manlier and braver--more like his old
+self. He carried himself with a kind of timid pride, as though he knew
+himself to be of a greater value than he was likely to be reckoned at
+by others; almost as though he were confident that he was possessed of
+a claim to merit which, once stated, could not fail to be recognised.
+At the same time, there was a distressful hesitancy in his manner, not
+unnatural under the circumstances, of a man not sure of his
+acceptability. He seemed forever on the point of declaring himself,
+and forever thinking better of his decision--postponing his
+declaration to a later time. His bearing was an irritating combination
+of false humility and suppressed self-assertion.
+
+Beorn, when he had recovered from his debauch, was as silent,
+absorbed, and uncompanionable as ever. He appeared to have retained no
+memory of what he had said, and to be quite unconscious of Spurling's
+arrival--he had become again in all things the Man with the Dead Soul.
+
+But with Peggy and Eyelids it was different. Half-breeds as they were,
+and, by reason of their Indian blood, instinctive disguisers of
+emotion, their aversion for Spurling was plain. Sometimes, when his
+back was turned and they thought that they were unobserved, they would
+glance swiftly up at one another, and an expression would come into
+their eyes, a small pin-point of angry fire, which betokened danger
+for the man they hated. Very strangely to Granger, since Spurling's
+arrival, they had manifested a great fondness for being in his own
+company; one or other of them was never far from his side. Though he
+turned upon them angrily, telling them that he wished to be by
+himself, they continually disobeyed and, next minute, like faithful
+dogs, with apologetic faces, were to be found watching near by. What
+was the motive of their conduct? Did they think that he was in danger,
+and required protecting?
+
+But there was a graver happening which he had noticed. With Spurling's
+return, he had thought that now certainly he had solved the mystery of
+the signalling to the bend. On the first day, however, he had found
+himself mistaken. Sitting in the doorway of his store, he had watched
+the undesired one go down to the pier, push off in a canoe, and paddle
+down-river for a bathe. Quarter of a mile from the bend, he had seen
+him back-water, rise to his knees, gaze straight ahead in a startled
+manner, and then, turning quickly about, come racing back like one
+pursued for his life. Looking round, he had seen that Peggy and
+Eyelids were also witnessing these tactics, with expressions which
+betrayed their consternation. As he watched, they had raised their
+hands and waved. When Spurling had landed, he had been waiting for him
+at the pier-head. "What was it that you saw over there?" he asked
+sternly.
+
+Spurling, being panic-stricken, had at first found difficulty in
+recovering his voice. Then, "Where? What do you mean?" he had panted.
+
+Granger, in silence, had pointed northeasterly towards the bend.
+
+With a nervous laugh, though his face was bloodless, Spurling had
+replied, "Nothing. I saw nothing. I just thought that it looked a bit
+lonesome, . . . so I turned back."
+
+Gazing at him attentively, and seeing how he trembled, Granger knew
+that he had not answered truly. With a shrug of his shoulders,
+twisting round on his heel, he had said sneeringly, "On the Last
+Chance River we don't run away from loneliness as though the hangman
+were behind us. If we did, we should be running all the time."
+
+He had not stayed to see the effect of his words, but long afterwards,
+when he looked down to the water's edge, Spurling was still sitting
+there, with his head between his hands and his body shaking.
+
+Early one evening, some days later, he came to him and said, "Mr.
+Granger," and it sounded oddly from those lips--in the old days, even
+in the beginning of their acquaintance, they had never mistered one
+another, "Mr. Granger, is there anywhere we can go to be quiet? I have
+something very private which I want to say."
+
+"O yes, there's the whole of Keewatin."
+
+"But isn't there some place where we shan't be overheard?"
+
+"We can paddle down to the bend. There's only one man who can hear us
+there--and he's in his grave."
+
+"Not there. Not there," Spurling had cried, trembling with fear and
+excitement.
+
+"Well, then, if you're so particular, you can speak with me here."
+
+Spurling looked round to where, at a short distance, Eyelids was
+diligently idling above a broken net. "Somewhere where we can't be
+overheard," he reiterated. At that moment Eyelids turned his head.
+
+This continual spying on all that he did, the reason for which he
+could not comprehend, was getting on Granger's nerves; he felt that it
+would be a relief to be alone, even though it meant being alone with
+the man whom he had most cause to hate. However, somehow he pitied him
+just now; perhaps because of the manner of his address, which had
+brought into sharp contrast their present relations with those of
+other days.
+
+"There's the island up-river to the westward, where I keep my dogs in
+summer-time; if that will suit your purpose."
+
+Spurling showed his pleasure at the suggestion, and, hurrying his
+steps, led the way down to the river-bank. Getting into a canoe, they
+set out towards the west. They had not gone half a mile before they
+caught the sound of paddle-strokes behind them. Turning about, they
+saw that Eyelids was following. He attempted to loiter, and threw in a
+line as if his only intention were to fish. Granger flushed with
+anger. Without a word, he commenced to paddle back till they drew
+nearly level with the intruder, who pretended to be so engaged in his
+pastime as not to notice their approach. Then he cried in a voice that
+was choking with rage, "Get back to the Point, you half-breed spy. If
+you dare to follow me again, I'll turn you out to-morrow, and you can
+take your trade elsewhere." Nor would he proceed farther on his
+journey till he had watched his brother-in-law get safe to land; then,
+with a twist of the paddle, he brought his own craft round, and
+continued towards the sunset. Two miles up-river, in the
+middle-stream, stood a rocky island; as yet it was only a dull grey
+speck in a pathway of red.
+
+They pushed on in silence up the straight, dark grove of mysterious
+forest. Water-birds were calling in the rushes; at one point, as they
+passed, a great bull caribou lifted up his head from drinking, and
+regarded them with a look of curiosity, totally void of fear; a heron
+drifted slowly over the tree-tops, and disappeared. To Granger, with
+even this short distance placed between himself and his customary
+associates, there came a sense of release, and with it an instinct for
+kindness. As they neared the shore of the island, the huskies
+commenced to howl; soon they could see them bunched together on the
+shore awaiting their arrival. A dog in the north, even though he has
+been imported, is never heard to bark. To hear them at first, a
+stranger might suppose that a woman was wearily weeping herself to
+death in the forest, because of a grief which was inconsolable. The
+wail of the huskies, reaching him at intervals across the expanse of
+water, seemed the voice of his own desolation, coming out to meet him.
+
+The whole world was empty, and he began to feel the need of
+friendship. He let his eyes linger on the head and shoulders of the
+man in front of him, and remembered with what eagerness long ago, when
+awaiting his arrival at some appointed rendezvous, he had striven to
+catch sight of him approaching, towering above the littler people of
+the London crowd. And now, instead of brief and chance-snatched
+moments, they were allowed to pass whole days together; yet, because
+of what had happened, they could find no pleasure in one another.
+Pleasure! The only sensation which he derived from Spurling's company
+was one of intense annoyance. And there had been a time when, if
+anyone had dared to tell him that that could ever happen, he would
+have denied it with an oath.
+
+Could it be that the fault was his own, and that he had misjudged this
+man? He recalled how, when he had discovered Strangeways' body at the
+bend, and had thought it Spurling's, he had bitterly accused himself
+of all manner of unkindness. He smiled grimly at the remembrance--it
+was human nature to do that. He could quite well imagine that at some
+future time, when Spurling was truly dead, he might blame himself
+afresh, with an equal bitterness and an equal sincerity. It would be
+easy to judge charitably of him then, for he would be beyond power of
+working any further mischief to the living. It is fear, not cruelty,
+which lies at the root of all uncharitableness. If apprehension were
+removed from our lives, it would be possible for the weakest man to
+live well. It was the fact that, trusting in God, he took no thought
+for the morrow, which enabled Jesus to become Christ.
+
+Gliding round the island, they came to a sandy cove, which faced the
+sunset. There they landed. Lifting the canoe a dozen paces up the
+shore and placing it in the scrub, where it might be out of sight,
+they struck into the brushwood by a narrow trail, which at once
+commenced to climb. After three minutes of travelling, they came out
+on to a tall bare rock, to one side of which grew a solitary pine.
+From there they could command a view of the river on every side.
+
+Granger settled himself down, with his back toward his companion,
+propping himself against the pine-trunk, with his face towards the
+fading light. The huskies gathered hungrily round in a semicircle,
+squatting on their haunches, wondering whether the coming of these men
+meant that they were going to be fed. The frogs croaked in the river;
+the mosquitoes trumpetted about their heads; save for these sounds,
+and the continual low murmur of the river, there was absolute quiet.
+In this environment, his eyes upon the faery domes and fiery spires of
+the western sky, into the inmost mystery of which the Last Chance
+River led, that torturing and old desire, which had always made it
+impossible for him to enjoy the moment in its flight, again possessed
+his mind: he had known it from a child, the ambition to follow,
+follow, follow, in the hope that somewhere, perhaps behind the setting
+sun, he might arrive at the land of perfectness for which he craved.
+
+His thoughts were disturbed somewhat brutally by a voice behind.
+"Still careless of your life! I see you hav'n't brought your gun with
+you. How did you know that it wasn't 'Die,' that I wanted to say?"
+
+He turned lazily round, and was surprised at the altered expression
+which had come into Spurling's face. It was frank and self-reliant,
+and, oddly enough, had a look that was almost tender.
+
+"What made you say that?" Granger inquired.
+
+Spurling drew nearer. "Well, a fellow had to say something to break
+the ice," he replied; "so I thought I might as well give you your
+chance of taking the worst impression of me." He paused; then he asked
+in a low voice, "You were thinking of London and the old times?"
+
+Granger nodded his head.
+
+"I've often done that; I can understand. It was torture to me in the
+Yukon, and it was madness to me over there," pointing with his hand to
+the northward, where the Forbidden River lay. "What would you say," he
+added, "if I were to tell you that it could all come back again?"
+
+Granger's reply was quiet and calculated, so that it seemed to be
+quite within the bounds of courteous conversation. "I think I should
+tell you that you lied," he said.
+
+"But if I should give you proof that not only the old things were
+possible, but that El Dorado might come true, and that within a year
+we could seek it out together, as we have always planned to do?"
+
+For answer Granger jerked out his foot, and sent a gaunt grey husky
+flying, which had come within his range. It was one of those which
+Spurling had left behind over two months ago at Murder Point, when he
+had exchanged teams with Granger in his endeavour to escape
+Strangeways. Spurling, when he saw it, recognised the meaning which
+Granger's action implied. It was as if he had said, "So the old things
+are possible, are they, you villain? What about that man whom you say
+that you killed, whose body was washed up near Forty-Mile?" He opened
+his lips to explain, and then fell silent. It was impossible to excuse
+himself in the presence of those wolfish beasts, who had been
+witnesses to all the degradation of mind and body which had overtaken
+him in that terrible escape. No man could estimate the penalty which
+he had had to pay for his moment's folly, except one who had endured
+it. When he allowed his memory to dwell upon it, that frenzied rush
+across half a continent seemed to have occupied all his life. The
+thought of it made him afraid.
+
+"Good God! And my mother meant me for a minister!" he exclaimed,
+burying his face in his hands.
+
+Granger looked up suspiciously, but he said nothing.
+
+"No, I never told you that," he continued fiercely, "and I suppose you
+don't believe me now. Seems somehow odd to you, I daresay, that Druce
+Spurling should ever have thought himself worthy to talk to men about
+their souls and Christ. You'd have thought it a good joke if I'd told
+you even when you knew me at my best. _When you knew me!_ Bah! You
+never knew me; you were always a harsh judge when it came to setting a
+value on things which you didn't understand."
+
+When Granger still kept silent and gave no sign of interest, Spurling
+broke out afresh: "Damnation! I tell you you never knew anything about
+me. You were always too selfish to take the trouble to get into other
+folks' insides; yet you went about complaining that people were
+unsympathetic. Here's the difference between us; I may be a scoundrel,
+but whatever I've done I've played the man and never blamed anyone
+else for my crimes, while you--! You were always a weak dreamer,
+depending on others for your strength. You were discontented, but you
+never raised your littlest finger in an attempt to make men better.
+All you could think of was yourself, and your own ambition to escape.
+So though, perhaps, I've sunk to a lower level than you have ever
+touched, I want you to know there was once a time when I did reach up
+to a nobler and a better."
+
+Gradually, as he had spoken, there had grown into his voice a
+concentrated fury. He was giving utterance to an old grievance over
+which he had brooded for many years; as happens frequently in such
+cases, only a portion of his complaint could be proved by facts, the
+remainder being an overgrowth of embittered imagination.
+
+His eyes sought out the face of the man whom he accused, but it told
+him nothing; he sat there silent, with his head thrown back a little,
+unemotional as the distant stretch of cold grey river up which he
+gazed.
+
+The sun had vanished, and the prolonged dusk of the northland was
+stealing from out the forest. At length Granger answered him: "It may
+be true, and if so, what follows?"
+
+"Oh, nothing: only I thought I'd tell you this so that one man might
+not think too badly of me, if before long I should be called upon to
+die. I must have looked a horrid beast when I came to you last April."
+
+Whether consciously or not, Granger nodded his head, as much as to
+say, "You did. Most certainly you did."
+
+His companion broke into a harsh laugh. "The Reverend Druce Spurling!
+How d'you like the sound of it? That's what I might have been to-day,
+and a fat lot you care about it."
+
+To Granger, as he listened, there had come the painful knowledge,
+bearing out the accusation that he had never cared for the inward
+things of men, that this was the first scrap of confession which
+Spurling had ever let fall in his presence. Why, up to that moment he
+had not heard a word about his mother, and had certainly never
+credited him with a pronounced religious instinct.
+
+Yes, perhaps that statement, which had sounded so exaggerated at
+first, was true; and he was a hard and selfish man. Up to now he'd
+excused himself on the score of his superior sensitiveness and
+ideality. Probably it was this same error which Pere Antoine, in
+gentler manner, had tried to point out, when he said, "You will never
+help yourself, or the world, by merely being sad. No man ever has. It
+is because of your flight from sadness that you have met with all your
+dangers. All your life you have spent in striving to escape from
+things which are sad." His thoughts travelled back to those earlier
+days, when he'd poured out his troubles to Spurling, and told him all
+about himself; and always with the assurance that he would be
+understood and would gain sympathy. John Granger as he had been then,
+now seemed like a complaining child to himself. He was certain that,
+were he to be met by that old self to-day, he would have no patience
+with him. But Spurling had had patience.
+
+So, when all was said and done, he must consider himself a pretty
+worthless fellow; and, after all, Spurling, despite his blood-stained
+hands, was probably the better man.
+
+"Why Spurling failed to become a parson"--a strange topic for thought
+and conversation this, on the Last Chance River at nightfall!
+
+But Spurling was speaking again, timidly and half to himself. "Suppose
+God should brand a mark on our foreheads for every crime which we have
+perpetrated, I wonder what kind of beasts we should appear to one
+another then?"
+
+Turning his head, in order that his face might not be seen, Granger
+replied, "Much the same kind of beasts, I suspect, as we appear to one
+another now." Then, speaking more hurriedly, "It wasn't to talk of
+these things, and to ask me that question, that you required me to
+come with you to some place where we might be by ourselves. Tell me,
+what is it that you want me to do for you? You were good to me once,
+and I'm willing to help you in any way that is honourable, and that
+isn't too dangerous."
+
+Spurling laughed shortly, and said, "It isn't your help that I'm
+asking; it's you that I'm trying to help. Here, look at that." He
+passed something to him. "I didn't act squarely by you in the
+Klondike, and I want to make up for it now. When we made that strike
+in Drunkman's Shallows, the success of it turned my head; even then,
+if you'd not been so impatient, I think I should have come to myself
+and have behaved decently. You put my back up with your suspicions,
+and by seeming to claim a part of my wealth as though it were yours by
+right. But I'm anxious to forget that now."
+
+In the meanwhile, Granger had been examining the thing which had been
+placed in his hands. It was wrapped up carefully in several rags,
+which were knotted and tedious to untie. When he had stript them off,
+he found that they contained a nugget, somewhat bigger than the one
+which Eyelids had shown him, but of the same rounded formation, as
+though it had been taken from a river-bed. "Where did you get it?" he
+asked excitedly.
+
+"Where the half-breed got his--from the Forbidden River. Does El
+Dorado seem more possible to you now?"
+
+But Granger was thinking, and he did not answer the question. Suddenly
+the dream of his life had become recoverable. He had forgotten Peggy,
+and Murder Point, and even Spurling himself. Once more in imagination
+he was sailing up the Great Amana, following in his father's track.
+Once more he saw, as in Raleigh's day, the deer come down to the
+water's side, as if they were used to the keeper's call; and he
+watched anxiously ahead lest, in the rounding of the latest bend, the
+shining city should meet his sight and the salt expanse of Parima,
+from whose shores its towers are said to rise. In his eyes was the
+vision of the island near Puna, which Lopez wrote about, with its
+silver herb-gardens, and its flowers of gold, and its trees of gold
+and of silver; and in his ears was the tinkling music, which the
+sea-wind was wont to make as it swept through the metal forest,
+causing its branches to clang and its leaves to shake. He was far away
+from Keewatin now, making the phantom journey to the land of his
+desire.
+
+"Does El Dorado seem more possible to you now?"
+
+He turned to Spurling a face which had grown thin with earnestness,
+"Druce, tell me quickly," he said, "how long will it take us to get
+there?"
+
+"To get to El Dorado? The answer to that you should know best. But to
+get to the place on the Forbidden River where this gold was found? Oh,
+about five days."
+
+"Let us go there at once, then, before Beorn finds us out."
+
+"Ah, Beorn! The old trapper who put that half-breed on my track!"
+
+"Did he do that? Tell me about it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+MANITOUS AND SHADES OF THE DEPARTED
+
+
+"After I had left you, I journeyed three days to the northward, till I
+came to the mouth of the Forbidden River. There I found the cache
+which you spoke to me about; but I did not break into it at that time,
+as I was still well provided with food and ammunition. Because you had
+told me that the Forbidden River was unexplored and never visited,
+being haunted by Manitous and shades of the dead, I turned into it and
+travelled up it--I thought that I should find safety there.
+
+"On the second day, just as evening was falling, I saw the flare of a
+camp-fire, about two miles ahead. You'll remember that my nerves were
+badly shaken when I came to you at Murder Point; and they hadn't been
+much improved by those five days of flight through the winter
+loneliness. When I saw that light blaze up in the distance, I began to
+be afraid--and it wasn't the fear of men that I was thinking about. I
+waited until it was utterly night and then, leaving my dogs behind,
+stole stealthily forward to prospect. As I drew nearer, I saw that a
+hut of boughs had been erected, and that a man was sitting, with his
+rifle on his knees, before the fire. He was very old and tall. But I
+had no opportunity to get a closer view of him, for, at that moment,
+he must have heard me; he put his head on one side to listen, and
+rose to his feet. Without the waste of any time, he fired in my
+direction. Luckily I had thrown myself flat along the snow, for the
+bullet whizzed over my head. He advanced towards me a little way, and
+then, thinking that he had been mistaken, went back to his fire,
+grumbling to himself, and sat down. The cold ate into my bones, yet I
+dared not stir until I was certain that he had gone to sleep.
+Presently he arose, looked suspiciously around, piled more wood on his
+fire, and went into his hut.
+
+"I hurried back to where I had left my dogs, harnessed them in and,
+leaving the river-bank, travelled into the bush for a distance of
+about two miles; there I tied them up, and then returned to the river
+by myself, coming out at a point somewhat nearer to the old man's hut.
+I lay down behind a clump of trees and waited. Before day had come, I
+could hear that he was astir; but he seemed to be almighty busy for a
+Keewatin trapper, who was only changing camp. About midday he had made
+his preparations, and, stamping out his fire, set out down-stream, in
+the direction of the Last Chance River. I knew that in half-an-hour he
+must come across my trail, and have his suspicions of the previous
+night confirmed. Sure enough, after he had passed my place of hiding
+and had got below me about three hundred yards, he struck my tracks.
+He pulled up sharply, and wheeled round, as if he could feel that my
+eyes were watching him; he threw up his head like an old bull caribou
+scenting danger.
+
+"I had left two trails leading from that point, the one towards his
+hut and back again, the other into the bush to where my dogs were
+tethered. If he was determined to follow up the latter and to trace me
+to my hiding, I was ready for him, and would have the advantage of
+knowing his whereabouts, whilst he was ignorant of mine. He must have
+been going through some such argument himself, for presently he
+whipped up his dogs and, with one last glance across his shoulder,
+continued on his journey. When he had vanished, and I had made certain
+that he did not intend to return, I went forward to inspect his
+abandoned camp.
+
+"Inside the hut I found that the floor was of earth and below the
+snow-level, making evident the fact that it had been erected before
+the winter had commenced. When I examined the walls, which were
+constructed of boughs and mud, I came to the conclusion that they had
+been standing for many years, but had been renewed from time to time.
+All this made it clear to me that you had been mistaken in saying that
+the Forbidden River had never been travelled. The next thing to
+discover was what had brought the old man up there. The earth of the
+floor was not packed together, but looked loose and rough, as though
+it had been newly dug. This gave me my first clue to the secret. When
+I walked above it, it did not sound solid, so I commenced to scrape
+away the earth. Six inches down I came to branches of trees spread
+crosswise, as though to form a roof to a cellar. Pulling these aside,
+after another hour of labour, I looked down into a pit which had been
+hollowed out. It was getting dark now, so I lit a fire.
+
+"I climbed into the pit, by some rudely fashioned stairs which had
+been shaped in the side of the wall, and soon found myself on level
+footing. Groping about down there, I could feel that the sides were
+tunnelled, and had been roughly timbered with the stems of trees.
+Going above ground, I fetched a torch and then saw all that I had
+commenced to suspect--and a good deal more.
+
+"Piled up in one corner was an outfit of miner's implements, pans,
+axes, spades, picks, etc., and close beside them was a sack of
+moose-hide. Whipping out my knife, I cut through the thongs by which
+the sack was tied; it lurched over, letting fall a dozen ounces or so
+of gold dust. On searching round, I found in another corner a second
+sack containing nuggets. When I went about the walls, and pushed my
+way into some of the tunnels, I was made certain that I was in one of
+the richest placer-mines that I had ever set eyes on. Then I went up
+to consider what all this meant.
+
+"Here was I, a man fleeing for his life, and here was this old man, a
+pioneer in an unexplored region, who, for some reason of his own, was
+keeping secret the knowledge of his bonanza, yet taking the gold out
+all the while. Couldn't I, by making the world a present of his
+knowledge, buy back my life? Soon I recognised that that was folly;
+the world would accept the present, but it would also demand my life.
+There was nothing for it but to act by stealth. If I could once get
+out of Keewatin with all these riches, I would be able to purchase my
+escape; especially if I should remain in hiding for a year or so,
+until the search had been abandoned, and I had been given up for dead.
+Then I could sneak out and get to South America, where I was not
+known, and commence life afresh. The thought of South America brought
+El Dorado to my mind, and then I remembered you, two hundred miles'
+distant at Murder Point. 'Why shouldn't I tell Granger?' I said. 'Then
+we could both escape, and go in search of El Dorado together, as we
+have always planned.'"
+
+He paused and looked at his companion to see what effect his words had
+had. Granger was sitting with his head bent forward, his knees drawn
+up and his arms about them, all attention, with a strange look of
+hunger in his eyes. "Well, for God's sake don't keep me waiting,
+Druce. Go on," he said.
+
+It was the second time that Granger had called him "Druce" in less
+than two hours; he was now certain of his ground.
+
+"If you are willing to help me, I think we can do as we have always
+planned. What do you think about it?"
+
+"I'm willing to the death. But after you'd discovered the mine, what
+did you do then? Did the old man come back?"
+
+"The next few days I kept a careful lookout, in case I should be
+surprised. When nothing happened, I commenced to prospect for myself.
+I could not do much as the ground was frozen; but I thawed out some of
+the dirt, and gathered a few nuggets of pretty fair size. Then the
+river broke up, and I thought that I was safe for at least a time. But
+soon my provisions began to run low, so that it became necessary for
+me to turn back to the Last Chance River to break open the cache. I
+postponed the journey as long as I dared, and at last set out, with
+only enough flour and bacon to keep me going for two days. It was hard
+travelling, for my dogs were of no use to me, the snow being too moist
+for the passage of a sled. I had to work my way along by the
+river-bank, through melting drifts and tangled scrub. I dared not
+light a fire when I camped at night, lest it should be seen by the old
+man, and he should steal up and kill me while I slept.
+
+"I thought I began to see why he had gone away so meekly, though he
+knew that a stranger had found him out and was likely to stumble on
+his treasure: so long as I was in hiding, I had had him at a
+disadvantage; but now, having gone away quietly without resistance, he
+was able to await me under cover at the Forbidden River's mouth, and I
+would be the one who would run most risk when we came to an encounter.
+He had known that sooner or later I should run short of grub, and be
+forced to return to the Last Chance, and to pass by his ambush; all
+that he had to do was to await me, for there is but one way out.
+
+"It took me three days to make the journey and when, as night was
+falling, I came in sight of the spit of land which divides the two
+rivers, on which the cache had been made, I had exhausted my supply of
+rations. I was faint with hunger and perished with cold; but I dared
+do nothing to provide for myself until I had made certain that I was
+not spied upon.
+
+"The river-mouth looked deserted enough; on either bank it was bare of
+trees--a bald and bleak expanse of withered scrub, affording little
+cover. It would be difficult for any man to approach me, without being
+seen before he had come within gun-range. I followed along the
+left-hand bank, which I had been travelling, till I reached the point
+where the Last Chance and Forbidden Rivers join. Gazing up and down
+the Last Chance, the same scene of desolation met my eyes; there was
+no flash of camp-fire or sign of rising smoke. In the north, from
+which quarter the wind was blowing, I could detect no smell of
+burning. I began to think that I was safe, and determined to make
+short work of breaking into the cache and getting back to the hut
+again. Then I awoke to a fact which I had overlooked in my anxiety to
+avoid a surprise attack, that the cache was on the right-hand bank and
+that I was on the left.
+
+"The river was flowing rapidly, carrying down tree-trunks and grinding
+blocks of ice, so that it seemed impassable. Every now and then the
+hurrying mass would jam and pile up, forming a pathway above the
+current, but not for so long a time as would allow me to climb across.
+
+"I'd been going on half-rations for several days in order to make my
+food eke out and, consequently, was miserably nourished. A death by
+drowning is preferable any day to the slower tortures of starvation; I
+made up my mind to cross the river at once, at whatever cost. I began
+to forget my fear of the hidden enemy in my eagerness to satisfy my
+hunger.
+
+"Retracing my steps, I walked up-stream, searching for a tree-trunk
+which would be of sufficient weight to carry me. I planned to launch
+out a quarter of a mile above the point which I wished to make on the
+other side, and to trust to the current, and what little steering I
+could manage, to get me across. I lost much time in my search, for the
+larger logs which had been driven ashore had got wedged, and required
+more than one man's strength to refloat them.
+
+"When I found a trunk of sufficient size, the wind had dropped and a
+mist was settling down, which made it difficult for me to see anything
+that was not immediately before my eyes. A haunting sensation of
+insecurity began to pervade my mind. I hardly know how to describe it;
+it was not dread of a physical death, but fear lest my soul might get
+lost. Though I was now about to imperil my life, for the preservation
+of which, during the last half year, I had made every effort of which
+a human being is capable, that seemed to me as nothing when compared
+with this new danger. If a man dies, he may live again; but if his
+soul is snatched from him, what is there left that can survive? This
+was the menace of which I was aware--a menace of spiritual death, to
+the cause of which I was drawing nearer through the mist. My whole
+desire now was to procure the provisions for which I had made the
+journey, and to escape.
+
+"I got astride the trunk, steadying myself with a long birch-pole
+which I had cut, and pushed off. The water was icy cold, causing my
+legs to ache painfully, as if they were being torn from my body by
+heavy weights. Soon the log was caught in the central current and
+began to race. Like maddened horses, foaming at my side, before, and
+behind, the drift-ice rushed. In the misty greyness of the night,
+these floating ruins of the winter's silence assumed curious and
+terrifying shapes. Sometimes they appeared to be polar bears, having
+human hands and faces; sometimes they seemed to be huskies, with the
+eyes and ears of men; but more often they were creatures utterly
+corrupt, who, swimming beside me, acclaimed me as their equal and as
+one of themselves.
+
+"I remembered the reason which you had stated why the Forbidden River
+is never travelled--and I knew the power of fear as never before. I
+could not see where I was going; no land was in sight. I could
+perceive nothing but mocking befouled faces, and they were on every
+side. With my steering pole I pushed continually towards the right,
+dreading every moment that I would lose my balance, or would be swept
+out into the Last Chance far below the cache. These thoughts made me
+desperate, and I renewed the struggle with something that was more
+than physical strength; I knew that, should I die at that time, I
+would become one of those damned grey faces.
+
+"The crossing could not have occupied more than a few minutes, but
+they seemed like ages. I felt as though, for so long as I could
+remember, I had been sitting astride a log, hurrying through a mist on
+a rushing river.
+
+"Presently I heard the grating of ice against ice and the cannoning of
+logs, and I knew that I was nearing the other side. There was a sudden
+shock; the tree which I rode swung round, and I found myself
+scrambling wildly up the bank out of the reach of the hands which were
+thrust out after me. I rose to my feet and ran, tripping and falling
+continually as my snowshoes plunged deep in the melting crust. Each
+time I fell, it seemed to me that I had not tripped, but had been
+struck down from behind by the river-creatures which pursued me. Then
+the sound of the water grew more faint, the mist closed in upon me,
+and I sank exhausted. I had no idea of my position as regards the
+cache, nor would I have any means of finding out until morning should
+come and the fog should rise. But I knew that it would be fatal to sit
+still in my sodden clothes, on the drenching snow, without a fire,
+till daylight; so I got upon my feet and commenced to tread slowly
+about.
+
+"Presently behind the mist I could hear something moving, which was
+following and keeping pace with me stride by stride. Its footsteps did
+not seem to be those of a man, but more frequent and lighter. I was
+in that state of mind when suspense is the worst part of danger; I did
+not care particularly how much I had to suffer if only I might know
+completely what death and by whose hands I was to die. Drawing my
+revolver, I made a plunge forward in the direction from which the
+sound had come. I saw nothing; but, when I stopped and listened, I
+could hear the footsteps going round about me at just the same
+distance away. I determined to pursue them; at any rate such an
+occupation would keep me in motion and prevent me from perishing from
+cold and dampness. But it's difficult to hunt the thing by which you
+are hunted. Towards daybreak a slight breeze got up which, coming in
+little gusts, cleared alleys in the heavy atmosphere as it forced a
+passage. The footsteps had ceased by this time, but I could hear the
+creature's panting breath; for some reason it had ceased to follow. I
+waited until I heard the breeze coming and then made a rush in the
+direction from which the breathing came. There, straight before me,
+sitting on its haunches, I saw the shadow of what appeared to be a
+gigantic timber-wolf; the only part of it which I could discern
+plainly was its eyes, which, to my terrified imagination, blazed out
+dazzling and huge through the gloom like carriage lamps.
+
+"And another thing I noticed, that it was sitting beside the cache for
+which I was searching. Then the breeze died down, the mist closed in
+again, and I could detect nothing of the creature's presence but the
+sound of its breath.
+
+"With my revolver in my right hand and my knife in my left, I crept
+slowly forward. Just ahead of me I could see something stirring, and
+I fired. There was a scramble of hurrying feet, and then silence.
+
+"When I came to the cache, it was deserted. I should have delayed till
+daylight, but my hunger was so great that I could not wait. Breaking
+it open, I sat down to gorge myself on the first thing that came
+handy--some raw fish which had been buried there. Something moved
+behind me; before I had time to turn properly round, it had leapt on
+my back. I could not draw my revolver, there was no time; my only
+weapon was my knife. I saw the great face and eyes peering over my
+left shoulder and made a downward stab, gashing open a deep wound from
+the ear to the lower fangs. With a cry that was almost human, the
+beast jumped back and vanished.
+
+"When day had come, I took as much of the provisions as I could carry,
+and made good my escape. I was surprised at the old man's absence, and
+fearful lest at any moment he might turn up. I did not cross the river
+at the mouth, but worked my way along the right-hand bank, intending
+to cross higher up and nearer the hut, where it was more narrow. At
+noon I made a halt and snatched a little sleep, for I had purposed to
+travel through the night. Some hours after darkness had fallen, I
+began to be haunted with the old sense that something was following.
+At first I heard no sound, for I was travelling over open ground.
+Presently I had to enter a thicket, and there I was made certain; for
+I could distinctly hear the snapping of branches, as if bent and
+forced aside by the passage of some forest animal. I pushed rapidly
+ahead, for it was not the safest place in which to be attacked. As I
+glanced across my shoulder and from side to side, I continually
+caught glimpses of a thing which was grey.
+
+"Sometimes I was certain that I saw a face peering out at me from
+above the brake; but whether it was that of the old man or of the
+timber-wolf, I could not tell--strangely enough, their faces seemed to
+me to be one and the same. When the day came, I felt that I was free
+again, and making camp I slept. The same thing happened next night,
+and the night after that, for it took me more than three days to make
+the homeward journey. But each night, as I moved farther away from the
+Forbidden River's mouth, the creature which followed had to traverse a
+longer and longer trail to come up with me, as I approached nearer to
+my destination.
+
+"After I had crossed the river and reached the hut, he rarely came;
+and then only when the dusk had fallen early because of clouds or
+rain. Yet there were times, just before the dawn, when I fancied that
+I could see him watching me from the bank."
+
+"But what has this got to do with the half-breed?" Granger broke in
+impatiently.
+
+"That's what I'd like to know myself. But I don't know, so I'm simply
+giving you facts as they happened. The horror of that wolf's face,
+which I confused with my memory of the old man's, made a deep
+impression on me; I suppose that's why I've said so much about it.
+
+"However mistaken you may have been about the Forbidden River never
+having been travelled, you were correct enough when you told me that
+it was haunted. . . . And it isn't pleasant to be living a five-days'
+journey from the nearest white man, in a place where the beasts look
+like lost souls and have the eyes of the damned."
+
+Granger shrugged his shoulders, "And the half-breed?" he inquired.
+
+"The half-breed turned up five weeks after my return from the cache.
+I'd been out cutting cord-wood and, when I came back, he was sitting
+at the door of the hut. How long he'd been there, I could not tell; I
+had been absent for perhaps two hours. I tried to find out how he'd
+come, but he pretended not to understand; so, as I know no Cree, our
+conversation wasn't very lengthy. At first, however, in spite of the
+danger of his discovering who I was and what I was doing there, I was
+pleased to see him, for I was getting moody and low-spirited with
+living by myself. I tried to be content with supposing that he was a
+trapper, who had strayed out of his district and had lighted on me by
+accident.
+
+"We sat by the fire outside the hut and smoked together, smiling and
+exchanging signs every now and then, to show that we were friendly.
+But I watched him closely, and soon perceived that he was far more
+knowing than he was willing to admit; I began to believe that he had
+visited me with a purpose. I hadn't allowed him inside the hut for
+fear he should see the pit, which was uncovered, and should guess the
+secret or get suspicious; but I noticed that, whenever he thought that
+I was not watching, his eyes would slowly turn in that direction. I
+determined to put him to the test. Though it was as yet quite early, I
+built up the fire for the night and signed to him that I was sleepy.
+He nodded his head and went on smoking; so I lay down and feigned to
+close my eyes. I must have fallen asleep, for when I woke the blaze
+had died down to a mound of charcoal and glowing ash, with here and
+there a little spurt of flame. When I looked stealthily round, I
+discovered that my companion was missing, but by listening I could
+hear a sound of moving within the hut. Just then I saw his figure
+coming out, so I lay down as though I had never wakened. He stood in
+the doorway smiling to himself, holding something which sparkled in
+his hand. Then he returned to the fire and sat down quite near to me,
+so that he could watch my face.
+
+"I suppose I must have betrayed myself for, without any warning, he
+flung himself upon me, slipping a noose about my neck as I attempted
+to rise, which he drew tight, so that I was nearly strangled. Standing
+behind me, jerking at the noose, he commanded me to hold up my hands.
+I was too choked and dazed for struggle, so did as he bade me. When he
+had bound me hand and foot, and gagged me, he threw me inside the hut
+and, without a word of explanation, departed down-stream on his
+journey.
+
+"I tried to burst the thongs, but they were too stout either to loosen
+or to break. I wormed my way out on to the river-bank and tried to
+chafe them against a rock, but only succeeded in bruising my flesh.
+The sun came out and shone down upon me till my thirst grew agonising.
+It seemed to me that at last I had run to the end of my tether. Then a
+thought occurred to me; wriggling toward the fire, I found that it
+still smouldered. By pushing and scraping with my bound hands and
+feet, I managed to get some leaves and twigs together, which soon
+sprang into a blaze. I waited until it had died down into a narrow
+flame, over which I held my hands till the thongs were charred; then,
+with a quick twist of the wrists, which caused my scorched flesh to
+flake off in shreds, I wrenched my hands apart. This is all true that
+I am telling you; you can see for yourself. Already you must have
+noticed those marks." He held out his wrists for Granger's inspection;
+they were horribly mutilated.
+
+"And after that, when you got better, did the half-breed leave you
+undisturbed or did he come back?"
+
+"I did not see either the half-breed or the old man again until that
+early morning when I gazed in through the window at Murder Point . . .
+and, do you know, that scar on the old man's face is in the same place
+as the wound which I gave the timber-wolf?"
+
+Granger laughed nervously. "And what d'you make of that?"
+
+"I hardly dare to say; but, somehow, that beast seemed to me to be
+more than a wolf--it looked like a dead soul."
+
+"A dead what? You've said that once before to-night."
+
+Spurting stared at him, amazed at his agitation. "A dead soul," he
+repeated; "a soul which has gone out from a man, and left his body
+still alive."
+
+"Do you know what name the Indians have given to that old man?" asked
+Granger in an awe-struck voice.
+
+"How should I know? I think you called him Beorn."
+
+"Yes, but his other name is the _Man with the Dead Soul_."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+IN HIDING ON HUSKIES' ISLAND
+
+
+They stared at one another in silence, striving not to realise the
+meaning of those words; yet their meaning was unavoidable.
+
+Both knew the legend of the _loup-garou_, the grim tradition of the
+peasants of Quebec which the _coureurs des bois_ have carried with
+them into every part of Canada. Often in the Klondike, when seated
+round the stove on a winter's night, they had heard it retold by
+French-Canadians, in low excited whispers, with swift and frightened
+turnings of the head. They had laughed at it in the daylight: yet at
+night, when the tale was in the telling, it had seemed very real to
+them. Then there had come that Christmas-Eve, when Jacques La France
+had been found dead in his shack, with a hole in his neck, just
+outside of Dawson City. Little Baptiste had owned with tears to the
+crime, and had excused himself saying that he had been compelled to
+the shooting because Jacques was his dearest friend, and Jacques had
+become a _loup-garou_ through not attending the Easter Sacrament for
+seven years; as everybody knew, only by the inflicting of a bloody
+wound on his beast's body could his soul be saved from hell.
+
+The jury who had tried him had been composed mostly of
+French-Canadians. When it had been proved to them that wolf tracks had
+been found before the dead man's threshold, they had acquitted
+Baptiste, and had apologised for his arrest, in defiance of the
+judge's disapproval.
+
+    *    *    *    *    *
+
+Two and a half years at Murder Point had made Granger undogmatic on
+problems of metempsychosis, and of the extent to which the barriers
+which hedge in Man's spiritual life may be pushed back.
+
+It seemed not unlikely to him that there were men whose souls,
+consciously or unconsciously, either by reason of their crimes or for
+the better accomplishment of an evil desire, could go out from their
+bodies while they slept, and be changed into the forms of beasts of
+prey between sunset and dawn-rise. At all events, this was a
+phenomenon which could not be disproved, and there were many who
+believed it true.
+
+So he recalled unjudgingly the story of Jacques, also he remembered an
+instance still nearer home--that of the Hudson Bay factor, who had
+prayed to God that he might gaze with his living eyes upon his
+disembodied soul.
+
+It was not the possibility of the fact which he doubted, but
+Spurling's motive in telling him such a tale.
+
+Might he not have shown him the gold only in order to regain his
+friendship, and then have lied to him in order to restrain him from
+investigating, and, perhaps, with the purpose of sowing distrust in
+his mind concerning Beorn and Eyelids? Whatever had been his purpose,
+_there_ was the gold; Granger was determined, in spite of the risk, to
+see the Forbidden River for himself. Spurling was speaking, "And his
+eyebrows meet," he said.
+
+Granger knew to what he was referring, for, all the world over, where
+this belief is current, it is supposed that the werewolf may be
+detected in his human guise by the meeting of his eyebrows, which
+appear like wings, as if his soul were prepared for flight.
+
+He was about to reply, when his hand, straying about his throat,
+chanced upon the silver chain by which the locket of Mordaunt was
+suspended, which he had stolen from the body of Strangeways. It was
+like a warning voice, recalling the past, which urged him to distrust
+this man. Spurling must have seen the change, for he leant over
+towards him appealingly, as if he were about to entreat him to be
+patient. With a gesture of annoyance Granger rose to his feet and
+commenced to walk away; but he halted sharply and drew into the
+shadow, signing to Spurling to keep quiet. From very far away, borne
+on the stillness of the night, they could hear the rhythmic beat of
+several paddle-blades.
+
+Crawling upon his hands and knees, Spurling joined him. "What is it?"
+he asked. "Is it Eyelids again?" Granger pointed up-river. "They're
+coming from the west," he whispered, "and there are at least four men
+by the sound of the blades."
+
+"What men come from the west at this season? Surely, they should be
+travelling in the opposite direction, going towards God's Voice?"
+
+"They should be, and it is for that reason that I fear for your
+safety."
+
+Nothing more was said, but Spurling guessed what was implied--that
+this might be a fresh messenger of justice, coming down the Last
+Chance River to rob him of his life.
+
+Very stealthily, taking advantage of every shadow, they crept down the
+hillside through the underbrush, till they came to the cove where
+they had landed. Twenty paces from the water's edge they hid
+themselves, at a point from which they could command a view of the
+travellers' approach.
+
+Nearer and nearer the monotonous swirling of the water, beaten by the
+paddles, came; the darkness ahead of the island shifted and took
+shape; they could distinctly hear the sound of men's voices, engaged
+in low-pitched and angry conversation. A large canoe, carrying six
+men, which flew the red flag of the Hudson Bay Company, shot out from
+the shadows. Now they could make out some of the words which were
+being spoken by two of the travellers.
+
+"And you say that you believe he's innocent! Well then I tell you that
+he's a damned scoundrel. If he didn't actually kill him, it wasn't for
+lack of the desire; you may bet your sweet life on that. In any case,
+he's a demoralising influence in the district, and it's best for all
+parties that he should be put out of the way."
+
+A second voice interrupted at this point; it seemed to be arguing and
+trying to conciliate, but its tones were so low and spoken so rapidly
+that it was only possible to gather its general intention. The first
+voice spoke again.
+
+"I don't care about the other man; there's no sense in looking for
+him. He's probably dead by now. But the fellows I can't stand are
+these blamed private traders; they're always up to some dirty work.
+When I get my chance of putting one of them out of business, I don't
+hesitate. To hell with all private traders, I say."
+
+The canoe had now drawn level with the cove, so that Granger was able
+to recognise its occupants. In the stern sat the Indian steersman,
+with a rifle ready to his hand. Next to him sat a large red-bearded
+man, broad in the shoulders, massive in the jowl, almost brutal in his
+evidence of strength; even in that dusky light one could feel that his
+face was clenched in a scowl, and that his eyes were piercingly gray
+and cruel. Facing him, with his back towards the prow, sat Pere
+Antoine, a little bent forward, gesticulating with his hands, his
+whole attitude that of one who is trying to explain and persuade.
+After him came the remaining three Indian and half-breed paddle-men,
+sharp-featured and unemotional, stooping vigorously to their work.
+
+"And what do you propose doing?" asked Pere Antoine.
+
+"Why, what I've already told you a dozen times--treat him like a mad
+dog. I shall arrest him at once, and take him back with me as prisoner
+to God's Voice. When once I've got him there, I shall make him confess
+and get together sufficient evidence to have him hanged. This whole
+affair has been a scandal, and I'm going to put a stop to it. I shall
+make an example of this man. Why, soon it won't be safe to travel
+anywhere, unless you go protected. He must have had a nice lot of
+ruffians for his friends, if this fellow Spurling was a specimen. And
+now they've taken to paying him visits. . . ."
+
+The canoe bore the speaker out of earshot, leaving the listeners with
+the sentence uncompleted.
+
+Granger was aroused from some very uncomfortable imaginings by
+Spurling, who, touching him on the elbow, exclaimed in surprise, "Why,
+it isn't me; it's you they're after!"
+
+Then, when he received no answer, he asked, "What is it that you have
+done?"
+
+It was Cain accusing Judas with a vengeance.
+
+"Done! I've done nothing," Granger exclaimed, pushing him aside;
+"Robert Pilgrim is mistaken."
+
+"That's what we all say, until we are forced to own up."
+
+But Granger was not listening to what Spurling said; he was tortured
+with the truth of one sentence which he had heard that night. "If he
+didn't actually kill him, it wasn't for lack of the desire." How had
+Robert Pilgrim guessed that? As he himself had confessed to
+Strangeways, he had been tempted at first to let him go on his way
+unwarned, and take his chances of falling through the ice. Eventually
+he had cautioned him, but so late and in such a manner that his words
+had only had the effect of skilfully forwarding his earlier base
+intention. _If he had not actually killed him, it was not for lack of
+the desire._ And by how much was he superior to this man, crouching at
+his side, whom he had so often condemned and had again condemned that
+night?
+
+Spurling answered that question for him. Rising to his feet and
+stretching his cramped arms and legs, he remarked, "Well, of course,
+if you won't take me into your confidence, there's nothing more to be
+said. If you don't want to tell me, I won't trouble you by asking
+again; but it seems to me that we're both in the one boat now."
+
+This new sense of equality with his companion, though it was only an
+equality in crime, had suddenly brought about a change for the better
+in Spurling. He carried himself freely, in the old defiant manner, and
+had lost his attitude of cringing subservience. At first Granger had
+it in his heart to hate him for the change, knowing, as he did, that
+it arose from an unhesitating acceptance of this chance-heard,
+unproved assertion of his own kindred degradation. But soon the hatred
+gave way to another emotion, which, perhaps, had its genesis in a
+memory of those earlier days, when this man had been willing to stand
+between him and the world. In gazing upon him, looking so big and
+powerful, he was comforted with a sense that his misery was shared. A
+latter-day writer has wisely recorded, "I have observed that the mere
+knowing that other people have been tried as we have been tried is a
+consolation to us, and that we are relieved by the assurance that our
+sufferings are not special and peculiar. In the worst of maladies, the
+healing effect which is produced by the visit of a friend who can
+simply say, 'I have endured all that,' is most marked."
+
+And it was this consolation which Granger now began to experience in
+Spurling's presence.
+
+Though the separate circumstances which lay behind their common
+accusation were utterly different, the one man being innocent of the
+infamy wherewith he was charged and the other guilty, their danger was
+the same.
+
+Without telling him anything of Strangeways' death or entering into
+any explanation of the reasons for which he was suspected, Granger
+determined to face, without dispute, the premier fact in the
+case--that he was hunted for his life as was Spurling--and to plan for
+the future with him, as though he were his fellow-criminal in result
+as well as in intent.
+
+They returned to their former station, on the rock beneath the
+solitary pine, from which they could command a view of the approach to
+the island on every side, and there lay themselves down, so that
+their presence might not be observed. Then Granger spoke, "Well, and
+what is to be done?" he said.
+
+Spurling's answer was brief and to the point. "Hide here till the way
+is clear; then seek out the Forbidden River, and afterwards escape."
+
+"But Eyelids knows where we are, and he may betray us?"
+
+"Yes, but he does not know, unless you have told him, that I am a man
+with a price upon his head; and it is me, not you, whom he hates."
+
+"And we have no food."
+
+"If the worst comes to the worst, we have the huskies; and it seems to
+me that the priest was your friend--and then there is your wife."
+
+Even in his present predicament Granger could not restrain a smile,
+for it had not occurred to him to rely on Peggy for help--_his wife_.
+
+"Yes," he replied grimly, "there is my wife."
+
+But before the night was over he had occasion to regret his sneer.
+They had agreed to keep watch, turn and turn about, two hours at a
+stretch. Spurling was on guard, when Granger was aroused by the
+furious yelping of the huskies on the shore which was nearest to the
+river-bank.
+
+Peering cautiously over the edge of the rock, they could see that
+something was swimming down the current, making for the island, but
+whether man or animal they could not yet discern. As it came nearer
+they saw that it was a head, upon which was balanced a burden, which
+the swimmer supported with one hand. Running down to where the huskies
+were gathered, they cuffed them into silence, and there waited. The
+laboured breathing grew louder and louder; presently a face was
+lifted clear of the water, which Granger recognised. Turning to
+Spurling, as he stepped into the river to help the swimmer out, he
+whispered, "It's Peggy."
+
+He caught her in his arms, and, taking her bundle from her, drew her
+safe to land. She was naked and shivered in the cold night air--a
+slender statue of bronze. Her hair hung dripping about her shoulders,
+and her eyes were bright with excitement. Granger thought, as he gazed
+on her, that he had never realised how beautiful she was. Freed from
+her conventional European garments, there was a grace of rebellion
+about her which brought her into harmony with the forest environment,
+which was also unconfined.
+
+But she had come to the island on a serious errand, and with no
+thought of being admired. Drawing her husband to one side, she told
+him that he would find a revolver and food, sufficient for three days,
+in the bundle which she had brought, and advised him to lie quietly on
+the island until Robert Pilgrim should have gone away. She told him
+that Pere Antoine was his friend, and was doing his best to save him.
+When Granger asked her how she had known where he was, she replied
+that Eyelids had told her, but that she had made him promise to tell
+no one else, so that even Antoine was in ignorance of his whereabouts.
+She had given them to understand that he had set out for God's Voice a
+week ago, and had simulated surprise and grave concern that he had not
+arrived before the factor's departure; but she added, "They know that
+I am lying."
+
+When Granger referred to the murder with which he was charged, and
+began hurriedly to explain why he had not told her about it, she
+became strangely perturbed, and cut him short, saying that she must
+get back to the store before her absence was observed. It was quite
+evident to him that she had not for a moment doubted but that he was
+guilty; it was also evident that so small a misdemeanour as killing a
+man was not reckoned in her code of morals as being very blameworthy.
+He felt hurt at her lack of faith in his integrity; but afterwards,
+when he came to think things over, was amazed at her unswerving
+loyalty in spite of that deficiency.
+
+He watched her plunge into the river on her return journey, swim
+across, run lightly up the bank to where her clothes were lying, and
+disappear in the gloom of the forest.
+
+"If I could only learn to care for her," he thought, "even here, in
+Keewatin, I might have something left to live for." And then, in the
+solemnity which precedes the sunrise, made conscious of the emptiness
+which her departure had left, he added, "And I do begin to care."
+
+It was noticeable that in all that she had said, she had made no
+reference to Spurling. For the next three days they lay in hiding, no
+one coming near them, either friend or enemy. To occupy the time, and
+forget their anxiety, as though they were not men who dwelt beneath
+the shadow of death, they talked of their old quest, making plans for
+the future, and mapping out with their fingers in the dust new routes,
+by the following of which El Dorado might be attained. And it was thus
+that they strove to escape the pain of the realness of their
+present--by entering into a faery land, sufficiently remote from life
+to remain unthreatened.
+
+It was in this land of the imagination that they had first met, and
+formed their friendship. Revisiting it in one another's company, the
+hideousness of what had happened was, for the time being, blotted out;
+they renewed their former intimacy and passion. With the mention of
+familiar names, kind associations of bygone pleasures were aroused,
+and the old affection sprang to life. They shrank from any allusion to
+such things as had befallen them since their London days. Yet
+continually, in the midst of the most eager conversation, one or other
+of them would glance up, and cast his eyes along the river to the
+eastward, remembering Murder Point. It was in the early dawn of the
+fourth day, when, gazing toward the store, Granger descried two red
+squares of sail flapping against the sunrise. It was his lookout, and
+Spurling was asleep. He aroused him, bending over him and crying, "The
+York boats are coming from Crooked Creek; we shall be rid of Robert
+Pilgrim now." When Spurling was thoroughly awake and had seen the
+sails for himself, he asked him to explain. Then Granger told him how,
+in the summer of every year, the outposts of the Hudson Bay Company
+send in their winter's catch of furs to the head fort of their
+district, which in this case was God's Voice, where the skins are
+baled and graded, and dispatched to the London headquarters--which,
+being the most important duty of a factor's year, meant that Robert
+Pilgrim would have to return in order to superintend.
+
+All through the long June day they waited, hoping to see their enemy's
+departure; but the sails had been lowered and nothing was now visible
+of the York boats save their tall bare masts jutting above the
+river-banks. At times they would see groups of voyageurs, walking
+distantly among the trees, perhaps assisting the factor in one last
+lazy search for the fugitive. As the heat of the afternoon increased,
+even these disappeared. But, when evening was come, they saw, to their
+great joy, that the sails were hoisted again; and presently, borne to
+them over the brooding stillness, they heard the cries of the rowers
+and the thud of the heavy oars in the wooden rowlocks. Those sounds
+meant freedom to them; they trembled in their excitement.
+
+Peering out from between the bushes, they watched the approach of the
+two black galleys, each with its eight oarsmen and cargo of piled-up
+bales, like pirate craft returning with their spoils. The flashing of
+the gawdy scarves of the men, the motion of their bodies as they stood
+up for the stroke, flung their weight upon the enormous oars, and sat
+down at the finish, only to rise up again with monotonous shouts of
+encouragement, the banging of the sail against the mast, the rippling
+of the water as the prow pressed forward--all these spoke of life to
+the watchers, of endeavour, and bravery, and travel, causing their
+blood to redouble its pace and their hope to arise. There was still
+one doubt which troubled them, lest, in spite of the need of his
+presence at the fort, the enmity of Robert Pilgrim should have
+persuaded him to stay. But that was soon laid to rest, when in the
+bows of the leading York boat they saw his canoe, and later, as the
+sail swung round, caught a glimpse of the red-bearded man himself,
+seated in the stern. Antoine was by his side. As the boat passed by,
+they strained their ears to catch any scrap of conversation which
+might be of use to them in making their escape. But the noise of the
+voyageurs and of the wind in the sail was deafening, moreover the boat
+was making good headway, so that they only overheard one phrase:
+
+"You've brought me on a fool's errand. You say the man is dead, and
+you've shown me his grave, and yet. . . ." It was Pilgrim who was
+speaking; but before he had finished his sentence, his voice was
+drowned in the shouting of the men and the splashing of the blades.
+
+Granger, having watched them out of sight, turned to Spurling with a
+sigh of relief. "Thank God, they've gone," he said.
+
+Then he noticed that his companion was deadly pale. "What's the matter
+now," he asked; "are you so badly cut up at parting with such dear
+friends?"
+
+"Did you hear what he said?" gasped Spurling, pushing his face nearer,
+and staring Granger squarely between the eyes. "Did you hear what he
+said? 'You say the man is dead, and you've shown me his grave, and
+yet. . . .' And yet what? Can you guess how that sentence was going to
+end?"
+
+Granger was bewildered by his ferocious earnestness. He could not
+imagine its purpose, or what had caused it. "Why, of course I heard
+what he said," he replied. "I suppose Antoine's been trying to
+persuade the factor that I am dead, and he's loath to believe it."
+
+"If that is what he meant all the better for us, but I doubt it."
+
+But why he doubted it Granger could not get him to confess; so,
+turning his mind to other thoughts, like a sensible man, he set about
+launching the canoe, preparatory to the return to Murder Point. The
+last sight they saw as they paddled away, was the four gray huskies,
+which Spurling had brought with him on his first arrival, seated on
+their haunches in a row by the water's edge, raising their dismal
+voices to the sky. "Looks as though those damned beasts were doing
+their best to call Pilgrim back," said Spurling.
+
+On the way to the Point they talked matters over, and determined that,
+since they had no time to waste, they would stop at the store only so
+long as was necessary for the getting together of an outfit, and would
+depart for the Forbidden River that night. Eyelids and Beorn were to
+be left in charge at Murder Point, which would serve to flatter at
+least one of them, and would keep them occupied. If they should demand
+an explanation for this sudden going away, the answer was obvious,
+that Granger did not choose to be arrested by the factor of God's
+Voice. There was only one embarrassment which stood in their way,
+which was that in Granger's absence the boat would probably arrive
+from Garnier, Parwin and Wrath, bringing articles of trade in exchange
+for his year's collection of furs, letters of instructions from the
+partners for the future conduct of their interests, and expecting to
+carry back to Winnipeg his annual statement of accounts. He made up
+his mind to meet this difficulty by ordering Peggy to tell the
+partners that he was dead. Such a report, he calculated, were it
+believed and properly circulated, would help him greatly in his escape
+from Keewatin, when he had gathered his gold on the Forbidden River
+and was ready to go out. This course of action had been suggested to
+him by the unfinished sentence of Robert Pilgrim, which they had
+overheard.
+
+As they drew near the Point, they were struck with the profoundness of
+its quiet. They themselves had experienced so great a change in their
+four days of absence, so much of emotional strife and perturbation,
+that they were somehow surprised to find it unaltered. Beorn, as
+usual, was sitting on the pier-head, smoking his pipe; he did not look
+up or recognise them. Eyelids, on the other side of the river, was
+setting his evening nets: he nodded to Granger from across the water,
+smiled and went on with his work. On entering the shack, they
+discovered Peggy busily engaged over the evening meal, as though they
+had forwarned her as to when they would arrive. Her face betrayed
+neither annoyance nor pleasure--she might never have visited Huskies'
+Island. In the presence of so much that was commonplace, Spurling's
+fantastic account of what had happened to him on the Forbidden River
+seemed absurd and outrageous.
+
+It took them two hours to prepare their outfit and carry it down to
+the canoe; they were in no hurry to set out, for so long as they were
+on the Last Chance they intended to travel only by night.
+
+No one seemed to notice their doings, and even they themselves,
+becoming infected with the quiet of their surroundings, gradually
+ceased from conversing, and, except for an occasional necessary
+question, did their work in silence. At last, when it had grown as
+dark as it ever is in June time in Keewatin, signalling to one another
+with their eyes, they agreed that it was time to set out. Spurling
+having stepped down to the pier, Granger looked round for Peggy. He
+found her sitting in the grass a few paces behind him; she had come
+there so gently that he had been unaware of her nearness. Taking his
+place beside her, he commenced to speak to her the words which he had
+planned to say. She listened attentively, making no sign which would
+betray her state of mind. "Do you understand?" he asked her; and she
+for answer bowed her head.
+
+Thinking that she was indifferent as to what became of him, he rose to
+his feet, saying in a hard voice, "Good-bye. I must be going. Thank
+you for what you did for me on the island!" He had turned his back and
+descended the mound a few paces, when he felt her clinging to his
+hand, pressing it against her cheek, and he knew that she was crying.
+
+"Why, what's the matter?" he asked, bending down to her.
+
+"Don't go, don't go," she whispered.
+
+"Why not, Peggy? I've not been of much use to you. I don't think
+you'll miss me."
+
+"I hate that man," she panted.
+
+"But why?"
+
+"Because he's taking you away from me; and, though you may return from
+this journey, there will come a day when you will not return and I
+shall be left alone."
+
+Granger was surprised at her display of passion--she had seemed to him
+so cold. He had come to think of her as only a squaw-wife: but it was
+the white woman in her who had spoken those words. He tried to comfort
+her, denying her doubts and talking to her as though she had been a
+frightened child. But throughout all that he said she kept on
+whispering, "He is taking you away from me. One day he will see to it
+that you do not return."
+
+And had Granger stopped to think, he would have known that what she
+said was true; for, when once his dream of El Dorado had become
+capable of accomplishment, she would be to him as nothing. He heard
+Spurling calling him by name. Lifting her to her feet, he kissed her
+upon the mouth, and, amazed at his own kindness, as though he had done
+something shameful, ran down the mound, stepped into the canoe, and
+launched out.
+
+Bending forward to Spurling, who was sitting in the bows, "It's El
+Dorado or death this time," he whispered. Spurling did not answer him,
+but he saw him crouch his shoulders as if to avoid a lash, and heard
+his mutter, like the echo of his own voice, "_Or death_."
+
+The canoe was travelling heavily, for Spurling had stopped paddling.
+Granger was about to expostulate with him when, watching him more
+attentively, he discovered that his eyes were fixed upon the bend. As
+they drew nearer, and were passing by, his body trembled and he buried
+his face in his hands. Not until the bend was behind him did he take
+up his paddle--and then he flung himself into the work with frenzy, as
+one who fled.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE FORBIDDEN RIVER
+
+
+"If we are to get back before the winter closes in upon us we must
+start to-night."
+
+Spurling looked up from the pan of dirt which he was washing. "You've
+said that ten times a day in the last two weeks if you've said it
+once," he snapped.
+
+"Yes, but I mean it this time. We've got all the gold that we can
+carry. If you won't come with me, I shall take the canoe and start
+back by myself."
+
+"Oh, you will, will you? And d'you think that I don't see through your
+game?" Then noticing how Granger's hand had gone instinctively to his
+hip-pocket, he added, "And if it comes to fighting, I go armed
+myself."
+
+In a flash both men had whipped out their revolvers, but Spurling was
+the fraction of a second late; Granger had him covered.
+
+"So you're going to murder me, after all," Spurling continued
+sneeringly. "You've postponed it a long time; it was at Drunkman's
+Shallows that you were going to do it first. Your excuse then was that
+you weren't John Granger, but your baser self. You were always a good
+hand at excuses. And pray who are you now?"
+
+"Throw away that revolver," shouted Granger, in a voice that was thick
+with anger.
+
+Spurling tossed it a couple of yards away.
+
+"No, that won't do. Throw it into the river. Don't rise to your feet;
+crawl to it on your hands and knees."
+
+Spurling looked at him surlily to see whether he dared disobey, then
+did as he was commanded. There was a flash of silver as the weapon
+spun through the air, a commotion of spray, as though a fish had
+risen, and a distant and more distant shining as it sank down and
+settled on the river-bed.
+
+"That's right. Now let me tell you, Druce Spurling, that you're a fool
+for your pains. If either you or I are to be alive this time next
+year, however we may feel towards one another at present, we've got to
+act as though we were friends. There'll be time enough for quarrelling
+when we've seen the last of Murder Point, and have passed out over the
+winter trail with our gold, and know that we are safe. Why, you fool,
+we've been here nearly four months and we've already got more gold
+than we can take with us; it's October, and the river may close up
+almost any day."
+
+Spurling began to mutter something about how, if it weren't for
+Granger, _he'd_ be able to get out all right.
+
+"What's that you're saying?" Granger interrupted him. "I've heard that
+tale ever since we set out and I'm sick of hearing it. You fancy that
+the Mounted Police think that you are dead, and have ceased to search
+for you, and that I'm the man they're after now. You say that I'm
+known in the district, and that you are unknown, except by that
+half-breed who caught sight of you as you went by God's Voice;
+therefore you argue that I am a danger, a hindrance to you. You'd like
+to get rid of me, so that you may get out with the gold, in safety, by
+yourself. It's the same old trick that you tried to play me in the
+Klondike; you want to reach El Dorado without me. You swine! Do you
+know why it is that the Mounted Police are after me? It's because I
+took pity on you, remembering old times, and tried to prevent your
+being hanged--that's why. And you make it an excuse for deserting me.
+I've not told you that before, and I can see that you don't believe me
+now. Well, I'm not going to give you the details which would prove
+it--I'm not asking for gratitude from such a cur as you've turned out.
+All I'm going to say is this: from the first of your coming up here
+I've tried to play fair by you; I've done more than that, I've come
+near giving you my life--giving, mind you, not letting you take it as
+you've been inclined to do many times. And I'm willing to play fair
+until the end--until we get outside and are safe; then we can each go
+on our separate ways, if we so decide. I know where I'm going--to El
+Dorado. I daresay you're going to try to get there too, but that is
+none of my concern. I'm concerned with the present. That canoe is
+mine, and what's left of the grub is mine. The gold we share between
+us. If you don't want to come with me I'll take the canoe and other
+things which belong to me, and my share of the dust and nuggets, and
+you can stay here. But if you come with me, you've got to be
+honourable and behave like a man--not a husky. I give you two minutes
+to make your choice."
+
+"There isn't any choice to be made," growled Spurling; "you offer me
+your company or starvation. I choose your company, much as I detest
+it. And I'd like to know who you are to speak to me like this? And
+what there is to lose your temper about? If you'd explained what you'd
+wanted, I'd have come quietly; but I'd rather cut my throat at once
+and be done with it than be ordered about by a man like you--a fellow
+married to a squaw-wife."
+
+Granger's face went white and his lips trembled; his finger closed
+upon the trigger, then with an effort he controlled himself. "I think
+I've heard enough from you on that point," he said; "suppose we drop
+this discussion and get the canoe ready?"
+
+He turned upon his heel and walked into the hut, followed more slowly
+by Spurling.
+
+This was by no means their first falling out in the past four months;
+from the night that they left Murder Point things had been going from
+bad to worse. Given two men who set out into the forest together,
+bound by the strongest ties of friendship, who travel in one another's
+footsteps and sleep side by side for days and nights at a stretch,
+without seeing any other face but one another's and their own
+reflected visage, with nothing to break the silence but their own
+voices, and the cries of the wilderness, which have become
+irritatingly monotonous because of their sameness and frequent
+reiteration, and it is a thing to be marvelled at if they do not come
+back enemies. But when they set out each with his own hidden secret,
+each with his own private suspicion of his companion, with a gnawing
+enmity between them which has been changed into a show of friendship
+only by force of circumstance, when the object of their journey is a
+possession over which they have quarrelled before and parted company,
+concerning which they are already secretly jealous, then the final
+relationship of those two men can be forecast without any fear of
+error.
+
+Before they had reached the Forbidden River they had ceased to
+converse. By the time that they had landed at the hut, their nerves
+were jangled. Before they had been working there many days they had
+thought their way over all their old grievances, and, like petulant
+children, were on the lookout for any new cause of offence. The cause
+had come when Spurling, tired with rocking the cradle, his face and
+hands swollen by the sun and mosquito-bitten, had said, "I don't see
+why we should take all this trouble. I'm going to quit work."
+
+Granger was attending to the flume which they had constructed. "You're
+going to do no such thing," he had said.
+
+"Yes, I am; you're not my master and I shan't ask your permission.
+There's as much gold as we shall require in those two sacks which the
+Man with the Dead Soul washed out. If you've got such a scrupulous
+conscience, you can dig out your share; but I'm not going to help
+you."
+
+"So you've turned thief now, in addition to your other profession,"
+was the retort which Granger had thrown back.
+
+Out of such small foolishnesses had arisen quarrel after quarrel, so
+that it had become only necessary for Spurling to make a statement for
+Granger to contradict him, or for Granger to express a desire for
+Spurling to thwart its accomplishment. Day by day they would toil
+together, digging out the muck, emptying it into the sluice-boxes or
+testing it in the pan, without exchanging a word; then some trifling
+difficulty would arise, for which, perhaps, neither of them was
+responsible, and they would seize the opportunity to goad one another
+on to murder with the evil of what they said. On one point only were
+they agreed--the gathering of the most wealth in the shortest time;
+for wealth meant to them escape and the preserving of their lives. To
+this end they feverishly laboured both day and night, reserving no
+special hours for sleep and rest. Yet, even in their escape, as has
+been seen, they did not necessarily include one another; so far as
+Spurling was concerned, when once the gold had been acquired, it was
+"each man for himself." There was no loyalty between them; they were
+kept together only by a common avarice, and by fear of the wideness of
+the Northland.
+
+Yet there were times when Granger would waken to a sense of something
+that was better. By the end of August they had washed out all the dust
+and nuggets that they could possibly carry, and it was then that he
+had recognised that greed, regardless of consequence, had become the
+master-passion of both their lives. The words which the Dead Soul had
+spoken to him would come back, "I will make a man more precious than
+fine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir"--and he would
+look at Spurling and, bending down above the water, he would regard
+himself. Going over to Spurling he would say, laying his hand upon his
+shoulder, "Druce, in spite of the harsh things which we have spoken,
+we must still be friends, and seek out El Dorado together."
+
+After such a reconciliation they would talk together of their plans
+and the various ways in which they would amend their lives; but
+gradually they came to know that, while they lived, their hatred never
+could be dead, and, defiant of whatsoever resolutions they might make,
+would surely reassert itself. It was the spirit of the North which
+spoke through them, and not they themselves--the spirit of silence,
+striving to utter itself, and of enmity to all the world.
+
+They carried out their treasure from the hut and placed it in the
+canoe. It was done up in all kinds of packets, in flour-sacks, empty
+tobacco-tins, torn strips of blanket which they had sewn together, and
+abandoned clothing tied up at the arms and legs. Before they had
+placed it all in, together with what remained to them of their outfit,
+the little craft sat so low in the water that it was evident that it
+would be swamped if there was added to its burden the weight of two
+men. They were compelled to sit down and consider how much of their
+outfit could be abandoned. Even then, when they had rejected all the
+provisions, save those which were necessary for a five days' journey,
+and their blankets and their rifles, the canoe was still unsafe.
+
+At Spurling's suggestion they limited themselves to half rations and
+took off all their clothing except their trousers and shirts; and
+still it was too heavy. Very reluctantly they set to work to take out
+some of the gold, commencing with the smaller amounts. When they had
+finished, they had thrown out all their last month's work, and still
+the canoe was by no means steady.
+
+Spurling, with the foresight and thrift of a man who has a long life
+before him, went into the hut and, bringing out a spade, commenced to
+dig. When he had made a hole of sufficient width and depth, he buried
+the abandoned nuggets and gold dust.
+
+Granger watched him to the end. Then, with a touch of bitterness in
+his tones, he asked, "And what's that for?"
+
+"In case I should ever be able to come back," said Spurling, "and so
+that no one else may find it."
+
+"Don't you worry yourself, you'll be in El Dorado before that time,
+or else hanged. In either case, a trifle like that won't matter."
+
+He scowled; Granger's flippancies on the subject of death, especially
+death with a rope about his neck, always made him feel unhappy. He
+tried to take his place in the stern, but Granger would not trust him
+there; he signed to him to take the forward paddle, where he would
+have no opportunity of making a surprise attack. They pushed off and
+quickly lost sight of the hut, the discovery of which had meant so
+much to them. Now that they had procured their wealth and abandoned
+their diggings, all their eagerness was for escape.
+
+The sunset lay behind them, and before, like a black-mailed host,
+preparing to dispute their passage, the shadows of night were
+gathered. During the past month the forest leaves had turned from
+green, and gray, into copper, yellow, and flaming red. The branches of
+the tallest of the underbrush were already bare and, clustered
+together beneath the tree-trunks, created the effect of scarves of
+mist which shifted from silver to lavender. The floor of the forest
+was of gold, where the fallen foliage had scattered; but, where the
+scrub-oak grew, it was golden splashed with blood. The dominant tone
+of the landscape was of gold and blood; through the heart of which ran
+the river, changing by infinitesimal, overlapping shadings from yellow
+into red, from red into night-colour, from night-colour into
+nothingness. Down this roadway passed the trespassers, with the thing
+which they had stolen weighing down their canoe to the point of
+danger; murder was in their hearts, and grey fear ran before them.
+Instinctively they bowed their heads, suspicious of one another,
+peering ahead into the distance for an enemy who awaited them, and
+from side to side or behind for one who followed.
+
+During their stay at the hut, nothing had come near to disturb
+them--nothing in human guise. But from the first they had been aware
+of the timber-wolf, which Spurling had seen on his first visit and had
+described to Granger. It had not shown itself in the daytime and had
+rarely been seen in its entirety at night; but they had known that it
+was near them by the rustling of the bushes, and had at times caught a
+glimpse of its shadow, or of its eyes looking out at them from under
+cover.
+
+Even when they had not heard it, they had come across its footprints.
+Towards the dawn, had one of them risen early and strayed far from
+camp, he had sometimes seen it cross his path ahead, or had heard it
+tracking him. So nervous had they become, that they had never stirred
+far from one another; while one had slept, the other had kept watch.
+Perhaps this dread of a constant menacer, and the more terrible fear
+of being left alone in its presence, had prevented bloodshed when
+their more furious quarrels were at their height. Of a mere wolf, no
+man who is armed need have terror; their discomfort arose from the
+suspicion that this creature, which watched and lay in wait for them,
+was more than an animal.
+
+There had been a night when it was Spurling's turn to keep guard, and
+he had slept. Granger had wakened with a nervous sense of peril.
+Through the open door of the hut he had seen the silver of the
+moonlight in the tree-tops across the river and had seen the outline
+of his companion stretched along the ground. As he watched, he had
+seen a shadow fall across the threshold, followed by a head. It was
+grey in colour, the ears were laid back, and the fangs were bared as
+if with hunger. But it was the eyes which had absorbed his attention.
+They were angry and reproachful; he had seen them before--they were
+the eyes of a man whose soul is dead. They recalled to him that night
+when Beorn had declared himself. That he recognised them, as he
+admitted to himself when daylight was come, may have been only fancy;
+but the impression which he had while he gazed on them was very real.
+Moreover, he saw distinctly the scar of the wound which Spurling had
+inflicted in his fight at the cache. Then the head had been withdrawn,
+and the hut had been darkened by a huge form which stood across the
+doorway. He had heard Spurling turn over on his side, rouse up and cry
+out.
+
+The form had crouched and sprung, and the light shone in again. There
+was a sound of scuffling outside, followed by a thud. Leaping to his
+feet, dazed and bewildered, he had run out in time to see a
+timber-wolf of monstrous size, with Spurling's arm in its mouth,
+dragging him away into the forest. Careless of his own safety, he had
+gone after the animal, belabouring its head with the stock of his
+rifle, for he was afraid to shoot, lest he should wound his companion.
+It had dropped its prey and fled, bounding off into the dusk between
+the tree-trunks, leaving Spurling a little mauled but not much
+injured. This experience had served to prove to them that, however
+much they hated, they were still indispensable to each other's safety,
+and must hold together.
+
+Granger, for his own peace of mind, had sought to find an explanation
+for this happening. If the beast was indeed Beorn's soul, then why
+was it exiled there, on the Forbidden River? Had Beorn killed the
+miners, in his underground fights on the Comstock, not out of
+righteous indignation, as he had stated, but only for the pleasure of
+destroying life and out of envious, disappointed avarice? Had he
+mocked God consciously in making Him responsible for those crimes, and
+in attributing to Him their inspiration? If these things were so, then
+this might have been his fitting punishment, that, when by his own
+wickedness he had made himself an outcast from the company of mankind,
+and had been compelled to banish himself, for the sake of his own
+preservation, to a land where nothing was of much value, money least
+of all, there he had discovered the gold in the profitless search of
+which he had made himself vile. The power over gladness, which it
+would have represented to another man, had been of no use to him now,
+for he had not dared to take it out of the district to where it would
+acquire its artificial worth; yet he had not dared to remain on the
+Forbidden River: for there was no food there. So his body and soul had
+parted company; his body going south to God's Voice, while his soul
+stayed near to the thing after which it had lusted, for which it had
+exchanged its happiness, to guard it, that it might not become the
+possession of a freer man and bring him the gladness which to a
+murderer is denied.
+
+This had seemed to Granger to be the only explanation which fitted in
+with all the facts. In accepting it, he had found room for the
+suspicion that he also had laid waste his life not for the sake of
+romance, not for his dream's sake, but for the sake of greed alone.
+Having made gold his hope, having said to the fine gold, "Thou art my
+confidence," he had committed an iniquity to be punished by the judge.
+
+Had he suffered all that punishment as yet, or was there worse to
+follow? Would the worst that he could expect be death? Once, when he
+was poor, he had only feared life; but now, with his treasure beneath
+his feet, with the canoe gliding southward on the journey out, there
+was added this new terror--the fear of death. He desired most
+passionately to live now.
+
+Darkness had fallen and the air was growing colder. Presently, flake
+by flake, the first snow of winter drifted down. The two men said
+nothing, but they paddled faster, for the chill struck into their
+chests through their shirts, making them repent the folly which had
+led them to abandon their clothing that more gold might be carried.
+Every now and again, Spurling broke out into a fit of coughing and, as
+he shivered, the canoe trembled. As for Granger his hands were heavy,
+his arms ached, and his fingers were numb; he dimly wondered at his
+own perseverance that he still continued to ply his paddle. As the
+cold spread through him, his senses took to sleeping. He was aroused
+by a sudden jerk and a shout from Spurling, "Curse you. Back water.
+Turn her head out into the river."
+
+Looking up, he saw that they had struck the bank and come near
+capsizing. And he saw more than that; scarcely two yards away a pair
+of glowing eyes shone out at him.
+
+"For the sake of God, make haste," cried Spurling; "the brute's about
+to pounce."
+
+With a twist of the paddle he swung the canoe's head round, and with
+the help of Spurling drove her out. They were none too early, for,
+just behind them, where a moment since the canoe had been hanging,
+they heard a splash.
+
+For the rest of the night they kept watch over themselves lest they
+slept. Till the dawn broke, whenever they turned their eyes toward the
+bank, they could discern the grey streak of the timber-wolf, dodging
+in and out between the tree-trunks, keeping pace with them. So long as
+they were on the Forbidden River they journeyed both day and night,
+allowing themselves scant time for rest. If they had been eager to get
+there, they were still more anxious to get away. When in the middle of
+the third night they swung out into the Last Chance, they stopped and
+looked back. The moon was shining; sitting squarely on its haunches
+they could see the timber-wolf, which had run out on the spit of land
+to the water's edge, gazing after them malignantly.
+
+Breaking the long silence, Spurling said, "Thank God, he can come no
+further."
+
+"But his body awaits us at Murder Point," Granger replied.
+
+"I can deal with men's bodies," Spurling said. Then they moved onward,
+pressing up against the current.
+
+At the first hint of daylight they landed and hid themselves, lest, in
+that deserted land, their presence should be detected. The precaution
+proved wise, for about noon a party of belated voyageurs passed
+northward en route for the Crooked Creek. They were singing, keeping
+time with their paddles; their careless gladness made the hunted men,
+for all their gold, feel envious.
+
+They dared not kindle a fire, and at last, that they might save the
+little warmth they had, were compelled to lie down together, breast to
+breast, clasping one another closely as though they were friends. At
+sunset they again set out. All night long to Granger the sky seemed
+filled with uncouth legendary animals, which trooped across the
+horizon file on file. Sometimes they were Beorn's camels, sometimes
+they were timber-wolves or brindled huskies with yellow faces, but
+more often they were creatures of evil passions, for which there are
+no names. To avoid looking at them, he would keep his eyes in the
+canoe or would stare at Spurling's back. But the sight of his
+companion's monotonous movements, compelling him to go on working when
+his arms ached and his body seemed broken, caused such mad fury to
+arise within him that he feared for his own actions, and was glad to
+return his eyes to the clouds. At dawn, as though a golden door had
+been opened, the creatures passed in and disappeared, and he saw them
+no more till sunset.
+
+For himself, he would gladly have lain down, and died, had not
+Spurling with the same indomitable courage which he had displayed on
+the Dawson trail, roused him up and compelled him with his brutal
+jibes to play the man. By the end of the first day on the Last Chance
+their food gave out, and since leaving the hut all their meals had
+been scanty; then they would willingly have given a third of the gold
+which they carried in exchange for a hatful of the flour which, in
+their greed for nuggets, they had left behind on the Forbidden River's
+banks. If a bird flew over their heads, they dared not fire a gun lest
+its report should be heard, so great was their fear of possible
+arrest.
+
+As their weakness increased, the downward rush of the current seemed
+to gather strength; there were times when their progress was almost
+imperceptible. Sufficient snow had already fallen to cloak the land in
+whiteness, and they were very conscious that every day the
+temperature, was sinking lower. In the middle of the seventh night of
+their journey they felt something grate against their prow, and they
+knew that the river was freezing over. They had only five more miles
+to traverse; they were too exhausted and stiff with cold to attempt to
+reach their destination by walking along the bank, even if they had
+been willing to abandon their treasure; so there was nothing for it
+but to make one last effort. So nerveless were they with fatigue that,
+when they went by the bend, Spurling forgot to be afraid of the thing
+which he had seen there; he had not the strength to remember. They
+reached the pier when the dawn was breaking, so faint that they could
+not rise and crawl out. They would have drifted back over the way
+which they had travelled, had not the ice closed in and held them.
+
+Two hours after their arrival, Eyelids looked out from the window at
+Murder Point and, seeing them, came to their rescue and lifted them
+into the shack.
+
+They had arrived none too early, for that day the river froze over,
+the snow fell in earnest, and the Keewatin winter settled down.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE BETRAYAL
+
+
+Granger had been sick and delirious for several days as a result of
+exposure and starvation. Day and night Peggy had nursed him with
+unwearying attention; one would have supposed that he had been always
+kind to her, and that she was greatly in his debt. Since his brain had
+cleared she had said little to him; but, when she touched him, he
+could feel the thrill of passion that travelled through her hands. Her
+face told him nothing; it was only when suddenly she raised up her
+eyes that he saw the longing which they could not hide. Because her
+eyes betrayed her, she rarely looked at him. He would gladly have
+spoken with her frankly, but her reserve deterred him, and, moreover,
+a great anxiety weighed upon his mind--he did not know how many of his
+secrets and hidden intentions he had let out in his ravings. The
+altered bearing of his companions made him aware that they had each
+learnt something fresh about himself, one another, and the manner in
+which he regarded them. The Man with the Dead Soul was alone
+unchanged.
+
+So he sat among them on his couch of furs as morosely as Beorn
+himself, striving to grope his way back into the darkness from which
+his mind had issued, torturing himself to remember how much his lips
+had admitted during the time when his vigilance was relaxed. He could
+only recall the shadows of his words and acts; the real things, which
+lurked behind the shadows, continually evaded capture. Yet it seemed
+to him that he must have laid bare all his life, confessing to Eyelids
+and his sister his every affection and his every treachery, whether
+accomplished or intended.
+
+Then, if he had done that, he had told Peggy to her face how he was
+purposing to desert her! It was this suspicion which kept him silent;
+he waited for her to reveal herself. But she refused to help him; in
+her looks there was no condemnation, and in her treatment of him
+nothing but gentleness. Surely there should have been contempt, if she
+had known _all_ about him!
+
+Two pictures stood out so sharply from the background chaos of his
+impressions, that he believed them to be veritable memories. The one
+was of Peggy kneeling at his side, taking him in her arms, as though
+he were a child, and laying his head upon her breast, and of himself
+mistaking her for his mother or Mordaunt, and speaking to her all
+manner of tenderness. The other was of his perpetual terror lest
+Spurling had gone southward without him, having stolen his share of
+the treasure; and of one night when Peggy to quiet him had roused up
+Eyelids, who had brought in Spurling--and Spurling's hands were bound.
+
+When he had come to himself, his first action had been to look round
+for Spurling--and he was not there. Two days had now passed, and there
+was still no sign of him. As his strength returned, the fear of his
+delirium gained ground upon him--lest Spurling had escaped. Brooding
+over the past with a sick man's fancy, he discovered a new cause for
+agitation--_if Spurling had departed, he would never know the truth
+about Mordaunt_. For the recovery of the gold he scarcely cared now;
+the apparent actualness of Mordaunt's presence, bending over him in
+his delirium, had recalled her vividly to his memory, awakening the
+passion which he had striven to crush down, so that now it seemed
+all-important to him that he should ask Spurling that one question,
+"Was the body that was found near Forty-Mile clothed in a woman's
+dress?"
+
+The return of a certain season, which the mind has associated with a
+special experience, will often arouse and poignantly concentrate an
+old emotion, which has been almost forgotten throughout the other
+months of the year. The arrival of Spurling, and the agony which he
+had suffered when he had begun to suspect that the woman whom he loved
+was dead, had happened when the snow was on the ground; perhaps it was
+the sight of the frozen river and the white landscape which now caused
+him to remember so furiously the vengeance which he had planned,
+should Mordaunt prove to be the woman whom Spurling had murdered. So,
+for the time being, the seeking of El Dorado and preserving of his own
+life seemed paltry objects when compared with the asking of that
+question, and the exacting, if need be, of the necessary revenge.
+
+On the third day after the recovery of his senses he could endure his
+suspicions no longer. Peggy had gone out for a little while; Eyelids
+was busy in the store; only the Man with the Dead Soul was left with
+him in the shack. Seizing his opportunity, he got up and dressed. He
+was so weak that at first he could scarcely stand. Tottering toward
+the door, he already had his hand upon the latch when Beorn arose and
+followed him. Though Granger had asked him no question, "I will show
+you," he said.
+
+Outside they met Peggy returning; but her father waved her sternly
+aside, and, putting his arms about Granger to support him, guided him
+to the back of Bachelors' Hall. A stoutly built cabin was there, which
+stood by itself and was windowless, the door of which was iron-bound
+and padlocked; it was used as a cell in which Indians and half-breeds
+were kept, should they grow refractory. Producing the key, he opened
+the door; as they entered they were greeted with a volley of curses.
+
+In the farthest corner lay a man, crouched on a bed of mouldy furs.
+The cell was not often used, and was covered with decaying
+fungus-growth from the dampness of the past summer. When Granger tried
+to speak to him, his voice was drowned by the sort of noise that a dog
+makes when it comes out from its kennel; then he saw that Spurling was
+chained low down to the floor by his hands and feet, so that he could
+not stand upright. With an hysteric cry of gladness he ran forward,
+and was only saved from Spurling's teeth, as he bent back his head, by
+Beorn, who pushed him to one side so heavily that he fell to the
+ground. Then Eyelids came in, and picked him up and carried him back
+to the shack.
+
+For the next few days he had plenty of leisure to reflect. He wondered
+whether Beorn's treatment of Spurling, and the fact that he had shown
+him to him on the earliest occasion, was meant as a threat to himself;
+or had the disclosures which he had made in his delirium given him the
+impression that he also was entirely Spurling's enemy. The bearing of
+Eyelids and of Peggy led him to believe that the latter supposition
+was correct. His natural instinct was to free the man at once,--but
+he thought better of it; Spurling would be at least kept out of
+mischief there till he himself was well.
+
+Now that his mind was at ease, he commenced to mend rapidly; when two
+more days had passed, he was up and able to get about without much
+help. On visiting the trading-store he found that his canoe was lying
+there, just as he had brought it back; nothing of its contents had
+been removed or unpacked. He sat down beside it, and tried to
+formulate his plans.
+
+So far, in spite of his illness, everything had happened for the best.
+Spurling was safe until he should require him. The gold was now in his
+absolute possession. Very shortly Eyelids and Beorn would set out on
+their winter's hunt, leaving him, save for Peggy, free to act
+unobserved. But he had made a discovery, the knowledge of which
+disturbed him--that a part, at least, of the reason for Peggy's
+reticence and new gentleness was that before long she would be a
+mother. That fact made him feel differently towards her; he could not
+now desert her, for it would mean abandoning his child.
+
+When he pictured to himself what the Northland might do for a child
+who was fatherless, especially if it were a girl, he knew that,
+whatever plans he made, they must include his half-breed wife.
+Moreover, her approaching maternity appealed to the chivalry in his
+nature, making him ashamed that he had ever thought to leave her.
+Until his child was born, at whatever risk to himself, he must
+postpone his departure and lie in hiding at Murder Point. And after
+that? He must take her into his confidence, as he should have done
+long ago, as if she were all white. He would have to leave her behind
+at first, but would make arrangements for her to follow after him when
+the road was clear.
+
+Having arrived at this point, his train of reasoning was broken off by
+the appearance of Eyelids, who came to ask for two outfits, and to
+inform him that he and Beorn had determined to set out on the winter
+trail that night. The rest of the day was spent in preparations, and
+the getting together of their teams of huskies.
+
+Just before they left, a visit was paid to Spurling in the cabin, and
+the key was handed over to Granger. While there, Granger referred to
+the matter which he had been wanting to mention all day. Turning to
+Eyelids, as though it were of little importance, he said, "Before you
+return, as I daresay you've noticed, something will have happened. I
+want you to promise me to come back for Christmas Eve, so that we may
+celebrate the event." Then, throwing aside his disguise of
+indifference, he spoke more earnestly, "I want you and Beorn to
+promise me that."
+
+Spurling looked sharply up from his corner; being ignorant of the
+matter which Granger hinted at, he watched to see if the words
+contained a reference to himself. Peggy turned her head away and began
+to steal softly out. But her brother stayed her, and throwing his arm
+about her shoulder, said, "I promise you; we shall return." And Beorn
+gave him his hand as a sign of his assent.
+
+They closed and locked the door on the prisoner, and the father and
+son set out.
+
+A sudden instinct for carefulness had prompted him to make that
+request. At the last moment he had thought that he noticed on Beorn's
+part a certain uneasiness in handing over to him the custody of
+Spurling. He was afraid that the distrust might grow upon him, causing
+him to return unexpectedly, perhaps just at the time when he and
+Spurling were starting on their southward journey. It was to prevent
+such an interference with his plans that he had named a definite time
+for their next meeting, for, by so doing, he had given Beorn to
+understand that he intended to remain at Murder Point throughout
+December. The hinting at the birth of his child had added to his
+request a show of naturalness, and had at the same time let them know
+that he was aware of his wife's condition--a difficult knowledge to
+communicate to people who spoke rarely, and then only of trivial
+affairs. As yet he had not decided as to when he would set out, for he
+hesitated between the manfully fulfilling of his new responsibility
+and the callously accomplishing of his old purpose; if he should
+choose the latter, he had provided for Peggy so that she would not be
+left too long by herself, by the promise which he had exacted from her
+brother and father to return for Christmas Eve.
+
+For the first time he was left truly alone with her. Standing side by
+side, they watched the trappers descend the Point to the pier, where
+their dogs lay waiting them. The whips cracked and the teams
+straightened out.
+
+For a few strides they moved toward the opposite bank and then, to
+Granger's amazement, wheeled to the left, and commenced travelling
+up-river to the west. The loaded sleds swung lightly over the ice and,
+as he listened, the shouting of the drivers and the yelping of the
+huskies grew fainter, till they were no more heard. He was made
+terribly afraid by the direction they had taken, for he knew that
+Beorn's trapping grounds had always lain to the northwards, and never
+around God's Voice; they were still less likely to do so now, since he
+had quarrelled with the factor. Then why had he gone to the west?
+
+He turned to the girl at his side to question her, "Did you know that
+they were going there?" he said. She did not answer him; he saw that
+her eyes were intently fixed upon the bend. Her lips moved, and her
+hands made the sign of the cross upon her breast as if she were
+praying. Without replying, she entered the shack.
+
+He did not follow her, for his feelings were changed with anger. He
+felt that, whether knowingly or unknowingly, they had betrayed him
+through their secretiveness. While he had been absent they must have
+heard that Spurling was a man with a price upon his head. They might
+even have learnt it from Pilgrim at the time of his June visit, but
+had not laid hands upon him because he had appeared to be his friend.
+But now since their return, in his delirium he had probably uttered
+words concerning Spurling which had left them with the impression that
+he desired his death--and had given them their excuse for gratifying
+their own covetousness and revenge for the Forbidden River trespass.
+
+Even what he had said to them about returning for Christmas Eve might
+have been taken as having a double meaning, referring not only to the
+birth of the child, but also to the thousand-dollar reward to be
+gained by the arrest. Spoken as it was, in the prison-cabin, that was
+most likely how it had been taken. Since they had accepted him as
+their confederate, it seemed evident that they did not know that the
+arrest of Spurling might entail his own hanging. If all that he had
+conjectured was true, he had now no option but to release Spurling and
+to make good his escape with him at once; for from Murder Point to
+God's Voice was no more than seventy miles. At once! But he would not
+be strong enough to travel for some days yet, and Spurling could not
+be in very excellent condition for such a journey--to be thrown into
+an out-house and left there for a fortnight, with back bent double and
+arms and legs bound, is not the best kind of training.
+
+Before doing anything rash he would talk to Peggy, and find out how
+much she knew about it. Following her into the shack, he made fast the
+door and threw himself on the pile of furs which had been his couch.
+The lamp was not lighted, but the stove was red-hot and scattered an
+angry glare. He called to her; she came to him timidly from the far
+end of the room and sat down beside him. He commenced abruptly by
+telling her that the man who was chained out there in the cabin was a
+murderer. Did she know that? She nodded. How did she know that? She
+shuddered, and pointed with her hand out of the window in the
+direction of the bend.
+
+He did not gather what she meant, but for the present he let it pass.
+
+And did she know that there were a thousand dollars offered for
+Spurling's capture? She shrugged her shoulders, and again gave her
+assent. Then, raising himself on his elbow, he asked her plainly, "Is
+that what Eyelids has gone to get?"
+
+She smiled down at him as though she were owning to something worthy;
+"I hope so," she said.
+
+"Why do you hope so," he asked in a hard voice; "because of the
+money?"
+
+She drew back from him as though he had affronted her. "No, not for
+that," she said, speaking slowly.
+
+"Then why?"
+
+"Because he is trying to take you away from me."
+
+"And you think that when the Mounted Police have hanged him that it
+will be all right, and I shall stay here?"
+
+She did not answer him, but he knew that she was thinking of her
+child. "Whether Spurling escapes or is taken," he said, "will make no
+difference to my doings. I cannot stay; they are hunting for me,
+because they think I also am a murderer."
+
+She turned sharply round. "But we are doing this to save you; we
+thought that you agreed and understood. When you have given them this
+man, they will pardon you, and you will be allowed to stay."
+
+"Who told you that? Was it Antoine?"
+
+"Robert Pilgrim."
+
+He laughed in her face. "Bah! Robert Pilgrim!" he exclaimed. "He told
+you that, and you believed him! Why, you little fool, he doesn't care
+a curse what happens to Spurling, whether he's caught or gets away;
+it's me that he's anxious to put to death. But he couldn't have told
+you that when we were in hiding on Huskies' Island, or you'd have
+betrayed us then."
+
+"He sent word to us by a messenger while you were away. But, if I had
+known, I shouldn't have betrayed you then, for this man seemed to be
+at that time your friend."
+
+"Then why have you done so now?"
+
+"Because he has become your enemy and you hate him; and because there
+is no other way of saving you for my child and for myself. He is
+trying to take you away from me." She spoke in a fierce strained
+whisper, kneeling, with her hands spread out before her, and her head
+thrown back.
+
+"You haven't saved me," he said, rising to his feet angrily; "all
+you've done is to place the rope about my neck."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE HAND IN THE DOORWAY
+
+
+He picked up a lantern and, having lighted it, left the shack. Going
+round the out-building of the store, he made his way through the snow
+to the cabin where Spurling was imprisoned. As he placed the key in
+the padlock, he could hear the rattle of the chains of the man inside.
+Having opened the door, he halted on the threshold, afraid and ashamed
+to enter. There was dead silence. Lifting the lantern above his head,
+he could make out the figure of Spurling, crouched like a beast on
+knees and hands, with eyes which watched him doubtfully.
+
+"They have gone," he said.
+
+Spurling did not answer, but followed his every movement.
+
+"They have gone," he repeated; "but they have not gone to the
+Forbidden River--they have gone in the direction of God's Voice."
+
+Then Spurling spoke. "Thank God," he said, "for they'll hang you as
+well."
+
+Granger placed the lantern on the floor and sat himself down.
+"Spurling," he said, "we both of us have some old scores to pay off;
+at the present moment, I happen to have the upper hand. But this is
+not the time to settle them. For instance, you have never told me the
+name of the woman whom you shot in the Klondike."
+
+Spurling broke in furiously, saying, "I have told you already, that
+it was not a woman I murdered, but a man."
+
+Granger waved him aside with his hand. "I'm not asking you her name,"
+he said. "We've not got the time to quarrel, for there is still a
+chance of our saving ourselves. It'll take Beorn and Eyelids at least
+four days to reach God's Voice and come back. But I don't think
+they'll touch at God's Voice at all; they'll skirt it and go farther
+south. They won't trust Robert Pilgrim, lest he should claim a part of
+the reward. If I know Eyelids, it's the thousand dollars he's after,
+and he wants it all for himself. Their purpose is to go on until they
+meet the winter patrol, so that they may be able to give direct
+information to the Mounted Police themselves. Now before they do that,
+a good deal of time may be lost, for the winter patrol has hardly
+started as yet, and it may go in a new direction so that they'll miss
+it at first. With the best of luck, they'll have to travel three
+hundred miles, a ten days' journey, before they fall in with it. While
+they're searching for it, we shall be able to slip by them and get
+out. If you'll promise to stand by me I'll release you. If you won't,
+I shall leave you here and go on myself. But I warn you fairly, no
+man, unless he leaves the gold behind him, can make that journey by
+himself with any hope of surviving. Our last chance, whether we want
+to reach El Dorado or merely to save our lives, is to stick together
+and persuade ourselves that we are friends."
+
+"I'll stand by you," Spurling said; "I'm no more anxious to die by the
+rope or starvation than you are yourself. But what are we to do with
+the half-breed woman--your wife? To leave her behind us, free to go
+where she chooses, would be suicide."
+
+Granger eyed him angrily, for he did not like the sinister whisper in
+which he had asked that question. He might just as well have said,
+"Shall I shoot her while you go outside and scrape out her grave?" But
+to have paid attention to it just then would have brought them to high
+words at the outset; so he said, "We can't take her with us, for she
+is soon to have a child. But I think, when I have explained things to
+her, she'll give us her promise to keep our secret, and we shall be
+able to trust her word."
+
+"Humph! You think that? Well, knock off these chains."
+
+Granger brought the lantern nearer and was stooping to his work, when
+Spurling stopped him, laying his hand upon his shoulder. "Hist! What's
+that?" he said. Granger listened. He could distinctly hear the crunch
+of footsteps on the snow, moving stealthily away from the cabin.
+Running to the door, he caught sight of a woman's skirt, disappearing
+round the corner of the store, and recognised the shadow which was
+flung behind as Peggy's. She must have heard all that they had said.
+
+Spurling waited till his chains were off and he was able to stand
+upright, a free man. Then he asked significantly, "And now what are
+you going to do with her?"
+
+"That is my business," Granger retorted hotly.
+
+"But I think that it is also mine."
+
+He knew that it would be unwise to argue the point, so he led the way
+to Bachelors' Hall, Spurling limping stiffly behind. So cramped had he
+become with the cold, and the position in which he had been chained
+during his confinement, that he could hardly move a step without
+groaning. Until he should recover, despite his own weakness, Granger
+knew that he was physically the stronger and still had the upper hand.
+For Peggy's sake he intended to make the best use of his time; he
+began to have fears for her as to what might happen were she left to
+the mercy of Spurling's choice.
+
+"What are we coming here for?" growled Spurling, as they stopped at
+the door of the hall; "why can't we go to the shack? I'm desperately
+cold and there's a fire there."
+
+"I'll light you a fire," said Granger, placing his hands on his
+shoulders and thrusting him inside.
+
+"You're mighty anxious that I shouldn't get near your wife," said
+Spurling; "she must be very valuable."
+
+Granger went off and soon returned with fuel. The stove was damp and
+rusty, and did not draw well at first, so that all the room was filled
+with smoke. Spurling had stumbled over to the shelf and lay there
+complaining. When the wood had caught and was burning brightly,
+Granger fetched him something to eat and then went out to speak with
+Peggy, leaving him alone, promising to return again to spend the
+night.
+
+When he had entered the shack, it appeared to be empty. He called
+Peggy's name, but she did not reply. Listening intently, he heard the
+sound of sobbing which she was endeavouring to stifle. Going over to
+the berth he found her lying there, with face turned to the wall.
+Sitting down beside her, he placed his arms about her, and tried to
+make her turn his way, but she refused to be comforted.
+
+"Peggy," he said, "you heard what we were saying in the cabin? You
+remember how I said that I was able to trust your word. I want you to
+promise me that you will not tell anyone that we have left, and that
+you will not try to follow until I send to tell you that all is safe,
+so that you can come to me."
+
+"You will never send," she said.
+
+"Why do you say that?"
+
+"Because that man will quarrel with you and kill you on the way out."
+
+"That's nonsense; you must listen to what I have planned. This summer
+we found gold on the Forbidden River."
+
+"I know that."
+
+"Who told you?"
+
+"Eyelids."
+
+"Why did he tell you?"
+
+"He found it himself in the spring, when father sent him up there
+after Spurling; and he was angry when he knew that you had gone there,
+because he wanted it for himself."
+
+"Did he stop here all summer?"
+
+"Yes, but father went away. I think he must have followed you. He got
+back four days before your return."
+
+"Humph! I suspected that, for I saw something that was very like him
+there. . . . And do you still think that they have gone to tell the
+Mounted Police only in order that Spurling may be arrested?"
+
+"I don't know; but that's what they said. I chose to believe them
+because that was the only way in which I could keep you for myself."
+
+"Well, then, listen. No matter what Eyelids and Beorn may intend, if
+the Mounted Police once get hold of me the result will be that I shall
+get hanged. The one way in which you can keep me for yourself is to
+help me to escape. I can't take you with me as you are at present; you
+know that. And I can't strike the trail alone; I must have someone to
+help me take the gold out. There's no one but Spurling. Besides, I've
+promised to stick by him; he saved my life once, and I'm paying back
+the debt. When once I've reached Winnipeg, I'll be able to purchase
+friends who will hide me, if need be; but I hope to get there ahead of
+the news of my escape, before the police have my description and are
+on the lookout. I shall strike for the south, and, when the hunt is
+over and I'm given up for dead, I'll send you word where you can join
+me."
+
+"You never will do that."
+
+"And why not?"
+
+"Because you will be dead."
+
+Granger was losing patience. Whatever reasoning he used, he could not
+move her beyond that one assertion.
+
+"Won't you help me to take the one chance of life that I think I
+have?" he said. "It can't make much difference to you if Spurling does
+kill me on the trail; if I stay here, I shall die a few weeks later,
+more disgracefully."
+
+She stood up and led him over to the window, through which the moon
+was shining, so that he could see her face. She placed her arms about
+his neck, as if she were a white woman. "I will tell you the truth
+now," she said; "I have been keeping something back that I might save
+you from yourself. Since you joined with this man and helped him take
+the gold from the Forbidden River, Eyelids and my father have both
+become your enemies. The factor did send his message that your life
+would be spared if Spurling was given up, but I think he was speaking
+falsely. I have tried to keep you near me because I alone, if need be,
+can stand between you and them. If you set out with Spurling, he will
+kill you; and if you stay here, you will be arrested. But if you will
+come with me into the forest, we can join some Indians of my mother's
+tribe, and they will hide us where you never can be found."
+
+Granger watched her while she was speaking, wondering whether he was
+hearing the very truth this time. "And, if I do as you ask me, what
+will happen to Spurling?" he said.
+
+She drew him nearer to herself. "I hate that man," she whispered; "let
+him die as he deserves."
+
+"And why didn't you tell me everything at first?"
+
+"Because you are not strong enough to make the journey yet; and I
+wanted to keep you resting here, till you had no other choice of
+saving yourself but by following me into the forest. While my father
+was present, I did not dare to tell you--_for his soul is dead_."
+
+Granger took his eyes from off her face; she tempted him--he had been
+so long unused to kindness. He gazed out of the window, far away
+across the frozen forest, and heard the dream of his boyhood calling
+to him to seek the city out of sight. His choice lay between this
+woman and El Dorado, in whose search he had wasted all his life. He
+did not deceive himself, whatever he might say aloud; his hesitancy
+did not arise out of unwillingness to desert Spurling, but from
+unwillingness to abandon the quest while a fragment of hope remained.
+With that stolen gold, if he could slip by the winter patrol and carry
+it out to Winnipeg, he would be able to strike for the south and sail
+up the Great Amana, past the rocks with the forgotten handwriting,
+till he came to the lake of Parima, on whose shores the city is said
+to stand.
+
+She saw that his will was wavering and that his choice was going
+against her. Seizing his hands in her own and pressing them to her
+breast, "I am only a poor half-breed girl," she cried, "but I am soon
+to be the mother of your child; and our child will be nearly all white
+like yourself. You can't think what my life was before you came to me;
+for, though my body is half Indian, my mind has become a white woman's
+since I went to school in Winnipeg. I am so white that I would die for
+you to-morrow, if I could give you life by doing that. I could not
+tell you this before, while my father and brother were present;
+somehow, with their silence they stifled my words, and made me silent.
+But don't judge me by the past months, believe me now."
+
+"Peggy," he said, "what should we do in the forest, if we went there
+and joined your mother's tribe? We should starve, and grow sullen; and
+you would be treated as a squaw, and our child would grow up an
+Indian."
+
+"But I should not mind that if only we were together."
+
+"But we shall be together if my plan works out and I manage to escape.
+Then there's Spurling; however much I hate him, I cannot break my
+promise to him and leave him to die."
+
+She dropped his hands and drew away from him. "You are going to meet
+the white woman," she said; "you had planned to desert me whatever
+happened."
+
+"Who told you that?"
+
+"Your lips told me, when you were sick and they moved of themselves."
+
+"But I promise you now that, when I am safe, I will send you word so
+that you can find me. If I ever did think of deserting you, it was
+before I knew that we were going to have a child."
+
+"You will not send for me," she said; "but I promise that I will do
+nothing to you that will hinder you from going out."
+
+"But what will you do when I am gone, and you yourself will be needing
+help?"
+
+"I shall go, like any other squaw, to the Indian women of my tribe."
+
+There was nothing more to be said; she had given him what he had
+asked. Bidding her good-night, he left the shack.
+
+On returning to the Hall, he found Spurling very restless. "What have
+you been doing all this time?" he asked. "I'd got a good mind to come
+in search of you. I thought you must have struck the trail with your
+squaw, leaving me behind."
+
+Granger pretended not to notice his ill-nature, but told him what he
+had arranged. They talked matters over and determined to make a start
+on the following night. Neither of them were in proper condition to
+travel, but they knew that they had no time to waste. Before they lay
+down to sleep, Spurling altered his position, spreading his furs
+between the stove and the entrance, with his head so near the
+threshold that the door could not be opened wide enough to permit of
+anyone passing out without his being wakened; Granger smiled grimly,
+wondering how long it would take them to quarrel at that rate, when
+one of them thought it necessary to take such precautions. Spurling
+was soon snoring, but Granger could get no rest. The night was
+bitterly cold, and the fire needed constant replenishing. It seemed to
+him that no sooner had he piled on more wood, and wrapped himself in
+his blankets, and laid himself down, than he would feel the
+temperature lowering, and a chill passing over his body like an icy
+hand, beginning at his feet and working up to his head. Shivering and
+with teeth chattering, he would raise himself up on his elbow, only to
+see that the wood was again burnt through and that the fire was going
+out.
+
+At last he determined to give up the attempt to sleep. Pulling a box
+near the stove and using it as a back-rest, he gathered his blankets
+tightly round him and lit his pipe.
+
+Across his shoulders, through the window behind him, fell a shaft of
+moonlight; in front of him, dazzling his eyes, was the redness of the
+glowing charcoal, and the yellow of the jumping flames; within
+hand-stretch to the right lay Spurling, with his feet toward the fire
+and his head within six inches of the threshold. In the great
+stillness which was outside, nothing was to be heard save the rustling
+of the snow as it bound tighter, and the occasional low booming of the
+trees as the frost, acting on the sap, bent their branches.
+
+With his accustomed passion for fairness, he commenced to examine his
+dealings with Peggy and to try to regard his actions from her
+view-point. In his recent conversation with her she had revealed
+qualities the existence of which he had not suspected; he had not
+reckoned her at her true worth. He began to be uncertain even now as
+to whether he was doing right in leaving her. Perhaps she, for all her
+ignorance, was wiser than himself. But of one thing she had made him
+certain, that of all creatures which walked, and talked, and ate, and
+drank, upon the earth, she alone stood by him in his crisis for an
+unselfish reason, and loved him for himself. He knew now, though he
+had not realised it until that night, that he loved her in return,
+half-breed though she was, and could not do without her. He was
+willing to own to himself that, in his treatment of her, he had not
+always been just and, because of her race, at times had been
+despising. He'd been more or less of a fool, and had refused a good
+deal of available happiness.
+
+He looked towards the door; if it had not been for the unpleasantness
+of awaking Spurling, he would have gone at once to the shack and said
+to her, "I don't mind who you are, I love you better than any white
+girl, and would prefer you from amongst them all, were I again given
+my choice." Before he set out, he would like to have her believe that
+he was going, at least partly, for her sake.
+
+The smoke from the burning wood made his eyes grow heavy; he began to
+drowse. He dreamt that he had taken Peggy's advice and had gone with
+her into the forest, having joined himself to the people of her tribe.
+It must have happened years ago, for their child was a sturdy boy who
+ran beside them. She was leading the way through a dark wood, holding
+him by the hand. He asked her where she was going, and for answer she
+laid her finger on his lips and only smiled. On and on they went, and
+then, far away in the distance, he began to see a little light. It
+grew brighter and more dazzling as they approached, so that he had to
+close his eyes. Presently she halted and told him to look. He was
+standing on the edge of a precipice, in the side of which steps had
+been hewn out, and far below was a silver lake which he knew to be
+Parima; and far away was a gleaming of domes and spires which he
+recognised. He was about to speak to thank her, when he tottered and
+his feet sank from under him. As he fell, he stared up at her; the
+last thing he saw was the expression of agony that was in her eyes.
+
+He awoke with a start, but his instinct warned him not to stir. The
+shaft of moonlight had been blotted out, and he knew that someone,
+standing outside, behind him, was gazing in through the window. It was
+not Spurling, for he lay breathing heavily, fast asleep, over to his
+right. As he crouched there motionless, he ran through the list of all
+possible assailants in his mind. It might be Beorn or Eyelids. It
+might be Robert Pilgrim. It might even be the Mounted Police, arrived
+before their time. It might be only a renegade trapper of the Hudson
+Bay Company, who had come by night, that he might not be discovered,
+to see if the private trader would offer a higher price for his catch
+of furs. Then the darkness was removed, and the light shone in again.
+Quickly turning his head, he looked toward the window, and saw nothing
+there. Very quietly he rose to his feet, tiptoed to the window and
+looked out. At first he could see no one; then he saw the outer edge
+of a figure, pressed close to the wall of the house, standing upright
+beside the door-jamb. He crept back from the panes, so that he should
+not obscure the little light he had. Moving over to the right, he
+halted mid-way between the window and Spurling.
+
+He could hear the muffled breathing of the person outside and could
+almost feel the pressure of his body against the wall on the other
+side. In the few seconds' respite, while nothing happened, he glanced
+round, taking in the situation and trying to forecast the probable
+sequence of action. Since Spurling had lain down, he had altered his
+position, so that now his body stretched across the entrance, with his
+head in the corner where the two walls met, forming an acute angle
+with the threshold so that, though he prevented the door from opening
+more than two or three inches, directly it was opened his person would
+be visible, and exposed to attack.
+
+Gently the latch was raised and, by slow degrees, the door began to
+swing inwards. The slit which it made let in a narrow ray of
+moonlight, which, leaving Spurling's face in shadow, fell slanting
+across his neck. If he had not moved in his sleep, his head would have
+been farther out from the wall, and the light, striking on his eyes
+would have aroused him; as it was, he was undisturbed. Alert with the
+horror of it, Granger watched to see what would follow next. The
+person on the other side, peering through the opening, had been warned
+by the same sight of the exposed bare neck, and, desisting from
+pushing the door wider, was deliberating.
+
+When a short interval had elapsed, he saw a hand thrust through the
+crack; it gripped a trapper's hunting knife, with the blade pointing
+downwards, and was poised about to strike. Granger was unarmed
+himself; there was but one thing that could be done to save his
+comrade's life. Flinging all his weight upon the door, he closed it,
+imprisoning the assailant's hand above the wrist joint. The knife
+clattered to the floor, where it stuck out quivering, grazing
+Spurling's cheek as it fell. The hand tried to wrench itself free, the
+fingers opening and closing convulsively, but there was no sound from
+outside.
+
+Spurling awoke with a cry, and clapping his hand to his face found it
+wet with blood. He rose to his feet with his fists clenched, and the
+look of a wild beast at bay in his eyes. His lips were working with
+nervousness and desire to fight. "What is it?" he whispered. "Have
+they come to take us?"
+
+Granger signed to him to stand back and keep quiet. Then he followed
+the direction of Granger's eyes, and he also saw the hand. Bending
+down, with his back against the door, Granger examined it. It was
+brown and slim--far too small for a man's hand, and far too dusky to
+belong to a person who was white. The light, stealing in through the
+aperture, showed it plainly and fell along its length; the fingers had
+ceased to writhe and were extended, as if the thing had died.
+
+While Granger had been looking, Spurling also had seen and had
+surmised. Coming swiftly forward, he stooped to pick up the knife.
+Granger read his purpose and, as he leant forward to pluck it from the
+boards, kicked him heavily in the chest, so that he lost his balance
+and fell sprawling on his back. Before he could recover himself, he
+had opened the door and released the hand. Possessing himself of the
+knife, he set his back against the door again to prevent Spurling from
+following. There was a little cry of gladness, and the sound of
+footsteps rustling the snow as they hurried away.
+
+For the remainder of the long night, he stood guard over the man whom
+he had rescued. When the dawn broke and he visited the shack, he found
+that Peggy had vanished.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+SPURLING TAKES FRIGHT
+
+
+If Spurling had suspected Granger before, he was doubly suspicious of
+him now. Wherever he went, his heavy treacherous eyes followed and
+spied upon him. In one thing only were they united--in their desire to
+see the last of Murder Point. For the accomplishment of this end, they
+laboured feverishly in sullen silence. On visiting the dog-pen, they
+found that of the eleven huskies which had been there, three were
+missing; of the eight which remained, four were the animals left over
+from the grey team belonging to Spurling, and these were the best.
+This meant that they would be able to harness but four dogs apiece to
+a sled, and would have to leave some of their wealth behind, limiting
+each outfit together with the gold to not more than three hundred
+pounds. On examining his clothing, Granger found that his favourite
+capote was not there; he conjectured that Peggy had taken that also in
+her hurry.
+
+They went to the store and selected their provisions with care, taking
+no flour or canned goods, but tallow and fat bacon, because this food
+is least bulky and affords most nourishment. For the same reason,
+instead of the usual allowance for a husky of two raw white fish a
+day, they took lumps of grease frozen solid. Of the gold they took
+mostly dust, because it packed closer than nuggets. This they divided
+into equal shares and poured into moose-hide sacks, which they lashed
+to the bottom of their sleds, with their outfit above.
+
+They clothed themselves warmly for the journey, for already there were
+forty degrees of frost, and this was but November. They put on three
+flannel shirts apiece and one of duffel, and over them a beaded shirt
+of leather. They swathed their feet in duffel, covering them with high
+moccasins, and encased their legs in several wrappings of duffel
+leggins. Their caps were of fur, the hair of which reached down over
+their foreheads, ears, and necks, giving them protection. Over all
+they flung capotes, which extended to their knees and were caught in
+at the waist with a scarlet sash.
+
+Having fed the huskies, Granger returned to the shack, to run through
+his belongings and destroy whatever he did not wish to be found. He
+turned to Spurling, saying, "You'd better lie down now and get a
+little rest."
+
+Spurling blinked at him, and swallowed once or twice, hesitating. Then
+he said, "It's a pleasant meeting that they'll have, with two of us
+absent."
+
+Granger was sorting out old letters, dated years back--things which
+brought memories. He did not pay any attention; perhaps he had not
+heard.
+
+"It's a pleasant meeting that they'll have, I say, with two of us
+absent," Spurling repeated.
+
+"What meeting? I don't understand."
+
+"Why, the meeting you promised them on Christmas Eve--the one you were
+so pressing about."
+
+Granger raised up his head and looked at him. "Don't you be so certain
+of that," he said; "we may not be absent--we may be caught by Eyelids
+and brought back."
+
+Spurling cursed him under his breath.
+
+Granger went on sorting out his papers, burning them or putting them
+aside. Some were from his mother; one was from his father, faded with
+age; and some were from girls whose very names had passed from his
+remembrance. Presently he stopped, and turning round again, with a
+different look in his eyes, handed a page to his companion, saying,
+"Read that."
+
+Spurling laughed harshly and took it. It was in his own handwriting.
+"None of your softness," he said. "I've got long past sentiment."
+
+Granger watched him as he scanned its contents, and saw his face grow
+solemn. It had been written seven years back, before they had left
+England, when both their sympathies were fresher, before their souls
+had grown tarnished. It read: "John, I've just seen the unemployed,
+about four battalions of 'em or from two to three thousand
+men--unemployed, half-clothed, half-fed, and half-men. God! that such
+a sight could be in this world, and here in London; our London,
+wealthy London, the city of luxury and at our own doors. Four
+battalions of men in real want; not a want such as you and I know when
+we run short of our damned tobacco, but a want when the belly is sick
+and empty and has no prospect of being filled--a want of necessities.
+Four battalions of men in want, and how many children and women does
+that represent? God's hooligans, God's scamps, and God's wrecks! '_His
+wrecks_,' how can I write such words. How pitiable are their physical
+conditions, their privation and distress of body! But what of their
+souls, the starvation of their minds? Why, I doubt if they could
+subscribe a respectable soul among the whole four battalions.
+
+"Males who might have been men and of some use in the world, if only
+a finger had shown them the road instead of shoving 'em down into
+wrecks and damnation.
+
+"I can write no more. I must go out and walk about."
+
+Spurling gulped down a sob, and without comment crunched the sheet up
+in his hand, and flung it towards the stove; but it fell short and
+rolled to where Granger was standing. He stooped, picked it up and
+smoothed it out. "I'll put it in my pocket," he said, "to remember
+what we were; we may need the reminder on our journey."
+
+"Damn your softness," Spurling broke out. "I want to forget the past,
+and to live like the beast I am. How could I shoot down even an Indian
+to defend myself, if I were to remember things like that! It's gold
+that's changed me; and now that I've got it I intend, at all costs, to
+win out."
+
+"Yes, it's gold that's changed us," Granger said.
+
+Presently he paused again. "I had intended to keep that to threaten
+you with, but you can have it now," he said.
+
+Spurling rose up from the floor, and coming over to the table took the
+paper from him. It was the warrant for his arrest. His hand shook as
+he read it.
+
+"Granger, how did you get that?" he asked in a low voice. "Was it from
+Strangeways?"
+
+On the spur of the moment, to avoid the direct answering of the
+question and that he might learn the exact truth about something else,
+he drew forth the locket from his breast.
+
+"What's that?" asked Spurling. "Another reminder?"
+
+"Come and look for yourself."
+
+"I don't want to remember, I tell you."
+
+"But this has something to do with the answer to your question."
+
+Spurling came behind and looked over his shoulder carelessly, not
+expecting to see anything which was of much concern. Then he started,
+so violently that the portrait fell from Granger's hand. "My God, it
+_was_ a woman!" he moaned. "A woman! A woman!"
+
+Granger turned upon him, willing to be angry; but he saw that he had
+no need of further revenge. The man's body seemed to have shrunk into
+itself, and to have grown smaller. His lower jaw hung down, giving a
+purposeless expression to the face and mouth. The eyes were vacant and
+stared out on space, focussing nothing. Whatever anger he had had was
+turned to pity as he regarded him. So Spurling had not known that
+Mordaunt was a woman! And the body which was found at Forty-Mile had
+not been clothed in a woman's dress! How Strangeways must be laughing
+out there, alone in the coldness, three feet beneath the snow at the
+bend!
+
+Yet, for all his pity, Granger could not bring himself to touch the
+man--he looked too absorbed in his tragedy. Out of decency he turned
+his back upon him, hurrying his task to an end. Already he had been
+too long about it; they had no time to linger. Peggy's absence might
+have many purposes; when she returned, she might not come
+unaccompanied. Before he made a start, after his night of watching he
+would require rest.
+
+Spurling had drawn away from him and was huddled in a corner,
+whispering to himself. He must say and do something to brace him up,
+and show to him that in his eyes he was still a man. If he didn't
+recover quickly, they would have to postpone their journey. He was a
+fool to have shown him that.
+
+The last of the papers had been burned; he tied the few which he had
+preserved into a little bundle, and thrust them in his breast. Going
+over to Spurling, he laid his hand on his shoulder and said, "Druce,
+old fellow, I'm very tired. I want to take an hour's sleep before we
+set out. You'd best watch and see that nothing happens. In two hours
+it'll be sunset; wake me before then."
+
+He raised up his haggard face and nodded, but he did not look at him
+squarely. Granger, having made up the fire, laid himself down.
+
+When he awoke, he found that the room was in darkness; it must have
+been night for several hours. It was the coldness which had aroused
+him, for the fire had gone out.
+
+He supposed that Spurling must be sleeping, so he called to him,
+"Spurling, Spurling, are you there?"
+
+There was no answer. He listened for his breathing, but could hear
+nothing. Getting upon his feet as swiftly as the stiffness of his
+muscles would allow, he groped his way over to the corner where he had
+last seen him. He was not there. Then he lit the lamp, and saw that
+the room was empty.
+
+His first thought was that, in his despair, he had gone outside and
+shot himself. Recalling his uncanny horror of the bend, he fancied
+that he could trace madness in all his recent actions; but then he
+remembered that his fear of the bend had been shared. He became
+possessed of a new and more personal dread. What if in giving him the
+warrant and showing him the portrait, he had told him too much--more
+than his courage and honesty could bear? He rushed to the door of the
+shack, and out to where the sleds and huskies had been left. One of
+the sleds was gone; his own outfit lay scattered on the snow and the
+gold had been taken. But he made a yet worse discovery, for of the
+eight huskies, only two remained; Spurling's four gray dogs and the
+two best of his own team were missing. He looked wildly round on the
+great emptiness. The night pressed down on the earth, as though to
+imprison it; the forest closed in on the river, menacing and silent;
+and the river ran on, a level, untravelled roadway, from the west. He
+shouted, and cursed, and called down God's vengeance on Spurling.
+Then, for a moment he was quiet, and heard his own voice coming back
+to him as an echo from the bend. His voice had tried to escape and was
+returning to him because it could find no way out.
+
+Crazily turning his face down-river, he shouted, "Hey, Strangeways,
+may God damn Spurling."
+
+Muffled, as if the dead man were answering him from underground, the
+cry came back, "Hey, Strangeways, may God damn Spurling."
+
+He covered his face with his hands and sat down in the snow laughing.
+It was all a cruel jest. "Oh, the hypocrite! The hypocrite!" he
+shrieked. "He came here hunted and I helped him with my life. He has
+taken everything, and given me death."
+
+Through his head ran maddeningly the scraps of the conversation he had
+had with Peggy: "I'll strike for the south, and, when the hunt is
+over, I'll send you word where you can join me." "You never will do
+that." "And why not?" "Because you will be dead."
+
+On all his thought, as if she were sitting at his side, her voice
+broke in persistently, drearily and low-pitched reiterating, "Because
+you will be dead. Because you will be dead."
+
+A hard look came into his eyes; he ceased from his laughing and
+whispering. Turning to the quarter behind his back from which he had
+seemed to hear her speaking last, he said quietly, "But I shan't be
+dead."
+
+Then he rose up and entered the shack.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE MURDER IN THE SKY
+
+
+However lightly he travels and however hard the snow may have packed,
+a man who has only two huskies and is handicapped by a body just
+recovered from sickness does not make much speed in winter travelling.
+
+Through the long hours of the dreary November night Granger, with
+hard, set face, had pushed on up the Last Chance River, towards God's
+Voice, following in Spurling's tracks. It was the gold that he
+desired. And if he recaptured it, what then? He was not capable of
+carrying it out to Winnipeg by himself. He knew that his pursuit was
+madness; he had nothing to gain by it but revenge. He was hardly
+likely to gain even that, for the man in front of him had three dogs
+to his one, fuller rations, and a start of several hours; he could
+only hope to overtake him by the happening of some accident.
+
+Yet he knew that he would overtake him, for he felt, beyond reach of
+argument, that Spurling was fated to die by his hand. Both of them had
+striven to avoid it; once he himself had fled that he might not commit
+the crime, and Spurling was now trying to escape that it might not
+come about. No matter what they did, it must happen. Though God should
+"advance a terrible right arm," and pluck them apart, and fling them
+to the opposite extremes of the world, they would surely travel and
+travel, perhaps involuntarily, till they came again together. It would
+have been far better if he had not been interfered with at the
+Shallows and had been permitted to accomplish his enmity there--so,
+more than three years of futile suffering might have been spared and
+Mordaunt would be still alive.
+
+He was hardly conscious of any anger; his was the unreasoned
+relentless instinct of the pursuing hound. He was savage justice and
+the law of self-preservation personified. He was the will of destiny
+decreeing that Spurling should not reach El Dorado alive.
+
+The dogs struggled on uncomplainingly; this was their first trip of
+the season and they were still comparatively fresh, though the man was
+tired. To the eastward the crescent of a faint old moon hung low in
+the sky. As Granger ran, he turned his head and, watching it, was
+thankful to see that at last the tardy dawn had begun to spread. Over
+the withered stretch of woodland to his right the Aurora swept between
+the stars, like an extinguishing angel, who caused them to flicker
+and, as he beat his wings about them, one by one to go out.
+
+It was a morning of bitter coldness. As the breath left his nostrils,
+he could almost see it congeal and fall to the ground, a filmy sheet
+of ice. The heads of the huskies were clouded with smoke, so that they
+seemed to be on fire as they panted forward dragging on the traces.
+
+The tracks, which he was following, now branched off to the left, and,
+mounting the river-bank, entered into a little hollow at the edge of
+the forest. Here, about the base of a tree, the snow had been recently
+trampled and a fire smouldered. It was Spurling's first camp.
+Granger, having unharnessed and fed his huskies, taking his axe from
+his girdle, cut down a sapling fir and roused the dying embers to a
+blaze. The flames shot up, and, climbing the bark of the tree,
+crackled among the branches overhead. Unpacking his tallow he melted
+it in a cup. Before it was all drunk, the surface was frozen solid.
+Then, lest his muscles should stiffen, he set out again.
+
+The air was full of minute particles of snow, like frozen dew, which
+caused the whole atmosphere, as far as eye could reach, to sparkle in
+the sunshine. The sky was greenish grey and without a cloud. The
+stillness of the world was magical; in the miles of landscape which
+were visible, nothing stirred. The snapping of a twig sounded like the
+crashing ruin of a forest giant. The gliding of the sled across the
+snow, and the padding footsteps of the huskies, thundered down the
+tunnel of the river through the pines like the galloping of heavy
+artillery over gravel. When, at rare intervals, the river cracked,
+perhaps four or five miles away, it reverberated through the
+tree-tops, causing their burden of snow to tremble and glisten, like
+the report of neighbouring cannon. Every whisper was exaggerated to a
+shout, so that the ears were deafened and longed for quiet--quiet
+which, unlike silence, consisted of a multitude of small sounds
+singing, almost inaudibly, together.
+
+Shortly after noon the light faded, and the blinding whiteness was
+converted into iron grey. Over to the westward the sun was hidden, and
+the horizon became threatening with a leaden bank of cloud. The
+temperature sank lower and the twilight was obliterated; night rushed
+down.
+
+The dogs were now thoroughly worn out; only by continual lashing
+could he keep them to their work. The roughness of the ice had mangled
+their feet; they marked out the trail which they traversed with
+crimson dots of blood. He had hoped to reach Spurling's next
+camping-place before making another halt; but his rate of travelling
+had grown slower, and already the advantage of Spurling's four
+additional huskies was beginning to tell. At last his dogs lay down in
+their traces and refused to budge. He knew that he could force them to
+go no further.
+
+Using the sled as a shovel, he dug out a hollow, throwing up a
+circular mount to protect him from the wind, should it arise.
+Searching along the river-bank, he collected wood for a fire,
+sufficient to last him till morning. He set up his sled on end, like a
+tombstone, for a head rest, and lay himself down with his feet toward
+the blaze. The dogs gathered round him shivering, lying one on either
+side, striving to share the warmth of his body. He beat them off at
+first, but they always crept back; so at last, becoming languidly
+sorry for them, he let them stop there.
+
+He was terribly tired; his bones felt like bars of red-hot iron
+scorching their way through his flesh. The hardness of the ice beneath
+the snow surface had racked his body in every joint. Every now and
+then he would get up and throw some wood on the fire, and lie down
+again, pulling his blanket over his head, folding his arms tightly
+across his chest, and gathering his knees up close to his body to
+conserve whatever heat he had. Though his body slept, never for a
+second did his brain lose consciousness of the cold and of the sense
+of travel. Always he seemed to be pressing on, doggedly, wearily, with
+the forest rushing past him on either hand. Spurling was in sight;
+sometimes he would halt, and jeeringly beckon to him. When he had come
+within speaking distance of him, he would start off again, leaving a
+narrow track of gold behind, for one of the sacks had burst.
+
+Gradually the most fatal feeling that any man can experience in
+northland travel stole upon him--_he felt that he did not care_. If
+the fire went out, what matter? He would not get up to relight it. If
+Spurling were standing at his side, he would not disturb himself to
+look at him. If Mordaunt were to come to him, well, he might perhaps
+turn round to look at her.
+
+He began to dream of her as he had seen her in the locket. They were
+both back in the old homeland. He was talking with her in an English
+garden and a thrush was singing overhead. How long it was since he had
+listened to the song of any bird! Why, he had almost forgotten that
+there was such an ecstasy in the world. So exalted was he, that he
+paid more attention to the thrush's song than to the words which
+Mordaunt said. Then she grew angry and shook him; but he sat there
+motionless, looking up into the branches of the tree, away from her,
+watching the sun through the greenness of the leaves, and the
+quivering throat of the bird. She rose up and left him in indignation;
+then darkness fell. He tried to follow her, but had no power to move
+himself. He tried to cry out, but his tongue was joined to the roof of
+his mouth. Making a great effort, he came to himself.
+
+When he pushed up his arms to throw off his covering, they seemed to
+be lifting a weight of surpassing heaviness. He sat upright and tried
+to open his eyes; he was blind--he could see nothing. He groped to
+feel his eyeballs with his hands; but his fingers were frozen--they
+could feel nothing. He rose to his feet in panic and stood there
+swaying, as though he had been set upon a dizzy pedestal which had
+grown to be part of himself, so that he could not move, but could only
+bend.
+
+"I must keep quiet," he told himself; "I must keep quiet. If I get
+frightened, I shall wander away to my death."
+
+When he tried to step forward his feet clapped together like solid
+blocks of ice. Very distantly, it seemed to him, he could make out a
+little glow of red and feel a breath of warmness. Going down on his
+hands and knees, he crawled towards it. It was coming to meet him;
+they had met. He lay down beside the redness and his panic left him.
+
+Then he became conscious that it was hurting him and he commenced to
+hate it. In struggling to get away from it, he found that he could
+move more freely. Sensation had come into his hands; raising them he
+felt his eyes. His great terror was not of death, but that he should
+be forever sightless. He ran his fingers across his eyes and found
+that they were covered with flesh--that his eyelids were frozen
+together. With his two hands he forced them apart, and gazed about
+him. Wherever he looked there was endless space with nothing to deter
+him, stretching away on every side. The moon, in her last quarter, was
+barely visible--a mere shadow of silver in the sky; so indistinct was
+his vision, that it seemed to him as though he were looking at the
+image of the firmament reflected in water, rather than at the stars
+themselves. Yet, in the certain renewal of his sight, there came to
+him a gladness which he had not known for many a day.
+
+When he turned toward the fire, he perceived the cause of his mishap:
+he had overslept himself and it was nearly out. By the way in which it
+was scattered abroad and the smouldering of the fur which was about
+his throat and arms, he guessed that in his blindness and instinctive
+desire for warmth, he had thrown himself upon its ashes. Having
+gathered what remained of it together, he flung on more fuel and set
+to work to chafe his extremities, restoring circulation. He was too
+chilled to think of attempting sleep again that night: so, when his
+limbs were sufficiently thawed out, he renewed his journey.
+
+The atmosphere was wonderfully clear, but there was in the air a sense
+of evil and foreboding. Even the dogs seemed to be aware of it, for as
+they ran, turning their heads from side to side to see which way the
+whip was coming that they might dodge it, there was a look of
+foreknowledge and terror in their eyes which warned Granger.
+
+As the dawn was spreading, he was startled by a long-drawn sigh, which
+travelled from horizon to horizon and died out. The dogs heard it, and
+sitting down abruptly in their tracks nearly overturned the sled.
+Gazing away to the northward, he saw a shadowy cloud arise, whirl and
+drift languidly over the tree-tops and fall back again out of sight.
+He lashed at the huskies, and with difficulty set them going. But the
+sled drew heavily, as though it were being dragged through sand, for
+the snow was gritty as the seashore: so intense was the cold that all
+slipperiness had gone out of it. He fastened a line to the load and
+went on ahead, breaking the trail and hauling with all his strength.
+
+Before long the sigh was heard again; but this time it came nearer,
+and columns of white smoke rose up and danced in the river-bed. Then
+he knew that he was in for a _poudre_ day--the day which of all others
+the winter voyageur holds in most dread. While such weather lasts,
+even the hardiest traveller will refuse to leave his fire; for he
+knows that before long every land-mark will be blotted out, that his
+very dogs will refuse to obey him, and that to-morrow, when the wind
+has dropped and the snow has settled, the chances are that the sun
+will find him with a quiet face turned upward to the sky, immobile and
+statuesque as if carved from Parian marble.
+
+Leaving Spurling's trail, he ascended the bank and worked along by the
+forest's edge, that so he might gain shelter. With every fresh puff of
+breath from the north, the coiling snakes of snow grew larger,
+writhing across the tree-tops and pouring tumultuously into the
+river-bed, where they rioted and fought till the day grew dark and it
+was difficult to see the next step. Respiration became painful, but
+Granger was determined not to halt, for this was one of the accidents
+which would help him to come up with Spurling. Feeling his way from
+tree to tree, he struggled on. His head became dizzy with the effort.
+His body, for all its coldness, broke out into a chilly sweat. He was
+invaded by a terrible inertia, so that he was half-minded to lie down
+and go to sleep; but the thought that Spurling had halted somewhere,
+perhaps only twenty miles ahead, and was losing time, drew him on.
+Presently his dogs sat down again, lifting their voices above the
+storm in a dismal wailing.
+
+He cut their traces and went forward, dragging the sled himself. They
+followed him a few paces behind, slinking through the darkness with
+their heads down and their tails between their legs. They reminded him
+of the timber-wolf on the Forbidden River; there were times when,
+catching a partial glimpse of them, he could have sworn that they had
+been joined by a third.
+
+By midday the wind died down, the atmosphere began to clear and the
+snow to settle. Returning to the river he sought in vain for
+Spurling's tracks; either he had passed him in the blackness or they
+had been obliterated. He would know the truth in the next six hours
+for, if he were still ahead, he would come to his abandoned camp.
+
+Towards sunset he halted and lit a fire; he intended to travel through
+the night and was in need of rest. He had fed his huskies and was
+stooping above the flames, cooking himself some bacon, when he raised
+his eyes to the west. For a minute he crouched, gazing with the
+fascination of horror at what he saw taking place apparently not more
+than fifty yards away, but with such clearness that it might not have
+been more than ten paces. Where ten seconds before there had been
+nothing in view but the straight length of river and the snow-capped
+forest, dripping with icicles, there was now, hanging above the trees
+face-downwards, anchored to the sky by crimson threads, the inverted
+image of a portage, leading up from the right-hand bank of a river,
+hedged in on either side with a row of crosses which marked graves of
+bygone voyageurs. Midway in the path was a little cabin, which had
+been set up for the shelter of bestormed travellers by employees of
+the Hudson Bay. Granger recognised the place; it was Dead Rat Portage,
+and must be at least fifteen miles from where he was now standing and
+ten from God's Voice.
+
+Out of the cabin, on his hands and knees, crawled a man. He was
+evidently badly frost-bitten, for he tried to drag himself upright by
+the door-post, but failed miserably, falling forward along the ground.
+As he lay there, he turned toward Granger a face which was
+expressionless as if it had been covered with a mask of waxen leprosy;
+it was frozen solid, as were his feet and hands. Granger knew, more by
+the clothes than the ghastly features, that the man was Spurling.
+
+He seemed now to have given up hope of standing erect, and began to
+move painfully on all fours across the snow to where a log of rotten
+wood was lying. Having reached it, he tried to raise it, but there was
+not the strength in his hands. He tried to fasten his teeth upon it,
+to drag it back with him; but his jaws seemed paralysed. Then he crept
+back to the cabin.
+
+Soon he came out again, and, having reached the log, commenced to
+light it with a match. At first it refused to ignite, but when he had
+pushed some broken twigs under it, it burst into flame. He bent over
+it hungrily, drawing so near that Granger expected to see his clothing
+catch fire.
+
+Then, as he watched, he saw a second figure. It was that of a man,
+dressed precisely as he himself was dressed, and his back was turned
+towards him so that he could not discern his face; he carried in his
+hand an axe. He moved stealthily on snowshoes, dodging from tree to
+tree, lest he should be discovered by the crouching man. His intention
+was so evidently evil, that Granger cried out a warning to save
+Spurling. Murder, when watched in this way, was so brutal that, though
+he himself had planned to do the deed, his whole moral nature
+revolted against it now. He cried again, but his warning was not
+heard. He wished that the man with the axe would turn his head, that
+he might see his face.
+
+A horrible, grotesque suspicion was growing up within him; he fancied
+that he knew the man--that he had seen him before in the Klondike,
+_that he was himself_. Spurling, quite unaware of his danger, was
+holding out his hands to the flames; it was not until the man was
+close behind him that be heard his footsteps and turned his head. His
+face was frozen; the frost had bound him hand and foot, making him
+defenceless, so that he could hardly stir; the only means of appeal he
+had was the expression in his eyes.
+
+Granger thought that he saw that expression--the cornered soul
+gesticulating, shrieking for mercy from the living eyes in the
+half-dead face. When the murderer raised his axe, he saw the soul's
+pitiful cowardice and how it shrank. The axe came crashing down. There
+was no need to strike twice; he fell limply backward, throwing his
+arms out wide--and there was an end of El Dorado and of all his dreams
+of avarice.
+
+The murderer, as if suddenly afraid of his own handiwork, without
+turning his head, hurried on across the portage through the forest,
+and was quickly lost to sight.
+
+Scenting the blood, the four gray huskies, one by one, came out from
+the cabin, where they seemed to have been asleep, and the others
+followed them. They came slowly over to where their tyrant was lying,
+and sniffed his body. They did it cautiously, for as yet they had not
+lost their fear of him; he might awake and belabour them for
+disturbing his last long rest.
+
+In falling his legs had shot from under him into the fire, scattering
+the embers, so he lay full length, with the red gash in his forehead,
+his arms spread out like a cross, and his face, in the inverted image,
+turned earthwards, gazing down on Granger and the Last Chance River
+with startled, unseeing eyes.
+
+The mirage began to fade and float cloudwards, drifting up-river above
+the tree-tops higher and higher, till it vanished in the west.
+
+Of all that he had witnessed Granger had heard no sound--there lay the
+chief terror of it. Like the handwriting on the wall in Babylon, it
+had taken place in silence. The crime which he had so often
+contemplated, and planned, had been transacted before his eyes; the
+person who had done the deed had kept his back turned toward him, but
+in his attire was strangely like himself--and instead of being
+gratified he was filled with loathing and hatred for the slayer.
+
+In the person of another he had seen the vileness which he had been
+seeking for himself, and was horrified. He knew that, had he had his
+chance, he might have taken Spurling's life in just some such way as
+that--he had imagined how he would do it many times. And now that it
+was accomplished, he was sick with pity for the murdered man.
+
+To one thing he had instantly made up his mind, that, if this should
+prove to be more than a fancy of delirium--the miraged portrayal of a
+villainy which had actually occurred--he would track the assassin as
+he had tracked Spurling, till the last ounce of his strength failed
+him, that Spurling might be avenged. Perhaps, in the avenging he hoped
+to clear himself in his own sight of his imagined share in the crime.
+
+He felt as though the deed had been the result of his own projected
+hatred, and that he himself was the real murderer. When he remembered
+the appearance of the man whom he now followed, it seemed like going
+in pursuit of his own self.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE BLIZZARD
+
+
+Now that he was nearing God's Voice, it was necessary that he should
+travel more cautiously and keep a sharp lookout ahead. At any moment
+he might come in sight of a Company's trapper, either sitting beneath
+the trees by his camp-fire or racing down-river between the tall
+banks, following his sled. He might be recognised, and recognition
+would lead to his arrest. Whatever happened afterwards, he desired his
+freedom for yet a little while, so he went carefully. In the course of
+the night he passed by one wigwam; but the Indian was evidently away,
+for no dog rose up to herald his approach. If the squaw was there, she
+did not rouse; he got by unnoticed.
+
+Hoping against hope, he argued with himself, trying to believe that
+Spurling was alive. He told himself that this had been a vision sent
+to him from God to turn him aside from his crime. He had gazed upon
+himself as he would have become, and his soul had revolted at the
+sight.
+
+As he ran on, swearing at his huskies, urging them forward with the
+lash, he offered up to God many fervid thanks for the mercy which He
+had shown him, hoping that by these means, even though the calamity
+had happened, he might shame his Maker by his gratitude into putting
+back the hands of time, and so restoring the murdered man to life. At
+last by the constant reiteration of the thing which he desired, he
+began to take it for granted that his prayer was answered. Spurling
+was not dead; he was alive, and he was going to ask his forgiveness
+for the evil which he had thought against him.
+
+He put together the words which he would say to him when they met, and
+the gestures he would use to make his words convincing. He repeated
+them over many times that he might retain them in his memory. Then
+something would happen to take his attention away, one of the dogs
+would be shirking or the sled would have overturned, and, when he came
+back to the words which he had planned, he would be thrown into a
+frenzy, finding that they had slipped his mind.
+
+Though he was desperately in earnest over this game at which he
+played, he was aware all the while of its unreality--that it was but a
+game. His sanity warned him that what he had seen had truly happened,
+and that the man was dead. This was not the first occasion upon which
+he had seen a mirage when the snow was down and the land was white.
+There had been times before, when, at the moment of daybreak or
+sunset, he had witnessed strange freaks of inverted forest and river
+hovering in the sky. Once he had seen an Indian ten miles away,
+attacking a wolf which had been caught by the leg in a steel trap,
+belonging to another man. So distinctly had he seen his features and
+dress that, at a later day, when he had brought in his winter catch of
+furs to exchange, he had recognised him; and when he had offered him
+the wolf-skin, had accused him of the theft. Moreover, he knew that,
+whether the sight which he had witnessed was mirage or fancy, he did
+not deserve the leniency for which he prayed. He had had his chance
+and warning three times already: once in the Klondike; once after the
+arrival of Spurling, when God wrote upon the ice; and once at the
+bend, when in the company of Pere Antoine he had mistaken the body of
+Strangeways for that of Spurling.
+
+Then there was the appearance of the murderer to be accounted for, and
+his motive in slaying. He had been smaller in stature than himself, as
+had been the creature at the Shallows, but he had had the same
+peculiarities of clothing and was very much alike. Yet he strove to
+drive down all his doubts and to believe the thing which he
+desired--that the phenomenon was the result of imagination, and that
+Spurling was not dead.
+
+He made small progress in his travelling, for his body was worn out by
+previous hardships. Sometimes he took over two hours to go three
+miles; it was long past midnight when Dead Rat Portage came in sight.
+
+At this point the river made a large curve to the southward and
+broadened out into rapids; the portage was eight hundred yards in
+length and saved voyageurs six miles, crossing the neck of land by a
+narrow trail and picking up the Last Chance River on the other side.
+In summer time the York boats were unloaded here, and dragged across
+on rollers, the freight being carried on men's backs. As he drew near,
+his hope sank; the place looked so gloomy and forbidding. There were
+stories told about it and of how it had won its name, which might well
+make any man afraid. An old fort, established by the French at the
+time when they disputed the possession of Keewatin with Prince
+Rupert's Company, had once stood there; it was said that some of the
+crosses which fringed the trail marked spots where its defenders lay
+buried. However, it was not the memory of the past, but the knowledge
+of what might now await him, which caused him to hesitate.
+
+On the river's bank, where the portage commenced, was a cleared space,
+from which a path led round the cabin and tunnelled into the forest.
+As he eased his sled out of the river-bed, he caught the smell of
+burning, and, when he had topped the bank, he saw the glow of an
+almost extinguished fire. The overhanging trees, casting their network
+of shadows across the snow, prevented him from distinguishing at that
+distance any object that lay beneath them. While he halted, half
+inclined to wait till daybreak before proceeding further with his
+investigation, he was startled by the sound of footsteps. They came
+toward him very cautiously and there were many of them. He saw the
+glint of eyes in the darkness, shining out and disappearing among the
+crosses. He tried to count them; as far as he could make out there
+were six pairs. Then he called them softly by name, and there came
+toward him Spurling's four grey huskies and the two of his own team,
+which had been taken.
+
+And still he clung desperately to his hope and would not allow himself
+to believe that in the shadow of the trees, a dozen yards from where
+he was standing, the man whom he had set out to kill was lying
+murdered. He whispered his name, not daring to speak louder. When no
+answer was returned, he rallied his retreating faith by saying, "He is
+sleeping. I must approach him gently. If he awakes and hears me, he
+may think I am his enemy and escape me."
+
+Leaving his dogs, he stole toward the sparks of fire. Although he
+still denied the mirage, telling himself that what he had seen was
+fancied, he directed his steps by that which he had witnessed in the
+sky.
+
+Drawing nearer, he made out the smouldering log; cowardice prompted
+him to procrastinate, he crept round behind it. The air was heavy with
+the smell of scorching leather. His eyes growing more accustomed to
+the shadow, he saw the figure of a man, lying on the snow with his
+arms stretched out in the shape of a cross and his moccasined feet
+protruding above the glowing ashes. The last vestige of hope left him;
+he knew that Spurling was dead. With certainty, his power of decision
+returned; he still had a purpose to live for--to avenge this death.
+
+Having pulled the body aside and heaped branches against the log, he
+rekindled the fire. In the light which it cast he could see the
+blurred trail of Spurling, where he had crawled to and from the cabin;
+also he could see the tracks which the slayer's snowshoes had left as
+he strode away through the forest following the portage. He stooped
+and examined them. By so doing he learnt a new fact--that the man who
+had done the deed was of Indian blood, for the toes of his footprints
+inclined to turn inwards, and in carrying his feet forward he had kept
+them closer together than does a white man; also he judged that he was
+lightly built, for the snow beneath his steps was not much crushed.
+
+So Beorn was not the culprit, nor was his phantom-self from the
+Klondike. He thought of Eyelids; but Eyelids was a tall man and his
+stride ought to have been longer. That which he had witnessed in the
+mirage led him to believe that the act had been premeditated, and
+therefore had some strong motive; either it had been done for the
+reward or for the sake of theft.
+
+He looked round for Spurling's sled and found it in the cabin; it was
+still loaded--the gold had not been touched. He was puzzled. If theft
+was not the object, why had the body been left? Without its production
+or some part of it that was recognisable, the thousand dollars would
+not be awarded. The best way to solve the mystery was to follow up the
+murderer; and, if he were to do that, there was no time to lose.
+
+Dragging the remains into the cabin, he made fast the door, that the
+wolves might not destroy them; he would care for them on his homeward
+journey--if he survived to come back. Harnessing the four grey huskies
+into his sled, since they were the freshest, he set out across the
+portage. Turning his head, as he entered the forest, he took one last
+look at the deserted camp. The fire, burning brightly, with no one to
+sit by it, added the final touch to the general aspect of melancholy.
+Wailing through the darkness the huskies wandered; and in the
+background, when the flames shot up, appeared the crosses, bending one
+toward another, which marked the sleeping-places of men who, years
+since, had lived and suffered, and obtained their rest.
+
+Beneath the trees, the gloom was so heavy that he could see nothing;
+but on coming out on to the banks of the river on the other side he
+again picked up the murderer's trail. It led up the Last Chance in a
+south-westerly direction towards God's Voice, which was only ten miles
+distant. He had begun to take it for granted that the man was a Hudson
+Bay employee, hurrying toward the fort to claim the reward, when the
+tracks, branching off to the left, climbed out of the river and
+plunged into a low-lying, thickly wooded wilderness, striking due
+south.
+
+In Keewatin the rivers are the only highways; to leave them even in
+summer time, if you have no guide and are not a man born in the
+district, is extremely dangerous; to do so in winter when, after every
+precaution has been taken, travel remains precarious, is to court
+almost certain death. For a moment Granger hesitated. He examined the
+prints of the snowshoes and saw that they were very recent. The man
+must have waited somewhere, and seen him coming. He must know now that
+he was being followed, and could not be far ahead. "Well, it's death
+whatever happens," thought Granger; "to go on to God's Voice is death;
+to return to Murder Point is death. I'd just as soon die by this man's
+hand, trying to avenge Spurling, as one cold morning in Winnipeg with
+a rope about my neck."
+
+The day rose late and cloudy. The sun did not show itself. The sky
+weighed down upon the tree-tops, as if too heavy to support itself.
+Presently large flakes of snow, the size of feathers, drifted through
+the air, making a gentle rustling as they fell. Granger pressed on
+more hurriedly, for he feared that, if he dropped too far behind, the
+snow would cover up all traces of the man, and so he would escape him.
+Sometimes he fancied that he could hear him going on ahead, for every
+now and then a twig would snap. In the heat of his pursuit he took no
+account of direction.
+
+About midday he halted; of late all sounds had grown rarer and the
+snow had thickened, causing even his own footprints to appear blurred
+a few seconds after they had been made. Of the trail which he
+followed he could see nothing himself, trusting to his huskies' sense
+of smell to lead him aright.
+
+Soon he grew strangely nervous, for he thought that he heard the
+crunch of snowshoes coming up behind. He persuaded himself that it was
+imagination, until his dogs, swinging round in a half-circle, began to
+travel back in a direction parallel to the route they had already
+traversed. He paused and listened again; behind him he could
+distinctly hear the sound of something stirring. Then he knew that he
+was no longer the pursuer.
+
+His blood froze in his veins, and he began to lose confidence. He
+realised that if the murderer knew the district and was moving in a
+circle purposely, he was doing so in order that he might lure him to
+his death. Abandoning all thought of pursuit, his sole endeavour
+became to regain the river-bed. He lashed his dogs, urging them
+forward to the limit of their strength; but he came to nothing that
+was familiar; and, when he paused for breath, he could always hear the
+snowshoes following.
+
+Then he awoke to the knowledge that he was lost. His first sensation
+was of blank bewilderment, producing in him an utter loss of memory.
+He strove to quiet himself, but his will-power refused to operate. Who
+he was, and why he was there, he could not remember; of two things
+only was he conscious, that he was pursued by something that was evil,
+and that he was lost.
+
+A state of chaos reigned within him, which was soon succeeded by an
+all-pervading terror. He must escape somehow to safety, to a place
+where there were men. He longed to dash on somewhere, on and on; but
+he was paralysed by his utter inability to think consecutively or to
+choose out any particular direction. He began to see horrible
+contorted shapes about him, and to imagine modes of death which were
+still more horrible. He might die of starvation, he might die of
+thirst, he might die of frost; but his worst fear was of something
+which he would never see, which would steal softly up, when he was too
+cold to turn his head, and strike him from behind. He circled round
+and round to avoid the blow; but he felt that, as he moved, the thing
+moved keeping pace with him, so that, for all his alertness, it was
+always behind his back.
+
+In a way in which he had never desired it before, he longed for human
+companionship--just to look once more upon a living face. And to all
+these fears and yearnings there was the undertow of an added
+horror--the terror lest he should become insane. He burst into a
+passion of weeping; as the tears fell they froze upon his face. The
+air was thick with snow which the rising wind drifted about, driving
+it into curious and fantastic shapes. Had he been more quiet, he would
+have known that his only wise plan was to lie down until the blizzard
+was past. It would bury him, but as a covering it would act as a
+blanket to keep him warm. The blizzard seemed to him to be hemming him
+in, building up about him a shifting wall through which the pursuer
+could attack him unseen.
+
+Always he was conscious of the pursuer's presence; always he could see
+the picture of Spurling's uplifted face and the pleading that was in
+his eyes as the assailant, with his back turned towards the onlooker,
+poised the axe above his head. That he might not share that fate he
+broke away into the greyness, tripping over snow ridges, falling into
+drifts, and bruising his body against the trunks of trees in the
+madness of his flight. His huskies added to his panic by following
+him.
+
+There were times when he ran so far ahead that he could neither see
+nor hear them; but, when he halted, panting, they would emerge and lay
+themselves down at his side. He hated them; they were sinister in his
+eyes. Had they not brought Spurling from Winnipeg, and had not their
+yellow-faced leader been the cause of Strangeways' death?
+
+The wind, rising higher, shrieked among the branches. He wandered on,
+neither knowing nor caring where he went, for he had lost all sense of
+locality or time. There were intervals during which he must have
+dreamed and slept, for he passed down an endless street of tall
+houses, built in the English fashion, and the blinds were up and it
+was nightfall. On the windows danced the light of fires, burning on
+the hearths inside; and sometimes he could see the faces of children
+looking out at him. He held up his blue hands at them, making signs
+that they should let him in that he might warm himself; but they shook
+their heads mischievously, and ran away and laughed.
+
+After one of these experiences, more real to him than the others, he
+came to himself. Surely that was the sound of music and dancing that
+came to him above the cry of the storm. He waited for a lull and
+listened, then followed the direction of the sound. As he drew nearer,
+he caught the thud of moccasined feet beating time upon a boarded
+floor, and snatches of the tune which the violin was playing.
+Something loomed up out of the darkness to meet him. He held out his
+hands to force it from him, and drove them against a door. Then he
+knew that he had arrived at God's Voice.
+
+He was half inclined to knock; at least they would not threaten him
+and drive him away this time as they had done in the previous winter.
+What was more likely to happen was that the man who opened to him,
+recognising him, would seize him by the throat, drag him inside and
+quickly slam the door. He would push him before him across the square
+till he came to the room where the trappers were dancing, where, in
+all probability, the factor was. And Robert Pilgrim when he saw him,
+wagging his red beard at him, would shout, "Ha, so you heard me
+whistle, and have come like a dog!"
+
+He drew himself upright and stepped back from the gateway. No, he
+could not endure that. Any death was preferable to the price that he
+would have to pay for such shelter.
+
+He worked his way along the wall till he stood beneath the window
+where the fort was assembled. It was a comfort to him to hear again
+the sound of voices. He listened to the fiddling and recognised it as
+that of Sandy McQuean, the half-breed son of a famous Orkney man. He
+had learnt his art from his father. They were all Scotch airs that he
+played. He could sing, when he chose, with a Highland accent, and had
+caught the knack of imbuing what he sang with an intolerable pathos.
+
+The stamping of feet had ceased, but the violinist wandered on.
+Presently a new melody began to emerge from the improvisations, and a
+man's voice rose above the storm. The words he sang were _The Flowers
+o' the Forest_:
+
+      "I've seen the smiling
+      Of fortune beguiling;
+    I've felt all its favours, and found its decay;
+      Sweet was its blessing,
+      Kind its caressing;
+    But now 'tis fled--fled far away."
+
+Granger shifted his feet uneasily as he listened, and half-turned to
+go.
+
+As he did so, he found that someone was standing close behind him. He
+did not see his face, but one glance was enough to warn him. He dodged
+and ran to the river. The man was following him again. He took the
+direction which was open to him, and set out down-stream, returning to
+the portage.
+
+The wind was dead against him, blinding his eyes and choking him with
+snow. He bowed his head and struggled on. He made a brave effort, but
+he knew that he was slowly freezing. His flesh was icy and his bones
+seemed heavy, weighing him down. The blood halted, and leapt forward,
+and halted in his veins and arteries, as though there were frequent
+stoppages past which it had to squeeze its way; he could hear it
+surging.
+
+Gradually his physical pain grew less and, as it did so, his mind
+attained an unwonted clearness. He had somewhat the same experience as
+is said to come to drowning men in their last moments of
+consciousness. He was able to review his life as a whole and justly,
+attributing to each separate action its proper importance, and share
+of praise or blame. He realised that his hiding from Robert Pilgrim on
+Huskies' Island, journey to the Forbidden River, and pursuit of
+Spurling, had been one long series of mistakes, each one tending to
+make him appear more guilty of Strangeways' death. He owned that all
+his life had been spent in avoiding his most obvious duties, and in
+setting himself hard tasks in exchange, which were impossible of
+accomplishment. His first duty had been towards his mother, and he had
+abandoned it nominally for the sake of a childish pledge, really for
+the glamour of El Dorado. His more recent duty had been to fulfil his
+obligations to his half-breed wife, especially now that she was about
+to bear him a child; he had forsaken her for his old dream's sake and
+for the sake of a revenge which he had persuaded himself was noble.
+
+Reviewing these facts, he promised himself that, if ever he were given
+again the power of choice, he would return to Murder Point and live
+for her. Another matter became clear in his mind; that, when
+Spurling's body was discovered, if the man who had done the deed did
+not own up, he would be accused of the murder--and it _would_ be
+murder, for it would be thought that he had killed him not in the
+cause of justice, but out of private spite. Morally he knew that he
+was the culprit and deserved to be hanged, for he had only avoided
+being guilty through the accident of having been forestalled in his
+crime.
+
+He stumbled and fell full length in a drift. He did not try to rise.
+He had no fear of dying; his only desire was to get warm now. He
+pressed nearer to the snow and closed his eyes, and gradually lost
+consciousness.
+
+He was awakened by someone rubbing his face vigorously. He resented
+the interference; he wanted the rest. Once he opened his eyes, and was
+blinded by a roaring fire. As the warmth spread through him and his
+circulation returned, his body became very painful, as though it were
+being pierced by millions of red-hot needles. The agony of it brought
+him to himself.
+
+A man was bending over him, whose face he could not see, for the hood
+was fastened before it, leaving only his eyes visible. By his dress he
+knew that he was his pursuer and Spurling's slayer. Again he was
+impressed with the fancy, not so much by his proportions which were
+smaller, but by his clothing, that he was very like himself. Languidly
+he awaited an opportunity to get another glimpse of his eyes; somehow
+they were familiar, he knew them. Then, because the man, murderer
+though he was, was saving his life, he turned away his head. He would
+not see anything which, in a weaker moment, might tempt him to give
+information in order that he might save himself.
+
+The man, seeing that he was recovered and safe to be left, without a
+word of explanation glided off into the darkness.
+
+Granger sat up and looked after him; he was puzzled by the memory of
+those eyes. He ran through all the list of his acquaintance, and could
+not place them. The blizzard had now subsided, and the stars shone
+overhead. He must have lain unconscious for some time before being
+found. All around him, and as far as eye could reach, the snow lay in
+short choppy waves, which took on the appearance of motion by reason
+of the shadows. As he watched, something lifted up its head above a
+ridge, and he saw that it was one of the huskies. Either his team had
+followed him, or the man had brought them with him. Rising to his
+feet, on the other side of the fire he saw his sled. He felt hungry,
+and going towards it was about to get out some provisions, when he
+found that that was unnecessary; in the ashes a can of black tea was
+brewing and some bacon had been left, also a bundle of wood sufficient
+to last him till morning. He spent the remainder of the night there,
+and at daybreak continued his journey to the portage.
+
+When he reached the cabin and pushed open the door, he found that it
+was occupied. An Indian, of the Sucker tribe, whom he had previously
+met, was sitting there. Looking round he saw that Spurling's body was
+in the same place and untouched, but that the load upon the sled had
+been rifled.
+
+When he had offered him some tobacco, the Indian, jerking his head in
+the direction of the body, asked, "You kill him?"
+
+Granger signed denial. The Indian looked doubtful. Then he said,
+pointing to the old tracks in the cabin which his snowshoes had left,
+"All the same, those your tracks."
+
+Granger was in no mood for arguing, so he nodded assent. The Indian
+was silent for a while. Presently he rose to his feet and harnessed in
+his team. As he passed out of the door, he said, "You bad man. All the
+same, you kill him."
+
+Granger followed him out and saw him crossing the portage towards
+God's Voice. He scraped a hole in the snow and buried Spurling.
+
+On turning his attention to the sled, he saw that the Indian had taken
+everything except the gold. He poured out the dust and nuggets above
+Spurling's grave; it was the thing which he had loved most in life, as
+some men love goodness and flowers. To both Spurling and himself it
+was worthless now; but it was the only offering which he had.
+
+Leaving the mound sparkling white and yellow in the sunshine, he
+struck the trail down the Last Chance River, returning to Murder
+Point.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE LAST CHANCE
+
+
+Since the middle of November he had been back at the Point: it was now
+the day before Christmas, and Peggy was still absent. During the last
+six weeks he had waited anxiously, always listening, even in his
+sleep, for her returning footstep. It was extraordinary to him to
+notice how, now that he had lost her, every other affection that he
+had ever known became dwarfed and of no acount in comparison with his
+love of her. He no longer thought of Mordaunt or of El Dorado; all his
+anxiety was for the half-breed wife, whom he had once despised. There
+was but one ambition, the fulfilment of which he greatly desired, and
+that was again to see her and to look upon his child. Somewhere
+outside, beneath the grey chaos of white forest and gloomy sky, in the
+wigwam of a trapper, tended by Indian women, she had faced her ordeal
+and had, perhaps, survived. If ever he was to see her it would be
+to-night, when her kinsmen had promised to return.
+
+At first, when he had left Dead Rat Portage, he had feared that he
+would be overtaken by the Mounted Police or Robert Pilgrim before ever
+he reached the Point. For six weeks he had remained there undisturbed
+and solitary.
+
+Watching from his window day by day, he had seen an occasional Indian
+pass, averting his face and, if he were a Catholic, crossing himself
+to avoid the overlooking of the evil eye. When such chance travellers
+approached the bend, he had noticed how they seemed to see something
+there, which he could not see, and climbing out of the river-trail,
+making a wide circuit, hurried their steps to get quickly by. Though
+he had spoken to no one for so long a time, he had not been
+lonely--watching for Peggy was a continual, if painful, source of
+excitement. And another matter had kept him fully occupied. Being an
+honest man, he knew that since the spring of the year he had not done
+well by his employers; therefore, since he thought it highly probable
+that, at any moment, he might be called away on a longer journey than
+any that he had yet undertaken, he had spent a large part of his
+leisure in making a report of the trade and contents of the store,
+which would be of service to his unlucky successor in the post of
+agent.
+
+His chief cause for disquiet had been the hidden personality of the
+man whom he had seen in the sky, and who had afterwards rescued him
+from the blizzard near God's Voice. The haunting recollection of those
+eyes, of which he had caught but a glimpse as the man bent over him
+and the fire beat up into his shrouded face, had tortured him,
+allowing him rest from thought neither day nor night. For weeks he had
+searched his memory for some forgotten record, which would account for
+their seeming familiarity. Where had he seen them before? Was it
+before he left England, or in the Klondike? Or had their owner once
+come to trade with him at the store?
+
+Ten days ago, when he was sitting half-dozing by the stove, thinking
+of nothing in particular, a face had drifted up from his subconscious
+memory, grouping its features about the eyes. He had staggered to his
+feet, horrified at the significance which this new knowledge, if true,
+gave to the motive of the crime. Bewildering details, which he had
+noticed in the man's appearance and had not been able to reconcile,
+now built themselves into the chain of evidence and were readily
+explained--there could be no mistake. He had bowed his head in his
+trembling hands, giving God broken thanks that he had been spared the
+final remorse which would have come to him had he been successful in
+his pursuit of Spurling's murderer. All that night he had prayed,
+aghast and terrified, that God would protect the assailant from
+detection.
+
+And perhaps God had heard him, for the morning found him strangely
+quiet; he thought that he had now discovered a way to go out of life a
+gentleman, though no one but himself and one other would know that his
+gallantry was not disgrace.
+
+The short December daylight wore away and night fell. He spread a meal
+for four people, with fare which was unusually ample. Having lit the
+lamp and built up a roaring fire in the stove, he sat down to await
+the arrival of his guests.
+
+To evade his excitement of anticipation, which was becoming painful,
+he drove his thoughts back to other Christmas Eves, and tried to
+imagine and share in the innocent happiness which the season was
+bringing to children, still illusioned and unwise, all the world over
+that night. He had almost succeeded in beguiling himself into the
+belief that he was again a child, when the huskies commenced to howl,
+giving warning of someone's approach.
+
+Listening acutely, he caught the distant shouting of dog-drivers,
+coming down-river, across the ice. He ran to the window and saw the
+forms of two men, stooping down unharnessing their teams at the Point.
+He recognised them, but did not go outside to make them welcome, since
+he had not yet learnt their purpose. The door opened, and Beorn and
+Eyelids entered.
+
+There was nothing altered in Beorn's appearance; but Eyelids looked
+haggard and fatigued with travel.
+
+He came towards Granger with a stealthy tread, yet so slowly that he
+seemed rather to be drawing back. "Where's Peggy?" were the first
+words he uttered. "She's gone away," Granger said. Then, seeing her
+brother's genuine concern, he commenced to explain a little of what
+had taken place in his absence. He was recounting his discovery of
+Spurling's flight, when his listener, taking it for granted that he
+already knew the rest, broke in impatiently, with "You damn fool!
+Why'd you kill him?"
+
+Granger smiled. He was amused at the half-breed's new air of
+domineering boldness and the change which it made in his countenance.
+"Oh, so you know that?" he inquired. Eyelids came over and shook him
+by the arm, as though he thought that he needed awakening.
+
+Speaking rapidly, tumbling over his words, sometimes relapsing into
+the Cree dialect, he commenced to give a hurried account of his own
+actions. There had been a thousand dollars offered for Spurling's
+capture, and he had gone to claim it. It was not covetousness
+altogether which had prompted him to do that; the reward was only an
+incident. His father was determined to be revenged for the trespass of
+the Forbidden River, and he had accompanied his father, hoping, by so
+doing, to save his brother-in-law's life--the handing over of
+Spurling to justice would have proved him innocent of complicity in
+Strangeway's death.
+
+They had had to go a long way south before they had met with the
+winter patrol and had been able to give their information. They had
+been coming back with Sergeant Shattuck to make the arrest, when they
+had fallen in with an Indian of the Sucker tribe. He had given them
+news that a month ago a man had been murdered at the Dead Rat Portage
+by the agent at the Point, where he believed they had quarrelled,
+though why and what about he could not guess.
+
+Arriving at God's Voice, they had learnt that gold had been found,
+scattered above the grave at the Dead Rat. And now the Mounted Police
+were coming, Eyelids said, to take Granger away to be hanged. He had
+heard Robert Pilgrim and the sergeant arranging it together, and had
+come on ahead to give him warning. He believed that the pursuers were
+not far behind. His quarrel had been with Spurling, not with Granger;
+he was emphatic about that. He would not have accompanied his father,
+had he not gathered from words which he had let fall in his delirium,
+that Granger hated Spurling as much as any of them. He had thought
+that he would understand their purpose in going southward, and would
+be willing to guard Spurling in order that he might be betrayed. And
+now he had come to make him an offer: there was yet time to escape; he
+would hide him so securely in the forest that he never would be
+tracked.
+
+Granger thought that he discovered in Eyelids' vehemence the
+blustering confusion of a repentant Judas.
+
+He shook his head, "No," he answered, "I intend to wait."
+
+Eyelids pressed him for a reason. "I must see Peggy," he replied: "she
+will certainly be here to-night. Even if she had already arrived and
+were willing to go with me, I should stay."
+
+For a man of Indian training, Eyelids used many words to persuade him.
+When he saw that he had failed, he relapsed into sullen silence. Beorn
+paid no attention, but stared grimly before him with his dead-soul
+eyes, as though he had heard nothing. Granger fancied that he must
+often have worn that same expression when, crouched beneath the
+auriferous ledges of the Fair-haired Annie, he had listened to the
+picks of his enemies drawing nearer, and had waited to deal out
+unhurried and impartial death to the men of the Bloody Thunder Mine.
+
+There was the sound of long striding steps ascending the mound; it was
+not the tread of Peggy. Without the formality of knocking, the latch
+was raised and Pere Antoine towered in the doorway. His garments were
+frosted and glistened, so that he seemed to be clothed in a vaporous
+incandescence. His face was very stern and sad. He said nothing, but
+gazing full on Granger, he beckoned to him that he should come
+outside.
+
+Casting his capote about him and drawing on his mittens, he obeyed.
+Antoine led the way to the back of the store, till they stood on the
+edge of the clearing, where the forest began. The full moon shining
+down on the country made it appear legendary and ghostlike, a
+veritable Hollow land, such as the Indians believed in, entering into
+which a man might wander on forever, without home-coming, and never
+taste of death. Granger felt that he would scarcely experience
+surprise were he to witness, drifting on poised wings from an opening
+in the clouds, a flight of shadowy angels, voyaging to some newer
+planet where they should startle other shepherds, singing to them the
+tidings of the Christ.
+
+Antoine recalled him, saying, "I may not be doing right, for I cannot
+guess your motives, but I have come to tell you that I am willing to
+help you to escape."
+
+If he had come to him on any other errand than that of his own
+preservation, Granger knew, as he watched the pity struggling with the
+sternness in his face, that he would have followed him anywhere, to
+peril and to shame. But now, that was impossible.
+
+"Antoine," he replied, "I cannot. Spurling is dead."
+
+Le Pere surveyed him curiously in silence. "But you--did you do it?"
+he said.
+
+"You know that I always meant to do it."
+
+"Then you are determined to die?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"For some one else?"
+
+"Pshaw! For me it is no sacrifice. You know that I would have killed
+him, had God given me the time."
+
+Antoine drew off his mitten, and held out to him his bare right hand.
+"You are a noble man," he said; "I will keep your secret."
+
+As they returned to the shack, Eyelids looked up at them inquiringly,
+as though he were about to ask them what preparations he should make
+for their journey. When he saw how, saying nothing, they sat
+themselves down to wait, he shrugged his shoulders desperately.
+Presently, with a false show of indifference, he set about playing the
+moccasin-game, which consists of placing buttons, bullets, and
+anything small which comes handy, into an empty moccasin, shaking
+them up together, and guessing the number which the shoe contains. It
+is a gambling game which, in earlier days, was wont to cause much
+bloodshed and ruin among the buffalo-runners of the plains.
+
+The hours went by and the night grew late. The meal which had been
+spread was still untasted. They did not converse; there seemed so
+little to say, and, moreover, their voices might prevent them from
+hearing the first warning of Peggy's approach. The roaring of the logs
+in the stove, and the monotonous clicking of the buttons and bullets
+one against the other as Eyelids shook them, and again as he emptied
+them upon the floor, like the ominous tapping of muffled hammers at
+work about a coffin, were the only sounds, and these, at last, by
+reason of their regularity, began to grow nerve-racking. Between the
+emptying of the moccasin, and the gathering up and re-shaking of the
+counters, Granger held his breath. It seemed to him that Eyelids was
+gambling with an invisible player, and that the stake which he stood
+to lose or win was his own life. It was inconceivable that any man
+should have sat playing all these hours at a game of hazard, risking
+nothing, having for antagonist himself.
+
+Relief came from without. From far across the river the forest-silence
+was shattered by a piercing cry. It reached him distantly at first,
+but, with each interval that elapsed, it grew nearer. It was like the
+tortured, desperate complaining of a soul in its final agony. Stealing
+to the window, he looked out, and saw upon the farther bank the
+outline of a timber-wolf. He looked at Beorn; he also had heard it,
+for he had pricked up his ears like a husky and was listening. Fearing
+that the suspense of these long and silent hours might cause him to
+behave unworthily, he clutched Antoine by the shoulder, and whispered,
+"For God's sake, say something. Tell us one of your tales."
+
+Then Le Pere thought awhile, and afterwards, in a low sonorous voice,
+commenced to recount the story of the founding of the Huron
+Mission--one of the noblest histories in the world, of men who have
+died for men. As he progressed, Eyelids looked up from his
+moccasin-game and the little tappings, as of muffled hammers about a
+coffin, ceased for a spell.
+
+He told them of Isaac Jogues, the Jesuit; how he was the most timid of
+men, and how for his love of Christ he became brave.
+
+He told them of his capture, on the second day of August, 1642, by the
+Iroquois, and the patience with which his sufferings were endured. How
+when he was near dying of hunger and thirst, he used the drops of
+rain, which had gathered in an ear of corn which had been thrown him,
+to baptize two dying men. How when the Indians had grown weary of
+torturing him and had cast him out into the March bleakness, he spent
+his days in the forest praying, and carving the name of _Jesus_ on the
+tree-trunks with his lacerated hands.
+
+Then followed the account of his miraculous escape to France and the
+honours which were proffered him by Church and State, no one of which
+he would take, save only permission to return to Canada that, as he
+had lived, so he might die for men, and the Pope's special
+dispensation that he might say the Mass, from which he had been
+debarred by his mutilations.
+
+And he told them the story of Brebeuf and the vision which he had had
+in the winter of 1640, when sojourning among the Neutral Nation. How
+he beheld in the sky the apparition of a great cross, advancing
+towards him from the quarter where lay the Iroquois land. How he had
+spoken to his comrades about it, and they had questioned him, "What is
+it like? How large?" And he had answered them, saying, "It is large
+enough to crucify us all."
+
+Granger interrupted him, smiling grimly to himself and whispering,
+"Yes, and I have seen it in Keewatin--_large enough to crucify us
+all_."
+
+Antoine, overhearing his words, replied, "I know you have." After
+which they fell silent. For perhaps an hour they remained thus, and
+the flame of the lamp sank lower and lower as the oil became
+exhausted; no one rose to attend to it.
+
+A panting breath was heard outside. The door flew open and a man stood
+upon the threshold. "They are coming," he gasped in a rasping voice.
+"My God! they are coming."
+
+No one stirred. They did not recognise his tones and it was too dark
+to see his face. They were each one wondering who was this stranger,
+who could find in the death of anyone, save himself, a matter for
+distress.
+
+He closed the door; in so doing, they saw that he carried a bundle,
+like a deformity, strapped across his shoulders. They watched him in
+silence until, cowed by the coldness of their reception, he was
+turning to depart; then Antoine spoke up. "Come nearer the stove, my
+son," he said, "where you can warm yourself, and we can look upon your
+face."
+
+Slowly the man moved forward, casting a long shadow on the wall. And
+now to the four men gazing, the shadow which the stranger cast seemed
+to have become of more interest than his face--for there were two
+shadows, one of which followed ominously behind. While the first umbra
+was dim and blurred, the second was dense and well-defined; moreover
+it stood by itself, as if cast by an unseen presence, and was in every
+way different from that of the stranger. It seemed endowed with a
+separate personality; its actions were independent of those of the man
+and shadow which it followed. In watching it, they felt that there
+were six people in the room instead of five.
+
+Recognition came to them each one at about the same time; they rose to
+their feet fascinated, and stared like men gone mad. The thing stood
+upright, a little way out from the wall it seemed, its head turned
+towards them, as if conscious of their inspection--_and yet it was
+only a shadow_. And it was the shadow of a man over six feet in height
+and proportionately broad of chest, who carried his dog-whip
+left-handed. It was the shadow which Spurling would have cast, had he
+been alive. And Spurling had cursed Granger merely for suggesting
+that, despite their preparations for departure, they might all meet
+again at Murder Point on Christmas Eve.
+
+The stranger, being ignorant of what they saw, for whichever way he
+turned the pursuer stole behind him, and growing alarmed at their
+terrified expressions, withdrew from the circle of the lamp and
+firelight, willing to hide himself.
+
+Granger was the first to remove his gaze from the wall and to recover
+from his surprise. He approached the shrinking figure. "Peggy," he
+cried: and as she turned, he saw that her capote was the one which he
+had missed, and that the remainder of her man's dress was his own
+borrowed attire.
+
+She came towards him with her arms stretched out and, as she did so,
+his heart was strangely stirred within him by a little puling cry.
+
+"It was the only way to save you," she moaned; "and it has not saved
+you."
+
+"I know, I understand," he whispered. Then he loosed her arms from
+about his neck and unslung the baby from her shoulders. Fear for their
+common safety struggling with the mother's pride and tenderness, she
+followed him to the firelight and allowed him to kneel beside her.
+Their bodies pressing close together, they wondered at and touched
+with a strange reverence the little weakly creature sprawling in her
+lap. It commenced to wail, and she bared to it her breasts. To Antoine
+watching her, she seemed the Madonna of Keewatin, with her stifled
+love, naked passions, and heroic fight for life--and to-morrow would
+be Christmas night.
+
+In the presence of the child they had all forgotten the shadow,
+hovering there behind her, and the sorrow which it meant. Even
+Eyelids, the Judas of the tragedy, stole nearer and, extending his
+hands, touched shyly this frail body of newborn life, as if by so
+doing he could cleanse them. No one interfered with him; they were too
+glad. The Man with the Dead Soul looked on unmoved; his countenance
+was alone unchanged. He was listening intently.
+
+A wolf-call broke the stillness of the night. Going to the door, he
+stepped out, threw back his head and answered. It was the sign for
+which he had waited. Eyelids snatched up his gun and placed himself
+before Granger, prepared to defend him; but Granger took the gun from
+his hand. "No. Not that," he said.
+
+Turning about, he saw that Peggy had risen and, with his child in her
+arms, was hurrying toward the threshold. Guessing her purpose, he
+caught her by the waist and drew her back. He led her to that corner
+of the room which was darkest, and, making her sit down, bent above
+her speaking in a low quick voice. For two minutes nothing was heard
+but her sobbing, the hissing of his whispered messages, and the slow,
+deep-drawn breathing of Eyelids and Antoine. They both knew now that
+he was innocent since they had seen the shadow. The air was heavy with
+suspense. There was a crunching of snow which came nearer, ascending
+the mound toward the shack. There was the sound of several footsteps,
+as of men taking up positions about the house. The door burst open and
+Beorn entered, followed by a man who, Granger guessed from his bearing
+and dress, was Sergeant Shattuck. It was his last chance to redeem
+himself.
+
+He rose up, resting his hand on his wife's shoulder to keep her
+seated, and stood in front of her, hiding her from view, so that the
+sergeant should not see that tell-tale shadow behind her. Even while
+he held himself there in breathless silence, taking his first look at
+the man who had travelled all those miles only to carry him southward
+to his death, he smiled grimly, amused at the Homeric justice of
+it--that Spurling should have killed and been killed by a woman in
+disguise, and that on his head should rest the burden of the shame, he
+who throughout his life had never _done_, but had only _intended_.
+
+Then the sergeant spoke. "John Granger, are you there?"
+
+"I am."
+
+"I arrest you, John Granger, on the charge of being concerned in the
+death of Corporal Eric Strangeways, and of the wilful murder of one
+Druce Spurling, your accomplice in the latter crime, whom you, well
+knowing that he was a fugitive from justice, assisted to escape from
+the afore-mentioned Eric Strangeways."
+
+Peggy half rose to her feet, with a choking cry, and tried to speak;
+but Granger checked her.
+
+"I plead guilty," he said; "I am ready to come with you. I have only
+one request to make, that you take me away with you at once, setting
+out this night."
+
+The sergeant looked doubtful; he had made a long journey, and he and
+his dogs were tired. But hearing the sound of intolerable sobbing, he
+thought that he understood, and nodded his assent.
+
+They all stepped out, closing the door behind them, and left Granger
+alone with his wife. In five minutes the door opened and he joined
+them. His face was grey and tremulous, but his lips were steady and
+smiling. "Large enough to crucify us all," murmured Antoine when he
+saw him. Granger knew what he meant--that he was referring to Keewatin
+and to his sacrifice. He shook his head at him; he was not thinking of
+that. He was thinking of Spurling's shadow, made prisoner by its own
+hatred, chained behind the woman weeping in the shack, and of how he
+had cheated it of its pitiful revenge. But it was not yet too late for
+one of his companions, or even Peggy herself, to betray his secret. He
+would not feel that she was safe until Murder Point had been lost to
+sight. Stepping briskly over to Shattuck he inquired, "Any need of
+handcuffs to-night, Sergeant?"
+
+"Not if you pledge me your word," he replied: but he spoke
+absent-mindedly, taking no steps toward departure. Granger grew
+impatient; every moment thus wasted might lose him his chance of
+making a decent exit from life. He had sought for so many things which
+he had not found, that he was now frenziedly covetous of attaining
+this last success.
+
+"Sergeant, you remember your promise to me that . . ."
+
+Before he had finished his sentence, Shattuck broke in on him
+excitedly, exclaiming, "By God, but it's you that it's wanting. Look,
+over there, down-river to the northeast."
+
+Turning quickly about to the direction indicated, his eyes fell upon
+the bend. There, standing a short way out from the bank on the ice, so
+that he could see it clearly, was the figure of a man, _with the
+moonlight streaming through him_. Granger recognised him by his
+tallness and uprightness. He was waving to him, seeing which he waved
+back. As though he had been waiting for that permission, he began to
+move up-river with incredible swiftness towards the Point. Having come
+within hailing distance he halted, and putting his hands to his mouth
+shouted, "Be brave! Be brave! It is only death."
+
+Had Strangeways stepped out from his grave to taunt him with the
+futility of his own words, which had been spoken to comfort him in his
+distress? The apparition was growing vaguer. Just before it vanished,
+it cried again and waved its hand, "Jesus of Galilee! Jesus Christ!"
+
+The sound reached him faintly as a whisper. He thought that his own
+memory must have spoken till, turning round and scanning the other
+men's faces, he saw that they also had heard.
+
+"What was it that he said?" asked Eyelids.
+
+"Sounded as though he was swearing," Shattuck replied.
+
+But Granger and Antoine knew better; they knew that it was the dead
+lover giving his approval of this last act of the rival who was to die
+for his death.
+
+The sergeant required no further urging to hasten his departure.
+Descending to the river-bed, he harnessed in his huskies and set out
+up the Last Chance, taking with him the independent trader southwards,
+as he had so often desired,--but to be hanged.
+
+
+
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