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+The Project Gutenberg EBook Northern Lights, v1,  by Gilbert Parker
+#14 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+  Contents:
+    A Lodge In The Wilderness
+    Once At Red Man's River
+    The Stroke Of The Hour
+    Buckmaster's Boy
+
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+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**EBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
+
+
+Title: Northern Lights, Volume 1.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6186]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on September 6, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NORTHERN LIGHTS, v1, BY PARKER ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+NORTHERN LIGHTS
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+Volume 1.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+Volume 1.
+A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS
+ONCE AT RED MAN'S RIVER
+THE STROKE OF THE HOUR
+BUCKMASTER'S BOY
+
+Volume 2.
+TO-MORROW
+QU'APPELLE
+THE STAKE AND THE PLUMB-LINE
+
+Volume 3.
+WHEN THE SWALLOWS HOMEWARD FLY
+GEORGE'S WIFE
+MARCILE
+
+Volume 4.
+A MAN, A FAMINE, AND A HEATHEN BOY
+THE HEALING SPRINGS AND THE PIONEERS
+THE LITTLE WIDOW OF JANSEN
+WATCHING THE RISE OF ORION
+
+Volume 5.
+THE ERROR OF THE DAY
+THE WHISPERER
+AS DEEP AS THE SEA
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+This book, Northern Lights, belongs to an epoch which is a generation
+later than that in which Pierre and His People moved. The conditions
+under which Pierre and Shon McGann lived practically ended with the
+advent of the railway.  From that time forwards, with the rise of towns
+and cities accompanied by an amazing growth of emigration, the whole life
+lost much of that character of isolation and pathetic loneliness which
+marked the days of Pierre.  When, in 1905, I visited the Far West again
+after many years, and saw the strange new life with its modern episode,
+energy, and push, and realised that even the characteristics which marked
+the period just before the advent, and just after the advent, of the
+railway were disappearing, I determined to write a series of stories
+which would catch the fleeting characteristics and hold something of the
+old life, so adventurous, vigorous, and individual, before it passed
+entirely and was forgotten.  Therefore, from 1905 to 1909, I kept drawing
+upon all those experiences of others, from the true tales that had been
+told me, upon the reminiscences of Hudson's Bay trappers and hunters, for
+those incidents natural to the West which imagination could make true.
+Something of the old atmosphere had gone, and there was a stir and a
+murmur in all the West which broke that grim yet fascinating loneliness
+of the time of Pierre.
+
+Thus it is that Northern Lights is written in a wholly different style
+from that of Pierre and His People, though here and there, as for
+instance in A Lodge in the Wilderness, Once at Red Man's River, The
+Stroke of the Hour, Qu'appelle, and Marcile, the old note sounds, and
+something of the poignant mystery, solitude, and big primitive incident
+of the earlier stories appears.  I believe I did well--at any rate for
+myself and my purposes--in writing this book, and thus making the human
+narrative of the Far West and North continuous from the time of the
+sixties onwards.  So have I assured myself of the rightness of my
+intention, that I shall publish a novel presently which will carry on
+this human narrative of the West into still another stage-that of the
+present, when railways are intersecting each other, when mills and
+factories are being added to the great grain elevators in the West, and
+when hundreds and thousands of people every year are moving across the
+plains where, within my own living time, the buffalo ranged in their
+millions, and the red men, uncontrolled, set up their tepees.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+The tales in this book belong to two different epochs in the life of the
+Far West.  The first five are reminiscent of "border days and deeds"--
+of days before the great railway was built which changed a waste into a
+fertile field of civilisation.  The remaining stories cover the period
+passed since the Royal North-West Mounted Police and the Pullman car
+first startled the early pioneer, and sent him into the land of the
+farther North, or drew him into the quiet circle of civic routine and
+humdrum occupation.
+
+G. P.
+
+
+
+
+Volume 1.
+
+A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS
+ONCE AT RED MAN'S RIVER
+THE STROKE OF THE HOUR
+BUCKMASTER'S BOY
+
+
+
+
+A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS
+
+"Hai--Yai, so bright a day, so clear!" said Mitiahwe as she entered the
+big lodge and laid upon a wide, low couch, covered with soft skins, the
+fur of a grizzly which had fallen to her man's rifle.  "Hai-yai, I wish
+it would last for ever--so sweet!" she added, smoothing the fur
+lingeringly, and showing her teeth in a smile.
+
+"There will come a great storm, Mitiahwe.  See, the birds go south so
+soon," responded a deep voice from a corner by the doorway.
+
+The young Indian wife turned quickly, and, in a defiant fantastic mood
+--or was it the inward cry against an impending fate, the tragic future
+of those who will not see, because to see is to suffer?--she made some
+quaint, odd motions of the body which belonged to a mysterious dance of
+her tribe, and, with flashing eyes, challenged the comely old woman
+seated on a pile of deer-skins.
+
+"It is morning, and the day will last for ever," she said nonchalantly,
+but her eyes suddenly took on a faraway look, half apprehensive, half
+wondering.  The birds were indeed going south very soon, yet had there
+ever been so exquisite an autumn as this, had her man ever had so
+wonderful a trade--her man with the brown hair, blue eyes, and fair,
+strong face?
+
+"The birds go south, but the hunters and buffalo still go north,"
+Mitiahwe urged searchingly, looking hard at her mother--Oanita, the Swift
+Wing.
+
+"My dream said that the winter will be dark and lonely, that the ice will
+be thick, the snow deep, and that many hearts will be sick because of the
+black days and the hunger that sickens the heart," answered Swift Wing.
+
+Mitiahwe looked into Swift Wing's dark eyes, and an anger came upon her.
+"The hearts of cowards will freeze," she rejoined, "and to those that
+will not see the sun the world will be dark," she added.  Then suddenly
+she remembered to whom she was speaking, and a flood of feeling ran
+through her; for Swift Wing had cherished her like a fledgeling in the
+nest till her young white man came from "down East."  Her heart had leapt
+up at sight of him, and she had turned to him from all the young men of
+her tribe, waiting in a kind of mist till he, at last, had spoken to her
+mother, and then one evening, her shawl over her head, she had come along
+to his lodge.
+
+A thousand times as the four years passed by she had thought how good it
+was that she had become his wife--the young white man's wife, rather than
+the wife of Breaking Rock, son of White Buffalo, the chief, who had four
+hundred horses, and a face that would have made winter and sour days for
+her.  Now and then Breaking Rock came and stood before the lodge, a
+distance off, and stayed there hour after hour, and once or twice he came
+when her man was with her; but nothing could be done, for earth and air
+and space were common to them all, and there was no offence in Breaking
+Rock gazing at the lodge where Mitiahwe lived.  Yet it seemed as though
+Breaking Rock was waiting--waiting and hoping.  That was the impression
+made upon all who saw him, and even old White Buffalo, the chief, shook
+his head gloomily when he saw Breaking Rock, his son, staring at the big
+lodge which was so full of happiness, and so full also of many luxuries
+never before seen at a trading post on the Koonce River.  The father of
+Mitiahwe had been chief, but because his three sons had been killed in
+battle the chieftainship had come to White Buffalo, who was of the same
+blood and family.  There were those who said that Mitiahwe should have
+been chieftainess; but neither she nor her mother would ever listen to
+this, and so White Buffalo, and the tribe loved Mitiahwe because of her
+modesty and goodness.  She was even more to White Buffalo than Breaking
+Rock, and he had been glad that Dingan the white man--Long Hand he was
+called--had taken Mitiahwe for his woman.  Yet behind this gladness of
+White Buffalo, and that of Swift Wing, and behind the silent watchfulness
+of Breaking Rock, there was a thought which must ever come when a white
+man mates with an Indian maid, without priest or preacher, or writing, or
+book, or bond.
+
+Yet four years had gone; and all the tribe, and all who came and went,
+half-breeds, traders, and other tribes, remarked how happy was the white
+man with his Indian wife.  They never saw anything but light in the eyes
+of Mitiahwe, nor did the old women of the tribe who scanned her face as
+she came and went, and watched and waited too for what never came--not
+even after four years.
+
+Mitiahwe had been so happy that she had not really missed what never
+came; though the desire to have something in her arms which was part of
+them both had flushed up in her veins at times, and made her restless
+till her man had come home again.  Then she had forgotten the unseen for
+the seen, and was happy that they two were alone together--that was the
+joy of it all, so much alone together; for Swift Wing did not live with
+them, and, like Breaking Rock, she watched her daughter's life, standing
+afar off, since it was the unwritten law of the tribe that the wife's
+mother must not cross the path or enter the home of her daughter's
+husband.  But at last Dingan had broken through this custom, and insisted
+that Swift Wing should be with her daughter when he was away from home,
+as now on this wonderful autumn morning, when Mitiahwe had been singing
+to the Sun, to which she prayed for her man and for everlasting days with
+him.
+
+She had spoken angrily but now, because her soul sharply resented the
+challenge to her happiness which her mother had been making.  It was her
+own eyes that refused to see the cloud, which the sage and bereaved woman
+had seen and conveyed in images and figures of speech natural to the
+Indian mind.
+
+"Hai-yai," she said now, with a strange touching sigh breathing in the
+words, "you are right, my mother, and a dream is a dream; also, if it be
+dreamt three times, then is it to be followed, and it is true.  You have
+lived long, and your dreams are of the Sun and the Spirit."  She shook a
+little as she laid her hand on a buckskin coat of her man hanging by the
+lodge-door; then she steadied herself again, and gazed earnestly into her
+mother's eyes.  "Have all your dreams come true, my mother?" she asked
+with a hungering heart.  "There was the dream that came out of the dark
+five times, when your father went against the Crees, and was wounded, and
+crawled away into the hills, and all our warriors fled--they were but a
+handful, and the Crees like a young forest in number!  I went with my
+dream, and found him after many days, and it was after that you were
+born, my youngest and my last.  There was also"--her eyes almost closed,
+and the needle and thread she held lay still in her lap--"when two of
+your brothers were killed in the drive of the buffalo.  Did I not see it
+all in my dream, and follow after them to take them to my heart?  And
+when your sister was carried off, was it not my dream which saw the
+trail, so that we brought her back again to die in peace, her eyes seeing
+the Lodge whither she was going, open to her, and the Sun, the Father,
+giving her light and promise--for she had wounded herself to die that the
+thief who stole her should leave her to herself.  Behold, my daughter,
+these dreams have I had, and others; and I have lived long and have seen
+the bright day break into storm, and the herds flee into the far hills
+where none could follow, and hunger come, and--"
+
+"Hai-yo, see, the birds flying south," said the girl with a gesture
+towards the cloudless sky.  "Never since I lived have they gone south so
+soon."  Again she shuddered slightly, then she spoke slowly: "I also have
+dreamed, and I will follow my dream.  I dreamed"--she knelt down beside
+her mother, and rested her hands in her mother's lap--"I dreamed that
+there was a wall of hills dark and heavy and far away, and that whenever
+my eyes looked at them they burned with tears; and yet I looked and
+looked, till my heart was like lead in my breast; and I turned from them
+to the rivers and the plains that I loved.  But a voice kept calling to
+me, 'Come, come!  Beyond the hills is a happy land.  The trail is hard,
+and your feet will bleed, but beyond is the happy land.'  And I would not
+go for the voice that spoke, and at last there came an old man in my
+dream and spoke to me kindly, and said, 'Come with me, and I will show
+thee the way over the hills to the Lodge where thou shalt find what thou
+hast lost.'  And I said to him, 'I have lost nothing;' and I would not
+go.  Twice I dreamed this dream, and twice the old man came, and three
+times I dreamed it; and then I spoke angrily to him, as but now I did to
+thee; and behold he changed before my eyes, and I saw that he was now
+become--"she stopped short, and buried her face in her hands for a
+moment, then recovered herself--"Breaking Rock it was, I saw before me,
+and I cried out and fled.  Then I waked with a cry, but my man was beside
+me, and his arm was round my neck; and this dream, is it not a foolish
+dream, my mother?"
+
+The old woman sat silent, clasping the hands of her daughter firmly, and
+looking out of the wide doorway towards the trees that fringed the river;
+and presently, as she looked, her face changed and grew pinched all at
+once, and Mitiahwe, looking at her, turned a startled face towards the
+river also.
+
+"Breaking Rock!" she said in alarm, and got to her feet quickly.
+
+Breaking Rock stood for a moment looking towards the lodge, then came
+slowly forward to them.  Never in all the four years had he approached
+this lodge of Mitiahwe, who, the daughter of a chief, should have married
+himself, the son of a chief!  Slowly but with long slouching stride
+Breaking Rock came nearer.  The two women watched him without speaking.
+Instinctively they knew that he brought news, that something had
+happened; yet Mitiahwe felt at her belt for what no Indian girl would be
+without; and this one was a gift from her man, on the anniversary of the
+day she first came to his lodge.
+
+Breaking Rock was at the door now, his beady eyes fixed on Mitiahwe's,
+his figure jerked to its full height, which made him, even then, two
+inches less than Long Hand.  He spoke in a loud voice:
+
+"The last boat this year goes down the river tomorrow.  Long Hand, your
+man, is going to his people.  He will not come back.  He has had enough
+of the Blackfoot woman.  You will see him no more."  He waved a hand to
+the sky.  "The birds are going south.  A hard winter is coming quick.
+You will be alone.  Breaking Rock is rich.  He has five hundred horses.
+Your man is going to his own people.  Let him go.  He is no man.  It is
+four years, and still there are but two in your lodge.  How!"
+
+He swung on his heel with a chuckle in his throat, for he thought he had
+said a good thing, and that in truth he was worth twenty white men.  His
+quick ear caught a movement behind him, however, and he saw the girl
+spring from the lodge door, something flashing from her belt.  But now
+the mother's arms were round her, with cries of protest, and Breaking
+Rock, with another laugh, slipped away swiftly toward the river.
+
+"That is good," he muttered.  "She will kill him perhaps, when she goes
+to him.  She will go, but he will not stay.  I have heard."
+
+As he disappeared among the trees Mitiahwe disengaged herself from her
+mother's arms, went slowly back into the lodge, and sat down on the great
+couch where, for so many moons, she had lain with her man beside her.
+
+Her mother watched her closely, though she moved about doing little
+things.  She was trying to think what she would have done if such a thing
+had happened to her, if her man had been going to leave her.  She assumed
+that Dingan would leave Mitiahwe, for he would hear the voices of his
+people calling far away, even as the red man who went East into the great
+cities heard the prairies and the mountains and the rivers and his own
+people calling, and came back, and put off the clothes of civilisation,
+and donned his buckskins again, and sat in the Medicine Man's tent, and
+heard the spirits speak to him through the mist and smoke of the sacred
+fire.  When Swift Wing first gave her daughter to the white man she
+foresaw the danger now at hand, but this was the tribute of the lower
+race to the higher, and--who could tell!  White men had left their Indian
+wives, but had come back again, and for ever renounced the life of their
+own nations, and become great chiefs, teaching useful things to their
+adopted people, bringing up their children as tribesmen--bringing up
+their children!  There it was, the thing which called them back, the
+bright-eyed children with the colour of the brown prairie in their faces,
+and their brains so sharp and strong.  But here was no child to call
+Dingan back, only the eloquent, brave, sweet face of Mitiahwe.  .  .  .
+If he went!  Would he go?  Was he going?  And now that Mitiahwe had been
+told that he would go, what would she do?  In her belt was--but, no, that
+would be worse than all, and she would lose Mitiahwe, her last child, as
+she had lost so many others.  What would she herself do if she were in
+Mitiahwe's place?  Ah, she would make him stay somehow--by truth or by
+falsehood; by the whispered story in the long night, by her head upon his
+knee before the lodge-fire, and her eyes fixed on his, luring him, as the
+Dream lures the dreamer into the far trail, to find the Sun's hunting-
+ground where the plains are filled with the deer and the buffalo and the
+wild horse; by the smell of the cooking-pot and the favourite spiced
+drink in the morning; by the child that ran to him with his bow and
+arrows and the cry of the hunter--but there was no child; she had
+forgotten.  She was always recalling her own happy early life with her
+man, and the clean-faced papooses that crowded round his knee--one wife
+and many children, and the old Harvester of the Years reaping them so
+fast, till the children stood up as tall as their father and chief.  That
+was long ago, and she had had her share--twenty-five years of happiness;
+but Mitiahwe had had only four.  She looked at Mitiahwe, standing still
+for a moment like one rapt, then suddenly she gave a little cry.
+Something had come into her mind, some solution of the problem,
+and she ran and stooped over the girl and put both hands on her head.
+
+"Mitiahwe, heart's blood of mine," she said, "the birds go south, but
+they return.  What matter if they go so soon, if they return soon.  If
+the Sun wills that the winter be dark, and he sends the Coldmaker to
+close the rivers and drive the wild ones far from the arrow and the gun,
+yet he may be sorry, and send a second summer--has it not been so, and
+Coldmaker has hurried away--away!  The birds go south, but they will
+return, Mitiahwe."
+
+"I heard a cry in the night while my man slept," Mitiahwe answered,
+looking straight before her, "and it was like the cry of a bird-calling,
+calling, calling."
+
+"But he did not hear--he was asleep beside Mitiahwe.  If he did not wake,
+surely it was good luck.  Thy breath upon his face kept him sleeping.
+Surely it was good luck to Mitiahwe that he did not hear."
+
+She was smiling a little now, for she had thought of a thing which would,
+perhaps, keep the man here in this lodge in the wilderness; but the time
+to speak of it was not yet.  She must wait and see.
+
+Suddenly Mitiahwe got to her feet with a spring, and a light in her eyes.
+"Hai-yai!" she said with plaintive smiling, ran to a corner of the
+lodge, and from a leather bag drew forth a horse-shoe and looked at it,
+murmuring to herself.
+
+The old woman gazed at her wonderingly.  "What is it, Mitiahwe?" she
+asked.
+
+"It is good-luck.  So my man has said.  It is the way of his people.
+It is put over the door, and if a dream come it is a good dream; and if a
+bad thing come, it will not enter; and if the heart prays for a thing hid
+from all the world, then it brings good-luck.  Hai-yai!  I will put it
+over the door, and then--"All at once her hand dropped to her side, as
+though some terrible thought had come to her, and, sinking to the floor,
+she rocked her body backward and forward for a time, sobbing.  But
+presently she got to her feet again, and, going to the door of the lodge,
+fastened the horseshoe above it with a great needle and a string of
+buckskin.
+
+"Oh great Sun," she prayed, "have pity on me and save me!  I cannot live
+alone.  I am only a Blackfoot wife; I am not blood of his blood.  Give,
+O great one, blood of his blood, bone of his bone, soul of his soul, that
+he will say, This is mine, body of my body, and he will hear the cry and
+will stay.  O great Sun, pity me!"  The old woman's heart beat faster as
+she listened.  The same thought was in the mind of both.  If there were
+but a child, bone of his bone, then perhaps he would not go; or, if he
+went, then surely he would return, when he heard his papoose calling in
+the lodge in the wilderness.
+
+As Mitiahwe turned to her, a strange burning light in her eyes, Swift
+Wing said: "It is good.  The white man's Medicine for a white man's wife.
+But if there were the red man's Medicine too--"
+
+"What is the red man's Medicine?" asked the young wife, as she smoothed
+her hair, put a string of bright beads around her neck, and wound a red
+sash round her waist.
+
+The old woman shook her head, a curious half-mystic light in her eyes,
+her body drawn up to its full height, as though waiting for something.
+"It is an old Medicine.  It is of winters ago as many as the hairs of the
+head.  I have forgotten almost, but it was a great Medicine when there
+were no white men in the land.  And so it was that to every woman's
+breast there hung a papoose, and every woman had her man, and the red men
+were like leaves in the forest--but it was a winter of winters ago, and
+the Medicine Men have forgotten; and thou hast no child!  When Long Hand
+comes, what will Mitiahwe say to him?"
+
+Mitiahwe's eyes were determined, her face was set, she flushed deeply,
+then the colour fled.  "What my mother would say, I will say.  Shall the
+white man's Medicine fail?  If I wish it, then it will be so: and I will
+say so."
+
+"But if the white man's Medicine fail?"--Swift Wing made a gesture toward
+the door where the horse-shoe hung.  "It is Medicine for a white man,
+will it be Medicine for an Indian?"
+
+"Am I not a white man's wife?"
+
+"But if there were the Sun Medicine also, the Medicine of the days long
+ago?"
+
+"Tell me.  If you remember--Kai!  but you do remember--I see it in your
+face.  Tell me, and I will make that Medicine also, my mother."
+
+"To-morrow, if I remember it--I will think, and if I remember it,
+to-morrow I will tell you, my heart's blood.  Maybe my dream will come
+to me and tell me.  Then, even after all these years, a papoose--"
+
+"But the boat will go at dawn to-morrow, and if he go also--"
+
+"Mitiahwe is young, her body is warm, her eyes are bright, the songs she
+sings, her tongue--if these keep him not, and the Voice calls him still
+to go, then still Mitiahwe shall whisper, and tell him--"
+
+"Hai-yo-hush," said the girl, and trembled a little, and put both hands
+on her mother's mouth.
+
+For a moment she stood so, then with an exclamation suddenly turned and
+ran through the doorway, and sped toward the river, and into the path
+which would take her to the post, where her man traded with the Indians
+and had made much money during the past six years, so that he could have
+had a thousand horses and ten lodges like that she had just left.  The
+distance between the lodge and the post was no more than a mile, but
+Mitiahwe made a detour, and approached it from behind, where she could
+not be seen.  Darkness was gathering now, and she could see the glimmer
+of the light of lamps through the windows, and as the doors opened and
+shut.  No one had seen her approach, and she stole through a door which
+was open at the rear of the warehousing room, and went quickly to another
+door leading into the shop.  There was a crack through which she could
+see, and she could hear all that was said.  As she came she had seen
+Indians gliding through the woods with their purchases, and now the shop
+was clearing fast, in response to the urging of Dingan and his partner,
+a Scotch half-breed.  It was evident that Dingan was at once abstracted
+and excited.
+
+Presently only two visitors were left, a French halfbreed call Lablache,
+a swaggering, vicious fellow, and the captain of the steamer, Ste. Anne,
+which was to make its last trip south in the morning--even now it would
+have to break its way through the young ice.  Dingan's partner dropped a
+bar across the door of the shop, and the four men gathered about the
+fire.  For a time no one spoke.  At last the captain of the Ste. Anne
+said: "It's a great chance, Dingan.  You'll be in civilisation again, and
+in a rising town of white people--Groise 'll be a city in five years, and
+you can grow up and grow rich with the place.  The Company asked me to
+lay it all before you, and Lablache here will buy out your share of the
+business, at whatever your partner and you prove its worth.  You're
+young; you've got everything before you.  You've made a name out here for
+being the best trader west of the Great Lakes, and now's your time.  It's
+none of my affair, of course, but I like to carry through what I'm set to
+do, and the Company said, 'You bring Dingan back with you.  The place is
+waiting for him, and it can't wait longer than the last boat down.'
+You're ready to step in when he steps out, ain't you, Lablache?"
+
+Lablache shook back his long hair, and rolled about in his pride.  "I
+give him cash for his share to-night someone is behin' me, share, yes!
+It is worth so much, I pay and step in--I take the place over.  I take
+half the business here, and I work with Dingan's partner.  I take your
+horses, Dingan, I take you lodge, I take all in your lodge--everyt'ing."
+
+His eyes glistened, and a red spot came to each cheek as he leaned
+forward.  At his last word Dingan, who had been standing abstractedly
+listening, as it were, swung round on him with a muttered oath, and the
+skin of his face appeared to tighten.  Watching through the crack of the
+door, Mitiahwe saw the look she knew well, though it had never been
+turned on her, and her heart beat faster.  It was a look that came into
+Dingan's face whenever Breaking Rock crossed his path, or when one or two
+other names were mentioned in his presence, for they were names of men
+who had spoken of Mitiahwe lightly, and had attempted to be jocular about
+her.
+
+As Mitiahwe looked at him, now unknown to himself, she was conscious of
+what that last word of Lablache's meant.  Everyt'ing meant herself.
+Lablache--who had neither the good qualities of the white man nor the
+Indian, but who had the brains of the one and the subtilty of the other,
+and whose only virtue was that he was a successful trader, though he
+looked like a mere woodsman, with rings in his ears, gaily decorated
+buckskin coat and moccasins, and a furtive smile always on his lips!
+Everyt'ing!--Her blood ran cold at the thought of dropping the lodge-
+curtain upon this man and herself alone.  For no other man than Dingan
+had her blood run faster, and he had made her life blossom.  She had seen
+in many a half-breed's and in many an Indian's face the look which was
+now in that of Lablache, and her fingers gripped softly the thing in her
+belt that had flashed out on Breaking Rock such a short while ago.  As
+she looked, it seemed for a moment as though Dingan would open the door
+and throw Lablache out, for in quick reflection his eyes ran from the man
+to the wooden bar across the door.
+
+"You'll talk of the shop, and the shop only, Lablache," Dingan said
+grimly.  "I'm not huckstering my home, and I'd choose the buyer if I was
+selling.  My lodge ain't to be bought, nor anything in it--not even the
+broom to keep it clean of any half-breeds that'd enter it without leave."
+
+There was malice in the words, but there was greater malice in the tone,
+and Lablache, who was bent on getting the business, swallowed his ugly
+wrath, and determined that, if he got the business, he would get the
+lodge also in due time; for Dingan, if he went, would not take the lodge-
+or the woman with him; and Dingan was not fool enough to stay when he
+could go to Groise to a sure fortune.
+
+The captain of the Ste. Anne again spoke.  "There's another thing the
+Company said, Dingan.  You needn't go to Groise, not at once.  You can
+take a month and visit your folks down East, and lay in a stock of home-
+feelings before you settle down at Groise for good.  They was fair when I
+put it to them that you'd mebbe want to do that.  'You tell Dingan,' they
+said, 'that he can have the month glad and grateful, and a free ticket on
+the railway back and forth.  He can have it at once,' they said."
+
+Watching, Mitiahwe could see her man's face brighten, and take on a look
+of longing at this suggestion; and it seemed to her that the bird she
+heard in the night was calling in his ears now.  Her eyes went blind a
+moment.
+
+"The game is with you, Dingan.  All the cards are in your hands; you'll
+never get such another chance again; and you're only thirty," said the
+captain.
+
+"I wish they'd ask me," said Dingan's partner with a sigh, as he looked
+at Lablache.  "I want my chance bad, though we've done well here--good
+gosh, yes, all through Dingan."
+
+"The winters, they go queeck in Groise," said Lablache.  "It is life all
+the time, trade all the time, plenty to do and see--and a bon fortune to
+make, bagosh!"
+
+"Your old home was in Nove Scotia, wasn't it, Dingan?" asked the captain
+in a low voice.  "I kem from Connecticut, and I was East to my village
+las' year.  It was good seein' all my old friends again; but I kem back
+content, I kem back full of home-feelin's and content.  You'll like the
+trip, Dingan.  It'll do you good."  Dingan drew himself up with a start.
+"All right.  I guess I'll do it.  Let's figure up again," he said to his
+partner with a reckless air.
+
+With a smothered cry Mitiahwe turned and fled into the darkness, and back
+to the lodge.  The lodge was empty.  She threw herself upon the great
+couch in an agony of despair.
+
+A half-hour went by.  Then she rose, and began to prepare supper.  Her
+face was aflame, her manner was determined, and once or twice her hand
+went to her belt, as though to assure herself of something.
+
+Never had the lodge looked so bright and cheerful; never had she prepared
+so appetising a supper; never had the great couch seemed so soft and rich
+with furs, so homelike and so inviting after a long day's work.  Never
+had Mitiahwe seemed so good to look at, so graceful and alert and
+refined--suffering does its work even in the wild woods, with "wild
+people."  Never had the lodge such an air of welcome and peace and home
+as to-night; and so Dingan thought as he drew aside the wide curtains of
+deerskin and entered.
+
+Mitiahwe was bending over the fire and appeared not to hear him.
+"Mitiahwe," he said gently.
+
+She was singing to herself to an Indian air the words of a song Dingan
+had taught her:
+
+    "Open the door: cold is the night, and my feet are heavy,
+     Heap up the fire, scatter upon it the cones and the scented leaves;
+     Spread the soft robe on the couch for the chief that returns,
+     Bring forth the cup of remembrance--"
+
+It was like a low recitative, and it had a plaintive cadence, as of a
+dove that mourned.
+
+"Mitiahwe," he said in a louder voice, but with a break in it too; for it
+all rushed upon him, all that she had been to him--all that had made the
+great West glow with life, made the air sweeter, the grass greener, the
+trees more companionable and human: who it was that had given the waste
+places a voice.  Yet--yet, there were his own people in the East, there
+was another life waiting for him, there was the life of ambition and
+wealth, and, and home--and children.
+
+His eyes were misty as she turned to him with a little cry of surprise,
+how much natural and how much assumed--for she had heard him enter--it
+would have been hard to say.  She was a woman, and therefore the daughter
+of pretence even when most real.  He caught her by both arms as she shyly
+but eagerly came to him.  "Good girl, good little girl," he said.  He
+looked round him.  "Well, I've never seen our lodge look nicer than it
+does to-night; and the fire, and the pot on the fire, and the smell of
+the pine-cones, and the cedar-boughs, and the skins, and--"
+
+"And everything," she said, with a queer little laugh, as she moved away
+again to turn the steaks on the fire.  Everything!  He started at the
+word.  It was so strange that she should use it by accident, when but a
+little while ago he had been ready to choke the wind out of a man's body
+for using it concerning herself.
+
+It stunned him for a moment, for the West, and the life apart from the
+world of cities, had given him superstition, like that of the Indians,
+whose life he had made his own.
+
+Herself--to leave her here, who had been so much to him?  As true as the
+sun she worshipped, her eyes had never lingered on another man since she
+came to his lodge; and, to her mind, she was as truly sacredly married to
+him as though a thousand priests had spoken, or a thousand Medicine Men
+had made their incantations.  She was his woman and he was her man.  As
+he chatted to her, telling her of much that he had done that day, and
+wondering how he could tell her of all he had done, he kept looking round
+the lodge, his eye resting on this or that; and everything had its own
+personal history, had become part of their lodge-life, because it had a
+use as between him and her, and not a conventional domestic place.  Every
+skin, every utensil, every pitcher and bowl and pot and curtain, had been
+with them at one time or another, when it became of importance and
+renowned in the story of their days and deeds.
+
+How could he break it to her--that he was going to visit his own people,
+and that she must be alone with her mother all winter, to await his
+return in the spring?  His return?  As he watched her sitting beside him,
+helping him to his favourite dish, the close, companionable trust and
+gentleness of her, her exquisite cleanness and grace in his eyes, he
+asked himself if, after all, it was not true that he would return in the
+spring.  The years had passed without his seriously thinking of this
+inevitable day.  He had put it off and off, content to live each hour as
+it came and take no real thought for the future; and yet, behind all was
+the warning fact that he must go one day, and that Mitiahwe could not go
+with him.  Her mother must have known that when she let Mitiahwe come to
+him.  Of course; and, after all, she would find another mate, a better
+mate, one of her own people.
+
+But her hand was in his now, and it was small and very warm, and suddenly
+he shook with anger at the thought of one like Breaking Rock taking her
+to his wigwam; or Lablache--this roused him to an inward fury; and
+Mitiahwe saw and guessed the struggle that was going on in him, and she
+leaned her head against his shoulder, and once she raised his hand to her
+lips, and said, "My chief!"
+
+Then his face cleared again, and she got him his pipe and filled it, and
+held a coal to light it; and, as the smoke curled up, and he leaned back
+contentedly for the moment, she went to the door, drew open the curtains,
+and, stepping outside, raised her eyes to the horseshoe.  Then she said
+softly to the sky: "O Sun, great Father, have pity on me, for I love him,
+and would keep him.  And give me bone of his bone, and one to nurse at my
+breast that is of him.  O Sun, pity me this night, and be near me when I
+speak to him, and hear what I say!"
+
+"What are you doing out there, Mitiahwe?" Dingan cried; and when she
+entered again he beckoned her to him.  "What was it you were saying?  Who
+were you speaking to?" he asked.  "I heard your voice."
+
+"I was thanking the Sun for his goodness to me.  I was speaking for the
+thing that is in my heart, that is life of my life," she added vaguely.
+
+"Well, I have something to say to you, little girl," he said, with an
+effort.
+
+She remained erect before him waiting for the blow--outwardly calm,
+inwardly crying out in pain.  "Do you think you could stand a little
+parting?" he asked, reaching out and touching her shoulder.
+
+"I have been alone before--for five days," she answered quietly.
+
+"But it must be longer this time."
+
+"How long?" she asked, with eyes fixed on his.  "If it is more than a
+week I will go too."
+
+"It is longer than a month," he said.  "Then I will go."
+
+"I am going to see my people," he faltered.
+
+"By the Ste. Anne?"
+
+He nodded.  "It is the last chance this year; but I will come back--
+in the spring."
+
+As he said it he saw her shrink, and his heart smote him.  Four years
+such as few men ever spent, and all the luck had been with him, and the
+West had got into his bones!  The quiet, starry nights, the wonderful
+days, the hunt, the long journeys, the life free of care, and the warm
+lodge; and, here, the great couch--ah, the cheek pressed to his, the lips
+that whispered at his ear, the smooth arm round his neck.  It all rushed
+upon him now.  His people?  His people in the East, who had thwarted his
+youth, vexed and cramped him, saw only evil in his widening desires, and
+threw him over when he came out West--the scallywag, they called him, who
+had never wronged a man or-or a woman!  Never--wronged-a-woman?  The
+question sprang to his lips now.  Suddenly he saw it all in a new light.
+White or brown or red, this heart and soul and body before him were all
+his, sacred to him; he was in very truth her "Chief."
+
+Untutored as she was, she read him, felt what was going on in him.  She
+saw the tears spring to his eyes.  Then, coming close to him she said
+softly, slowly: "I must go with you if you go, because you must be with
+me when--oh, hai-yai, my chief, shall we go from here?  Here in this
+lodge wilt thou be with thine own people--thine own, thou and I--and
+thine to come."  The great passion in her heart made the lie seem very
+truth.
+
+With a cry he got to his feet, and stood staring at her for a moment,
+scarcely comprehending; then suddenly he clasped her in his arms.
+
+"Mitiahwe--Mitiahwe, oh, my little girl!" he cried.  "You and me--and
+our own--our own people!"  Kissing her, he drew her down beside him on
+the couch.  "Tell me again--it is so at last?" he said, and she
+whispered in his ear once more.
+
+In the middle of the night he said to her, "Some day, perhaps, we will
+go East--some day, perhaps."
+
+"But now?" she asked softly.
+
+"Not now--not if I know it," he answered.  "I've got my heart nailed to
+the door of this lodge."
+
+As he slept she got quietly out, and, going to the door of the lodge,
+reached up a hand and touched the horse-shoe.
+
+"Be good Medicine to me," she said.  Then she prayed.  "O Sun, pity me
+that it may be as I have said to him.  O pity me, great Father!"
+
+In the days to come Swift Wing said that it was her Medicine; when her
+hand was burned to the wrist in the dark ritual she had performed with
+the Medicine Man the night that Mitiahwe fought for her man--but Mitiahwe
+said it was her Medicine, the horse-shoe, which brought one of Dingan's
+own people to the lodge, a little girl with Mitiahwe's eyes and form and
+her father's face.  Truth has many mysteries, and the faith of the woman
+was great; and so it was that, to the long end, Mitiahwe kept her man.
+But truly she was altogether a woman, and had good fortune.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ONCE AT RED MAN'S RIVER
+
+"It's got to be settled to-night, Nance.  This game is up here, up for
+ever.  The redcoat police from Ottawa are coming, and they'll soon be
+roostin' in this post; the Injuns are goin', the buffaloes are most gone,
+and the fur trade's dead in these parts.  D'ye see?"
+
+The woman did not answer the big, broad-shouldered man bending over her,
+but remained looking into the fire with wide, abstracted eyes and a face
+somewhat set.
+
+"You and your brother Bantry's got to go.  This store ain't worth a cent
+now.  The Hudson's Bay Company'll come along with the redcoats, and
+they'll set up a nice little Sunday-school business here for what they
+call 'agricultural settlers.'  There'll be a railway, and the Yankees'll
+send up their marshals to work with the redcoats on the border, and--"
+
+"And the days of smuggling will be over," put in the girl in a low voice.
+"No more bull-wackers and muleskinners 'whooping it up'; no more
+Blackfeet and Piegans drinking alcohol and water, and cutting each
+others' throats.  A nice quiet time coming on the border, Abe, eh?"
+
+The man looked at her queerly.  She was not prone to sarcasm, she had not
+been given to sentimentalism in the past; she had taken the border-life
+as it was, had looked it straight between the eyes.  She had lived up to
+it, or down to it, without any fuss, as good as any man in any phase of
+the life, and the only white woman in this whole West country.  It was
+not in the words, but in the tone, that Abe Hawley found something
+unusual and defamatory.
+
+"Why, gol darn it, Nance, what's got into you?  You bin a man out West,
+as good a pioneer as ever was on the border.  But now you don't sound
+friendly to what's been the game out here, and to all of us that've been
+risking our lives to get a livin'."
+
+"What did I say?" asked the girl, unmoved.
+
+"It ain't what you said, it's the sound o' your voice."
+
+"You don't know my voice, Abe.  It ain't always the same.  You ain't
+always about; you don't always hear it."
+
+He caught her arm suddenly.  "No, but I want to hear it always.  I want
+to be always where you are, Nance.  That's what's got to be settled
+to-day--to-night."
+
+"Oh, it's got to be settled to-night!" said the girl meditatively,
+kicking nervously at a log on the fire.  "It takes two to settle a thing
+like that, and there's only one says it's got to be settled.  Maybe it
+takes more than two--or three--to settle a thing like that."  Now she
+laughed mirthlessly.
+
+The man started, and his face flushed with anger; then he put a hand on
+himself, drew a step back, and watched her.
+
+"One can settle a thing, if there's a dozen in it.  You see, Nance, you
+and Bantry's got to close out.  He's fixing it up to-night over at
+Dingan's Drive, and you can't go it alone when you quit this place.  Now,
+it's this way: you can go West with Bantry, or you can go North with me.
+Away North there's buffalo and deer, and game aplenty, up along the
+Saskatchewan, and farther up on the Peace River.  It's going to be all
+right up there for half a lifetime, and we can have it in our own way
+yet.  There'll be no smuggling, but there'll be trading, and land to get;
+and, mebbe, there'd be no need of smuggling, for we can make it, I know
+how--good white whiskey--and we'll still have this free life for our own.
+I can't make up my mind to settle down to a clean collar and going to
+church on Sundays, and all that.  And the West's in your bones too.  You
+look like the West--"
+
+The girl's face brightened with pleasure, and she gazed at him steadily.
+
+"You got its beauty and its freshness, and you got its heat and cold--"
+
+She saw the tobacco-juice stain at the corners of his mouth, she became
+conscious of the slight odour of spirits in the air, and the light in her
+face lowered in intensity.
+
+"You got the ways of the deer in your walk, the song o' the birds in your
+voice; and you're going North with me, Nance, for I bin talkin' to you
+stiddy four years.  It's a long time to wait on the chance, for there's
+always women to be got, same as others have done--men like Dingan with
+Injun girls, and men like Tobey with half-breeds.  But I ain't bin
+lookin' that way.  I bin lookin' only towards you."  He laughed eagerly,
+and lifted a tin cup of whiskey standing on a table near.  "I'm lookin'
+towards you now, Nance.  Your health and mine together.  It's got to be
+settled now.  You got to go to the 'Cific Coast with Bantry, or North
+with me."
+
+The girl jerked a shoulder and frowned a little.  He seemed so sure of
+himself.
+
+"Or South with Nick Pringle, or East with someone else," she said
+quizzically.  "There's always four quarters to the compass, even when Abe
+Hawley thinks he owns the world and has a mortgage on eternity.  I'm not
+going West with Bantry, but there's three other points that's open."
+
+With an oath the man caught her by the shoulders, and swung her round to
+face him.  He was swelling with anger.  "You--Nick Pringle, that trading
+cheat, that gambler!  After four years, I--"
+
+"Let go my shoulders," she said quietly.  "I'm not your property.  Go and
+get some Piegan girl to bully.  Keep your hands off.  I'm not a bronco
+for you to bit and bridle.  You've got no rights.  You--"  Suddenly she
+relented, seeing the look in his face, and realising that, after all, it
+was a tribute to herself that she could keep him for four years and rouse
+him to such fury--"but yes, Abe," she added, "you have some rights.
+We've been good friends all these years, and you've been all right out
+here.  You said some nice things about me just now, and I liked it, even
+if it was as if you learned it out of a book.  I've got no po'try in me;
+I'm plain homespun.  I'm a sapling, I'm not any prairie-flower, but I
+like when I like, and I like a lot when I like.  I'm a bit of hickory,
+I'm not a prairie-flower--"
+
+"Who said you was a prairie-flower?  Did I?  Who's talking about prairie-
+flowers--"
+
+He stopped suddenly, turned round at the sound of a footstep behind him,
+and saw, standing in a doorway leading to another room, a man who was
+digging his knuckles into his eyes and stifling a yawn.  He was a
+refined-looking stripling of not more than twenty-four, not tall, but
+well made, and with an air of breeding, intensified rather than hidden by
+his rough clothes.
+
+"Je-rick-ety!  How long have I slept?" he said, blinking at the two
+beside the fire.  "How long?" he added, with a flutter of anxiety in his
+tone.
+
+"I said I'd wake you," said the girl, coming forwards.  "You needn't have
+worried."
+
+"I don't worry," answered the young man.  "I dreamed myself awake, I
+suppose.  I got dreaming of redcoats and U. S. marshals, and an ambush in
+the Barfleur Coulee, and--" He saw a secret, warning gesture from the
+girl, and laughed, then turned to Abe and looked him in the face.  "Oh, I
+know him!  Abe Hawley's all O. K.--I've seen him over at Dingan's Drive.
+Honour among rogues.  We're all in it.  How goes it--all right?" he added
+carelessly to Hawley, and took a step forwards, as though to shake hands.
+Seeing the forbidding look by which he was met, however, he turned to the
+girl again, as Hawley muttered something they could not hear.
+
+"What time is it?" he asked.
+
+"It's nine o'clock," answered the girl, her eyes watching his every
+movement, her face alive.
+
+"Then the moon's up almost?"
+
+"It'll be up in an hour."
+
+"Jerickety!  Then I've got to get ready."  He turned to the other room
+again and entered.
+
+"College pup!" said Hawley under his breath savagely.  "Why didn't you
+tell me he was here?"
+
+"Was it any of your business, Abe?" she rejoined quietly.
+
+"Hiding him away here--"
+
+"Hiding?  Who's been hiding him?  He's doing what you've done.  He's
+smuggling--the last lot for the traders over by Dingan's Drive.  He'll
+get it there by morning.  He has as much right here as you.  What's got
+into you, Abe?"
+
+"What does he know about the business?  Why, he's a college man from the
+East.  I've heard o' him.  Ain't got no more sense for this life than a
+dicky-bird.  White-faced college pup!  What's he doing out here?  If
+you're a friend o' his, you'd better look after him.  He's green."
+
+"He's going East again," she said, "and if I don't go West with Bantry,
+or South over to Montana with Nick Pringle, or North--"
+
+"Nancy--"  His eyes burned, his lips quivered.
+
+She looked at him and wondered at the power she had over this bully of
+the border, who had his own way with most people, and was one of the most
+daring fighters, hunters, and smugglers in the country.  He was cool,
+hard, and well-in-hand in his daily life, and yet, where she was
+concerned, "went all to pieces," as someone else had said about himself
+to her.
+
+She was not without the wiles and tact of her sex.  "You go now, and come
+back, Abe," she said in a soft voice.  "Come back in an hour.  Come back
+then, and I'll tell you which way I'm going from here."
+
+He was all right again.  "It's with you, Nancy," he said eagerly.  "I bin
+waiting four years."
+
+As he closed the door behind him the "college pup" entered the room
+again.  "Oh, Abe's gone!" he said excitedly.  "I hoped you'd get rid of
+the old rip-roarer.  I wanted to be alone with you for a while.  I don't
+really need to start yet.  With the full moon I can do it before
+daylight."  Then, with quick warmth, "Ah, Nancy, Nancy, you're a flower--
+the flower of all the prairies," he added, catching her hand and laughing
+into her eyes.
+
+She flushed, and for a moment seemed almost bewildered.  His boldness,
+joined to an air of insinuation and understanding, had influenced her
+greatly from the first moment they had met two months ago, as he was
+going South on his smuggling enterprise.  The easy way in which he had
+talked to her, the extraordinary sense he seemed to have of what was
+going on in her mind, the confidential meaning in voice and tone and
+words had, somehow, opened up a side of her nature hitherto unexplored.
+She had talked with him freely then, for it was only when he left her
+that he said what he instinctively knew she would remember till they met
+again.  His quick comments, his indirect but acute questions, his
+exciting and alluring reminiscences of the East, his subtle yet seemingly
+frank compliments, had only stimulated a new capacity in her, evoked
+comparisons of this delicate-looking, fine-faced gentleman with the men
+of the West by whom she was surrounded.  But later he appeared to stumble
+into expressions of admiration for her, as though he was carried off his
+feet and had been stunned by her charm.  He had done it all like a
+master.  He had not said that she was beautiful--she knew she was not--
+but that she was wonderful, and fascinating, and with "something about
+her" he had never seen in all his life, like her own prairies, thrilling,
+inspiring, and adorable.  His first look at her had seemed full of
+amazement.  She had noticed that, and thought it meant only that he was
+surprised to find a white girl out here among smugglers, hunters, squaw-
+men, and Indians.  But he said that the first look at her had made him
+feel things-feel life and women different from ever before; and he had
+never seen anyone like her, nor a face with so much in it.  It was all
+very brilliantly done.
+
+"You make me want to live," he had said, and she, with no knowledge
+of the nuances of language, had taken it literally, and had asked him
+if it had been his wish to die; and he had responded to her mistaken
+interpretation of his meaning, saying that he had had such sorrow he had
+not wanted to live.  As he said it his face looked, in truth, overcome by
+some deep inward care; so that there came a sort of feeling she had never
+had so far for any man--that he ought to have someone to look after him.
+This was the first real stirring of the maternal and protective spirit
+in her towards men, though it had shown itself amply enough regarding
+animals and birds.  He had said he had not wanted to live, and yet he
+had come out West in order to try and live, to cure the trouble that had
+started in his lungs.  The Eastern doctors had told him that the rough
+outdoor life would cure him, or nothing would, and he had vanished from
+the college walls and the pleasant purlieus of learning and fashion into
+the wilds.  He had not lied directly to her when he said that he had had
+deep trouble; but he had given the impression that he was suffering from
+wrongs which had broken his spirit and ruined his health.  Wrongs there
+certainly had been in his life, by whomever committed.
+
+Two months ago he had left this girl with her mind full of memories of
+what he had said to her, and there was something in the sound of the
+slight cough following his farewell words which had haunted her ever
+since.  Her tremendous health and energy, the fire of life burning so
+brightly in her, reached out towards this man living on so narrow a
+margin of force, with no reserve for any extra strain, with just enough
+for each day's use and no more.  Four hours before he had come again with
+his team of four mules and an Indian youth, having covered forty miles
+since his last stage.  She was at the door and saw him coming while he
+was yet along distance off.  Some instinct had told her to watch that
+afternoon, for she knew of his intended return and of his dangerous
+enterprise.  The Indians had trailed south and east, the traders had
+disappeared with them, her brother Bantry had gone up and over to
+Dingan's Drive, and, save for a few loiterers and last hangers-on, she
+was alone with what must soon be a deserted post; its walls, its great
+enclosed yard, and its gun-platforms (for it had been fortified) left for
+law and order to enter upon, in the persons of the red-coated watchmen of
+the law.
+
+Out of the South, from over the border, bringing the last great smuggled
+load of whiskey which was to be handed over at Dingan's Drive, and then
+floated on Red Man's River to settlements up North, came the "college
+pup," Kelly Lambton, worn out, dazed with fatigue, but smiling too, for
+a woman's face was ever a tonic to his blood since he was big enough to
+move in life for himself.  It needed courage--or recklessness--to run the
+border now; for, as Abe Hawley had said, the American marshals were on
+the pounce, the red-coated mounted police were coming west from Ottawa,
+and word had winged its way along the prairie that these redcoats were
+only a few score miles away, and might be at Fort Fair Desire at any
+moment.  The trail to Dingan's Drive lay past it.  Through Barfleur
+Coulee, athwart a great open stretch of country, along a wooded belt, and
+then, suddenly, over a ridge, Dingan's Drive and Red Man's River would be
+reached.
+
+The Government had a mind to make an example, if necessary, by killing
+some smugglers in conflict, and the United States marshals had been
+goaded by vanity and anger at one or two escapes "to have something for
+their money," as they said.  That, in their language, meant, "to let the
+red run," and Kelly Lambton had none too much blood to lose.
+
+He looked very pale and beaten as he held Nance Machell's hands now, and
+called her a prairie-flower, as he had done when he left her two months
+before.  On his arrival but now he had said little, for he saw that she
+was glad to see him, and he was dead for sleep, after thirty-six hours of
+ceaseless travel and watching and danger.  Now, with the most perilous
+part of his journey still before him, and worn physically as he was, his
+blood was running faster as he looked into the girl's face, and something
+in her abundant force and bounding life drew him to her.  Such vitality
+in a man like Abe Hawley would have angered him almost, as it did a
+little time ago, when Abe was there; but possessed by the girl, it roused
+in him a hunger to draw from the well of her perfect health, from the
+unused vigour of her being, something for himself.  The touch of her
+hands warmed him, in the fulness of her life, in the strong eloquence of
+face and form, he forgot she was not beautiful.  The lightness passed
+from his words, and his face became eager.
+
+"Flower, yes, the flower of the life of the West--that's what I mean,"
+he said.  "You are like an army marching.  When I look at you, my blood
+runs faster.  I want to march too.  When I hold your hand I feel that
+life's worth living--I want to do things."
+
+She drew her hand away rather awkwardly.  She had not now that command of
+herself which had ever been easy with the men of the West, except,
+perhaps, with Abe Hawley when--
+
+But with an attempt, only half-meant, to turn the topic, she said: "You
+must be starting if you want to get through to-night.  If the redcoats
+catch you this side of Barfleur Coulee, or in the Coulee itself, you'll
+stand no chance.  I heard they was only thirty miles north this
+afternoon.  Maybe they'll come straight on here to-night, instead of
+camping.  If they have news of your coming, they might.  You can't tell."
+
+"You're right."  He caught her hand again.  "I've got to be going now.
+But Nance--Nance--Nancy, I want to stay here, here with you; or to take
+you with me."
+
+She drew back.  "What do you mean?" she asked.  "Take me with you--me--
+where?"
+
+"East--away down East."
+
+Her brain throbbed, her pulses beat so hard.  She scarcely knew what to
+say, did not know what she said.  "Why do you do this kind of thing?  Why
+do you smuggle?" she asked.  "You wasn't brought up to this."
+
+"To get this load of stuff through is life and death to me," he answered.
+"I've made six thousand dollars out here.  That's enough to start me
+again in the East, where I lost everything.  But I've got to have six
+hundred dollars clear for the travel--railways and things; and I'm having
+this last run to get it.  Then I've finished with the West, I guess.  My
+health's better; the lung is closed up, I've only got a little cough now
+and again; and I'm off East.  I don't want to go alone."  He suddenly
+caught her in his arms.  "I want you--you, to go with me, Nancy--Nance!"
+
+Her brain swam.  To leave the West behind, to go East to a new life
+full of pleasant things, as this man's wife!  Her great heart rose, and
+suddenly the mother in her as well as the woman in her was captured by
+his wooing.  She had never known what it was to be wooed like this.
+
+She was about to answer, when there came a sharp knock at the door
+leading from the backyard, and Lambton's Indian lad entered.  "The
+soldier--he come--many.  I go over the ridge; I see.  They come quick
+here," he said.
+
+Nance gave a startled cry, and Lambton turned to the other room for his
+pistols, overcoat, and cap, when there was the sound of horses' hoofs,
+the door suddenly opened, and an officer stepped inside.
+
+"You're wanted for smuggling, Lambton," he said brusquely.  "Don't stir!"
+In his hand was a revolver.
+
+"Oh, bosh!  Prove it," answered the young man, pale and startled, but
+cool in speech and action.  "We'll prove it all right.  The stuff is
+hereabouts."  The girl said something to the officer in the Chinook
+language.  She saw he did not understand.  Then she spoke quickly to
+Lambton in the same tongue.
+
+"Keep him here a bit," she said.  "His men haven't come yet.  Your outfit
+is well hid.  I'll see if I can get away with it before they find it.
+They'll follow, and bring you with them, that's sure.  So if I have luck
+and get through, we'll meet at Dingan's Drive."
+
+Lambton's face brightened.  He quickly gave her a few directions in
+Chinook, and told her what to do at Dingan's if she got there first.
+Then she was gone.  The officer did not understand what Nance had said,
+but he realised that, whatever she intended to do, she had an advantage
+over him.  With an unnecessary courage he had ridden on alone to make his
+capture, and, as it proved, without prudence.  He had got his man, but he
+had not got the smuggled whiskey and alcohol he had come to seize.  There
+was no time to be lost.  The girl had gone before he realised it.  What
+had she said to the prisoner?  He was foolish enough to ask Lambton, and
+Lambton replied coolly: "She said she'd get you some supper, but she
+guessed it would have to be cold--What's your name?  Are you a colonel,
+or a captain, or only a principal private?"
+
+"I am Captain MacFee, Lambton.  And you'll now bring me where your outfit
+is.  March!"
+
+The pistol was still in his hand, and he had a determined look in
+his eye.  Lambton saw it.  He was aware of how much power lay in the
+threatening face before him, and how eager that power was to make itself
+felt, and provide "Examples"; but he took his chances.
+
+"I'll march all right," he answered, "but I'll march to where you tell
+me.  You can't have it both ways.  You can take me, because you've found
+me, and you can take my outfit too when you've found it; but I'm not
+doing your work, not if I know it."
+
+There was a blaze of anger in the eyes of the officer, and it looked for
+an instant as though something of the lawlessness of the border was going
+to mark the first step of the Law in the Wilderness, but he bethought
+himself in time, and said quietly, yet in a voice which Lambton knew he
+must heed:
+
+"Put on your things-quick."
+
+When this was accomplished, and MacFee had secured the smuggler's
+pistols, he said again, "March, Lambton."
+
+Lambton marched through the moonlit night towards the troop of men who
+had come to set up the flag of order in the plains and hills, and as he
+went his keen ear heard his own mules galloping away down towards the
+Barfleur Coulee.  His heart thumped in his breast.  This girl, this
+prairie-flower, was doing this for him, was risking her life, was
+breaking the law for him.  If she got through, and handed over the
+whiskey to those who were waiting for it, and it got bundled into the
+boats going North before the redcoats reached Dingan's Drive, it would
+be as fine a performance as the West had ever seen; and he would be six
+hundred dollars to the good.  He listened to the mules galloping, till
+the sounds had died into the distance, but he saw now that his captor
+had heard too, and that the pursuit would be desperate.
+
+A half-hour later it began, with MacFee at the head, and a dozen troopers
+pounding behind, weary, hungry, bad-tempered, ready to exact payment for
+their hardships and discouragement.
+
+They had not gone a dozen miles when a shouting horseman rode furiously
+on them from behind.  They turned with carbines cocked, but it was Abe
+Hawley who cursed them, flung his fingers in their faces, and rode on
+harder and harder.  Abe had got the news from one of Nancy's half-breeds,
+and, with the devil raging in his heart, had entered on the chase.  His
+spirit was up against them all; against the Law represented by the
+troopers camped at Fort Fair Desire, against the troopers and their
+captain speeding after Nancy Machell--his Nonce, who was risking her
+life and freedom for the hated, pale-faced smuggler riding between the
+troopers; and his spirit was up against Nance herself.
+
+Nance had said to him, "Come back in an hour," and he had come back to
+find her gone.  She had broken her word.  She had deceived him.  She had
+thrown the four years of his waiting to the winds, and a savage lust was
+in his heart, which would not be appeased till he had done some evil
+thing to someone.
+
+The girl and the Indian lad were pounding through the night with ears
+strained to listen for hoof-beats coming after, with eyes searching
+forward into the trail for swollen creeks and direful obstructions.
+Through Barfleur Coulee it was a terrible march, for there was no road,
+and again and again they were nearly overturned, while wolves hovered in
+their path, ready to reap a midnight harvest.  But once in the open
+again, with the full moonlight on their trail, the girl's spirits rose.
+If she could do this thing for the man who had looked into her eyes as no
+one had ever done, what a finish to her days in the West!  For they were
+finished, finished for ever, and she was going--she was going East; not
+West with Bantry, nor South with Nick Pringle, nor North with Abe Hawley,
+ah, Abe Hawley, he had been a good friend, he had a great heart, he was
+the best man of all the western men she had known; but another man had
+come from the East, a man who had roused something in her never felt
+before, a man who had said she was wonderful; and he needed someone to
+take good care of him, to make him love life again.  Abe would have been
+all right if Lambton had never come, and she had meant to marry Abe in
+the end; but it was different now, and Abe must get over it.  Yet she had
+told Abe to come back in an hour.  He was sure to do it; and, when he had
+done it, and found her gone on this errand, what would he do?  She knew
+what he would do.  He would hurt someone.  He would follow too.  But at
+Dingan's Drive, if she reached it before the troopers and before Abe,
+and did the thing she had set out to do; and, because no whiskey could
+be found, Lambton must go free; and they all stood there together, what
+would be the end?  Abe would be terrible; but she was going East, not
+North, and when the time came she would face it and put things right
+somehow.
+
+The night seemed endless to her fixed and anxious eyes and mind, yet dawn
+came, and there had fallen no sound of hoof-beats on her ear.  The ridge
+above Dingan's Drive was reached and covered, but yet there was no sign
+of her pursuers.  At Red Man's River she delivered her load of contraband
+to the traders waiting for it, and saw it loaded into the boats and
+disappear beyond the wooded bend above Dingan's.
+
+Then she collapsed into the arms of her brother Bantry, and was carried,
+fainting, into Dingan's Lodge.  A half-hour later MacFee and his troopers
+and Lambton came.  MacFee grimly searched the post and the shore, but he
+saw by the looks of all that he had been foiled.  He had no proof of
+anything, and Lambton must go free.
+
+"You've fooled us," he said to Nance sourly, yet with a kind of
+admiration too.  "Through you they got away with it.  But I wouldn't
+try it again, if I were you."
+
+"Once is enough," answered the girl laconically, as Lambton, set free,
+caught both her hands in his and whispered in her ear.
+
+MacFee turned to the others.  "You'd better drop this kind of thing," he
+said.  "I mean business."  They saw the troopers by the horses, and
+nodded.
+
+"Well, we was about quit of it anyhow," said Bantry.  "We've had all we
+want out here."
+
+A loud laugh went up, and it was still ringing when there burst into the
+group, out of the trail, Abe Hawley, on foot.
+
+He looked round the group savagely till his eyes rested on Nance and
+Lambton.  "I'm last in," he said in a hoarse voice.  "My horse broke its
+leg cutting across to get here before her--"  He waved a hand towards
+Nance.  "It's best stickin' to old trails, not tryin' new ones."  His
+eyes were full of hate as he looked at Lambton.  "I'm keeping to old
+trails.  I'm for goin' North, far up, where these two-dollar-a-day and
+hash-and-clothes people ain't come yet."  He made a contemptuous gesture
+toward MacFee and his troopers.  "I'm goin' North--" He took a step
+forward and fixed his bloodshot eyes on Nance.  "I say I'm goin' North.
+You comin' with me, Nance?"  He took off his cap to her.
+
+He was haggard, his buckskins were torn, his hair was dishevelled, and
+he limped a little; but he was a massive and striking figure, and MacFee
+watched him closely, for there was that in his eyes which meant trouble.
+"You said, 'Come back in an hour,' Nance, and I come back, as I said I
+would," he went on.  "You didn't stand to your word.  I've come to git
+it.  I'm goin' North, Nance, and I bin waitin' for four years for you to
+go with me.  Are you comin'?"
+
+His voice was quiet, but it had a choking kind of sound, and it struck
+strangely in the ears of all.  MacFee came nearer.
+
+"Are you comin' with me, Nance, dear?"
+
+She reached a hand towards Lambton, and he took it, but she did not
+speak.  Something in Abe's eyes overwhelmed her--something she had never
+seen before, and it seemed to stifle speech in her.  Lambton spoke
+instead.
+
+"She's going East with me," he said.  "That's settled."
+
+MacFee started.  Then he caught Abe's arm.  "Wait!" he said
+peremptorily.  "Wait one minute."  There was something in his voice
+which held Abe back for the instant.
+
+"You say she is going East with you," MacFee said sharply to Lambton.
+"What for?"  He fastened Lambton with his eyes, and Lambton quailed.
+"Have you told her you've got a wife--down East?  I've got your history,
+Lambton.  Have you told her that you've got a wife you married when you
+were at college--and as good a girl as ever lived?"
+
+It had come with terrible suddenness even to Lambton, and he was too
+dazed to make any reply.  With a cry of shame and anger Nancy started
+back.  Growling with rage and hate, Abe Hawley sprang toward Lambton,
+but the master of the troopers stepped between.
+
+No one could tell who moved first, or who first made the suggestion,
+for the minds of all were the same, and the general purpose was
+instantaneous; but in the fraction of a minute Lambton, under menace,
+was on his hands and knees crawling to the riverside.  Watchful, but not
+interfering, the master of the troopers saw him set adrift in a canoe
+without a paddle, while he was pelted with mud from the shore.
+
+The next morning at sunrise Abe Hawley and the girl he had waited for so
+long started on the North trail together, MacFee, master of the troopers
+and justice of the peace, handing over the marriage lines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STROBE OF THE HOUR
+
+"They won't come to-night--sure."
+
+The girl looked again towards the west, where, here and there, bare
+poles, or branches of trees, or slips of underbrush marked a road made
+across the plains through the snow.  The sun was going down golden red,
+folding up the sky a wide soft curtain of pink and mauve and deep purple
+merging into the fathomless blue, where already the stars were beginning
+to quiver.  The house stood on the edge of a little forest, which had
+boldly asserted itself in the wide flatness.  At this point in the west
+the prairie merged into an undulating territory, where hill and wood
+rolled away from the banks of the Saskatchewan, making another England in
+beauty.  The forest was a sort of advance-post of that land of beauty.
+
+Yet there was beauty too on this prairie, though there was nothing to the
+east but snow and the forest so far as eye could see.  Nobility and peace
+and power brooded over the white world.
+
+As the girl looked, it seemed as though the bosom of the land rose and
+fell.  She had felt this vibrating life beat beneath the frozen surface.
+Now, as she gazed, she smiled sadly to herself, with drooping eyelids
+looking out from beneath strong brows.
+
+"I know you--I know you," she said aloud.  "You've got to take your toll.
+And when you're lying asleep like that, or pretending to, you reach up-
+and kill.  And yet you can be kind-ah, but you can be kind and beautiful!
+But you must have your toll one way or t'other."  She sighed and paused;
+then, after a moment, looking along the trail--"I don't expect they'll
+come to-night, and mebbe not to-morrow, if--if they stay for THAT."
+
+Her eyes closed, she shivered a little.  Her lips drew tight, and her
+face seemed suddenly to get thinner.  "But dad wouldn't--no, he couldn't,
+not considerin'--"  Again she shut her eyes in pain.
+
+Her face was now turned from the western road by which she had expected
+her travellers, and towards the east, where already the snow was taking
+on a faint bluish tint, a reflection of the sky deepening nightwards in
+that half-circle of the horizon.  Distant and a little bleak and
+cheerless the half-circle was looking now.
+
+"No one--not for two weeks," she said, in comment on the eastern trail,
+which was so little frequented in winter, and this year had been less
+travelled than ever.  "It would be nice to have a neighbour," she added,
+as she faced the west and the sinking sun again.  "I get so lonely--just
+minutes I get lonely.  But it's them minutes that seem to count more than
+all the rest when they come.  I expect that's it--we don't live in
+months and years, but just in minutes.  It doesn't take long for an
+earthquake to do its work--it's seconds then.  .  .  .  P'r'aps dad won't
+even come to-morrow," she added, as she laid her hand on the latch.  "It
+never seemed so long before, not even when he's been away a week."  She
+laughed bitterly.  "Even bad company's better than no company at all.
+Sure.  And Mickey has been here always when dad's been away past times.
+Mickey was a fool, but he was company; and mebbe he'd have been better
+company if he'd been more of a scamp and less a fool.  I dunno, but I
+really think he would.  Bad company doesn't put you off so."
+
+There was a scratching at the inside of the door.  "My, if I didn't
+forget Shako," she said, "and he dying for a run!"
+
+She opened the door quickly, and out jumped a Russian dog of almost full
+breed, with big, soft eyes like those of his mistress, and with the air
+of the north in every motion--like his mistress also.
+
+"Come, Shako, a run--a run!"
+
+An instant after she was flying off on a path towards the woods, her
+short skirts flying and showing limbs as graceful and shapely as those of
+any woman of that world of social grace which she had never seen; for she
+was a prairie girl through and through, born on the plains and fed on its
+scanty fare--scanty as to variety, at least.  Backwards and forwards they
+ran, the girl shouting like a child of ten,--she was twenty-three, her
+eyes flashing, her fine white teeth showing, her hands thrown up in sheer
+excess of animal life, her hair blowing about her face-brown, strong
+hair, wavy and plentiful.
+
+Fine creature as she was, her finest features were her eyes and her
+hands.  The eyes might have been found in the most savage places; the
+hands, however, only could have come through breeding.  She had got them
+honestly; for her mother was descended from an old family of the French
+province.  That was why she had the name of Loisette--and had a touch of
+distinction.  It was the strain of the patrician in the full blood of the
+peasant; but it gave her something which made her what she was--what she
+had been since a child, noticeable and besought, sometimes beloved.  It
+was too strong a nature to compel love often, but it never failed to
+compel admiration.  Not greatly a creature of words, she had become moody
+of late; and even now, alive with light and feeling and animal life, she
+suddenly stopped her romp and run, and called the dog to her.
+
+"Heel, Shako!" she said, and made for the door of the little house,
+which looked so snug and home-like.  She paused before she came to the
+door, to watch the smoke curling up from the chimney straight as a
+column, for there was not a breath of air stirring.  The sun was almost
+gone and the strong bluish light was settling on everything, giving even
+the green spruce trees a curious burnished tone.
+
+Swish!  Thud!  She faced the woods quickly.  It was only a sound that she
+had heard how many hundreds of times!  It was the snow slipping from some
+broad branch of the fir trees to the ground.  Yet she started now.
+Something was on her mind, agitating her senses, affecting her self-
+control.
+
+"I'll be jumping out of my boots when the fire snaps, or the frost cracks
+the ice, next," she said aloud contemptuously.  "I dunno what's the
+matter with me.  I feel as if someone was hiding somewhere ready to pop
+out on me.  I haven't never felt like that before."
+
+She had formed the habit of talking to herself, for it had seemed at
+first, as she was left alone when her father went trapping or upon
+journeys for the Government, that by and by she would start at the sound
+of her own voice, if she didn't think aloud.  So she was given to
+soliloquy, defying the old belief that people who talked to themselves
+were going mad.  She laughed at that.  She said that birds sang to
+themselves and didn't go mad, and crickets chirruped, and frogs croaked,
+and owls hooted, and she would talk and not go crazy either.  So she
+talked to herself and to Shako when she was alone.
+
+How quiet it was inside when her light supper was eaten, bread and beans
+and pea-soup--she had got this from her French mother.  Now she sat, her
+elbows on her knees, her chin on her hands, looking into the fire.  Shako
+was at her feet upon the great musk-ox rug, which her father had got on
+one of his hunting trips in the Athabasca country years ago.  It belonged
+as she belonged.  It breathed of the life of the north-land, for the
+timbers of the hut were hewn cedar; the rough chimney, the seats, and the
+shelves on which a few books made a fair show beside the bright tins and
+the scanty crockery, were of pine; and the horned heads of deer and
+wapiti made pegs for coats and caps, and rests for guns and rifles.  It
+was a place of comfort; it had an air of well-to-do thrift, even as the
+girl's dress, though plain, was made of good sound stuff, grey, with a
+touch of dark red to match the auburn of her hair.
+
+A book lay open in her lap, but she had scarcely tried to read it.  She
+had put it down after a few moments fixed upon it.  It had sent her
+thoughts off into a world where her life had played a part too big for
+books, too deep for the plummet of any save those who had lived through
+the storm of life's trials; and life when it is bitter to the young is
+bitter with an agony the old never know.  At last she spoke to herself.
+
+"She knows now.  Now she knows what it is, how it feels--your heart like
+red-hot coals, and something in your head that's like a turnscrew, and
+you want to die and can't, for you've got to live and suffer."
+
+Again she was quiet, and only the dog's heavy breathing, the snap of the
+fire, or the crack of a timber in the deadly frost broke the silence.
+Inside it was warm and bright and home-like; outside it was twenty
+degrees below zero, and like some vast tomb where life itself was
+congealed, and only the white stars, low, twinkling, and quizzical,
+lived-a life of sharp corrosion, not of fire.
+
+Suddenly she raised her head and listened.  The dog did the same.  None
+but those whose lives are lived in lonely places can be so acute, so
+sensitive to sound.  It was a feeling delicate and intense, the whole
+nature getting the vibration.  You could have heard nothing had you been
+there; none but one who was of the wide spaces could have done so.  But
+the dog and the woman felt, and both strained towards the window.  Again
+they heard, and started to their feet.  It was far, far away, and still
+you could not have heard; but now they heard clearly--a cry in the night,
+a cry of pain and despair.  The girl ran to the window and pulled aside
+the bearskin curtain which had completely shut out the light.  Then she
+stirred the fire, threw a log upon it, snuffed the candles, hastily put
+on her moccasins, fur coat, wool cap, and gloves, and went to the door
+quickly, the dog at her heels.  Opening it, she stepped out into the
+night.
+
+"Qui va la?  Who is it?  Where?" she called, and strained towards the
+west.  She thought it might be her father or Mickey the hired man, or
+both.
+
+The answer came from the east, out of the homeless, neighbourless, empty
+east--a cry, louder now.  There were only stars, and the night was dark,
+though not deep dark.  She sped along the prairie road as fast as she
+could, once or twice stopping to call aloud.  In answer to her calls the
+voice sounded nearer and nearer.  Now suddenly she left the trail and
+bore away northward.  At last the voice was very near.  Presently a
+figure appeared ahead, staggering towards her.
+
+"Qui va la?  Who is it?" she asked.
+
+"Ba'tiste Caron," was the reply in English, in a faint voice.  She was
+beside him in an instant.
+
+"What has happened?  Why are you off the trail?" she said, and supported
+him.
+
+"My Injun stoled my dogs and run off," he replied.  "I run after.  Then,
+when I am to come to the trail"--he paused to find the English word, and
+could not--"encore to this trail I no can.  So.  Ah, bon Dieu, it has
+so awful!"  He swayed and would have fallen, but she caught him, bore
+him up.  She was so strong, and he was as slight as a girl, though tall.
+
+"When was that?" she asked.
+
+"Two nights ago," he answered, and swayed.  "Wait," she said, and pulled
+a flask from her pocket.  "Drink this-quick."
+
+He raised it to his lips, but her hand was still on it, and she only let
+him take a little.  Then she drew it away, though she had almost to use
+force, he was so eager for it.  Now she took a biscuit from her pocket.
+
+"Eat; then some more brandy after," she urged.  "Come on; it's not far.
+See, there's the light," she added cheerily, raising her head towards the
+hut.
+
+"I saw it just when I have fall down--it safe me.  I sit down to die--
+like that!  But it safe me, that light--so.  Ah, bon Dieu, it was so far,
+and I want eat so!"  Already he had swallowed the biscuit.
+
+"When did you eat last?" she asked, as she urged him on.
+
+"Two nights--except for one leetla piece of bread--O--O--I fin' it in my
+pocket.  Grace!  I have travel so far.  Jesu, I think it ees ten thousan'
+miles I go.  But I mus' go on, I mus' go--O--certainement."
+
+The light came nearer and nearer.  His footsteps quickened, though he
+staggered now and then, and went like a horse that has run its race, but
+is driven upon its course again, going heavily with mouth open and head
+thrown forwards and down.
+
+"But I mus' to get there, an' you-you will to help me, eh?"
+
+Again he swayed, but her strong arm held him up.  As they ran on, in a
+kind of dog-trot, her hand firm upon his arm--he seemed not to notice it
+--she became conscious, though it was half dark, of what sort of man she
+had saved.  He was about her own age, perhaps a year or two older, with
+little, if any, hair upon his face, save a slight moustache.  His eyes,
+deep sunken as they were, she made out were black, and the face, though
+drawn and famished, had a handsome look.  Presently she gave him another
+sip of brandy, and he quickened his steps, speaking to himself the while.
+
+"I haf to do it--if I lif.  It is to go, go, go, till I get."
+
+Now they came to the hut where the firelight flickered on the window-
+pane; the door was flung open, and, as he stumbled on the threshold, she
+helped him into the warm room.  She almost pushed him over to the fire.
+
+Divested of his outer coat, muffler, cap, and leggings, he sat on a bench
+before the fire, his eyes wandering from the girl to the flames, and his
+hands clasping and unclasping between his knees.  His eyes dilating with
+hunger, he watched her preparations for his supper; and when at last--and
+she had been but a moment--it was placed before him, his head swam, and
+he turned faint with the stress of his longing.  He would have swallowed
+a basin of pea-soup at a draught, but she stopped him, holding the basin
+till she thought he might venture again.  Then came cold beans, and some
+meat which she toasted at the fire and laid upon his plate.  They had not
+spoken since first entering the house, when tears had shone in his eyes,
+and he had said:
+
+"You have safe--ah, you have safe me, and so I will do it yet by help bon
+Dieu--yes."
+
+The meat was done at last, and he sat with a great dish of tea beside
+him, and his pipe alight.
+
+"What time, if please?" he asked.  "I t'ink nine hour, but no sure."
+
+"It is near nine," she said.  She hastily tidied up the table after his
+meal, and then came and sat in her chair over against the wall of the
+rude fireplace.  "Nine--dat is good.  The moon rise at 'leven; den I go.
+I go on," he said, "if you show me de queeck way."
+
+"You go on--how can you go on?" she asked, almost sharply.
+
+"Will you not to show me?" he asked.  "Show you what?" she asked
+abruptly.
+
+"The queeck way to Askatoon," he said, as though surprised that she
+should ask.  "They say me if I get here you will tell me queeck way to
+Askatoon.  Time, he go so fas', an' I have loose a day an' a night, an'
+I mus' get Askatoon if I lif--I mus' get dere in time.  It is all safe to
+de stroke of de hour, mais, after, it is--bon Dieu--it is hell then.  Who
+shall forgif me--no!"
+
+"The stroke of the hour--the stroke of the hour!"  It beat into her
+brain.  Were they both thinking of the same thing now?
+
+"You will show me queeck way.  I mus' be Askatoon in two days, or it is
+all over," he almost moaned.  "Is no man here--I forget dat name, my head
+go round like a wheel; but I know dis place, an' de good God He help me
+fin' my way to where I call out, bien sur.  Dat man's name I have
+forget."
+
+"My father's name is John Alroyd," she answered absently, for there were
+hammering at her brain the words, "The stroke of the hour."
+
+"Ah, now I get--yes.  An' your name, it is Loisette Alroy'--ah, I have it
+in my mind now--Loisette.  I not forget dat name, I not forget you--no."
+
+"Why do you want to go the 'quick' way to Askatoon?" she asked.
+
+He puffed a moment at his pipe before he answered her.  Presently he
+said, holding out his pipe, "You not like smoke, mebbe?"
+
+She shook her head in negation, making an impatient gesture.
+
+"I forget ask you," he said.  "Dat journee make me forget.  When Injun
+Jo, he leave me with the dogs, an' I wake up all alone, an' not know my
+way--not like Jo, I think I die, it is so bad, so terrible in my head.
+Not'ing but snow, not'ing.  But dere is de sun; it shine.  It say to me,
+'Wake up, Ba'tiste; it will be all right bime-bye.'  But all time I t'ink
+I go mad, for I mus' get Askatoon before--dat."
+
+She started.  Had she not used the same word in thinking of Askatoon.
+"That," she had said.
+
+"Why do you want to go the 'quick' way to Askatoon?" she asked again,
+her face pale, her foot beating the floor impatiently.
+
+"To save him before dat!" he answered, as though she knew of what he was
+speaking and thinking.  "What is that?" she asked.  She knew now,
+surely, but she must ask it nevertheless.
+
+"Dat hanging--of Haman," he answered.  He nodded to himself.  Then he
+took to gazing into the fire.  His lips moved as though talking to
+himself, and the hand that held the pipe lay forgotten on his knee.
+"What have you to do with Haman?" she asked slowly, her eyes burning.
+
+"I want safe him--I mus' give him free."  He tapped his breast.  "It is
+hereto mak' him free."  He still tapped his breast.
+
+For a moment she stood frozen still, her face thin and drawn and white;
+then suddenly the blood rushed back into her face, and a red storm raged
+in her eyes.
+
+She thought of the sister, younger than herself, whom Rube Haman had
+married and driven to her grave within a year--the sweet Lucy, with the
+name of her father's mother.  Lucy had been all English in face and
+tongue, a flower of the west, driven to darkness by this horse-dealing
+brute, who, before he was arrested and tried for murder, was about to
+marry Kate Wimper.  Kate Wimper had stolen him from Lucy before Lucy's
+first and only child was born, the child that could not survive the warm
+mother-life withdrawn, and so had gone down the valley whither the
+broken-hearted mother had fled.  It was Kate Wimper, who, before that,
+had waylaid the one man for whom she herself had ever cared, and drawn
+him from her side by such attractions as she herself would keep for an
+honest wife, if such she ever chanced to be.  An honest wife she would
+have been had Kate Wimper not crossed the straight path of her life.  The
+man she had loved was gone to his end also, reckless and hopeless, after
+he had thrown away his chance of a lifetime with Loisette Alroyd.  There
+had been left behind this girl, to whom tragedy had come too young, who
+drank humiliation with a heart as proud as ever straightly set its course
+through crooked ways.
+
+It had hurt her, twisted her nature a little, given a fountain of
+bitterness to her soul, which welled up and flooded her life sometimes.
+It had given her face no sourness, but it put a shadow into her eyes.
+
+She had been glad when Haman was condemned for murder, for she believed
+he had committed it, and ten times hanging could not compensate for that
+dear life gone from their sight--Lucy, the pride of her father's heart.
+She was glad when Haman was condemned, because of the woman who had
+stolen him from Lucy, because of that other man, her lover, gone out of
+her own life.  The new hardness in her rejoiced that now the woman, if
+she had any heart at all, must have it bowed down by this supreme
+humiliation and wrung by the ugly tragedy of the hempen rope.
+
+And now this man before her, this man with a boy's face, with the dark
+luminous eyes, whom she had saved from the frozen plains, he had that in
+his breast which would free Haman, so he had said.  A fury had its birth
+in her at that moment.  Something seemed to seize her brain and master
+it, something so big that it held all her faculties in perfect control,
+and she felt herself in an atmosphere where all life moved round her
+mechanically, she herself the only sentient thing, so much greater than
+all she saw, or all that she realised by her subconscious self.
+Everything in the world seemed small.  How calm it was even with the fury
+within!
+
+"Tell me," she said quietly--"tell me how you are able to save Haman?"
+
+"He not kill Wakely.  It is my brudder Fadette dat kill and get away.
+Haman he is drunk, and everyt'ing seem to say Haman he did it, an'
+everyone know Haman is not friend to Wakely.  So the juree say he must be
+hanging.  But my brudder he go to die with hawful bad cold queeck, an' he
+send for the priest an' for me, an' tell all.  I go to Governor with the
+priest, an' Governor gif me dat writing here."  He tapped his breast,
+then took out a wallet and showed the paper to her.  "It is life of dat
+Haman, voici!  And so I safe him for my brudder.  Dat was a bad boy,
+Fadette.  He was bad all time since he was a baby, an' I t'ink him pretty
+lucky to die on his bed, an' get absolve, and go to purgatore.  If he not
+have luck like dat he go to hell, an' stay there."
+
+He sighed, and put the wallet back in his breast carefully, his eyes
+half-shut with weariness, his handsome face drawn and thin, his limbs lax
+with fatigue.
+
+"If I get Askatoon before de time for dat, I be happy in my heart, for
+dat brudder off mine he get out of purgatore bime-bye, I t'ink."
+
+His eyes were almost shut, but he drew himself together with a great
+effort, and added desperately, "No sleep.  If I sleep it is all smash.
+Man say me I can get Askatoon by dat time from here, if I go queeck way
+across lak'--it is all froze now, dat lak'--an' down dat Foxtail Hills.
+Is it so, ma'm'selle?"
+
+"By the 'quick' way if you can make it in time," she said; "but it is no
+way for the stranger to go.  There are always bad spots on the ice--it is
+not safe.  You could not find your way."
+
+"I mus' get dere in time," he said desperately.  "You can't do it--
+alone," she said.  "Do you want to risk all and lose?"
+
+He frowned in self-suppression.  "Long way, I no can get dere in time?"
+he asked.
+
+She thought a moment.  "No; it can't be done by the long way.  But there
+is another way--a third trail, the trail the Gover'ment men made a year
+ago when they came to survey.  It is a good trail.  It is blazed in the
+woods and staked on the plains.  You cannot miss.  But--but there is so
+little time."  She looked at the clock on the wall.  "You cannot leave
+here much before sunrise, and--"
+
+"I will leef when de moon rise, at eleven," he interjected.
+
+"You have had no sleep for two nights, and no food.  You can't last it
+out," she said calmly.
+
+The deliberate look on his face deepened to stubbornness.
+
+"It is my vow to my brudder--he is in purgatore.  An' I mus' do it," he
+rejoined, with an emphasis there was no mistaking.  "You can show me dat
+way?"
+
+She went to a drawer and took out a piece of paper.  Then, with a point
+of blackened stick, as he watched her and listened, she swiftly drew his
+route for him.
+
+"Yes, I get it in my head," he said.  "I go dat way, but I wish--I wish
+it was dat queeck way.  I have no fear, not'ing.  I go w'en dat moon
+rise--I go, bien sur."
+
+"You must sleep, then, while I get some food for you."  She pointed to a
+couch in a corner.  "I will wake you when the moon rises."
+
+For the first time he seemed to realise her, for a moment to leave the
+thing which consumed him, and put his mind upon her.
+
+"You not happy--you not like me here?" he asked simply; then added
+quickly, "I am not bad man like me brudder--no."
+
+Her eyes rested on him for a moment as though realising him, while some
+thought was working in her mind behind.
+
+"No, you are not a bad man," she said.  "Men and women are equal on the
+plains.  You have no fear--I have no fear."
+
+He glanced at the rifles on the walls, then back at her.  "My mudder, she
+was good woman.  I am glad she did not lif to know what Fadette do."  His
+eyes drank her in for a minute, then he said: "I go sleep now, t'ank you
+--till moontime."
+
+In a moment his deep breathing filled the room, the only sound save for
+the fire within and the frost outside.
+
+Time went on.  The night deepened.
+
+                    .........................
+
+Loisette sat beside the fire, but her body was half-turned from it
+towards the man on the sofa.  She was not agitated outwardly, but within
+there was that fire which burns up life and hope and all the things that
+come between us and great issues.  It had burned up everything in her
+except one thought, one powerful motive.  She had been deeply wronged,
+and justice had been about to give "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a
+tooth."  But the man lying there had come to sweep away the scaffolding
+of justice--he had come for that.
+
+Perhaps he might arrive at Askatoon before the stroke of the hour,
+but still he would be too late, for in her pocket now was the Governor's
+reprieve.  The man had slept soundly.  His wallet was still in his
+breast; but the reprieve was with her.
+
+If he left without discovering his loss, and got well on his way, and
+discovered it then, it would be too late.  If he returned--she only saw
+one step before her, she would wait for that, and deal with it when it
+came.  She was thinking of Lucy, of her own lover ruined and gone.  She
+was calm in her madness.
+
+At the first light of the moon she roused him.  She had put food into his
+fur-coat pocket, and after he had drunk a bowl of hot pea-soup, while she
+told him his course again, she opened the door, and he passed out into
+the night.  He started forward without a word, but came back again and
+caught her hand.
+
+"Pardon," he said; "I go forget everyt'ing except dat.  But I t'ink what
+you do for me, it is better than all my life.  Bien sur, I will come
+again, when I get my mind to myself.  Ah, but you are beautibul," he
+said, "an' you not happy.  Well, I come again--yes, a Dieu."
+
+He was gone into the night, with the moon silvering the sky, and the
+steely frost eating into the sentient life of this northern world.
+Inside the house, with the bearskin blind dropped at the window again,
+and the fire blazing high, Loisette sat with the Governor's reprieve in
+her hand.  Looking at it, she wondered why it had been given to Ba'tiste
+Caron, and not to a police-officer.  Ah yes, it was plain--Ba'tiste was a
+woodsman and plainsman, and could go far more safely than a constable,
+and faster.  Ba'tiste had reason for going fast, and he would travel
+night and day--he was travelling night and day indeed.  And now Ba'tiste
+might get there, but the reprieve would not.  He would not be able to
+stop the hanging of Haman--the hanging of Rube Haman.
+
+A change came over her.  Her eyes blazed, her breast heaved now.  She had
+been so quiet, so cold and still.  But life seemed moving in her once
+again.  The woman, Kate Wimper, who had helped to send two people to
+their graves, would now drink the dregs of shame, if she was capable of
+shame--would be robbed of her happiness, if so be she loved Rube Haman.
+
+She stood up, as though to put the paper in the fire, but paused suddenly
+at one thought--Rube Haman was innocent of murder.
+
+Even so, he was not innocent of Lucy's misery and death, of the death of
+the little one who only opened its eyes to the light for an instant, and
+then went into the dark again.  But truly she was justified!  When Haman
+was gone things would go on just the same--and she had been so bitter,
+her heart had been pierced as with a knife these past three years.  Again
+she held out her hand to the fire, but suddenly she gave a little cry and
+put her hand to her head.  There was Ba'tiste!
+
+What was Ba'tiste to her?  Nothing-nothing at all.  She had saved his
+life--even if she wronged Ba'tiste, her debt would be paid.  No, she
+would not think of Ba'tiste.  Yet she did not put the paper in the fire,
+but in the pocket of her dress.  Then she went to her room, leaving the
+door open.  The bed was opposite the fire, and, as she lay there--she did
+not take off her clothes, she knew not why-she could see the flames.  She
+closed her eyes, but could not sleep, and more than once when she opened
+them she thought she saw Ba'tiste sitting there as he had sat hours
+before.  Why did Ba'tiste haunt her so?  What was it he had said in his
+broken English as he went away?--that he would come back; that she was
+"beautibul."
+
+All at once as she lay still, her head throbbing, her feet and hands icy
+cold, she sat up listening.  "Ah-again!" she cried.  She sprang from her
+bed, rushed to the door, and strained her eyes into the silver night.
+She called into the icy void, "Qui va la?  Who goes?"
+
+She leaned forwards, her hand at her ear, but no sound came in reply.
+Once more she called, but nothing answered.  The night was all light and
+frost and silence.
+
+She had only heard, in her own brain, the iteration of Ba'tiste's
+calling.  Would he reach Askatoon in time, she wondered, as she shut the
+door?  Why had she not gone with him and attempted the shorter way the
+quick way, he had called it?  All at once the truth came back upon her,
+stirring her now.  It would do no good for Ba'tiste to arrive in time.
+He might plead to them all and tell the truth about the reprieve, but it
+would not avail--Rube Haman would hang.  That did not matter--even though
+he was innocent; but Ba'tiste's brother would be so long in purgatory.
+And even that would not matter; but she would hurt Ba'tiste--Ba'tiste--
+Ba'tiste.  And Ba'tiste he would know that she--and he had called her
+"beautibul," that she had--
+
+With a cry she suddenly clothed herself for travel.  She put some food
+and drink in a leather bag and slung them over her shoulder.  Then she
+dropped on a knee and wrote a note to her father, tears falling from her
+eyes.  She heaped wood on the fire and moved towards the door.  All at
+once she turned to the crucifix on the wall which had belonged to her
+mother, and, though she had followed her father's Protestant religion,
+she kissed the feet of the sacred figure.
+
+"Oh, Christ, have mercy on me, and bring me safe to my journey's end-in
+time," she said breathlessly; then she went softly to the door, leaving
+the dog behind.
+
+It opened, closed, and the night swallowed her.  Like a ghost she sped
+the quick way to Askatoon.  She was six hours behind Ba'tiste, and, going
+hard all the time, it was doubtful if she could get there before the
+fatal hour.
+
+On the trail Ba'tiste had taken there were two huts where he could rest,
+and he had carried his blanket slung on his shoulder.  The way she went
+gave no shelter save the trees and caves which had been used to cache
+buffalo meat and hides in old days.  But beyond this there was danger in
+travelling by night, for the springs beneath the ice of the three lakes
+she must, cross made it weak and rotten even in the fiercest weather, and
+what would no doubt have been death to Ba'tiste would be peril at least
+to her.  Why had she not gone with him?
+
+"He had in his face what was in Lucy's," she said to herself, as she sped
+on.  "She was fine like him, ready to break her heart for those she cared
+for.  My, if she had seen him first instead of--"
+
+She stopped short, for the ice gave way to her foot, and she only sprang
+back in time to save herself.  But she trotted on, mile after mile, the
+dog-trot of the Indian, head bent forwards, toeing in, breathing steadily
+but sharply.
+
+The morning came, noon, then a fall of snow and a keen wind, and despair
+in her heart; but she had passed the danger-spots, and now, if the storm
+did not overwhelm her, she might get to Askatoon in time.  In the midst
+of the storm she came to one of the caves of which she had known.  Here
+was wood for a fire, and here she ate, and in weariness unspeakable fell
+asleep.  When she waked it was near sun-down, the storm had ceased, and,
+as on the night before, the sky was stained with colour and drowned in
+splendour.
+
+"I will do it--I will do it, Ba'tiste!" she called, and laughed aloud
+into the sunset.  She had battled with herself all the way, and she had
+conquered.  Right was right, and Rube Haman must not be hung for what he
+did not do.  Her heart hardened whenever she thought of the woman, but
+softened again when she thought of Ba'tiste, who had to suffer for the
+deed of a brother in "purgatore."  Once again the night and its silence
+and loneliness followed her, the only living thing near the trail till
+long after midnight.  After that, as she knew, there were houses here and
+there where she might have rested, but she pushed on unceasing.
+
+At daybreak she fell in with a settler going to Askatoon with his dogs.
+Seeing how exhausted she was, he made her ride a few miles upon his
+sledge; then she sped on ahead again till she came to the borders of
+Askatoon.
+
+People were already in the streets, and all were tending one way.  She
+stopped and asked the time.  It was within a quarter of an hour of the
+time when Haman was to pay another's penalty.  She spurred herself on,
+and came to the jail blind with fatigue.  As she neared the jail she saw
+her father and Mickey.  In amazement her father hailed her, but she would
+not stop.  She was admitted to the prison on explaining that she had a
+reprieve.  Entering a room filled with excited people, she heard a cry.
+
+It came from Ba'tiste.  He had arrived but ten minutes before, and, in
+the Sheriff's presence had discovered his loss.  He had appealed in vain.
+
+But now, as he saw the girl, he gave a shout of joy which pierced the
+hearts of all.
+
+"Ah, you haf it!  Say you haf it, or it is no use--he mus' hang.  Spik-
+spik!  Ah, my brudder--it is to do him right!  Ah, Loisette--bon Dieu,
+merci!"
+
+For answer she placed the reprieve in the hands of the Sheriff.  Then she
+swayed and fell fainting at the feet of Ba'tiste.
+
+She had come at the stroke of the hour.
+
+When she left for her home again the Sheriff kissed her.
+
+And that was not the only time he kissed her.  He did it again six months
+later, at the beginning of the harvest, when she and Ba'tiste Caron
+started off on the long trail of life together.  None but Ba'tiste knew
+the truth about the loss of the reprieve, and to him she was "beautibul"
+just the same, and greatly to be desired.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BUCKMASTER'S BOY
+
+"I bin waitin' for him, an' I'll git him of it takes all winter.  I'll
+git him--plumb."
+
+The speaker smoothed the barrel of his rifle with mittened hand, which
+had, however, a trigger-finger free.  With black eyebrows twitching over
+sunken grey eyes, he looked doggedly down the frosty valley from the
+ledge of high rock where he sat.  The face was rough and weather-beaten,
+with the deep tan got in the open life of a land of much sun and little
+cloud, and he had a beard which, untrimmed and growing wild, made him
+look ten years older than he was.
+
+"I bin waitin' a durn while," the mountain-man added, and got to his feet
+slowly, drawing himself out to six and a half feet of burly manhood.  The
+shoulders were, however, a little stooped, and the head was thrust
+forwards with an eager, watchful look--a habit become a physical
+characteristic.
+
+Presently he caught sight of a hawk sailing southward along the peaks of
+the white icebound mountains above, on which the sun shone with such
+sharp insistence, making sky and mountain of a piece in deep purity and
+serene stillness.
+
+"That hawk's seen him, mebbe," he said, after a moment.  "I bet it went
+up higher when it got him in its eye.  Ef it'd only speak and tell me
+where he is--ef he's a day, or two days, or ten days north."
+
+Suddenly his eyes blazed and his mouth opened in superstitious amazement,
+for the hawk stopped almost directly overhead at a great height, and
+swept round in a circle many times, waveringly, uncertainly.  At last it
+resumed its flight southward, sliding down the mountains like a winged
+star.
+
+The mountaineer watched it with a dazed expression for a moment longer,
+then both hands clutched the rifle and half swung it to position
+involuntarily.
+
+"It's seen him, and it stopped to say so.  It's seen him, I tell you, an'
+I'll git him.  Ef it's an hour, or a day, or a week, it's all the same.
+I'm here watchin', waitin' dead on to him, the poison skunk!"
+
+The person to whom he had been speaking now rose from the pile of cedar
+boughs where he had been sitting, stretched his arms up, then shook
+himself into place, as does a dog after sleep.  He stood for a minute
+looking at the mountaineer with a reflective, yet a furtively sardonic,
+look.  He was not above five feet nine inches in height, and he was slim
+and neat; and though his buckskin coat and breeches were worn and even
+frayed in spots, he had an air of some distinction and of concentrated
+force.  It was a face that men turned to look at twice and shook their
+heads in doubt afterwards--a handsome, worn, secretive face, in as
+perfect control as the strings of an instrument under the bow of a great
+artist.  It was the face of a man without purpose in life beyond the
+moment--watchful, careful, remorselessly determined, an adventurer's
+asset, the dial-plate of a hidden machinery.
+
+Now he took the handsome meerschaum pipe from his mouth, from which he
+had been puffing smoke slowly, and said in a cold, yet quiet voice, "How
+long you been waitin', Buck?"
+
+"A month.  He's overdue near that.  He always comes down to winter at
+Fort o' Comfort, with his string of half-breeds, an' Injuns, an' the
+dogs."
+
+"No chance to get him at the Fort?"
+
+"It ain't so certain.  They'd guess what I was doin' there.  It's surer
+here.  He's got to come down the trail, an' when I spot him by the
+Juniper clump"--he jerked an arm towards a spot almost a mile farther up
+the valley--"I kin scoot up the underbrush a bit and git him--plumb.  I
+could do it from here, sure, but I don't want no mistake.  Once only,
+jest one shot, that's all I want, Sinnet."
+
+He bit off a small piece of tobacco from a black plug Sinnet offered him,
+and chewed it with nervous fierceness, his eyebrows working, as he looked
+at the other eagerly.  Deadly as his purpose was, and grim and unvarying
+as his vigil had been, the loneliness had told on him, and he had grown
+hungry for a human face and human companionship.  Why Sinnet had come he
+had not thought to inquire.  Why Sinnet should be going north instead of
+south had not occurred to him.  He only realised that Sinnet was not the
+man he was waiting for with murder in his heart; and all that mattered to
+him in life was the coming of his victim down the trail.  He had welcomed
+Sinnet with a sullen eagerness, and had told him in short, detached
+sentences the dark story of a wrong and a waiting revenge, which brought
+a slight flush to Sinnet's pale face and awakened a curious light in his
+eyes.
+
+"Is that your shack--that where you shake down?" Sinnet said, pointing
+towards a lean-to in the fir trees to the right.
+
+"That's it.  I sleep there.  It's straight on to the Juniper clump, the
+front door is."  He laughed viciously, grimly.  "Outside or inside, I'm
+on to the Juniper clump.  Walk into the parlour?" he added, and drew
+open a rough-made door, so covered with green cedar boughs that it seemed
+of a piece with the surrounding underbrush and trees.  Indeed, the little
+but was so constructed that it could not be distinguished from the woods
+even a short distance away.
+
+"Can't have a fire, I suppose?" Sinnet asked.
+
+"Not daytimes.  Smoke 'd give me away if he suspicioned me," answered the
+mountaineer.  "I don't take no chances.  Never can tell."
+
+"Water?" asked Sinnet, as though interested in the surroundings, while
+all the time he was eyeing the mountaineer furtively--as it were, prying
+to the inner man, or measuring the strength of the outer man.  He lighted
+a fresh pipe and seated himself on a rough bench beside the table in the
+middle of the room, and leaned on his elbows, watching.
+
+The mountaineer laughed.  It was not a pleasant laugh to hear.  "Listen,"
+he said.  "You bin a long time out West.  You bin in the mountains a good
+while.  Listen."
+
+There was silence.  Sinnet listened intently.  He heard the faint drip,
+drip, drip of water, and looked steadily at the back wall of the room.
+
+"There--rock?" he said, and jerked his head towards the sound.
+
+"You got good ears," answered the other, and drew aside a blanket which
+hung on the back wall of the room.  A wooden trough was disclosed hanging
+under a ledge of rock, and water dripped into it softly, slowly.
+
+"Almost providential, that rock," remarked Sinnet.  "You've got your well
+at your back door.  Food--but you can't go far, and keep your eye on the
+Bend too," he nodded towards the door, beyond which lay the frost-touched
+valley in the early morning light of autumn.
+
+"Plenty of black squirrels and pigeons come here on account of the
+springs like this one, and I get 'em with a bow and arrow.  I didn't call
+myself Robin Hood and Daniel Boone not for nothin' when I was knee-high
+to a grasshopper."  He drew from a rough cupboard some cold game, and put
+it on the table, with some scones and a pannikin of water.  Then he
+brought out a small jug of whiskey and placed it beside his visitor.
+They began to eat.
+
+"How d'ye cook without fire?" asked Sinnet.  "Fire's all right at
+nights.  He'd never camp 'twixt here an' Juniper Bend at night.  The next
+camp's six miles north from here.  He'd only come down the valley
+daytimes.  I studied it 'all out, and it's a dead sure thing.  From
+daylight till dusk I'm on to him.  I got the trail in my eye."
+
+He showed his teeth like a wild dog, as his look swept the valley.  There
+was something almost revolting in his concentrated ferocity.
+
+Sinnet's eyes half closed as he watched the mountaineer, and the long,
+scraggy hands and whipcord neck seemed to interest him greatly.  He
+looked at his own slim brown hands with a half smile, and it was almost
+as cruel as the laugh of the other.  Yet it had, too, a knowledge and an
+understanding which gave it humanity.
+
+"You're sure he did it?" Sinnet asked presently, after drinking a very
+small portion of liquor, and tossing some water from the pannikin after
+it.  "You're sure Greevy killed your boy, Buck?"
+
+"My name's Buckmaster, ain't it--Jim Buckmaster?  Don't I know my own
+name?  It's as sure as that.  My boy said it was Greevy when he was
+dying.  He told Bill Ricketts so, and Bill told me afore he went East.
+Bill didn't want to tell, but he said it was fair I should know, for my
+boy never did nobody any harm--an' Greevy's livin' on.  But I'll git him.
+Right's right."
+
+"Wouldn't it be better for the law to hang him, if you've got the proof,
+Buck?  A year or so in jail, an' a long time to think over what's going
+round his neck on the scaffold--wouldn't that suit you, if you've got the
+proof?"
+
+A rigid, savage look came into Buckmaster's face.
+
+"I ain't lettin' no judge and jury do my business.  I'm for certain sure,
+not for p'r'aps!  An' I want to do it myself.  Clint was only twenty.
+Like boys we was together.  I was eighteen when I married, an' he come
+when she went--jest a year--jest a year.  An' ever since then we lived
+together, him an' me, an' shot together, an' trapped together, an' went
+gold-washin' together on the Cariboo, an' eat out of the same dish, an'
+slept under the same blanket, and jawed together nights--ever since he
+was five, when old Mother Lablache had got him into pants, an' he was fit
+to take the trail."
+
+The old man stopped a minute, his whipcord neck swelling, his lips
+twitching.  He brought a fist down on the table with a bang.  "The
+biggest little rip he was, as full of fun as a squirrel, an' never a
+smile-o-jest his eyes dancin', an' more sense than a judge.  He laid hold
+o' me, that cub did--it was like his mother and himself together; an' the
+years flowin' in an' peterin' out, an' him gettin' older, an' always jest
+the same.  Always on rock-bottom, always bright as a dollar, an' we
+livin' at Black Nose Lake, layin' up cash agin' the time we was to go
+South, an' set up a house along the railway, an' him to git married.  I
+was for his gittin' married same as me, when we had enough cash.  I use
+to think of that when he was ten, and when he was eighteen I spoke to him
+about it; but he wouldn't listen--jest laughed at me.  You remember how
+Clint used to laugh sort of low and teasin' like--you remember that laugh
+o' Clint's, don't you?"
+
+Sinnet's face was towards the valley and Juniper Bend, but he slowly
+turned his head and looked at Buckmaster strangely out of his half-shut
+eyes.  He took the pipe from his mouth slowly.
+
+"I can hear it now," he answered slowly.  "I hear it often, Buck."
+
+The old man gripped his arm so suddenly that Sinnet was startled,--in so
+far as anything could startle anyone who had lived a life of chance and
+danger and accident, and his face grew a shade paler; but he did not
+move, and Buckmaster's hand tightened convulsively.
+
+"You liked him, an' he liked you; he first learnt poker off you, Sinnet.
+He thought you was a tough, but he didn't mind that no more than I did.
+It ain't for us to say what we're goin' to be, not always.  Things in
+life git stronger than we are.  You was a tough, but who's goin' to judge
+you!  I ain't; for Clint took to you, Sinnet, an' he never went wrong in
+his thinkin'.  God! he was wife an' child to me--an' he's dead--dead--
+dead."
+
+The man's grief was a painful thing to see.  His hands gripped the table,
+while his body shook with sobs, though his eyes gave forth no tears.  It
+was an inward convulsion, which gave his face the look of unrelieved
+tragedy and suffering--Laocoon struggling with the serpents of sorrow and
+hatred which were strangling him.
+
+"Dead an' gone," he repeated, as he swayed to and fro, and the table
+quivered in his grasp.  Presently, however, as though arrested by a
+thought, he peered out of the doorway towards Juniper Bend.  "That hawk
+seen him--it seen him.  He's comin', I know it, an' I'll git him--plumb."
+He had the mystery and imagination of the mountain-dweller.
+
+The rifle lay against the wall behind him, and he turned and touched it
+almost caressingly.  "I ain't let go like this since he was killed,
+Sinnet.  It don't do.  I got to keep myself stiddy to do the trick when
+the minute comes.  At first I usen't to sleep at nights, thinkin' of
+Clint, an' missin' him, an' I got shaky and no good.  So I put a cinch on
+myself, an' got to sleepin' again--from the full dusk to dawn, for Greevy
+wouldn't take the trail at night.  I've kept stiddy."  He held out his
+hand as though to show that it was firm and steady, but it trembled with
+the emotion which had conquered him.  He saw it, and shook his head
+angrily.
+
+"It was seein' you, Sinnet.  It burst me.  I ain't seen no one to speak
+to in a month, an' with you sittin' there, it was like Clint an' me
+cuttin' and comin' again off the loaf an' the knuckle-bone of ven'son."
+
+Sinnet ran a long finger slowly across his lips, and seemed meditating
+what he should say to the mountaineer.  At length he spoke, looking into
+Buckmaster's face.  "What was the story Ricketts told you?  What did your
+boy tell Ricketts?  I've heard, too, about it, and that's why I asked you
+if you had proofs that Greevy killed Clint.  Of course, Clint should
+know, and if he told Ricketts, that's pretty straight; but I'd like to
+know if what I heard tallies with what Ricketts heard from Clint.
+P'r'aps it'd ease your mind a bit to tell it.  I'll watch the Bend--don't
+you trouble about that.  You can't do these two things at one time.  I'll
+watch for Greevy; you give me Clint's story to Ricketts.  I guess you
+know I'm feelin' for you, an' if I was in your place I'd shoot the man
+that killed Clint, if it took ten years.  I'd have his heart's blood--all
+of it.  Whether Greevy was in the right or in the wrong, I'd have him--
+plumb."
+
+Buckmaster was moved.  He gave a fierce exclamation and made a gesture
+of cruelty.  "Clint right or wrong?  There ain't no question of that.
+My boy wasn't the kind to be in the wrong.  What did he ever do but what
+was right?  If Clint was in the wrong I'd kill Greevy jest the same, for
+Greevy robbed him of all the years that was before him--only a sapling he
+was, an' all his growin' to do, all his branches to widen an' his roots
+to spread.  But that don't enter in it, his bein' in the wrong.  It was
+a quarrel, and Clint never did Greevy any harm.  It was a quarrel over
+cards, an' Greevy was drunk, an' followed Clint out into the prairie in
+the night and shot him like a coyote.  Clint hadn't no chance, an' he
+jest lay there on the ground till morning, when Ricketts and Steve Joicey
+found him.  An' Clint told Ricketts who it was."
+
+"Why didn't Ricketts tell it right out at once?" asked Sinnet.
+
+"Greevy was his own cousin--it was in the family, an' he kept thinkin' of
+Greevy's gal, Em'ly.  Her--what'll it matter to her!  She'll get married,
+an she'll forgit.  I know her, a gal that's got no deep feelin' like
+Clint had for me.  But because of her Ricketts didn't speak for a year.
+Then he couldn't stand it any longer, an' he told me--seein' how I
+suffered, an' everybody hidin' their suspicions from me, an' me up here
+out o' the way, an' no account.  That was the feelin' among 'em--what was
+the good of making things worse!  They wasn't thinkin' of the boy or of
+Jim Buckmaster, his father.  They was thinkin' of Greevy's gal--to save
+her trouble."
+
+Sinnet's face was turned towards Juniper Bend, and the eyes were fixed,
+as it were, on a still more distant object--a dark, brooding, inscrutable
+look.
+
+"Was that all Ricketts told you, Buck?"  The voice was very quiet, but
+it had a suggestive note.
+
+"That's all Clint told Bill before he died.  That was enough."
+
+There was a moment's pause, and then, puffing out long clouds of smoke,
+and in a tone of curious detachment, as though he were telling of
+something that he saw now in the far distance, or as a spectator of a
+battle from a far vantage-point might report to a blind man standing
+near, Sinnet said:
+
+"P'r'aps Ricketts didn't know the whole story; p'r'aps Clint didn't know
+it all to tell him; p'r'aps Clint didn't remember it all.  P'r'aps he
+didn't remember anything except that he and Greevy quarrelled, and that
+Greevy and he shot at each other in the prairie.  He'd only be thinking
+of the thing that mattered most to him--that his life was over, an' that
+a man had put a bullet in him, an'--"
+
+Buckmaster tried to interrupt him, but he waved a hand impatiently, and
+continued: "As I say, maybe he didn't remember everything; he had been
+drinkin' a bit himself, Clint had.  He wasn't used to liquor, and
+couldn't stand much.  Greevy was drunk, too, and gone off his head with
+rage.  He always gets drunk when he first comes South to spend the winter
+with his girl Em'ly."  He paused a moment, then went on a little more
+quickly.  "Greevy was proud of her--couldn't even bear her being crossed
+in any way; and she has a quick temper, and if she quarrelled with
+anybody Greevy quarrelled too."
+
+"I don't want to know anything about her," broke in Buckmaster roughly.
+"She isn't in this thing.  I'm goin' to git Greevy.  I bin waitin' for
+him, an' I'll git him."
+
+"You're going to kill the man that killed your boy, if you can, Buck; but
+I'm telling my story in my own way.  You told Ricketts's story; I'll tell
+what I've heard.  And before you kill Greevy you ought to know all there
+is that anybody else knows--or suspicions about it."
+
+"I know enough.  Greevy done it, an' I'm here."  With no apparent
+coherence and relevancy Sinnet continued, but his voice was not so even
+as before.  "Em'ly was a girl that wasn't twice alike.  She was
+changeable.  First it was one, then it was another, and she didn't seem
+to be able to fix her mind.  But that didn't prevent her leadin' men on.
+She wasn't changeable, though, about her father.  She was to him what
+your boy was to you.  There she was like you, ready to give everything up
+for her father."
+
+"I tell y' I don't want to hear about her," said Buckmaster, getting
+to his feet and setting his jaws.  "You needn't talk to me about her.
+She'll git over it.  I'll never git over what Greevy done to me or
+to Clint--jest twenty, jest twenty!  I got my work to do."
+
+He took his gun from the wall, slung it into the hollow of his arm, and
+turned to look up the valley through the open doorway.
+
+The morning was sparkling with life--the life and vigour which a touch of
+frost gives to the autumn world in a country where the blood tingles to
+the dry, sweet sting of the air.  Beautiful, and spacious, and buoyant,
+and lonely, the valley and the mountains seemed waiting, like a new-born
+world, to be peopled by man.  It was as though all had been made ready
+for him--the birds whistling and singing in the trees, the whisk of the
+squirrels leaping from bough to bough, the peremptory sound of the
+woodpecker's beak against the bole of a tree, the rustle of the leaves as
+a wood-hen ran past--a waiting, virgin world.
+
+Its beauty and its wonderful dignity had no appeal to Buckmaster.  His
+eyes and mind were fixed on a deed which would stain the virgin wild with
+the ancient crime that sent the first marauder on human life into the
+wilderness.
+
+As Buckmaster's figure darkened the doorway Sinnet seemed to waken as
+from a dream, and he got swiftly to his feet.
+
+"Wait--you wait, Buck.  You've got to hear all.  You haven't heard my
+story yet.  Wait, I tell you."  His voice was so sharp and insistent, so
+changed, that Buckmaster turned from the doorway and came back into the
+room.
+
+"What's the use of my hearin'?  You want me not to kill Greevy, because
+of that gal.  What's she to me?"
+
+"Nothing to you, Buck, but Clint was everything to her."
+
+The mountaineer stood like one petrified.
+
+"What's that--what's that you say?  It's a damn lie!"
+
+"It wasn't cards--the quarrel, not the real quarrel.  Greevy found Clint
+kissing her.  Greevy wanted her to marry Gatineau, the lumber-king.  That
+was the quarrel."
+
+A snarl was on the face of Buckmaster.  "Then she'll not be sorry when I
+git him.  It took Clint from her as well as from me."  He turned to the
+door again.  "But, wait, Buck, wait one minute and hear--"  He was
+interrupted by a low, exultant growl, and he saw Buckmaster's rifle
+clutched as a hunter, stooping, clutches his gun to fire on his prey.
+
+"Quick, the spy-glass!" he flung back at Sinnet.  "It's him--but I'll
+make sure."
+
+Sinnet caught the telescope from the nails where it hung, and looked out
+towards Juniper Bend.  "It's Greevy--and his girl, and the half-breeds,"
+he said, with a note in his voice that almost seemed agitation, and yet
+few had ever seen Sinnet agitated.  "Em'ly must have gone up the trail in
+the night."
+
+"It's my turn now," the mountaineer said hoarsely, and, stooping, slid
+away quickly into the undergrowth.  Sinnet followed, keeping near him,
+neither speaking.  For a half mile they hastened on, and now and then
+Buckmaster drew aside the bushes, and looked up the valley, to keep
+Greevy and his bois brulees in his eye.  Just so had he and his son and
+Sinnet stalked the wapiti and the red deer along these mountains; but
+this was a man that Buckmaster was stalking now, with none of the joy of
+the sport which had been his since a lad; only the malice of the avenger.
+The lust of a mountain feud was on him; he was pursuing the price of
+blood.
+
+At last Buckmaster stopped at a ledge of rock just above the trail.
+Greevy would pass below, within three hundred yards of his rifle.  He
+turned to Sinnet with cold and savage eyes.  "You go back," he said.
+"It's my business.  I don't want you to see.  You don't want to see,
+then you won't know, and you won't need to lie.  You said that the man
+that killed Clint ought to die.  He's going to die, but it's none o' your
+business.  I want to be alone.  In a minute he'll be where I kin git him
+--plumb.  You go, Sinnet-right off.  It's my business."
+
+There was a strange, desperate look in Sinnet's face; it was as hard as
+stone, but his eyes had a light of battle in them.
+
+"It's my business right enough, Buck," he said, "and you're not going to
+kill Greevy.  That girl of his has lost her lover, your boy.  It's broke
+her heart almost, and there's no use making her an orphan too.  She can't
+stand it.  She's had enough.  You leave her father alone--you hear me,
+let up!"  He stepped between Buckmaster and the ledge of rock from which
+the mountaineer was to take aim.
+
+There was a terrible look in Buckmaster's face.  He raised his single-
+barrelled rifle, as though he would shoot Sinnet; but, at the moment, he
+remembered that a shot would warn Greevy, and that he might not have time
+to reload.  He laid his rifle against a tree swiftly.
+
+"Git away from here," he said, with a strange rattle in his throat.
+"Git away quick; he'll be down past here in a minute."
+
+Sinnet pulled himself together as he saw Buckmaster snatch at a great
+clasp-knife in his belt.  He jumped and caught Buckmaster's wrist in a
+grip like a vice.
+
+"Greevy didn't kill him, Buck," he said.  But the mountaineer was gone
+mad, and did not grasp the meaning of the words.  He twined his left arm
+round the neck of Sinnet, and the struggle began, he fighting to free
+Sinnet's hand from his wrist, to break Sinnet's neck.  He did not realise
+what he was doing.  He only knew that this man stood between him and the
+murderer of his boy, and all the ancient forces of barbarism were alive
+in him.  Little by little they drew to the edge of the rock, from which
+there was a sheer drop of two hundred feet.  Sinnet fought like a panther
+for safety, but no sane man's strength could withstand the demoniacal
+energy that bent and crushed him.  Sinnet felt his strength giving.  Then
+he said in a hoarse whisper, "Greevy didn't kill him.  I killed him,
+and--"
+
+At that moment he was borne to the ground with a hand on his throat, and
+an instant after the knife went home.
+
+Buckmaster got to his feet and looked at his victim for an instant, dazed
+and wild; then he sprang for his gun.  As he did so the words that Sinnet
+had said as they struggled rang in his ears, "Greevy didn't kill him; I
+killed him!"
+
+He gave a low cry and turned back towards Sinnet, who lay in a pool of
+blood.
+
+Sinnet was speaking.  He went and stooped over him.  "Em'ly threw me over
+for Clint," the voice said huskily, "and I followed to have it out with
+Clint.  So did Greevy, but Greevy was drunk.  I saw them meet.  I was
+hid.  I saw that Clint would kill Greevy, and I fired.  I was off my
+head--I'd never cared for any woman before, and Greevy was her father.
+Clint was off his head too. He had called me names that day--a cardsharp,
+and a liar, and a thief, and a skunk, he called me, and I hated him just
+then.  Greevy fired twice wide.  He didn't know but what he killed Clint,
+but he didn't.  I did.  So I tried to stop you, Buck--"
+
+Life was going fast, and speech failed him; but he opened his eyes again
+and whispered, "I didn't want to die, Buck.  I am only thirty-five, and
+it's too soon; but it had to be.  Don't look that way, Buck.  You got the
+man that killed him--plumb.  But Em'ly didn't play fair with me--made a
+fool of me, the only time in my life I ever cared for a woman.  You leave
+Greevy alone, Buck, and tell Em'ly for me I wouldn't let you kill her
+father."
+
+"You--Sinnet--you, you done it!  Why, he'd have fought for you.  You--
+done it--to him--to Clint!"  Now that the blood-feud had been satisfied,
+a great change came over the mountaineer.  He had done his work, and the
+thirst for vengeance was gone.  Greevy he had hated, but this man had
+been with him in many a winter's hunt.  His brain could hardly grasp the
+tragedy--it had all been too sudden.
+
+Suddenly he stooped down.  "Sinnet," he said, "ef there was a woman in
+it, that makes all the difference.  Sinnet, of--"
+
+But Sinnet was gone upon a long trail that led into an illimitable
+wilderness.  With a moan the old man ran to the ledge of rock.  Greevy
+and his girl were below.
+
+"When there's a woman in it--!" he said, in a voice of helplessness and
+misery, and watched Em'ly till she disappeared from view.  Then he
+turned, and, lifting up in his arms the man he had killed, carried him
+into the deeper woods.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Even bad company's better than no company at all
+Future of those who will not see, because to see is to suffer
+I like when I like, and I like a lot when I like
+It ain't for us to say what we're goin' to be, not always
+Things in life git stronger than we are
+We don't live in months and years, but just in minutes
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NORTHERN LIGHTS, V1, BY PARKER ***
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