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+The Project Gutenberg EBook Northern Lights, v2,  by Gilbert Parker
+#15 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+  Contents:
+    To-morrow
+    Qu'appelle
+    The Stake And The Plumb-line
+
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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 2.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6187]
+[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, v2, 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 2.
+
+
+TO-MORROW
+QU'APPELLE
+THE STAKE AND THE PLUMB-LINE
+
+
+
+
+TO-MORROW
+
+"My, nothing's the matter with the world to-day!  It's so good it almost
+hurts."
+
+She raised her head from the white petticoat she was ironing, and gazed
+out of the doorway and down the valley with a warm light in her eyes and
+a glowing face.  The snow-tipped mountains far above and away, the fir-
+covered, cedar-ranged foothills, and, lower down, the wonderful maple and
+ash woods, with their hundred autumn tints, all merging to one soft, red
+tone, the roar of the stream tumbling down the ravine from the heights,
+the air that braced the nerves--it all seemed to be part of her, the
+passion of life corresponding to the passion of living in her.
+
+After watching the scene dreamily for a moment, she turned and laid the
+iron she had been using upon the hot stove near.  Taking up another, she
+touched it with a moistened finger to test the heat, and, leaning above
+the table again, passed it over the linen for a few moments, smiling at
+something that was in her mind.  Presently she held the petticoat up,
+turned it round, then hung it in front of her, eyeing it with critical
+pleasure.
+
+"To-morrow!" she said, nodding at it.  "You won't be seen, I suppose,
+but I'll know you're nice enough for a queen--and that's enough to know."
+
+She blushed a little, as though someone had heard her words and was
+looking at her, then she carefully laid the petticoat over the back of a
+chair.  "No queen's got one whiter, if I do say it," she continued,
+tossing her head.
+
+In that, at any rate, she was right, for the water of the mountain
+springs was pure, the air was clear, and the sun was clarifying; and
+little ornamented or frilled as it was, the petticoat was exquisitely
+soft and delicate.  It would have appealed to more eyes than a woman's.
+
+"To-morrow!"  She nodded at it again and turned again to the bright world
+outside.  With arms raised and hands resting against the timbers of the
+doorway, she stood dreaming.  A flock of pigeons passed with a whir not
+far away, and skirted the woods making down the valley.  She watched
+their flight abstractedly, yet with a subconscious sense of pleasure.
+Life--they were Life, eager, buoyant, belonging to this wild region,
+where still the heart could feel so much at home, where the great world
+was missed so little.
+
+Suddenly, as she gazed, a shot rang out down the valley, and two of the
+pigeons came tumbling to the ground, a stray feather floating after.
+With a startled exclamation she took a step forward.  Her brain became
+confused and disturbed.  She had looked out on Eden, and it had been
+ravaged before her eyes.  She had been thinking of to-morrow, and this
+vast prospect of beauty and serenity had been part of the pageant in
+which it moved.  Not the valley alone had been marauded, but that "To-
+morrow," and all it meant to her.
+
+Instantly the valley had become clouded over for her, its glory and its
+grace despoiled.  She turned back to the room where the white petticoat
+lay upon the chair, but stopped with a little cry of alarm.
+
+A man was standing in the centre of the room.  He had entered stealthily
+by the back door, and had waited for her to turn round.  He was haggard
+and travel stained, and there was a feverish light in his eyes.  His
+fingers trembled as they adjusted his belt, which seemed too large for
+him.  Mechanically he buckled it tighter.
+
+"You're Jenny Long, ain't you?" he asked.  "I beg pardon for sneakin'
+in like this, but they're after me, some ranchers and a constable--one
+o' the Riders of the Plains.  I've been tryin' to make this house all
+day.  You're Jenny Long, ain't you?"
+
+She had plenty of courage, and, after the first instant of shock, she had
+herself in hand.  She had quickly observed his condition, had marked the
+candour of the eye and the decision and character of the face, and doubt
+of him found no place in her mind.  She had the keen observation of the
+dweller in lonely places, where every traveller has the potentialities of
+a foe, while the door of hospitality is opened to him after the custom of
+the wilds.  Year in, year out, since she was a little girl and came to
+live here with her Uncle Sanger when her father died--her mother had gone
+before she could speak--travellers had halted at this door, going North
+or coming South, had had bite and sup, and bed, may be, and had passed
+on, most of them never to be seen again.  More than that, too, there had
+been moments of peril, such as when, alone, she had faced two wood-
+thieves with a revolver, as they were taking her mountain-pony with them,
+and herself had made them "hands-up," and had marched them into a
+prospector's camp five miles away.
+
+She had no doubt about the man before her.  Whatever he had done, it was
+nothing dirty or mean--of that she was sure.
+
+"Yes, I'm Jenny Long," she answered.  "What have you done?  What are they
+after you for?"
+
+"Oh! to-morrow," he answered, "to-morrow I got to git to Bindon.
+It's life or death.  I come from prospecting two hundred miles up North.
+I done it in two days and a half.  My horse dropped dead--I'm near dead
+myself.  I tried to borrow another horse up at Clancey's, and at
+Scotton's Drive, but they didn't know me, and they bounced me.
+So I borrowed a horse off Weigall's paddock, to make for here--to you.
+I didn't mean to keep that horse.  Hell, I'm no horse-stealer!  But I
+couldn't explain to them, except that I had to git to Bindon to save a
+man's life.  If people laugh in your face, it's no use explainin'.
+I took a roan from Weigall's, and they got after me.  'Bout six miles
+up they shot at me an' hurt me."
+
+She saw that one arm hung limp at his side and that his wrist was wound
+with a red bandana.
+
+She started forward.  "Are you hurt bad?  Can I bind it up or wash it for
+you?  I've got plenty of hot water here, and it's bad letting a wound get
+stale."
+
+He shook his head.  "I washed the hole clean in the creek below.  I
+doubled on them.  I had to go down past your place here, and then work
+back to be rid of them.  But there's no telling when they'll drop on to
+the game, and come back for me.  My only chance was to git to you.  Even
+if I had a horse, I couldn't make Bindon in time.  It's two days round
+the gorge by trail.  A horse is no use now--I lost too much time since
+last night.  I can't git to Bindon to-morrow in time, if I ride the
+trail."
+
+"The river?" she asked abruptly.
+
+"It's the only way.  It cuts off fifty mile.  That's why I come to you."
+
+She frowned a little, her face became troubled, and her glance fell on
+his arm nervously.  "What've I got to do with it?" she asked almost
+sharply.
+
+"Even if this was all right,"--he touched the wounded arm--" I couldn't
+take the rapids in a canoe.  I don't know them, an' it would be sure
+death.  That's not the worst, for there's a man at Bindon would lose his
+life--p'r'aps twenty men--I dunno; but one man sure.  To-morrow, it's go
+or stay with him.  He was good--Lord, but he was good!--to my little gal
+years back.  She'd only been married to me a year when he saved her,
+riskin' his own life.  No one else had the pluck.  My little gal, only
+twenty she was, an' pretty as a picture, an' me fifty miles away when the
+fire broke out in the hotel where she was.  He'd have gone down to hell
+for a friend, an' he saved my little gal.  I had her for five years after
+that.  That's why I got to git to Bindon to-morrow.  If I don't, I don't
+want to see to-morrow.  I got to go down the river to-night."
+
+She knew what he was going to ask her.  She knew he was thinking what all
+the North knew, that she was the first person to take the Dog Nose Rapids
+in a canoe, down the great river scarce a stone's-throw from her door;
+and that she had done it in safety many times.  Not in all the West and
+North were there a half-dozen people who could take a canoe to Bindon,
+and they were not here.  She knew that he meant to ask her to paddle him
+down the swift stream with its murderous rocks, to Bindon.  She glanced
+at the white petticoat on the chair, and her lips tightened.  To-morrow-
+tomorrow was as much to her here as it would be to this man before her,
+or the man he would save at Bindon.  "What do you want?" she asked,
+hardening her heart.  "Can't you see?  I want you to hide me here till
+tonight.  There's a full moon, an' it would be as plain goin' as by day.
+They told me about you up North, and I said to myself, 'If I git to Jenny
+Long, an' tell her about my friend at Bindon, an' my little gal, she'll
+take me down to Bindon in time.'  My little gal would have paid her own
+debt if she'd ever had the chance.  She didn't--she's lying up on Mazy
+Mountain.  But one woman'll do a lot for the sake of another woman.  Say,
+you'll do it, won't you?  If I don't git there by to-morrow noon, it's no
+good."
+
+She would not answer.  He was asking more than he knew.  Why should she
+be sacrificed?  Was it her duty to pay the "little gal's debt," to save
+the man at Bindon?  To-morrow was to be the great day in her own life.
+The one man in all the world was coming to marry her to-morrow.  After
+four years' waiting, after a bitter quarrel in which both had been to
+blame, he was coming from the mining town of Selby to marry her to-
+morrow.
+
+"What will happen?  Why will your friend lose his life if you don't get
+to Bindon?"
+
+"By noon to-morrow, by twelve o'clock noon; that's the plot; that's what
+they've schemed.  Three days ago, I heard.  I got a man free from trouble
+North--he was no good, but I thought he ought to have another chance, and
+I got him free.  He told me of what was to be done at Bindon.  There'd
+been a strike in the mine, an' my friend had took it in hand with
+knuckle-dusters on.  He isn't the kind to fell a tree with a jack-knife.
+Then three of the strikers that had been turned away--they was the
+ringleaders--they laid a plan that'd make the devil sick.  They've put a
+machine in the mine, an' timed it, an' it'll go off when my friend comes
+out of the mine at noon to-morrow."
+
+Her face was pale now, and her eyes had a look of pain and horror.  Her
+man--him that she was to marry--was the head of a mine also at Selby,
+forty miles beyond Bindon, and the horrible plot came home to her with
+piercing significance.
+
+"Without a second's warning," he urged, "to go like that, the man that
+was so good to my little gal, an' me with a chance to save him, an'
+others too, p'r'aps.  You won't let it be.  Say, I'm pinnin' my faith to
+you.  I'm--"
+
+Suddenly he swayed.  She caught him, held him, and lowered him gently in
+a chair.  Presently he opened his eyes.  "It's want o' food, I suppose,"
+he said.  "If you've got a bit of bread and meat--I must keep up."
+
+She went to a cupboard, but suddenly turned towards him again.  Her ears
+had caught a sound outside in the underbush.  He had heard also, and he
+half staggered to his feet.
+
+"Quick-in here!" she said, and, opening a door, pushed him inside.  "Lie
+down on my bed, and I'll bring you vittles as quick as I can," she added.
+Then she shut the door, turned to the ironing-board, and took up the
+iron, as the figure of a man darkened the doorway.
+
+"Hello, Jinny, fixin' up for to-morrow?" the man said, stepping inside,
+with a rifle under his arm and some pigeons in his hand.
+
+She nodded and gave him an impatient, scrutinising glance.  His face had
+a fatuous kind of smile.
+
+"Been celebrating the pigeons?" she asked drily, jerking her head
+towards the two birds, which she had seen drop from her Eden skies a
+short time before.
+
+"I only had one swig of whiskey, honest Injun!" he answered.  "I s'pose
+I might have waited till to-morrow, but I was dead-beat.  I got a bear
+over by the Tenmile Reach, and I was tired.  I ain't so young as I used
+to be, and, anyhow, what's the good!  What's ahead of me?  You're going
+to git married to-morrow after all these years we bin together, and
+you're going down to Selby from the mountains, where I won't see you, not
+once in a blue moon.  Only that old trollop, Mother Massy, to look after
+me."
+
+"Come down to Selby and live there.  You'll be welcome by Jake and me."
+
+He stood his gun in the corner and, swinging the pigeons in his hand,
+said: "Me live out of the mountains?  Don't you know better than that?
+I couldn't breathe; and I wouldn't want to breathe.  I've got my shack
+here, I got my fur business, and they're still fond of whiskey up North!"
+He chuckled to himself, as he thought of the illicit still farther up the
+mountain behind them.  "I make enough to live on, and I've put a few
+dollars by, though I won't have so many after to-morrow, after I've given
+you a little pile, Jinny."
+
+"P'r'aps there won't be any to-morrow, as you expect," she said slowly.
+
+The old man started.  "What, you and Jake ain't quarrelled again?  You
+ain't broke it off at the last moment, same as before?  You ain't had a
+letter from Jake?"  He looked at the white petticoat on the chairback,
+and shook his head in bewilderment.
+
+"I've had no letter," she answered.  "I've had no letter from Selby for a
+month.  It was all settled then, and there was no good writing, when he
+was coming to-morrow with the minister and the licence.  Who do you
+think'd be postman from Selby here?  It must have cost him ten dollars to
+send the last letter."
+
+"Then what's the matter?  I don't understand," the old man urged
+querulously.  He did not want her to marry and leave him, but he wanted
+no more troubles; he did not relish being asked awkward questions by
+every mountaineer he met, as to why Jenny Long didn't marry Jake Lawson.
+
+"There's only one way that I can be married tomorrow," she said at last,
+"and that's by you taking a man down the Dog Nose Rapids to Bindon to-
+night."
+
+He dropped the pigeons on the floor, dumbfounded.  "What in--"
+
+He stopped short, in sheer incapacity, to go further.  Jenny had not
+always been easy to understand, but she was wholly incomprehensible now.
+
+She picked up the pigeons and was about to speak, but she glanced at the
+bedroom door, where her exhausted visitor had stretched himself on her
+bed, and beckoned her uncle to another room.
+
+"There's a plate of vittles ready for you in there," she said.  "I'll
+tell you as you eat."
+
+He followed her into the little living-room adorned by the trophies of
+his earlier achievements with gun and rifle, and sat down at the table,
+where some food lay covered by a clean white cloth.
+
+"No one'll ever look after me as you've done, Jinny," he said, as he
+lifted the cloth and saw the palatable dish ready for him.  Then he
+remembered again about to-morrow and the Dog Nose Rapids.
+
+"What's it all about, Jinny?  What's that about my canoeing a man down to
+Bindon?"
+
+"Eat, uncle," she said more softly than she had yet spoken, for his words
+about her care of him had brought a moisture to her eyes.  "I'll be back
+in a minute and tell you all about it."
+
+"Well, it's about took away my appetite," he said.  "I feel a kind of
+sinking."  He took from his pocket a bottle, poured some of its contents
+into a tin cup, and drank it off.
+
+"No, I suppose you couldn't take a man down to Bindon," she said, as she
+saw his hand trembling on the cup.  Then she turned and entered the other
+room again.  Going to the cupboard, she hastily heaped a plate with food,
+and, taking a dipper of water from a pail near by, she entered her
+bedroom hastily and placed what she had brought on a small table, as her
+visitor rose slowly from the bed.
+
+He was about to speak, but she made a protesting gesture.
+
+"I can't tell you anything yet," she said.  "Who was it come?" he asked.
+
+"My uncle--I'm going to tell him."
+
+"The men after me may git here any minute," he urged anxiously.
+
+"They'd not be coming into my room," she answered, flushing slightly.
+
+"Can't you hide me down by the river till we start?" he asked, his eyes
+eagerly searching her face.  He was assuming that she would take him down
+the river: but she gave no sign.
+
+"I've got to see if he'll take you first," she answered.
+
+"He--your uncle, Tom Sanger?  He drinks, I've heard.  He'd never git to
+Bindon."
+
+She did not reply directly to his words.  "I'll come back and tell you.
+There's a place you could hide by the river where no one could ever find
+you," she said, and left the room.
+
+As she stepped out, she saw the old man standing in the doorway of the
+other room.  His face was petrified with amazement.
+
+"Who you got in that room, Jinny?  What man you got in that room?  I
+heard a man's voice.  Is it because o' him that you bin talkin' about no
+weddin' to-morrow?  Is it one o' the others come back, puttin' you off
+Jake again?"
+
+Her eyes flashed fire at his first words, and her breast heaved with
+anger, but suddenly she became composed again and motioned him to a
+chair.
+
+"You eat, and I'll tell you all about it, Uncle Tom," she said, and,
+seating herself at the table also, she told him the story of the man who
+must go to Bindon.
+
+When she had finished, the old man blinked at her for a minute without
+speaking, then he said slowly: "I heard something 'bout trouble down at
+Bindon yisterday from a Hudson's Bay man goin' North, but I didn't take
+it in.  You've got a lot o' sense, Jinny, an' if you think he's tellin'
+the truth, why, it goes; but it's as big a mixup as a lariat in a steer's
+horns.  You've got to hide him sure, whoever he is, for I wouldn't hand
+an Eskimo over, if I'd taken him in my home once; we're mountain people.
+A man ought to be hung for horse-stealin', but this was different.  He
+was doing it to save a man's life, an' that man at Bindon was good to his
+little gal, an' she's dead."
+
+He moved his head from side to side with the air of a sentimental
+philosopher.  He had all the vanity of a man who had been a success in a
+small, shrewd, culpable way--had he not evaded the law for thirty years
+with his whiskey-still?
+
+"I know how he felt," he continued.  "When Betsy died--we was only four
+years married--I could have crawled into a knot-hole an' died there.  You
+got to save him, Jinny, but"--he came suddenly to his feet--"he ain't
+safe here.  They might come any minute, if they've got back on his trail.
+I'll take him up the gorge.  You know where."
+
+"You sit still, Uncle Tom," she rejoined.  "Leave him where he is a
+minute.  There's things must be settled first.  They ain't going to look
+for him in my bedroom, be they?"
+
+The old man chuckled.  "I'd like to see 'em at it.  You got a temper,
+Jinny; and you got a pistol too, eh?"  He chuckled again.  "As good a
+shot as any in the mountains.  I can see you darin' 'em to come on.  But
+what if Jake come, and he found a man in your bedroom"--he wiped the
+tears of laughter from his eyes--"why, Jinny--!"
+
+He stopped short, for there was anger in her face.  "I don't want to hear
+any more of that.  I do what I want to do," she snapped out.
+
+"Well, well, you always done what you wanted; but we got to git him up
+the hills, till it's sure they're out o' the mountains and gone back.
+It'll be days, mebbe."
+
+"Uncle Tom, you've took too much to drink," she answered.  "You don't
+remember he's got to be at Bindon by to-morrow noon.  He's got to save
+his friend by then."
+
+"Pshaw!  Who's going to take him down the river to-night?  You're goin'
+to be married to-morrow.  If you like, you can give him the canoe.  It'll
+never come back, nor him neither!"
+
+"You've been down with me," she responded suggestively.  "And you went
+down once by yourself."
+
+He shook his head.  "I ain't been so well this summer.  My sight ain't
+what it was.  I can't stand the racket as I once could.  'Pears to me I'm
+gettin' old.  No, I couldn't take them rapids, Jinny, not for one frozen
+minute."
+
+She looked at him with trouble in her eyes, and her face lost some of its
+colour.  She was fighting back the inevitable, even as its shadow fell
+upon her.  "You wouldn't want a man to die, if you could save him, Uncle
+Tom--blown up, sent to Kingdom Come without any warning at all; and
+perhaps he's got them that love him--and the world so beautiful."
+
+"Well, it ain't nice dyin' in the summer, when it's all sun, and there's
+plenty everywhere; but there's no one to go down the river with him.
+What's his name?"
+
+Her struggle was over.  She had urged him, but in very truth she was
+urging herself all the time, bringing herself to the axe of sacrifice.
+
+"His name's Dingley.  I'm going down the river with him--down to Bindon."
+
+The old man's mouth opened in blank amazement.  His eyes blinked
+helplessly.
+
+"What you talkin' about, Jinny!  Jake's comin' up with the minister, an'
+you're goin' to be married at noon to-morrow."
+
+"I'm takin' him"--she jerked her head towards the room where Dingley was
+--"down Dog Nose Rapids to-night.  He's risked his life for his friend,
+thinkin' of her that's dead an' gone, and a man's life is a man's life.
+If it was Jake's life in danger, what'd I think of a woman that could
+save him, and didn't?"
+
+"Onct you broke off with Jake Lawson--the day before you was to be
+married; an' it's took years to make up an' agree again to be spliced.
+If Jake comes here to-morrow, and you ain't here, what do you think he'll
+do?  The neighbours are comin' for fifty miles round, two is comin' up a
+hundred miles, an' you can't--Jinny, you can't do it.  I bin sick of
+answerin' questions all these years 'bout you and Jake, an' I ain't goin'
+through it again.  I've told more lies than there's straws in a tick."
+
+She flamed out.  "Then take him down the river yourself--a man to do a
+man's work.  Are you afeard to take the risk?"
+
+He held out his hands slowly and looked at them.  They shook a little.
+"Yes, Jinny," he said sadly, "I'm afeard.  I ain't what I was.  I made a
+mistake, Jinny.  I've took too much whiskey.  I'm older than I ought to
+be.  I oughtn't never to have had a whiskey-still, an' I wouldn't have
+drunk so much.  I got money--money for you, Jinny, for you an' Jake, but
+I've lost what I'll never git back.  I'm afeard to go down the river with
+him.  I'd go smash in the Dog Nose Rapids.  I got no nerve.  I can't hunt
+the grizzly any more, nor the puma, Jinny.  I got to keep to common
+shootin', now and henceforth, amen!  No, I'd go smash in Dog Nose
+Rapids."
+
+She caught his hands impulsively.  "Don't you fret, Uncle Tom.  You've
+bin a good uncle to me, and you've bin a good friend, and you ain't the
+first that's found whiskey too much for him.  You ain't got an enemy in
+the mountains.  Why, I've got two or three--"
+
+"Shucks!  Women--only women whose beaux left 'em to follow after you.
+That's nothing, an' they'll be your friends fast enough after you're
+married tomorrow."
+
+"I ain't going to be married to-morrow.  I'm going down to Bindon
+to-night.  If Jake's mad, then it's all over, and there'll be more
+trouble among the women up here."
+
+By this time they had entered the other room.  The old man saw the white
+petticoat on the chair.  "No woman in the mountains ever had a petticoat
+like that, Jinny.  It'd make a dress, it's that pretty an' neat.  Golly,
+I'd like to see it on you, with the blue skirt over, and just hitched up
+a little."
+
+"Oh, shut up--shut up!" she said in sudden anger, and caught up the
+petticoat as though she would put it away; but presently she laid it down
+again and smoothed it with quick, nervous fingers.  "Can't you talk sense
+and leave my clothes alone?  If Jake comes, and I'm not here, and he
+wants to make a fuss, and spoil everything, and won't wait, you give him
+this petticoat.  You put it in his arms.  I bet you'll have the laugh on
+him.  He's got a temper."
+
+"So've you, Jinny, dear, so've you," said the old man, laughing.  "You're
+goin' to have your own way, same as ever--same as ever."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A moon of exquisite whiteness silvering the world, making shadows on the
+water as though it were sunlight and the daytime, giving a spectral look
+to the endless array of poplar trees on the banks, glittering on the foam
+of the rapids.  The spangling stars made the arch of the sky like some
+gorgeous chancel in a cathedral as vast as life and time.  Like the day
+which was ended, in which the mountain-girl had found a taste of Eden,
+it seemed too sacred for mortal strife.  Now and again there came the
+note of a night-bird, the croak of a frog from the shore; but the serene
+stillness and beauty of the primeval North was over all.
+
+For two hours after sunset it had all been silent and brooding, and then
+two figures appeared on the bank of the great river.  A canoe was softly
+and hastily pushed out from its hidden shelter under the overhanging
+bank, and was noiselessly paddled out to midstream, dropping down the
+current meanwhile.
+
+It was Jenny Long and the man who must get to Bindon.  They had waited
+till nine o'clock, when the moon was high and full, to venture forth.
+Then Dingley had dropped from her bedroom window, had joined her under
+the trees, and they had sped away, while the man's hunters, who had come
+suddenly, and before Jenny could get him away into the woods, were
+carousing inside.  These had tracked their man back to Tom Sanger's
+house, and at first they were incredulous that Jenny and her uncle had
+not seen him.  They had prepared to search the house, and one had laid
+his finger on the latch of her bedroom door; but she had flared out with
+such anger that, mindful of the supper she had already begun to prepare
+for them, they had desisted, and the whiskey-jug which the old man
+brought out distracted their attention.
+
+One of their number, known as the Man from Clancey's, had, however, been
+outside when Dingley had dropped from the window, and had seen him from a
+distance.  He had not given the alarm, but had followed, to make the
+capture by himself.  But Jenny had heard the stir of life behind them,
+and had made a sharp detour, so that they had reached the shore and were
+out in mid-stream before their tracker got to the river.  Then he called
+to them to return, but Jenny only bent a little lower and paddled on,
+guiding the canoe towards the safe channel through the first small rapids
+leading to the great Dog Nose Rapids.
+
+A rifle-shot rang out, and a bullet "pinged" over the water and
+splintered the side of the canoe where Dingley sat.  He looked calmly
+back, and saw the rifle raised again, but did not stir, in spite of
+Jenny's warning to lie down.
+
+"He'll not fire on you so long as he can draw a bead on me," he said
+quietly.
+
+Again a shot rang out, and the bullet sang past his head.
+
+"If he hits me, you go straight on to Bindon," he continued.  "Never mind
+about me.  Go to the Snowdrop Mine.  Get there by twelve o'clock, and
+warn them.  Don't stop a second for me--"
+
+Suddenly three shots rang out in succession--Tom Sanger's house had
+emptied itself on the bank of the river--and Dingley gave a sharp
+exclamation.
+
+"They've hit me, but it's the same arm as before," he growled.  "They got
+no right to fire at me.  It's not the law.  Don't stop," he added
+quickly, as he saw her half turn round.
+
+Now there were loud voices on the shore.  Old Tom Sanger was threatening
+to shoot the first man that fired again, and he would have kept his word.
+
+"Who you firin' at?" he shouted.  "That's my niece, Jinny Long, an' you
+let that boat alone.  This ain't the land o' lynch law.  Dingley ain't
+escaped from gaol.  You got no right to fire at him."
+
+"No one ever went down Dog Nose Rapids at night," said the Man from
+Clancey's, whose shot had got Dingley's arm.  "There ain't a chance of
+them doing it.  No one's ever done it."
+
+The two were in the roaring rapids now, and the canoe was jumping through
+the foam like a racehorse.  The keen eyes on the bank watched the canoe
+till it was lost in the half-gloom below the first rapids, and then they
+went slowly back to Tom Sanger's house.
+
+"So there'll be no wedding to-morrow," said the Man from Clancey's.
+
+"Funerals, more likely," drawled another.
+
+"Jinny Long's in that canoe, an' she ginerally does what she wants to,"
+said Tom Sanger sagely.
+
+"Well, we done our best, and now I hope they'll get to Bindon," said
+another.
+
+Sanger passed the jug to him freely.  Then they sat down and talked of
+the people who had been drowned in Dog Nose Rapids and of the last
+wedding in the mountains.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+It was as the Man from Clancey's had said, no one had ever gone down Dog
+Nose Rapids in the nighttime, and probably no one but Jenny Long would
+have ventured it.  Dingley had had no idea what a perilous task had been
+set his rescuer.  It was only when the angry roar of the great rapids
+floated up-stream to them, increasing in volume till they could see the
+terror of tumbling waters just below, and the canoe shot forward like a
+snake through the swift, smooth current which would sweep them into the
+vast caldron, that he realised the terrible hazard of the enterprise.
+
+The moon was directly overhead when they drew upon the race of rocks and
+fighting water and foam.  On either side only the shadowed shore,
+forsaken by the races which had hunted and roamed and ravaged here--not
+a light, nor any sign of life, or the friendliness of human presence to
+make their isolation less complete, their danger, as it were, shared by
+fellow-mortals.  Bright as the moon was, it was not bright enough for
+perfect pilotage.  Never in the history of white men had these rapids
+been ridden at nighttime.  As they sped down the flume of the deep,
+irresistible current, and were launched into the trouble of rocks and
+water, Jenny realised how great their peril was, and how different the
+track of the waters looked at nighttime from daytime.  Outlines seemed
+merged, rocks did not look the same, whirlpools had a different vortex,
+islands of stone had a new configuration.  As they sped on, lurching,
+jumping, piercing a broken wall of wave and spray like a torpedo,
+shooting an almost sheer fall, she came to rely on a sense of intuition
+rather than memory, for night had transformed the waters.
+
+Not a sound escaped either.  The man kept his eyes fixed on the woman;
+the woman scanned the dreadful pathway with eyes deep-set and burning,
+resolute, vigilant, and yet defiant too, as though she had been trapped
+into this track of danger, and was fighting without great hope, but with
+the temerity and nonchalance of despair.  Her arms were bare to the
+shoulder almost, and her face was again and again drenched; but second
+succeeded second, minute followed minute in a struggle which might well
+turn a man's hair grey, and now, at last-how many hours was it since they
+had been cast into this den of roaring waters!--at last, suddenly, over a
+large fall, and here smooth waters again, smooth and untroubled, and
+strong and deep.  Then, and only then, did a word escape either; but the
+man had passed through torture and unavailing regret, for he realised
+that he had had no right to bring this girl into such a fight.  It was
+not her friend who was in danger at Bindon.  Her life had been risked
+without due warrant.  "I didn't know, or I wouldn't have asked it," he
+said in a low voice.  "Lord, but you are a wonder--to take that hurdle
+for no one that belonged to you, and to do it as you've done it.  This
+country will rise to you."  He looked back on the raging rapids far
+behind, and he shuddered.  "It was a close call, and no mistake.  We must
+have been within a foot of down-you-go fifty times.  But it's all right
+now, if we can last it out and git there."  Again he glanced back, then
+turned to the girl.  "It makes me pretty sick to look at it," he
+continued.  "I bin through a lot, but that's as sharp practice as I
+want."
+
+"Come here and let me bind up your arm," she answered.  "They hit you--
+the sneaks!  Are you bleeding much?"
+
+He came near her carefully, as she got the big canoe out of the current
+into quieter water.  She whipped the scarf from about her neck, and with
+his knife ripped up the seam of his sleeve.  Her face was alive with the
+joy of conflict and elated with triumph.  Her eyes were shining.  She
+bathed the wound--the bullet had passed clean through the fleshy part of
+the arm--and then carefully tied the scarf round it over her
+handkerchief.
+
+"I guess it's as good as a man could do it," she said at last.
+
+"As good as any doctor," he rejoined.
+
+"I wasn't talking of your arm," she said.
+
+"'Course not.  Excuse me.  You was talkin' of them rapids, and I've got
+to say there ain't a man that could have done it and come through like
+you.  I guess the man that marries you'll get more than his share of
+luck."
+
+"I want none of that," she said sharply, and picked up her paddle again,
+her eyes flashing anger.
+
+He took a pistol from his pocket and offered it to her.  "I didn't mean
+any harm by what I said.  Take this if you think I won't know how to
+behave myself," he urged.
+
+She flung up her head a little.  "I knew what I was doing before I
+started," she said.  "Put it away.  How far is it, and can we do it in
+time?"
+
+"If you can hold out, we can do it; but it means going all night and all
+morning; and it ain't dawn yet, by a long shot."
+
+Dawn came at last, and the mist of early morning, and the imperious and
+dispelling sun; and with mouthfuls of food as they drifted on, the two
+fixed their eyes on the horizon beyond which lay Bindon.  And now it
+seemed to the girl as though this race to save a life or many lives was
+the one thing in existence.  To-morrow was to-day, and the white
+petticoat was lying in the little house in the mountains, and her wedding
+was an interminable distance off, so had this adventure drawn her into
+its risks and toils and haggard exhaustion.
+
+Eight, nine, ten, eleven o'clock came, and then they saw signs of
+settlement.  Houses appeared here and there upon the banks, and now and
+then a horseman watched them from the shore, but they could not pause.
+Bindon--Bindon--Bindon--the Snowdrop Mine at Bindon, and a death-dealing
+machine timed to do its deadly work, were before the eyes of the two
+voyageurs.
+
+Half-past eleven, and the town of Bindon was just beyond them.  A quarter
+to twelve, and they had run their canoe into the bank beyond which were
+the smokestacks and chimneys of the mine.  Bindon was peacefully pursuing
+its way, though here and there were little groups of strikers who had not
+resumed work.
+
+Dingley and the girl scrambled up the bank.  Trembling with fatigue, they
+hastened on.  The man drew ahead of her, for she had paddled for fifteen
+hours, practically without ceasing, and the ground seemed to rise up at
+her.  But she would not let him stop.
+
+He hurried on, reached the mine, and entered, shouting the name of his
+friend.  It was seven minutes to twelve.
+
+A moment later, a half-dozen men came rushing from that portion of the
+mine where Dingley had been told the machine was placed, and at their
+head was Lawson, the man he had come to save.
+
+The girl hastened on to meet them, but she grew faint and leaned against
+a tree, scarce conscious.  She was roused by voices.
+
+"No, it wasn't me, it wasn't me that done it; it was a girl.  Here she
+is--Jenny Long!  You got to thank her, Jake."
+
+Jake! Jake!  The girl awakened to full understanding now.  Jake--what
+Jake?  She looked, then stumbled forward with a cry.
+
+"Jake--it was my Jake!" she faltered.  The mine-boss caught her in his
+arms.  "You, Jenny!  It's you that's saved me!"
+
+Suddenly there was a rumble as of thunder, and a cloud of dust and stone
+rose from the Snowdrop Mine.  The mine-boss tightened his arm round the
+girl's waist.  "That's what I missed, through him and you, Jenny," he
+said.
+
+"What was you doing here, and not at Selby, Jake?" she asked.
+
+"They sent for me-to stop the trouble here."
+
+"But what about our wedding to-day?" she asked with a frown.
+
+"A man went from here with a letter to you three days ago," he said,
+"asking you to come down here and be married.  I suppose he got drunk,
+or had an accident, and didn't reach you.  It had to be.  I was needed
+here--couldn't tell what would happen."
+
+"It has happened out all right," said Dingley, "and this'll be the end of
+it.  You got them miners solid now.  The strikers'll eat humble pie after
+to-day."
+
+"We'll be married to-day, just the same," the mine-boss said, as he gave
+some brandy to the girl.
+
+But the girl shook her head.  She was thinking of a white petticoat in a
+little house in the mountains.  "I'm not going to be married to-day," she
+said decisively.
+
+"Well, to-morrow," said the mine-boss.
+
+But the girl shook her head again.  "To-day is tomorrow," she answered.
+"You can wait, Jake.  I'm going back home to be married."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+QU'APPELLE
+
+(Who calls?)
+
+
+"But I'm white; I'm not an Indian.  My father was a white man.  I've been
+brought up as a white girl.  I've had a white girl's schooling."
+
+Her eyes flashed as she sprang to her feet and walked up and down the
+room for a moment, then stood still, facing her mother,--a dark-faced,
+pock-marked woman, with heavy, somnolent eyes, and waited for her to
+speak.  The reply came slowly and sullenly--
+
+"I am a Blackfoot woman.  I lived on the Muskwat River among the braves
+for thirty years.  I have killed buffalo.  I have seen battles.  Men,
+too, I have killed when they came to steal our horses and crept in on our
+lodges in the night-the Crees!  I am a Blackfoot.  You are the daughter
+of a Blackfoot woman.  No medicine can cure that.  Sit down.  You have no
+sense.  You are not white.  They will not have you.  Sit down."
+
+The girl's handsome face flushed; she threw up her hands in an agony of
+protest.  A dreadful anger was in her panting breast, but she could not
+speak.  She seemed to choke with excess of feeling.  For an instant she
+stood still, trembling with agitation, then she sat down suddenly on a
+great couch covered with soft deerskins and buffalo robes.  There was
+deep in her the habit of obedience to this sombre but striking woman.
+She had been ruled firmly, almost oppressively, and she had not yet
+revolted.  Seated on the couch, she gazed out of the window at the flying
+snow, her brain too much on fire for thought, passion beating like a
+pulse in all her lithe and graceful young body, which had known the
+storms of life and time for only twenty years.
+
+The wind shrieked and the snow swept past in clouds of blinding drift,
+completely hiding from sight the town below them, whose civilisation had
+built itself many habitations and was making roads and streets on the
+green-brown plain, where herds of buffalo had stamped and streamed and
+thundered not long ago.  The town was a mile and a half away, and these
+two were alone in a great circle of storm, one of them battling against a
+tempest which might yet overtake her, against which she had set her face
+ever since she could remember, though it had only come to violence since
+her father died two years before--a careless, strong, wilful white man,
+who had lived the Indian life for many years, but had been swallowed at
+last by the great wave of civilisation streaming westward and northward,
+wiping out the game and the Indian, and overwhelming the rough, fighting,
+hunting, pioneer life.  Joel Renton had made money, by good luck chiefly,
+having held land here and there which he had got for nothing, and had
+then almost forgotten about it, and, when reminded of it, still held on
+to it with that defiant stubbornness which often possesses improvident
+and careless natures.  He had never had any real business instinct, and
+to swagger a little over the land he held and to treat offers of purchase
+with contempt was the loud assertion of a capacity he did not possess.
+So it was that stubborn vanity, beneath which was his angry protest
+against the prejudice felt by the new people of the West for the white
+pioneer who married an Indian, and lived the Indian life,--so it was that
+this gave him competence and a comfortable home after the old trader had
+been driven out by the railway and the shopkeeper.  With the first land
+he sold he sent his daughter away to school in a town farther east and
+south, where she had been brought in touch with a life that at once
+cramped and attracted her; where, too, she had felt the first chill
+of racial ostracism, and had proudly fought it to the end, her weapons
+being talent, industry, and a hot, defiant ambition.
+
+There had been three years of bitter, almost half-sullen, struggle,
+lightened by one sweet friendship with a girl whose face she had since
+drawn in a hundred different poses on stray pieces of paper, on the walls
+of the big, well-lighted attic to which she retreated for hours every
+day, when she was not abroad on the prairies, riding the Indian pony that
+her uncle the Piegan Chief, Ice Breaker, had given her years before.
+Three years of struggle, and then her father had died, and the refuge for
+her vexed, defiant heart was gone.  While he lived she could affirm the
+rights of a white man's daughter, the rights of the daughter of a pioneer
+who had helped to make the West; and her pride in him had given a glow to
+her cheek and a spring to her step which drew every eye.  In the chief
+street of Portage la Drome men would stop their trafficking and women
+nudge each other when she passed, and wherever she went she stirred
+interest, excited admiration, or aroused prejudice--but the prejudice did
+not matter so long as her father, Joel Renton, lived.  Whatever his
+faults, and they were many--sometimes he drank too much, and swore a
+great deal, and bullied and stormed--she blinked at them all, for he was
+of the conquering race, a white man who had slept in white sheets and
+eaten off white tablecloths, and used a knife and fork, since he was
+born; and the women of his people had had soft petticoats and fine
+stockings, and silk gowns for festal days, and feathered hats of velvet,
+and shoes of polished leather, always and always, back through many
+generations.  She had held her head high, for she was of his women, of
+the women of his people, with all their rights and all their claims.  She
+had held it high till that stormy day--just such a day as this, with the
+surf of snow breaking against the house--when they carried him in out of
+the wild turmoil and snow, laying him on the couch where she now sat, and
+her head fell on his lifeless breast, and she cried out to him in vain to
+come back to her.
+
+Before the world her head was still held high, but in the attic-room,
+and out on the prairies far away, where only the coyote or the prairie-
+hen saw, her head drooped, and her eyes grew heavy with pain and sombre
+protest.  Once in an agony of loneliness, and cruelly hurt by a
+conspicuous slight put upon her at the Portage by the wife of the Reeve
+of the town, who had daughters twain of pure white blood got from behind
+the bar of a saloon in Winnipeg, she had thrown open her window at night
+with the frost below zero, and stood in her thin nightdress, craving the
+death which she hoped the cold would give her soon.  It had not availed,
+however, and once again she had ridden out in a blizzard to die, but had
+come upon a man lost in the snow, and her own misery had passed from her,
+and her heart, full of the blood of plainsmen, had done for another what
+it would not do for itself.  The Indian in her had, with strange, sure
+instinct, found its way to Portage la Drome, the man with both hands and
+one foot frozen, on her pony, she walking at his side, only conscious
+that she had saved one, not two, lives that day.
+
+Here was another such day, here again was the storm in her heart which
+had driven her into the plains that other time, and here again was that
+tempest of white death outside.
+
+"You have no sense.  You are not white.  They will not have you.  Sit
+down--"
+
+The words had fallen on her ears with a cold, deadly smother.  There came
+a chill upon her which stilled the wild pulses in her, which suddenly
+robbed the eyes of their brightness and gave a drawn look to the face.
+
+"You are not white.  They will not have you, Pauline."  The Indian mother
+repeated the words after a moment, her eyes grown still more gloomy; for
+in her, too, there was a dark tide of passion moving.  In all the
+outlived years this girl had ever turned to the white father rather than
+to her, and she had been left more and more alone.  Her man had been kind
+to her, and she had been a faithful wife, but she had resented the
+natural instinct of her half-breed child, almost white herself and with
+the feelings and ways of the whites, to turn always to her father, as
+though to a superior guide, to a higher influence and authority.  Was
+not she herself the descendant of Blackfoot and Piegan chiefs through
+generations of rulers and warriors?  Was there not Piegan and Blackfoot
+blood in the girl's veins?  Must only the white man's blood be reckoned
+when they made up their daily account and balanced the books of their
+lives, credit and debtor,--misunderstanding and kind act, neglect and
+tenderness, reproof and praise, gentleness and impulse, anger and
+caress,--to be set down in the everlasting record?  Why must the Indian
+always give way--Indian habits, Indian desires, the Indian way of doing
+things, the Indian point of view, Indian food, Indian medicine?  Was it
+all bad, and only that which belonged to white life good?
+
+"Look at your face in the glass, Pauline," she added at last.  "You are
+good-looking, but it isn't the good looks of the whites.  The lodge of a
+chieftainess is the place for you.  There you would have praise and
+honour; among the whites you are only a half-breed.  What is the good?
+Let us go back to the life out there beyond the Muskwat River--up beyond.
+There is hunting still, a little, and the world is quiet, and nothing
+troubles.  Only the wild dog barks at night, or the wolf sniffs at the
+door and all day there is singing.  Somewhere out beyond the Muskwat the
+feasts go on, and the old men build the great fires, and tell tales, and
+call the wind out of the north, and make the thunder speak; and the young
+men ride to the hunt or go out to battle, and build lodges for the
+daughters of the tribe; and each man has his woman, and each woman has in
+her breast the honour of the tribe, and the little ones fill the lodge
+with laughter.  Like a pocket of deerskin is every house, warm and small
+and full of good things.  Hai-yai, what is this life to that!  There you
+will be head and chief of all, for there is money enough for a thousand
+horses; and your father was a white man, and these are the days when the
+white man rules.  Like clouds before the sun are the races of men, and
+one race rises and another falls.  Here you are not first, but last; and
+the child of the white father and mother, though they be as the dirt that
+flies from a horse's heels, it is before you.  Your mother is a
+Blackfoot."
+
+As the woman spoke slowly and with many pauses, the girl's mood changed,
+and there came into her eyes a strange, dark look deeper than anger.  She
+listened with a sudden patience which stilled the agitation in her breast
+and gave a little touch of rigidity to her figure.  Her eyes withdrew
+from the wild storm without and gravely settled on her mother's face,
+and with the Indian woman's last words understanding pierced, but did not
+dispel, the sombre and ominous look in her eyes.  There was silence for
+a moment, and then she spoke almost as evenly as her mother had done.
+
+"I will tell you everything.  You are my mother, and I love you; but you
+will not see the truth.  When my father took you from the lodges and
+brought you here, it was the end of the Indian life.  It was for you to
+go on with him, but you would not go.  I was young, but I saw, and I said
+that in all things I would go with him.  I did not know that it would be
+hard, but at school, at the very first, I began to understand.  There was
+only one, a French girl--I loved her--a girl who said to me, 'You are as
+white as I am, as anyone, and your heart is the same, and you are
+beautiful.'  Yes, Manette said I was beautiful."
+
+She paused a moment, a misty, far-away look came into her eyes, her
+fingers clasped and unclasped, and she added:
+
+"And her brother, Julien,--he was older,--when he came to visit Manette,
+he spoke to me as though I was all white, and was good to me.  I have
+never forgotten, never.  It was five years ago, but I remember him.  He
+was tall and strong, and as good as Manette--as good as Manette.  I loved
+Manette, but she suffered for me, for I was not like the others, and my
+ways were different--then.  I had lived up there on the Warais among the
+lodges, and I had not seen things--only from my father, and he did so
+much in an Indian way.  So I was sick at heart, and sometimes I wanted to
+die; and once--But there was Manette, and she would laugh and sing, and
+we would play together, and I would speak French and she would speak
+English, and I learned from her to forget the Indian ways.  What were
+they to me?  I had loved them when I was of them, but I came on to a
+better life.  The Indian life is to the white life as the parfleche pouch
+to--to this."  She laid her hand upon a purse of delicate silver mesh
+hanging at her waist.  "When your eyes are opened you must go on, you
+cannot stop.  There is no going back.  When you have read of all there is
+in the white man's world, when you have seen, then there is no returning.
+You may end it all, if you wish, in the snow, in the river, but there is
+no returning.  The lodge of a chief--ah, if my father had heard you say
+that--!"
+
+The Indian woman shifted heavily in her chair, then shrank away from the
+look fixed on her.  Once or twice she made as if she would speak, but
+sank down in the great chair, helpless and dismayed.
+
+"The lodge of a chief!" the girl continued in a low, bitter voice.
+"What is the lodge of a chief?  A smoky fire, a pot, a bed of skins, aih-
+yi!  If the lodges of the Indians were millions, and I could be head of
+all, and rule the land, yet would I rather be a white girl in the hut of
+her white man, struggling for daily bread among the people who sweep the
+buffalo out, but open up the land with the plough, and make a thousand
+live where one lived before.  It is peace you want, my mother, peace and
+solitude, in which the soul goes to sleep.  Your days of hope are over,
+and you want to drowse by the fire.  I want to see the white men's cities
+grow, and the armies coming over the hill with the ploughs and the
+reapers and the mowers, and the wheels and the belts and engines of the
+great factories, and the white woman's life spreading everywhere; for I
+am a white man's daughter.  I can't be both Indian and white.  I will not
+be like the sun when the shadow cuts across it and the land grows dark.
+I will not be half-breed.  I will be white or I will be Indian; and I
+will be white, white only.  My heart is white, my tongue is white, I
+think, I feel, as white people think and feel.  What they wish, I wish;
+as they live, I live; as white women dress, I dress."
+
+She involuntarily drew up the dark red skirt she wore, showing a white
+petticoat and a pair of fine stockings on an ankle as shapely as she had
+ever seen among all the white women she knew.  She drew herself up with
+pride, and her body had a grace and ease which the white woman's
+convention had not cramped.
+
+Yet, with all her protests, no one would have thought her English.
+She might have been Spanish, or Italian, or Roumanian, or Slav, though
+nothing of her Indian blood showed in purely Indian characteristics, and
+something sparkled in her, gave a radiance to her face and figure which
+the storm and struggle in her did not smother.  The white women of
+Portage la Drome were too blind, too prejudiced, to see all that she
+really was, and admiring white men could do little, for Pauline would
+have nothing to do with them till the women met her absolutely as an
+equal; and from the other halfbreeds, who intermarried with each other
+and were content to take a lower place than the pure whites, she held
+aloof, save when any of them was ill or in trouble.  Then she recognised
+the claim of race, and came to their doors with pity and soft impulses to
+help them.  French and Scotch and English half-breeds, as they were, they
+understood how she was making a fight for all who were half-Indian, half-
+white, and watched her with a furtive devotion, acknowledging her
+superior place, and proud of it.
+
+"I will not stay here," said the Indian mother with sullen stubbornness.
+"I will go back beyond the Warais.  My life is my own life, and I will do
+what I like with it."
+
+The girl started, but became composed again on the instant.  "Is your
+life all your own, mother?" she asked.  "I did not come into the world
+of my own will.  If I had I would have come all white or all Indian.  I
+am your daughter, and I am here, good or bad--is your life all your own?"
+
+"You can marry and stay here, when I go.  You are twenty.  I had my man,
+your father, when I was seventeen.  You can marry.  There are men.  You
+have money.  They will marry you--and forget the rest."
+
+With a cry of rage and misery the girl sprang to her feet and started
+forwards, but stopped suddenly at sound of a hasty knocking and a voice
+asking admittance.  An instant later, a huge, bearded, broad-shouldered
+man stepped inside, shaking himself free of the snow, laughing half-
+sheepishly as he did so, and laying his fur-cap and gloves with
+exaggerated care on the wide window-sill.
+
+"John Alloway," said the Indian woman in a voice of welcome, and with a
+brightening eye, for it would seem as though he came in answer to her
+words of a few moments before.  With a mother's instinct she had divined
+at once the reason for the visit, though no warning thought crossed the
+mind of the girl, who placed a chair for their visitor with a heartiness
+which was real--was not this the white man she had saved from death in
+the snow a year ago?  Her heart was soft towards the life she had kept in
+the world.  She smiled at him, all the anger gone from her eyes, and
+there was almost a touch of tender anxiety in her voice as she said "What
+brought you out in this blizzard?  It wasn't safe.  It doesn't seem
+possible you got here from the Portage."
+
+The huge ranchman and auctioneer laughed cheerily.  "Once lost, twice get
+there," he exclaimed, with a quizzical toss of the head, thinking he had
+said a good thing.  "It's a year ago to the very day that I was lost out
+back"--he jerked a thumb over his shoulder--"and you picked me up and
+brought me in; and what was I to do but come out on the anniversary and
+say thank you?  I'd fixed up all year to come to you, and I wasn't to be
+stopped, 'cause it was like the day we first met, old Coldmaker hitting
+the world with his whips of frost, and shaking his ragged blankets of
+snow over the wild west."
+
+"Just such a day," said the Indian woman after a pause.  Pauline remained
+silent, placing a little bottle of cordial before their visitor, with
+which he presently regaled himself, raising his glass with an air.
+
+"Many happy returns to us both!" he said, and threw the liquor down his
+throat, smacked his lips, and drew his hand down his great moustache and
+beard like some vast animal washing its face with its paw.  Smiling
+and yet not at ease, he looked at the two women and nodded his head
+encouragingly, but whether the encouragement was for himself or for
+them he could not have told.
+
+His last words, however, had altered the situation.  The girl had caught
+at a suggestion in them which startled her.  This rough white plainsman
+was come to make love to her, and to say--what?  He was at once awkward
+and confident, afraid of her, of her refinement, grace, beauty, and
+education, and yet confident in the advantage of his position, a white
+man bending to a half-breed girl.  He was not conscious of the
+condescension and majesty of his demeanour, but it was there, and
+his untutored words and ways must make it all too apparent to the girl.
+The revelation of the moment made her at once triumphant and humiliated.
+This white man had come to make love to her, that was apparent; but that
+he, ungrammatical, crude, and rough, should think he had but to put out
+his hand, and she in whom every subtle emotion and influence had delicate
+response, whose words and ways were as far removed from his as day from
+night, would fly to him, brought the flush of indignation to her cheek.
+She responded to his toast with a pleasant nod, however, and said:
+
+"But if you will keep coming in such wild storms, there will not be many
+anniversaries."  Laughing, she poured out another glass of liquor for
+him.
+
+"Well, now, p'r'aps you're right, and so the only thing to do is not to
+keep coming, but to stay--stay right where you are."
+
+The Indian woman could not see her daughter's face, which was turned to
+the fire, but she herself smiled at John Alloway, and nodded her head
+approvingly.  Here was the cure for her own trouble and loneliness.
+Pauline and she, who lived in different worlds, and yet were tied to each
+other by circumstances they could not control, would each work out her
+own destiny after her own nature, since John Alloway had come a-wooing.
+She would go back on the Warais, and Pauline would remain at the Portage,
+a white woman with her white man.  She would go back to the smoky fires
+in the huddled lodges; to the venison stew and the snake dance; to the
+feasts of the Medicine Men, and the long sleeps in the summer days, and
+the winter's tales, and be at rest among her own people; and Pauline
+would have revenge of the wife of the prancing Reeve, and perhaps the
+people would forget who her mother was.
+
+With these thoughts flying through her sluggish mind, she rose and moved
+heavily from the room, with a parting look of encouragement at Alloway,
+as though to say, a man that is bold is surest.
+
+With her back to the man, Pauline watched her mother leave the room, saw
+the look she gave Alloway.  When the door was closed she turned and
+looked Alloway in the eyes.
+
+"How old are you?" she asked suddenly.
+
+He stirred in his seat nervously.  "Why, fifty, about," he answered with
+confusion.
+
+"Then you'll be wise not to go looking for anniversaries in blizzards,
+when they're few at the best," she said with a gentle and dangerous
+smile.
+
+"Fifty-why, I'm as young as most men of thirty," he responded with an
+uncertain laugh.  "I'd have come here to-day if it had been snowing
+pitchforks and chain-lightning.  I made up my mind I would.  You saved my
+life, that's dead sure; and I'd be down among the: moles if it wasn't for
+you and that Piegan pony of yours.  Piegan ponies are wonders in a storm-
+seem to know their way by instinct.  You, too--why, I bin on the plains
+all my life, and was no better than a baby that day; but you--why, you
+had Piegan in you, why, yes--"
+
+He stopped short for a moment, checked by the look in her face, then went
+blindly on: "And you've got Blackfoot in you, too; and you just felt your
+way through the tornado and over the blind prairie like a, bird reaching
+for the hills.  It was as easy to you as picking out a moverick in a
+bunch of steers to me.  But I never could make out what you was doing on
+the prairie that terrible day.  I've thought of it a hundred times.  What
+was you doing, if it ain't cheek to ask?"
+
+"I was trying to lose a life," she answered quietly, her eyes dwelling
+on his face, yet not seeing him; for it all came back on her, the agony
+which had driven her out into the tempest to be lost evermore.
+
+He laughed.  "Well, now, that's good," he said; "that's what they call
+speaking sarcastic.  You was out to save, and not to lose, a life; that
+was proved to the satisfaction of the court."  He paused and chuckled to
+himself, thinking he had been witty, and continued:  "And I was that
+court, and my judgment was that the debt of that life you saved had to be
+paid to you within one calendar year, with interest at the usual per cent
+for mortgages on good security.  That was my judgment, and there's no
+appeal from it.  I am the great Justinian in this case."
+
+"Did you ever save anybody's life?" she asked, putting the bottle of
+cordial away, as he filled his glass for the third time.
+
+"Twice certain, and once dividin' the honours," he answered, pleased at
+the question.
+
+"And did you expect to get any pay, with or without interest?" she
+added.
+
+"Me?  I never thought of it again.  But yes--by gol, I did!  One case was
+funny, as funny can be.  It was Ricky Wharton over on the Muskwat River.
+I saved his life right enough, and he came to me a year after and said,
+You saved my life, now what are you going to do with it?  I'm stony
+broke.  I owe a hundred dollars, and I wouldn't be owing it if you hadn't
+saved my life.  When you saved it I was five hunderd to the good, and
+I'd have left that much behind me.  Now I'm on the rocks, because you
+insisted on saving my life; and you just got to take care of me.'
+I 'insisted!'  Well, that knocked me silly, and I took him on--blame me,
+if I didn't keep Ricky a whole year, till he went north looking for gold.
+Get pay--why, I paid!  Saving life has its responsibilities, little gal."
+
+"You can't save life without running some risk yourself, not as a rule,
+can you?" she said, shrinking from his familiarity.
+
+"Not as a rule," he replied.  "You took on a bit of risk with me, you and
+your Piegan pony."
+
+"Oh, I was young," she responded, leaning over the table, and drawing
+faces on a piece of paper before her.  "I could take more risks, I was
+only nineteen!"
+
+"I don't catch on," he rejoined.  "If it's sixteen or--"
+
+"Or fifty," she interposed.
+
+"What difference does it make?  If you're done for, it's the same at
+nineteen as fifty, and vicey-versey."
+
+"No, it's not the same," she answered.  "You leave so much more that you
+want to keep, when you go at fifty."
+
+"Well, I dunno.  I never thought of that."
+
+"There's all that has belonged to you.  You've been married, and have
+children, haven't you?"
+
+He started, frowned, then straightened himself.  "I got one girl--she's
+east with her grandmother," he said jerkily.
+
+"That's what I said; there's more to leave behind at fifty," she replied,
+a red spot on each cheek.  She was not looking at him, but at the face of
+a man on the paper before her--a young man with abundant hair, a strong
+chin, and big, eloquent eyes; and all around his face she had drawn the
+face of a girl many times, and beneath the faces of both she was writing
+Manette and Julien.
+
+The water was getting too deep for John Alloway.
+
+He floundered towards the shore.  "I'm no good at words," he said--
+"no good at argyment; but I've got a gift for stories--round the fire of
+a night, with a pipe and a tin basin of tea; so I'm not going to try and
+match you.  You've had a good education down at Winnipeg.  Took every
+prize, they say, and led the school, though there was plenty of fuss
+because they let you do it, and let you stay there, being half-Indian.
+You never heard what was going on outside, I s'pose.  It didn't matter,
+for you won out.  Blamed foolishness, trying to draw the line between red
+and white that way.  Of course, it's the women always, always the women,
+striking out for all-white or nothing.  Down there at Portage they've
+treated you mean, mean as dirt.  The Reeve's wife--well, we'll fix that
+up all right.  I guess John Alloway ain't to be bluffed.  He knows too
+much and they all know he knows enough.  When John Alloway, 32 Main
+Street, with a ranch on the Katanay, says, 'We're coming--Mr. and Mrs.
+John Alloway is coming,' they'll get out their cards visite, I guess."
+
+Pauline's head bent lower, and she seemed laboriously etching lines into
+the faces before her--Manette and Julien, Julien and Manette; and there
+came into her eyes the youth and light and gaiety of the days when Julien
+came of an afternoon and the riverside rang with laughter; the dearest,
+lightest days she had ever spent.
+
+The man of fifty went on, seeing nothing but a girl over whom he was
+presently going to throw the lasso of his affection, and take her home
+with him, yielding and glad, a white man, and his half-breed girl--but
+such a half-breed!
+
+"I seen enough of the way some of them women treated you," he continued,
+"and I sez to myself, Her turn next.  There's a way out, I sez, and John
+Alloway pays his debts.  When the anniversary comes round I'll put things
+right, I sez to myself.  She saved my life, and she shall have the rest
+of it, if she'll take it, and will give a receipt in full, and open a new
+account in the name of John and Pauline Alloway.  Catch it?  See--
+Pauline?"
+
+Slowly she got to her feet.  There was a look in her eyes such as had
+been in her mother's a little while before, but a hundred times
+intensified: a look that belonged to the flood and flow of generations of
+Indian life, yet controlled in her by the order and understanding of
+centuries of white men's lives, the pervasive, dominating power of race.
+
+For an instant she kept her eyes towards the window.  The storm had
+suddenly ceased, and a glimmer of sunset light was breaking over the
+distant wastes of snow.
+
+"You want to pay a debt you think you owe," she said, in a strange,
+lustreless voice, turning to him at last.  "Well, you have paid it.  You
+have given me a book to read which I will keep always.  And I give you a
+receipt in full for your debt."
+
+"I don't know about any book," he answered dazedly.  "I want to marry you
+right away."
+
+"I am sorry, but it is not necessary," she replied suggestively.
+Her face was very pale now.
+
+"But I want to.  It ain't a debt.  That was only a way of putting it.
+I want to make you my wife.  I got some position, and I can make the West
+sit up, and look at you and be glad."
+
+Suddenly her anger flared out, low and vivid and fierce, but her words
+were slow and measured.  "There is no reason why I should marry you--not
+one.  You offer me marriage as a prince might give a penny to a beggar.
+If my mother were not an Indian woman, you would not have taken it all
+as a matter of course.  But my father was a white man, and I am a white
+man's daughter, and I would rather marry an Indian, who would think me
+the best thing there was in the light of the sun, than marry you.  Had I
+been pure white you would not have been so sure, you would have asked,
+not offered.  I am not obliged to you.  You ought to go to no woman as
+you came to me.  See, the storm has stopped.  You will be quite safe
+going back now.  The snow will be deep, perhaps, but it is not far."
+
+She went to the window, got his cap and gloves, and handed them to him.
+He took them, dumbfounded and overcome.
+
+"Say, I ain't done it right, mebbe, but I meant well, and I'd be good to
+you and proud of you, and I'd love you better than anything I ever saw,"
+he said shamefacedly, but eagerly and honestly too.
+
+"Ah, you should have said those last words first," she answered.
+
+"I say them now."
+
+"They come too late; but they would have been too late in any case," she
+added.  "Still, I am glad you said them."
+
+She opened the door for him.
+
+"I made a mistake," he urged humbly.  "I understand better now.  I never
+had any schoolin'."
+
+"Oh, it isn't that," she answered gently.  "Goodbye."
+
+Suddenly he turned.  "You're right--it couldn't ever be," he said.
+"You're--you're great.  And I owe you my life still."
+
+He stepped out into the biting air.
+
+For a moment Pauline stood motionless in the middle of the room, her gaze
+fixed upon the door which had just closed; then, with a wild gesture of
+misery and despair, she threw herself upon the couch in a passionate
+outburst of weeping.  Sobs shook her from head to foot, and her hands,
+clenched above her head, twitched convulsively.
+
+Presently the door opened and her mother looked in eagerly.  At what she
+saw her face darkened and hardened for an instant, but then the girl's
+utter abandonment of grief and agony convinced and conquered her.
+Some glimmer of the true understanding of the problem which Pauline
+represented got into her heart, and drove the sullen selfishness from
+her face and eyes and mind.  She came over heavily and, sinking upon her
+knees, swept an arm around the girl's shoulder.  She realised what had
+happened, and probably this was the first time in her life that she had
+ever come by instinct to a revelation of her daughter's mind, or of the
+faithful meaning of incidents of their lives.
+
+"You said no to John Alloway," she murmured.  Defiance and protest spoke
+in the swift gesture of the girl's hands.  "You think because he was
+white that I'd drop into his arms!  No--no--no!"
+
+"You did right, little one."
+
+The sobs suddenly stopped, and the girl seemed to listen with all her
+body.  There was something in her Indian mother's voice she had never
+heard before--at least, not since she was a little child, and swung in a
+deer-skin hammock in a tamarac tree by Renton's Lodge, where the chiefs
+met, and the West paused to rest on its onward march.  Something of the
+accents of the voice that crooned to her then was in the woman's tones
+now.
+
+"He offered it like a lump of sugar to a bird--I know.  He didn't know
+that you have great blood--yes, but it is true.  My man's grandfather,
+he was of the blood of the kings of England.  My man had the proof.  And
+for a thousand years my people have been chiefs.  There is no blood in
+all the West like yours.  My heart was heavy, and dark thoughts came to
+me, because my man is gone, and the life is not my life, and I am only an
+Indian woman from the Warais, and my heart goes out there always now.
+But some great Medicine has been poured into my heart.  As I stood at the
+door and saw you lying there, I called to the Sun.  'O great Spirit,' I
+said, 'help me to understand; for this girl is bone of my bone and flesh
+of my flesh, and Evil has come between us!'  And the Sun Spirit poured
+the Medicine into my spirit, and there is no cloud between us now.  It
+has passed away, and I see.  Little white one, the white life is the only
+life, and I will live it with you till a white man comes and gives you a
+white man's home.  But not John Alloway--shall the crow nest with the
+oriole?"
+
+As the woman spoke with slow, measured voice, full of the cadences of a
+heart revealing itself, the girl's breath at first seemed to stop, so
+still she lay; then, as the true understanding of the words came to her,
+she panted with excitement, her breast heaved, and the blood flushed her
+face.  When the slow voice ceased, and the room became still, she lay
+quiet for a moment, letting the new thing find secure lodgment in her
+thought; then, suddenly, she raised herself and threw her arms round her
+mother in a passion of affection.
+
+"Lalika!  O mother Lalika!" she said tenderly, and kissed her again and
+again.  Not since she was a little girl, long before they left the
+Warais, had she called her mother by her Indian name, which her father
+had humorously taught her to do in those far-off happy days by the
+beautiful, singing river and the exquisite woods, when, with a bow
+and arrow, she had ranged a young Diana who slew only with love.
+
+"Lalika, mother Lalika, it is like the old, old times," she added softly.
+"Ah, it does not matter now, for you understand!"
+
+"I do not understand altogether," murmured the Indian woman gently.
+"I am not white, and there is a different way of thinking; but I will
+hold your hand, and we will live the white life together."
+
+Cheek to cheek they saw the darkness come, and, afterwards, the silver
+moon steal up over a frozen world, in which the air bit like steel and
+braced the heart like wine.  Then, at last, before it was nine o'clock,
+after her custom, the Indian woman went to bed, leaving her daughter
+brooding peacefully by the fire.
+
+For a long time Pauline sat with hands clasped in her lap, her gaze on
+the tossing flames, in her heart and mind a new feeling of strength and
+purpose.  The way before her was not clear, she saw no further than this
+day, and all that it had brought; yet she was as one that has crossed a
+direful flood and finds herself on a strange shore in an unknown country,
+with the twilight about her, yet with so much of danger passed that there
+was only the thought of the moment's safety round her, the camp-fire to
+be lit, and the bed to be made under the friendly trees and stars.
+
+For a half-hour she sat so, and then, suddenly, she raised her head
+listening, leaning towards the window, through which the moonlight
+streamed.  She heard her name called without, distinct and strange--
+"Pauline!  Pauline!"
+
+Starting up, she ran to the door and opened it.  All was silent and
+cruelly cold.  Nothing but the wide plain of snow and the steely air.
+But as she stood intently listening, the red glow from the fire behind
+her, again came the cry--"Pauline!" not far away.  Her heart beat hard,
+and she raised her head and called--why was it she should call out in a
+language not her own?  "Qu'appelle?  Qu'appelle?"
+
+And once again on the still night air came the trembling appeal--
+"Pauline!"
+
+"Qu'appelle?  Qu'appelle?" she cried, then, with a gasping murmur of
+understanding and recognition she ran forwards in the frozen night
+towards the sound of the voice.  The same intuitive sense which had made
+her call out in French, without thought or reason, had revealed to her
+who it was that called; or was it that even in the one word uttered there
+was the note of a voice always remembered since those days with Manette
+at Winnipeg?
+
+Not far away from the house, on the way to Portage la Drome, but a little
+distance from the road, was a crevasse, and towards this she sped, for
+once before an accident had happened there.  Again the voice called as
+she sped--"Pauline!" and she cried out that she was coming.  Presently
+she stood above the declivity, and peered over.  Almost immediately below
+her, a few feet down, was a man lying in the snow.  He had strayed from
+the obliterated road, and had fallen down the crevasse, twisting his foot
+cruelly.  Unable to walk he had crawled several hundred yards in the
+snow, but his strength had given out, and then he had called to the
+house, on whose dark windows flickered the flames of the fire, the name
+of the girl he had come so far to see.  With a cry of joy and pain at
+once she recognised him now.  It was as her heart had said--it was
+Julien, Manette's brother.  In a moment she was beside him, her arm
+around his shoulder.
+
+"Pauline!" he said feebly, and fainted in her arms.  An instant later
+she was speeding to the house, and, rousing her mother and two of the
+stablemen, she snatched a flask of brandy from a cupboard and hastened
+back.
+
+An hour later Julien Labrosse lay in the great sitting-room beside the
+fire, his foot and ankle bandaged, and at ease, his face alight with all
+that had brought him there.  And once again the Indian mother with a sure
+instinct knew why he had come, and saw that now her girl would have a
+white woman's home, and, for her man, one of the race like her father's
+race, white and conquering.
+
+"I'm sorry to give trouble," Julien said, laughing--he had a trick
+of laughing lightly; "but I'll be able to get back to the Portage
+to-morrow."
+
+To this the Indian mother said, however: "To please yourself is a great
+thing, but to please others is better; and so you will stay here till you
+can walk back to the Portage, M'sieu' Julien."
+
+"Well, I've never been so comfortable," he said--"never so--happy.  If
+you don't mind the trouble!"  The Indian woman nodded pleasantly, and
+found an excuse to leave the room.  But before she went she contrived
+to place near his elbow one of the scraps of paper on which Pauline had
+drawn his face, with that of Manette.  It brought a light of hope and
+happiness into his eyes, and he thrust the paper under the fur robes of
+the couch.
+
+"What are you doing with your life?" Pauline asked him, as his eyes
+sought hers a few moments later.
+
+"Oh, I have a big piece of work before me," he answered eagerly, "a great
+chance--to build a bridge over the St.  Lawrence, and I'm only thirty!
+I've got my start.  Then, I've made over the old Seigneury my father left
+me, and I'm going to live in it.  It will be a fine place, when I've done
+with it--comfortable and big, with old oak timbers and walls, and deep
+fireplaces, and carvings done in the time of Louis Quinze, and dark red
+velvet curtains for the drawingroom, and skins and furs.  Yes, I must
+have skins and furs like these here."  He smoothed the skins with his
+hand.
+
+"Manette, she will live with you?" Pauline asked.  "Oh no, her husband
+wouldn't like that.  You see, Manette is to be married.  She told me to
+tell you all about it."
+
+He told her all there was to tell of Manette's courtship, and added that
+the wedding would take place in the spring.
+
+"Manette wanted it when the leaves first flourish and the birds come
+back," he said gaily; "and so she's not going to live with me at the
+Seigneury, you see.  No, there it is, as fine a house, good enough for
+a prince, and I shall be there alone, unless--"
+
+His eyes met hers, and he caught the light that was in them, before the
+eyelids drooped over them and she turned her head to the fire.  "But the
+spring is two months off yet," he added.
+
+"The spring?" she asked, puzzled, yet half afraid to speak.
+
+"Yes, I'm going into my new house when Manette goes into her new house--
+in the spring.  And I won't go alone if--"
+
+He caught her eyes again, but she rose hurriedly and said: "You must
+sleep now.  Good-night."  She held out her hand.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you the rest to-morrow-to-morrow night when it's quiet
+like this, and the stars shine," he answered.  "I'm going to have a home
+of my own like this--ah, bien sur, Pauline."
+
+That night the old Indian mother prayed to the Sun.  "O great Spirit,"
+she said, "I give thanks for the Medicine poured into my heart.  Be good
+to my white child when she goes with her man to the white man's home
+far away.  O great Spirit, when I return to the lodges of my people, be
+kind to me, for I shall be lonely; I shall not have my child; I shall not
+hear my white man's voice.  Give me good Medicine, O Sun and great
+Father, till my dream tells me that my man comes from over the hills for
+me once more."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STAKE AND THE PLUMB-LINE
+
+She went against all good judgment in marrying him; she cut herself off
+from her own people, from the life in which she had been an alluring and
+beautiful figure.  Washington had never had two such seasons as those in
+which she moved; for the diplomatic circle who had had "the run of the
+world" knew her value, and were not content without her.  She might have
+made a brilliant match with one ambassador thirty years older than
+herself--she was but twenty-two; and there were at least six attaches
+and secretaries of legation who entered upon a tournament for her heart
+and hand; but she was not for them.  All her fine faculties of tact and
+fairness, of harmless strategy, and her gifts of wit and unexpected
+humour were needed to keep her cavaliers constant and hopeful to the
+last; but she never faltered, and she did not fail.  The faces of old men
+brightened when they saw her, and one or two ancient figures who, for
+years, had been seldom seen at social functions now came when they knew
+she was to be present.  There were, of course, a few women who said she
+would coquette with any male from nine to ninety; but no man ever said
+so; and there was none, from first to last, but smiled with pleasure at
+even the mention of her name, so had her vivacity, intelligence, and fine
+sympathy conquered them.  She was a social artist by instinct.  In their
+hearts they all recognised how fair and impartial she was; and she drew
+out of every man the best that was in him.  The few women who did not
+like her said that she chattered; but the truth was she made other people
+talk by swift suggestion or delicate interrogation.
+
+After the blow fell, Freddy Hartzman put the matter succinctly, and told
+the truth faithfully, when he said, "The first time I met her, I told her
+all I'd ever done that could be told, and all I wanted to do; including a
+resolve to carry her off to some desert place and set up a Kingdom of
+Two.  I don't know how she did it.  I was like a tap, and poured myself
+out; and when it was all over, I thought she was the best talker I'd ever
+heard.  But yet she'd done nothing except look at me and listen, and put
+in a question here and there, that was like a baby asking to see your
+watch.  Oh, she was a lily-flower, was Sally Seabrook, and I've never
+been sorry I told her all my little story!  It did me good.  Poor
+darling--it makes me sick sometimes when I think of it.  Yet she'll win
+out all right--a hundred to one she'll win out.  She was a star."
+
+Freddy Hartzman was in an embassy of repute; he knew the chancelleries
+and salons of many nations, and was looked upon as one of the ablest and
+shrewdest men in the diplomatic service.  He had written one of the best
+books on international law in existence, he talked English like a native,
+he had published a volume of delightful verse, and had omitted to publish
+several others, including a tiny volume which Sally Seabrook's charms had
+inspired him to write.  His view of her was shared by most men who knew
+the world, and especially by the elderly men who had a real knowledge of
+human nature, among whom was a certain important member of the United
+States executive called John Appleton.  When the end of all things at
+Washington came for Sally, these two men united to bear her up, that her
+feet should not stumble upon the stony path of the hard journey she had
+undertaken.
+
+Appleton was not a man of much speech, but his words had weight; for he
+was not only a minister; he came of an old family which had ruled the
+social destinies of a state, and had alternately controlled and disturbed
+its politics.  On the day of the sensation, in the fiery cloud of which
+Sally disappeared, Appleton delivered himself of his mind in the matter
+at a reception given by the President.
+
+"She will come back--and we will all take her back, be glad to have her
+back," he said.  "She has the grip of a lever which can lift the eternal
+hills with the right pressure.  Leave her alone--leave her alone.  This
+is a democratic country, and she'll prove democracy a success before
+she's done."
+
+The world knew that John Appleton had offered her marriage, and he had
+never hidden the fact.  What they did not know was that she had told him
+what she meant to do before she did it.  He had spoken to her plainly,
+bluntly, then with a voice that was blurred and a little broken, urging
+her against the course towards which she was set; but it had not availed;
+and, realising that he had come upon a powerful will underneath the sunny
+and so human surface, he had ceased to protest, to bear down upon her
+mind with his own iron force.  When he realised that all his reasoning
+was wasted, that all worldly argument was vain, he made one last attempt,
+a forlorn hope, as though to put upon record what he believed to be the
+truth.
+
+"There is no position you cannot occupy," he said.  "You have the perfect
+gift in private life, and you have a public gift.  You have a genius for
+ruling.  Say, my dear, don't wreck it all.  I know you are not for me,
+but there are better men in the country than I am.  Hartzman will be a
+great man one day--he wants you.  Young Tilden wants you; he has
+millions, and he will never disgrace them or you, the power which they
+can command, and the power which you have.  And there are others.  Your
+people have told you they will turn you off; the world will say things--
+will rend you.  There is nothing so popular for the moment as the fall of
+a favourite.  But that's nothing--it's nothing at all compared with the
+danger to yourself.  I didn't sleep last night thinking of it.  Yet I'm
+glad you wrote me; it gave me time to think, and I can tell you the truth
+as I see it.  Haven't you thought that he will drag you down, down, down,
+wear out your soul, break and sicken your life, destroy your beauty--you
+are beautiful, my dear, beyond what the world sees, even.  Give it up--
+ah, give it up, and don't break our hearts!  There are too many people
+loving you for you to sacrifice them--and yourself, too.  .  .  . You've
+had such a good time!"
+
+"It's been like a dream," she interrupted, in a faraway voice, "like a
+dream, these two years."
+
+"And it's been such a good dream," he urged; "and you will only go to a
+bad one, from which you will never wake.  The thing has fastened on him;
+he will never give it up.  And penniless, too--his father has cast him
+off.  My girl, it's impossible.  Listen to me.  There's no one on earth
+that would do more for you than I would--no one."
+
+"Dear, dear friend!" she cried with a sudden impulse, and caught his
+hand in hers and kissed it before he could draw it back.  "You are so
+true, and you think you are right.  But, but"--her eyes took on a deep,
+steady, far-away look--"but I will save him; and we shall not be
+penniless in the end.  Meanwhile I have seven hundred dollars a year of
+my own.  No one can touch that.  Nothing can change me now--and I have
+promised."
+
+When he saw her fixed determination, he made no further protest, but
+asked that he might help her, be with her the next day, when she was to
+take a step which the wise world would say must lead to sorrow and a
+miserable end.
+
+The step she took was to marry Jim Templeton, the drunken, cast-off son
+of a millionaire senator from Kentucky, who controlled railways, and
+owned a bank, and had so resented his son's inebriate habits that for
+five years he had never permitted Jim's name to be mentioned in his
+presence.  Jim had had twenty thousand dollars left him by his mother,
+and a small income of three hundred dollars from an investment which had
+been made for him when a little boy.  And this had carried him on; for,
+drunken as he was, he had sense enough to eke out the money, limiting
+himself to three thousand dollars a year.  He had four thousand dollars
+left, and his tiny income of three hundred, when he went to Sally
+Seabrook, after having been sober for a month, and begged her to marry
+him.
+
+Before dissipation had made him look ten years older than he was, there
+had been no handsomer man in all America.  Even yet he had a remarkable
+face; long, delicate, with dark brown eyes, as fair a forehead as man
+could wish, and black, waving hair, streaked with grey-grey, though he
+was but twenty-nine years of age.
+
+When Sally was fifteen and he twenty-two, he had fallen in love with her
+and she with him; and nothing had broken the early romance.  He had
+captured her young imagination, and had fastened his image on her heart.
+Her people, seeing the drift of things, had sent her to a school on the
+Hudson, and the two did not meet for some time.  Then came a stolen
+interview, and a fastening of the rivets of attraction--for Jim had gifts
+of a wonderful kind.  He knew his Horace and Anacreon and Heine and
+Lamartine and Dante in the originals, and a hundred others; he was a
+speaker of power and grace; and he had a clear, strong head for business.
+He was also a lawyer, and was junior attorney to his father's great
+business.  It was because he had the real business gift, not because
+he had a brilliant and scholarly mind, that his father had taken him
+into his concerns, and was the more unforgiving when he gave way to
+temptation.  Otherwise, he would have pensioned Jim off, and dismissed
+him from his mind as a useless, insignificant person; for Horace,
+Anacreon, and philosophy and history were to him the recreations of the
+feeble-minded.  He had set his heart on Jim, and what Jim could do and
+would do by and by in the vast financial concerns he controlled, when he
+was ready to slip out and down; but Jim had disappointed him beyond
+calculation.
+
+In the early days of their association Jim had left his post and taken to
+drink at critical moments in their operations.  At first, high words had
+been spoken; then there came the strife of two dissimilar natures, and
+both were headstrong, and each proud and unrelenting in his own way.
+Then, at last, had come the separation, irrevocable and painful; and Jim
+had flung out into the world, a drunkard, who, sober for a fortnight or a
+month, or three months, would afterward go off on a spree, in which he
+quoted Sappho and Horace in taverns, and sang bacchanalian songs with a
+voice meant for the stage--a heritage from an ancestor who had sung upon
+the English stage a hundred years before.  Even in his cups, even after
+his darling vice had submerged him, Jim Templeton was a man marked out
+from his fellows, distinguished and very handsome.  Society, however, had
+ceased to recognise him for a long time, and he did not seek it.  For two
+or three years he practised law now and then.  He took cases, preferably
+criminal cases, for which very often he got no pay; but that, too, ceased
+at last.  Now, in his quiet, sober intervals he read omnivorously, and
+worked out problems in physics for which he had a taste, until the old
+appetite surged over him again.  Then his spirits rose, and he was the
+old brilliant talker, the joyous galliard until, in due time, he became
+silently and lethargically drunk.
+
+In one of his sober intervals he had met Sally Seabrook in the street.
+It was the first time in four years, for he had avoided her, and though
+she had written to him once or twice, he had never answered her--shame
+was in his heart.  Yet all the time the old song was in Sally's ears.
+Jim Templeton had touched her in some distant and intimate corner of her
+nature where none other had reached; and in all her gay life, when men
+had told their tale of admiration in their own way, her mind had gone
+back to Jim, and what he had said under the magnolia trees; and his voice
+had drowned all others.  She was not blind to what he had become, but a
+deep belief possessed her that she, of all the world, could save him.
+She knew how futile it would look to the world, how wild a dream it
+looked even to her own heart, how perilous it was; but, play upon the
+surface of things as she had done so much and so often in her brief
+career, she was seized of convictions having origin, as it might seem,
+in something beyond herself.
+
+So when she and Jim met in the street, the old true thing rushed upon
+them both, and for a moment they stood still and looked at each other.
+As they might look who say farewell forever, so did each dwell upon the
+other's face.  That was the beginning of the new epoch.  A few days more,
+and Jim came to her and said that she alone could save him; and she meant
+him to say it, had led him to the saying, for the same conviction was
+burned deep in her own soul.  She knew the awful risk she was taking,
+that the step must mean social ostracism, and that her own people would
+be no kinder to her than society; but she gasped a prayer, smiled at Jim
+as though all were well, laid her plans, made him promise her one thing
+on his knees, and took the plunge.
+
+Her people did as she expected.  She was threatened with banishment from
+heart and home--with disinheritance; but she pursued her course; and the
+only person who stood with her and Jim at the altar was John Appleton,
+who would not be denied, and who had such a half-hour with Jim before
+the ceremony as neither of them forgot in the years that the locust ate
+thereafter.  And, standing at the altar, Jim's eyes were still wet, with
+new resolves in his heart and a being at his side meant for the best man
+in the world.  As he knelt beside her, awaiting the benediction, a sudden
+sense of the enormity of this act came upon him, and for her sake he
+would have drawn back then, had it not been too late.  He realised that
+it was a crime to put this young, beautiful life in peril; that his own
+life was a poor, contemptible thing, and that he had been possessed of
+the egotism of the selfish and the young.
+
+But the thing was done, and a new life was begun.  Before they were
+launched upon it, however, before society had fully grasped the
+sensation, or they had left upon their journey to northern Canada, where
+Sally intended they should work out their problem and make their home,
+far and free from all old associations, a curious thing happened.  Jim's
+father sent an urgent message to Sally to come to him.  When she came,
+he told her she was mad, and asked her why she had thrown her life away.
+
+"Why have you done it?" he said.  "You--you knew all about him; you
+might have married the best man in the country.  You could rule a
+kingdom; you have beauty and power, and make people do what you want:
+and you've got a sot."
+
+"He is your son," she answered quietly.
+
+She looked so beautiful and so fine as she stood there, fearless and
+challenging before him, that he was moved.  But he would not show it.
+
+"He was my son--when he was a man," he retorted grimly.
+
+"He is the son of the woman you once loved," she answered.
+
+The old man turned his head away.
+
+"What would she have said to what you did to Jim?"  He drew himself
+around sharply.  Her dagger had gone home, but he would not let her know
+it.
+
+"Leave her out of the question--she was a saint," he said roughly.
+
+"She cannot be left out; nor can you.  He got his temperament naturally;
+he inherited his weakness from your grandfather, from her father.  Do you
+think you are in no way responsible?"
+
+He was silent for a moment, but then said stubbornly: "Why--why have you
+done it?  What's between him and me can't be helped; we are father and
+son; but you--you had no call, no responsibility."
+
+"I love Jim.  I always loved him, ever since I can remember, as you did.
+I see my way ahead.  I will not desert him.  No one cares what happens to
+him, no one but me.  Your love wouldn't stand the test; mine will."
+
+"Your folks have disinherited you,--you have almost nothing, and I will
+not change my mind.  What do you see ahead of you?"
+
+"Jim--only Jim--and God."
+
+Her eyes were shining, her hands were clasped together at her side in the
+tenseness of her feeling, her indomitable spirit spoke in her face.
+
+Suddenly the old man brought his fist down on the table with a bang.
+"It's a crime--oh, it's a crime, to risk your life so!  You ought to have
+been locked up.  I'd have done it."
+
+"Listen to me," she rejoined quietly.  "I know the risk.  But do you
+think that I could have lived my life out, feeling that I might have
+saved Jim, and didn't try?  You talk of beauty and power and ruling--you
+say what others have said to me.  Which is the greater thing, to get what
+pleases one, or to work for something which is more to one than all else
+in the world?  To save one life, one intellect, one great man--oh, he has
+the making of a great man in him!--to save a soul, would not life be well
+lost, would not love be well spent in doing it?"
+
+"Love's labour lost," said the old man slowly, cynically, but not without
+emotion.
+
+"I have ambition," she continued.  "No girl was ever more ambitious, but
+my ambition is to make the most and best of myself.  Place?--Jim and I
+will hold it yet.  Power?--it shall be as it must be; but Jim and I will
+work for it to fulfil ourselves.  For me--ah, if I can save him--and I
+mean to do so--do you think that I would not then have my heaven on
+earth?  You want money--money--money, power, and to rule; and these are
+to you the best things in the world.  I make my choice differently,
+though I would have these other things if I could; and I hope I shall.
+But Jim first--Jim first, your son, Jim--my husband, Jim."
+
+The old man got to his feet slowly.  She had him at bay.  "But you are
+great," he said, "great!  It is an awful stake--awful.  Yet if you win,
+you'll have what money can't buy.  And listen to me.  We'll make the
+stake bigger.  It will give it point, too, in another way.  If you keep
+Jim sober for four years from the day of your marriage, on the last day
+of that four years I'll put in your hands for you and him, or for your
+child--if you have one--five millions of dollars.  I am a man of my word.
+While Jim drinks I won't take him back; he's disinherited.  I'll give him
+nothing now or hereafter.  Save him for four years,--if he can do that he
+will do all, and there's five millions as sure as the sun's in heaven.
+Amen and amen."
+
+He opened the door.  There was a strange soft light in her eyes as she
+came to go.
+
+"Aren't you going to kiss me?" she said, looking at him whimsically.
+
+He was disconcerted.  She did not wait, but reached up and kissed him on
+the cheek.  "Good-by," she said with a smile.  "We'll win the stake.
+Good-by."
+
+An instant, and she was gone.  He shut the door, then turned and looked
+in a mirror on the wall.  Abstractedly he touched the cheek she had
+kissed.  Suddenly a change passed over his face.  He dropped in a chair,
+and his fist struck the table as he said: "By God, she may do it, she may
+do it!  But it's life and death--it's life and death."
+
+Society had its sensation, and then the veil dropped.  For a long time
+none looked behind it except Jim's father.  He had too much at stake not
+to have his telescope upon them.  A detective followed them to keep Jim's
+record.  But this they did not know.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+From the day they left Washington Jim put his life and his fate in his
+wife's hands.  He meant to follow her judgment, and, self-willed and
+strong in intellect as he was, he said that she should have a fair chance
+of fulfilling her purpose.  There had been many pour parlers as to what
+Jim should do.  There was farming.  She set that aside, because it meant
+capital, and it also meant monotony and loneliness; and capital was
+limited, and monotony and loneliness were bad for Jim, deadening an
+active brain which must not be deprived of stimulants--stimulants of a
+different sort, however, from those which had heretofore mastered it.
+There was the law.  But Jim would have to become a citizen of Canada,
+change his flag, and where they meant to go--to the outskirts--there
+would be few opportunities for the law; and with not enough to do there
+would be danger.  Railway construction?  That seemed good in many ways,
+but Jim had not the professional knowledge necessary; his railway
+experience with his father had only been financial.  Above all else he
+must have responsibility, discipline, and strict order in his life.
+
+"Something that will be good for my natural vanity, and knock the
+nonsense out of me," Jim agreed, as they drew farther and farther away
+from Washington and the past, and nearer and nearer to the Far North and
+their future.  Never did two more honest souls put their hands in each
+other's, and set forth upon the thorniest path to a goal which was their
+hearts' desire.  Since they had become one, there had come into Sally's
+face that illumination which belongs only to souls possessed of an idea
+greater than themselves, outside themselves--saints, patriots; faces
+which have been washed in the salt tears dropped for others' sorrows,
+and lighted by the fire of self-sacrifice.  Sally Seabrook, the high-
+spirited, the radiant, the sweetly wilful, the provoking, to concentrate
+herself upon this narrow theme--to reconquer the lost paradise of one
+vexed mortal soul!
+
+What did Jim's life mean?--It was only one in the millions coming and
+going, and every man must work out his own salvation.  Why should she
+cramp her soul to this one issue, when the same soul could spend itself
+upon the greater motives and in the larger circle?  A wide world of
+influence had opened up before her; position, power, adulation, could all
+have been hers, as John Appleton and Jim's father had said.  She might
+have moved in well-trodden ways, through gardens of pleasure, lived a
+life where all would be made easy, where she would be shielded at every
+turn, and her beauty would be flattered by luxury into a constant glow.
+She was not so primitive, so unintellectual, as not to have thought of
+this, else her decision would have had less importance; she would have
+been no more than an infatuated emotional woman with a touch of second
+class drama in her nature.  She had thought of it all, and she had made
+her choice.  The easier course was the course for meaner souls, and she
+had not one vein of thin blood nor a small idea in her whole nature.  She
+had a heart and mind for great issues.  She believed that Jim had a great
+brain, and would and could accomplish great things.  She knew that he had
+in him the strain of hereditary instinct--his mother's father had ended
+a brief life in a drunken duel on the Mississippi, and Jim's boyhood had
+never had discipline or direction, or any strenuous order.  He might
+never acquire order, and the power that order and habit and the daily
+iteration of necessary thoughts and acts bring; but the prospect did not
+appal her.  She had taken the risk with her eyes wide open; had set her
+own life and happiness in the hazard.  But Jim must be saved, must be
+what his talents, his genius, entitled him to be.  And the long game must
+have the long thought.
+
+So, as they drew into the great Saskatchewan Valley, her hand in his,
+and hope in his eyes, and such a look of confidence and pride in her as
+brought back his old strong beauty of face, and smoothed the careworn
+lines of self-indulgence, she gave him his course: as a private he must
+join the North-West Mounted Police, the red-coated riders of the plains,
+and work his way up through every stage of responsibility, beginning at
+the foot of the ladder of humbleness and self-control.  She believed that
+he would agree with her proposal; but her hands clasped his a little more
+firmly and solicitously--there was a faint, womanly fear at her heart--
+as she asked him if he would do it.  The life meant more than occasional
+separation; it meant that there would be periods when she would not be
+with him; and there was great danger in that; but she knew that the risks
+must be taken, and he must not be wholly reliant on her presence for his
+moral strength.
+
+His face fell for a moment when she made the suggestion, but it cleared
+presently, and he said with a dry laugh: "Well, I guess they must make me
+a sergeant pretty quick.  I'm a colonel in the Kentucky Carbineers!"
+
+She laughed, too; then a moment afterwards, womanlike, wondered if she
+was right, and was a little frightened.  But that was only because she
+was not self-opinionated, and was anxious, more anxious than any woman
+in all the North.
+
+It happened as Jim said; he was made a sergeant at once--Sally managed
+that; for, when it came to the point, and she saw the conditions in which
+the privates lived, and realised that Jim must be one of them and clean
+out the stables, and groom his horse and the officers' horses, and fetch
+and carry, her heart failed her, and she thought that she was making her
+remedy needlessly heroical.  So she went to see the Commissioner, who was
+on a tour of scrutiny on their arrival at the post, and, as better men
+than he had done in more knowing circles, he fell under her spell.  If
+she had asked for a lieutenancy, he would probably have corrupted some
+member of Parliament into securing it for Jim.
+
+But Jim was made a sergeant, and the Commissioner and the captain of the
+troop kept their eyes on him.  So did other members of the troop who did
+not quite know their man, and attempted, figuratively, to pinch him here
+and there.  They found that his actions were greater than his words, and
+both were in perfect harmony in the end, though his words often seemed
+pointless to their minds, until they understood that they had conveyed
+truths through a medium more like a heliograph than a telephone.  By and
+by they begin to understand his heliographing, and, when they did that,
+they began to swear by him, not at him.
+
+In time it was found that the troop never had a better disciplinarian
+than Jim.  He knew when to shut his eyes, and when to keep them open.  To
+non-essentials he kept his eyes shut; to essentials he kept them very
+wide open.  There were some men of good birth from England and elsewhere
+among them, and these mostly understood him first.  But they all
+understood Sally from the beginning, and after a little they were glad
+enough to be permitted to come, on occasion, to the five-roomed little
+house near the barracks, and hear her talk, then answer her questions,
+and, as men had done at Washington, open out their hearts to her.  They
+noticed, however, that while she made them barley-water, and all kinds
+of soft drinks from citric acid, sarsaparilla and the like, and had one
+special drink of her own invention, which she called cream-nectar, no
+spirits were to be had.  They also noticed that Jim never drank a drop of
+liquor, and by and by, one way or another, they got a glimmer of the real
+truth, before it became known who he really was or anything of his story.
+And the interest in the two, and in Jim's reformation, spread through the
+country, while Jim gained reputation as the smartest man in the force.
+
+They were on the outskirts of civilisation; as Jim used to say, "One
+step ahead of the procession."  Jim's duty was to guard the columns of
+settlement and progress, and to see that every man got his own rights and
+not more than his rights; that justice should be the plumb-line of march
+and settlement.  His principle was embodied in certain words which he
+quoted once to Sally from the prophet Amos: "And the Lord said unto me,
+Amos, what seest thou?  And I said, A plumbline."
+
+On the day that Jim became a lieutenant his family increased by one.
+It was a girl, and they called her Nancy, after Jim's mother.  It was
+the anniversary of their marriage, and, so far, Jim had won, with what
+fightings and strugglings and wrestlings of the spirit only Sally and
+himself knew.  And she knew as well as he, and always saw the storm
+coming before it broke--a restlessness, then a moodiness, then a hungry,
+eager, helpless look, and afterwards an agony of longing, a feverish
+desire to break away and get the thrilling thing which would still the
+demon within him.
+
+There had been moments when his doom seemed certain--he knew and she knew
+that if he once got drunk again he would fall never to rise.  On one
+occasion, after a hard, long, hungry ride, he was half-mad with desire,
+but even as he seized the flask that was offered to him by his only
+enemy, the captain of B Troop, at the next station eastward, there came
+a sudden call to duty, two hundred Indians having gone upon the war-path.
+It saved him; it broke the spell.  He had to mount and away, with the
+antidote and stimulant of responsibility driving him on.
+
+Another occasion was equally perilous to his safety.  They had been idle
+for days in a hot week in summer, waiting for orders to return from the
+rail-head where they had gone to quell a riot, and where drink and
+hilarity were common.  Suddenly--more suddenly than it had ever come, the
+demon of his thirst had Jim by the throat.  Sergeant Sewell, of the grey-
+stubble head, who loved him more than his sour heart had loved anybody in
+all his life, was holding himself ready for the physical assault he must
+make upon his superior officer, if he raised a glass to his lips, when
+salvation came once again.  An accident had occurred far down on the
+railway line, and the operator of the telegraph-office had that very day
+been stricken down with pleurisy and pneumonia.  In despair the manager
+had sent to Jim, eagerly hoping that he might help them, for the Riders
+of the Plains were a sort of court of appeal for every trouble in the Far
+North.
+
+Instantly Jim was in the saddle with his troop.  Out of curiosity he
+had learned telegraphy when a boy, as he had learned many things, and,
+arrived at the scene of the accident, he sent messages and received them-
+-by sound, not on paper as did the official operator, to the amazement
+and pride of the troop.  Then, between caring for the injured in the
+accident, against the coming of the relief train, and nursing the sick
+operator through the dark moments of his dangerous illness, he passed a
+crisis of his own disease triumphantly; but not the last crisis.
+
+So the first and so the second and third years passed in safety.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+"PLEASE, I want to go, too, Jim."
+
+Jim swung round and caught the child up in his arms.  "Say, how dare you
+call your father Jim--eh, tell me that?"
+
+"It's what mummy calls you--it's pretty."
+
+"I don't call her 'mummy' because you do, and you mustn't call me Jim
+because she does--do you hear?"  The whimsical face lowered a little,
+then the rare and beautiful dark blue eyes raised slowly, shaded by the
+long lashes, and the voice said demurely, "Yes--Jim."
+
+"Nancy--Nancy," said a voice from the corner in reproof, mingled with
+suppressed laughter.  "Nancy, you musn't be saucy.  You must say 'father'
+to--"
+
+"Yes, mummy.  I'll say father to--Jim."
+
+"You imp--you imp of delight," said Jim, as he strained the dainty little
+lass to his breast, while she appeared interested in a wave of his black
+hair, which she curled around her finger.
+
+Sally came forwards with the little parcel of sandwiches she had been
+preparing, and put them in the saddle-bags lying on a chair at the door,
+in readiness for the journey Jim was about to make.  Her eyes were
+glistening, and her face had a heightened colour.  The three years which
+had passed since she married had touched her not at all to her
+disadvantage, rather to her profit.  She looked not an hour older;
+motherhood had only added to her charm, lending it a delightful gravity.
+The prairie life had given a shining quality to her handsomeness, an air
+of depth and firmness, an exquisite health and clearness to the colour
+in her cheeks.  Her step was as light as Nancy's, elastic and buoyant--
+a gliding motion which gave a sinuous grace to the movements of her body.
+There had also come into her eyes a vigilance such as deaf people
+possess, a sensitive observation imparting a deeper intelligence to the
+face.
+
+Here was the only change by which you could guess the story of her life.
+Her eyes were like the ears of an anxious mother who can never sleep till
+every child is abed; whose sense is quick to hear the faintest footstep
+without or within; and who, as years go on, and her children grow older
+and older, must still lie awake hearkening for the late footstep on the
+stair.  In Sally's eyes was the story of the past three years: of love
+and temptation and struggle, of watchfulness and yearning and anxiety, of
+determination and an inviolable hope.  Her eyes had a deeper look than
+that in Jim's.  Now, as she gazed at him, the maternal spirit rose up
+from the great well of protectiveness in her and engulfed both husband
+and child.  There was always something of the maternal in her eyes when
+she looked at Jim.  He did not see it--he saw only the wonderful blue,
+and the humour which had helped him over such difficult places these past
+three years.  In steadying and strengthening Jim's will, in developing
+him from his Southern indolence into Northern industry and sense of
+responsibility, John Appleton's warnings had rung in Sally's ears, and
+Freddy Hartzman's forceful and high-minded personality had passed before
+her eyes with an appeal powerful and stimulating; but always she came to
+the same upland of serene faith and white-hearted resolve; and Jim became
+dearer and dearer.
+
+The baby had done much to brace her faith in the future and comfort her
+anxious present.  The child had intelligence of a rare order.  She would
+lie by the half-hour on the floor, turning over the leaves of a book
+without pictures, and, before she could speak, would read from the pages
+in a language all her own.  She made a fairy world for herself, peopled
+by characters to whom she gave names, to whom she assigned curious
+attributes and qualities.  They were as real to her as though flesh and
+blood, and she was never lonely, and never cried; and she had buried
+herself in her father's heart.  She had drawn to her the roughest men in
+the troop, and for old Sewell, the grim sergeant, she had a specially
+warm place.
+
+"You can love me if you like," she had said to him at the very start,
+with the egotism of childhood; but made haste to add, "because I love
+you, Gri-Gri."  She called him Gri-Gri from the first, but they knew only
+long afterwards that "gri-gri" meant "grey-grey," to signify that she
+called him after his grizzled hairs.
+
+What she had been in the life-history of Sally and Jim they both knew.
+Jim regarded her with an almost superstitious feeling.  Sally was his
+strength, his support, his inspiration, his bulwark of defence; Nancy was
+the charm he wore about his neck--his mascot, he called her.  Once, when
+she was ill, he had suffered as he had never done before in his life.  He
+could not sleep nor eat, and went about his duties like one in a dream.
+When his struggles against his enemy were fiercest, he kept saying over
+her name to himself, as though she could help him.  Yet always it was
+Sally's hand he held in the darkest hours, in his brutal moments; for in
+this fight between appetite and will there are moments when only the
+animal seems to exist, and the soul disappears in the glare and gloom of
+the primal emotions.  Nancy he called his "lucky sixpence," but he called
+Sally his "guinea-girl."
+
+From first to last his whimsicality never deserted him.  In his worst
+hours, some innate optimism and humour held him steady in his fight.
+It was not depression that possessed him at the worst, but the violence
+of an appetite most like a raging pain which men may endure with a smile
+upon their lips.  He carried in his face the story of a conflict, the
+aftermath of bitter experience; and through all there pulsed the glow of
+experience.  He had grown handsomer, and the graceful decision of his
+figure, the deliberate certainty of every action, heightened the force of
+a singular personality.  As in the eyes of Sally, in his eyes was a long
+reflective look which told of things overcome, and yet of dangers
+present.  His lips smiled often, but the eyes said: "I have lived, I have
+seen, I have suffered, and I must suffer more.  I have loved, I have been
+loved under the shadow of the sword.  Happiness I have had, and golden
+hours, but not peace--never peace.  My soul has need of peace."
+
+In the greater, deeper experience of their lives, the more material side
+of existence had grown less and less to them.  Their home was a model of
+simple comfort and some luxury, though Jim had insisted that Sally's
+income should not be spent, except upon the child, and should be saved
+for the child, their home being kept on his pay and on the tiny income
+left by his mother.  With the help of an Indian girl, and a half-breed
+for outdoor work and fires and gardening, Sally had cared for the house
+herself.  Ingenious and tasteful, with a gift for cooking and an educated
+hand, she had made her little home as pretty as their few possessions
+would permit.  Refinement covered all, and three or four-score books were
+like so many friends to comfort her when Jim was away; like kind and
+genial neighbours when he was at home.  From Browning she had written
+down in her long sliding handwriting, and hung up beneath Jim's looking-
+glass, the heartening and inspiring words:
+
+         "One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
+               Never doubted clouds would break,
+          Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
+          Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
+               Sleep to wake."
+
+They had lived above the sordid, and there was something in the nature of
+Jim's life to help them to it.  He belonged to a small handful of men who
+had control over an empire, with an individual responsibility and
+influence not contained in the scope of their commissions.  It was a
+matter of moral force and character, and of uniform, symbolical only of
+the great power behind; of the long arm of the State; of the insistence
+of the law, which did not rely upon force alone, but on the certainty of
+its administration.  In such conditions the smallest brain was bound to
+expand, to take on qualities of judgment and temperateness which would
+never be developed in ordinary circumstances.  In the case of Jim
+Templeton, who needed no stimulant to his intellect, but rather a
+steadying quality, a sense of proportion, the daily routine, the command
+of men, the diverse nature of his duties, half civil, half military, the
+personal appeals made on all sides by the people of the country for
+advice, for help, for settlement of disputes, for information which his
+well-instructed mind could give--all these modified the romantic
+brilliance of his intellect, made it and himself more human.
+
+It had not come to him all at once.  His intellect at first stood in his
+way.  His love of paradox, his deep observation, his insight, all made
+him inherently satirical, though not cruelly so; but satire had become
+pure whimsicality at last; and he came to see that, on the whole, the
+world was imperfect, but also, on the whole, was moving towards
+perfection rather than imperfection.  He grew to realise that what seemed
+so often weakness in men was tendency and idiosyncrasy rather than evil.
+And in the end he thought better of himself as he came to think better
+of all others.  For he had thought less of all the world because he had
+thought so little of himself.  He had overestimated his own faults, had
+made them into crimes in his own eyes, and, observing things in others of
+similar import, had become almost a cynic in intellect, while in heart he
+had remained, a boy.
+
+In all that he had changed a great deal.  His heart was still the heart
+of a boy, but his intellect had sobered, softened, ripened--even in this
+secluded and seemingly unimportant life; as Sally had said and hoped it
+would.  Sally's conviction had been right.  But the triumph was not yet
+achieved.  She knew it.  On occasion the tones of his voice told her, the
+look that came into his eyes proclaimed it to her, his feverishness and
+restlessness made it certain.  How many a night had she thrown her arm
+over his shoulder, and sought his hand and held it while in the dark
+silence, wide-eyed, dry-lipped, and with a throat like fire he had held
+himself back from falling.  There was liquor in the house--the fight
+would not have been a fight without it.  She had determined that he
+should see his enemy and meet him in the plains and face him down; and he
+was never many feet away from his possible disaster.  Yet for long over
+three years all had gone well.  There was another year.  Would he last
+out the course?
+
+At first the thought of the great stake for which she was playing in
+terms of currency, with the head of Jim's father on every note, was much
+with her.  The amazing nature of the offer of five millions of dollars
+stimulated her imagination, roused her; gold coins are counters in the
+game of success, signs and tokens.  Money alone could not have lured her;
+but rather what it represented--power, width of action, freedom to help
+when the heart prompted, machinery for carrying out large plans, ability
+to surround with advantage those whom we love.  So, at first, while yet
+the memories of Washington were much with her, the appeal of the millions
+was strong.  The gallant nature of the contest and the great stake braced
+her; she felt the blood quicken in her pulse.
+
+But, all through, the other thing really mastered her: the fixed idea
+that Jim must be saved.  As it deepened, the other life that she had
+lived became like the sports in which we shared when children, full of
+vivacious memory, shining with impulse and the stir of life, but not to
+be repeated--days and deeds outgrown.  So the light of one idea shone in
+her face.  Yet she was intensely human too; and if her eyes had not been
+set on the greater glory, the other thought might have vulgarised her
+mind, made her end and goal sordid--the descent of a nature rather than
+its ascension.
+
+When Nancy came, the lesser idea, the stake, took on a new importance,
+for now it seemed to her that it was her duty to secure for the child its
+rightful heritage.  Then Jim, too, appeared in a new light, as one who
+could never fulfil himself unless working through the natural channels of
+his birth, inheritance, and upbringing.  Jim, drunken and unreliable,
+with broken will and fighting to find himself--the waste places were for
+him, until he was the master of his will and emotions.  Once however,
+secure in ability to control himself, with cleansed brain and purpose
+defined, the widest field would still be too narrow for his talents--and
+the five, yes, the fifty millions of his father must be his.
+
+She had never repented having married Jim; but twice in those three years
+she had broken down and wept as though her heart would break.  There were
+times when Jim's nerves were shaken in his struggle against the unseen
+foe, and he had spoken to her querulously, almost sharply.  Yet in her
+tears there was no reproach for him, rather for herself--the fear that
+she might lose her influence over him, that she could not keep him close
+to her heart, that he might drift away from her in the commonplaces and
+monotony of work and domestic life.  Everything so depended on her being
+to him not only the one woman for whom he cared, but the woman without
+whom he could care for nothing else.
+
+"Oh, my God, give me his love," she had prayed.  "Let me keep it yet a
+little while.  For his sake, not for my own, let me have the power to
+hold his love.  Make my mind always quiet, and let me blow neither hot
+nor cold.  Help me to keep my temper sweet and cheerful, so that he will
+find the room empty where I am not, and his footsteps will quicken when
+he comes to the door.  Not for my sake, dear God, but for his, or my
+heart will break--it will break unless Thou dost help me to hold him.
+O Lord, keep me from tears; make my face happy that I may be goodly to
+his eyes, and forgive the selfishness of a poor woman who has little,
+and would keep her little and cherish it, for Christ's sake."
+
+Twice had she poured out her heart so, in the agony of her fear that she
+should lose favour in Jim's sight--she did not know how alluring she was,
+in spite of the constant proofs offered her.  She had had her will with
+all who came her way, from governor to Indian brave.  Once, in a journey
+they had made far north, soon after they came, she had stayed at a
+Hudson's Bay Company's post for some days, while there came news of
+restlessness among the Indians, because of lack of food, and Jim had
+gone farther north to steady the tribes, leaving her with the factor
+and his wife and a halfbreed servant.
+
+While she and the factor's wife were alone in the yard of the post one
+day, an Indian--chief, Arrowhead, in warpaint and feathers, entered
+suddenly, brandishing a long knife.  He had been drinking, and there
+was danger in his black eyes.  With a sudden inspiration she came forward
+quickly, nodded and smiled to him, and then pointed to a grindstone
+standing in the corner of the yard.  As she did so, she saw Indians
+crowding into the gate armed with knives, guns, bows, and arrows.  She
+beckoned to Arrowhead, and he followed her to the grindstone.  She poured
+some water on the wheel and began to turn it, nodding at the now
+impassive Indian to begin.  Presently he nodded also, and put his knife
+on the stone.  She kept turning steadily, singing to herself the while,
+as with anxiety she saw the Indians drawing closer and closer in from the
+gate.  Faster and faster she turned, and at last the Indian lifted his
+knife from the stone.  She reached out her hand with simulated interest,
+felt the edge with her thumb, the Indian looking darkly at her the while.
+Presently, after feeling the edge himself, he bent over the stone again,
+and she went on turning the wheel still singing softly.  At last he
+stopped again and felt the edge.  With a smile which showed her fine
+white teeth, she said, "Is that for me?" making a significant sign across
+her throat at the same time.
+
+The old Indian looked at her grimly, then slowly shook his head in
+negation.
+
+"I go hunt Yellow Hawk to-night," he said.  "I go fight; I like marry you
+when I come back.  How!" he said and turned away towards the gate.
+
+Some of his braves held back, the blackness of death in their looks.
+He saw.  "My knife is sharp," he said.  "The woman is brave.  She shall
+live--go and fight Yellow Hawk, or starve and die."
+
+Divining their misery, their hunger, and the savage thought that had come
+to them, Sally had whispered to the factor's wife to bring food, and the
+woman now came running out with two baskets full, and returned for more.
+Sally ran forward among the Indians and put the food into their hands.
+With grunts of satisfaction they seized what she gave, and thrust it into
+their mouths, squatting on the ground.  Arrowhead looked on stern and
+immobile, but when at last she and the factor's wife sat down before the
+braves with confidence and an air of friendliness, he sat down also;
+yet, famished as he was, he would not touch the food.  At last Sally,
+realising his proud defiance of hunger, offered him a little lump of
+pemmican and a biscuit, and with a grunt he took it from her hands and
+ate it.  Then, at his command a fire was lit, the pipe of peace was
+brought out, and Sally and the factor's wife touched their lips to it,
+and passed it on.
+
+So was a new treaty of peace and loyalty made with Arrowhead and his
+tribe by a woman without fear, whose life had seemed not worth a minute's
+purchase; and, as the sun went down, Arrowhead and his men went forth to
+make war upon Yellow Hawk beside the Nettigon River.  In this wise had
+her influence spread in the land.
+
+                    .......................
+
+Standing now with the child in his arms and his wife looking at him with
+a shining moisture of the eyes, Jim laughed outright.  There came upon
+him a sudden sense of power, of aggressive force--the will to do.  Sally
+understood, and came and laughingly grasped his arm.
+
+"Oh, Jim," she said playfully, "you are getting muscles like steel.  You
+hadn't these when you were colonel of the Kentucky Carbineers!"
+
+"I guess I need them now," he said, smiling, and with the child still in
+his arms drew her to a window looking northward.  As far as the eye could
+see, nothing but snow, like a blanket spread over the land.  Here and
+there in the wide expanse a tree silhouetted against the sky, a tracery
+of eccentric beauty, and off in the far distance a solitary horseman
+riding towards the postriding hard.
+
+"It was root, hog, or die with me, Sally," he continued, "and I rooted.
+.  .  .  I wonder--that fellow on the horse--I have a feeling about him.
+See, he's been riding hard and long-you can tell by the way the horse
+drops his legs.  He sags a bit himself.  .  .  .  But isn't it beautiful,
+all that out there--the real quintessence of life."
+
+The air was full of delicate particles of frost on which the sun
+sparkled, and though there was neither bird nor insect, nor animal,
+nor stir of leaf, nor swaying branch or waving grass, life palpitated
+in the air, energy sang its song in the footstep that crunched the frosty
+ground, that broke the crusted snow; it was in the delicate wind that
+stirred the flag by the barracks away to the left; hope smiled in the
+wide prospect over which the thrilling, bracing air trembled.  Sally had
+chosen right.
+
+"You had a big thought when you brought me here, guinea-girl," he added
+presently.  "We are going to win out here"--he set the child down--"you
+and I and this lucky sixpence."  He took up his short fur coat.  "Yes,
+we'll win, honey."  Then, with a brooding look in his face, he added:
+
+             "'The end comes as came the beginning,
+               And shadows fail into the past;
+               And the goal, is it not worth the winning,
+               If it brings us but home at the last?
+
+             "'While far through the pain of waste places
+               We tread, 'tis a blossoming rod
+               That drives us to grace from disgraces,
+               From the fens to the gardens of God!'"
+
+He paused reflectively.  "It's strange that this life up here makes you
+feel that you must live a bigger life still, that this is only the wide
+porch to the great labour-house--it makes you want to do things.  Well,
+we've got to win the stake first," he added with a laugh.
+
+"The stake is a big one, Jim--bigger than you think."
+
+"You and her and me--me that was in the gutter."
+
+"What is the gutter, dadsie?" asked Nancy.
+
+"The gutter--the gutter is where the dish-water goes, midget," he
+answered with a dry laugh.
+
+"Oh, I don't think you'd like to be in the gutter," Nancy said solemnly.
+
+"You have to get used to it first, miss," answered Jim.  Suddenly Sally
+laid both hands on Jim's shoulders and looked him in the eyes.  "You must
+win the stake Jim.  Think--now!"
+
+She laid a hand on the head of the child.  He did not know that he was
+playing for a certain five millions, perhaps fifty millions, of dollars.
+She had never told him of his father's offer.  He was fighting only for
+salvation, for those he loved, for freedom.  As they stood there, the
+conviction had come upon her that they had come to the last battle-field,
+that this journey which Jim now must take would decide all, would give
+them perfect peace or lifelong pain.  The shadow of battle was over them,
+but he had no foreboding, no premonition; he had never been so full of
+spirits and life.
+
+To her adjuration Jim replied by burying his face in her golden hair, and
+he whispered:  "Say, I've done near four years, my girl.  I think I'm all
+right now--I think.  This last six months, it's been easy--pretty fairly
+easy."
+
+"Four months more, only four months more--God be good to us!" she said
+with a little gasp.
+
+If he held out for four months more, the first great stage in their life
+--journey would be passed, the stake won.
+
+"I saw a woman get an awful fall once," Jim said suddenly.  "Her bones
+were broken in twelve places, and there wasn't a spot on her body without
+injury.  They set and fixed up every broken bone except one.  It was
+split down.  They didn't dare perform the operation; she couldn't stand
+it.  There was a limit to pain, and she had reached the boundary.  Two
+years went by, and she got better every way, but inside her leg those
+broken pieces of bone were rubbing against each other.  She tried to
+avoid the inevitable operation, but nature said, 'You must do it, or
+die in the end.'  She yielded.  Then came the long preparations for the
+operation.  Her heart shrank, her mind got tortured.  She'd suffered too
+much.  She pulled herself together, and said, 'I must conquer this
+shrinking body of mine, by my will.  How shall I do it?'  Something
+within her said, 'Think and do for others.  Forget yourself.'  And so,
+as they got her ready for her torture, she visited hospitals, agonised
+cripple as she was, and smiled and talked to the sick and broken, telling
+them of her own miseries endured and dangers faced, of the boundary of
+human suffering almost passed; and so she got her courage for her own
+trial.  And she came out all right in the end.  Well, that's the way I've
+felt sometimes.  But I'm ready for my operation now whenever it comes,
+and it's coming,
+
+I know.  Let it come when it must."  He smiled.  There came a knock at
+the door, and presently Sewell entered.  "The Commissioner wishes you to
+come over, sir," he said.
+
+"I was just coming, Sewell.  Is all ready for the start?"
+
+"Everything's ready, sir, but there's to be a change of orders.
+Something's happened--a bad job up in the Cree country, I think."
+
+A few minutes later Jim was in the Commissioner's office.  The murder of
+a Hudson's Bay Company's man had been committed in the Cree country.  The
+stranger whom Jim and Sally had seen riding across the plains had brought
+the news for thirty miles, word of the murder having been carried from
+point to point.  The Commissioner was uncertain what to do, as the Crees
+were restless through want of food and the absence of game, and a force
+sent to capture Arrowhead, the chief who had committed the murder, might
+precipitate trouble.  Jim solved the problem by offering to go alone and
+bring the chief into the post.  It was two hundred miles to the Cree
+encampment, and the journey had its double dangers.
+
+Another officer was sent on the expedition for which Jim had been
+preparing, and he made ready to go upon his lonely duty.  His wife did
+not know till three days after he had gone what the nature of his mission
+was.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Jim made his journey in good weather with his faithful dogs alone, and
+came into the camp of the Crees armed with only a revolver.  If he had
+gone with ten men, there would have been an instant melee, in which
+he would have lost his life.  This is what the chief had expected, had
+prepared for; but Jim was more formidable alone, with power far behind
+him which could come with force and destroy the tribe, if resistance was
+offered, than with fifty men.  His tongue had a gift of terse and
+picturesque speech, powerful with a people who had the gift of
+imagination.  With five hundred men ready to turn him loose in the plains
+without dogs or food, he carried himself with a watchful coolness and
+complacent determination which got home to their minds with great force.
+
+For hours the struggle for the murderer went on, a struggle of mind over
+inferior mind and matter.  Arrowhead was a chief whose will had never
+been crossed by his own people, and to master that will by a superior
+will, to hold back the destructive force which, to the ignorant minds
+of the braves, was only a natural force of defence, meant a task needing
+more than authority behind it.  For the very fear of that authority put
+in motion was an incentive to present resistance to stave off the day of
+trouble.  The faces that surrounded Jim were thin with hunger, and the
+murder that had been committed by the chief had, as its origin, the
+foolish replies of the Hudson's Bay Company's man to their demand for
+supplies.  Arrowhead had killed him with his own hand.
+
+But Jim Templeton was of a different calibre.  Although he had not been
+told it, he realised that, indirectly, hunger was the cause of the crime
+and might easily become the cause of another; for their tempers were
+sharper even than their appetites.  Upon this he played; upon this he
+made an exhortation to the chief.  He assumed that Arrowhead had become
+violent, because of his people's straits, that Arrowhead's heart yearned
+for his people and would make sacrifice for them.  Now, if Arrowhead came
+quietly, he would see that supplies of food were sent at once, and that
+arrangements were made to meet the misery of their situation.  Therefore,
+if Arrowhead came freely, he would have so much in his favour before his
+judges; if he would not come quietly, then he must be brought by force;
+and if they raised a hand to prevent it, then destruction would fall upon
+all--all save the women and children.  The law must be obeyed.  They
+might try to resist the law through him, but, if violence was shown,
+he would first kill Arrowhead, and then destruction would descend like a
+wind out of the north, darkness would swallow them, and their bones would
+cover the plains.
+
+As he ended his words a young brave sprang forwards with hatchet raised.
+Jim's revolver slipped down into his palm from his sleeve, and a bullet
+caught the brave in the lifted arm.  The hatchet dropped to the ground.
+
+Then Jim's eyes blazed, and he turned a look of anger on the chief, his
+face pale and hard, as he said: "The stream rises above the banks; come
+with me, chief, or all will drown.  I am master, and I speak.  Ye are
+hungry because ye are idle.  Ye call the world yours, yet ye will not
+stoop to gather from the earth the fruits of the earth.  Ye sit idle in
+the summer, and women and children die round you when winter comes.
+Because the game is gone, ye say.  Must the world stand still because a
+handful of Crees need a hunting-ground?  Must the makers of cities and
+the wonders of the earth, who fill the land with plenty--must they stand
+far off, because the Crees and their chief would wander over millions of
+acres, for each man a million, when by a hundred, ay, by ten, each white
+man would live in plenty, and make the land rejoice.  See.  Here is the
+truth.  When the Great Spirit draws the game away so that the hunting is
+poor, ye sit down and fill your hearts with murder, and in the blackness
+of your thoughts kill my brother.  Idle and shiftless and evil ye are,
+while the earth cries out to give you of its plenty, a great harvest from
+a little seed, if ye will but dig and plant, and plough and sow and reap,
+and lend your backs to toil.  Now hear and heed.  The end is come.
+
+"For this once ye shall be fed--by the blood of my heart, ye shall be fed!
+And another year ye shall labour, and get the fruits of your labour, and
+not stand waiting, as it were, till a fish shall pass the spear, or a
+stag water at your door, that ye may slay and eat.  The end is come, ye
+idle men.  O chief, harken!  One of your braves would have slain me, even
+as you slew my brother--he one, and you a thousand.  Speak to your people
+as I have spoken, and then come and answer for the deed done by your
+hand.  And this I say that right shall be done between men and men.
+Speak."
+
+Jim had made his great effort, and not without avail.  Arrowhead rose
+slowly, the cloud gone out of his face, and spoke to his people, bidding
+them wait in peace until food came, and appointing his son chief in his
+stead until his return.
+
+"The white man speaks truth, and I will go," he said.  "I shall return,"
+he continued, "if it be written so upon the leaves of the Tree of Life;
+and if it be not so written, I shall fade like a mist, and the tepees
+will know me not again.  The days of my youth are spent, and my step no
+longer springs from the ground.  I shuffle among the grass and the fallen
+leaves, and my eyes scarce know the stag from the doe.  The white man is
+master--if he wills it we shall die, if he wills it we shall live.  And
+this was ever so.  It is in the tale of our people.  One tribe ruled, and
+the others were their slaves.  If it is written on the leaves of the Tree
+of Life that the white man rule us for ever, then it shall be so.  I have
+spoken.  Now, behold I go."
+
+Jim had conquered, and together they sped away with the dogs through the
+sweet-smelling spruce woods where every branch carried a cloth of white,
+and the only sound heard was the swish of a blanket of snow as it fell to
+the ground from the wide webs of green, or a twig snapped under the load
+it bore.  Peace brooded in the silent and comforting forest, and Jim and
+Arrowhead, the Indian ever ahead, swung along, mile after mile, on their
+snow-shoes, emerging at last upon the wide white prairie.
+
+A hundred miles of sun and fair weather, sleeping at night in the open in
+a trench dug in the snow, no fear in the thoughts of Jim, nor evil in the
+heart of the heathen man.  There had been moments of watchfulness, of
+uncertainty, on Jim's part, the first few hours of the first night after
+they left the Cree reservation; but the conviction speedily came to Jim
+that all was well; for the chief slept soundly from the moment he lay
+down in his blankets between the dogs.  Then Jim went to sleep as in his
+own bed, and, waking, found Arrowhead lighting a fire from a little load
+of sticks from the sledges.  And between murderer and captor there sprang
+up the companionship of the open road which brings all men to a certain
+land of faith and understanding, unless they are perverted and vile.
+There was no vileness in Arrowhead.  There were no handcuffs on his
+hands, no sign of captivity; they two ate out of the same dish, drank
+from the same basin, broke from the same bread.  The crime of Arrowhead,
+the gallows waiting for him, seemed very far away.  They were only two
+silent travellers, sharing the same hardship, helping to give material
+comfort to each other--in the inevitable democracy of those far places,
+where small things are not great nor great things small; where into men's
+hearts comes the knowledge of the things that matter; where, from the
+wide, starry sky, from the august loneliness, and the soul of the life
+which has brooded there for untold generations, God teaches the values of
+this world and the next.
+
+One hundred miles of sun and fair weather, and then fifty miles of
+bitter, aching cold, with nights of peril from the increasing chill,
+so that Jim dared not sleep lest he should never wake again, but die
+benumbed and exhausted.  Yet Arrowhead slept through all.  Day after day
+so, and then ten miles of storm such as come only to the vast barrens of
+the northlands; and woe to the traveller upon whom the icy wind and the
+blinding snow descended!  Woe came upon Jim Templeton and Arrowhead, the
+heathen.
+
+In the awful struggle between man and nature that followed, the captive
+became the leader.  The craft of the plains, the inherent instinct, the
+feeling which was more than eyesight became the only hope.  One whole day
+to cover ten miles--an endless path of agony, in which Jim went down
+again and again, but came up blinded by snow and drift, and cut as with
+lashes by the angry wind.  At the end of the ten miles was a Hudson's Bay
+Company's post and safety; and through ten hours had the two struggled
+towards it, going off at tangents, circling on their own tracks; but the
+Indian, by an instinct as sure as the needle to the pole, getting the
+direction to the post again, in the moments of direst peril and
+uncertainty.  To Jim the world became a sea of maddening forces which
+buffeted him; a whirlpool of fire in which his brain was tortured, his
+mind was shrivelled up; a vast army rending itself, each man against the
+other.  It was a purgatory of music, broken by discords; and then at
+last--how sweet it all was, after the eternity of misery--"Church bells
+and voices low," and Sally singing to him, Nancy's voice calling!  Then,
+nothing but sleep--sleep, a sinking down millions of miles in an ether of
+drowsiness which thrilled him; and after--no more.
+
+None who has suffered up to the limit of what the human body and soul
+may bear can remember the history of those distracted moments when the
+struggle became one between the forces in nature and the forces in man,
+between agonised body and smothered mind, yet with the divine
+intelligence of the created being directing, even though subconsciously,
+the fight.
+
+How Arrowhead found the post in the mad storm he could never have told.
+Yet he found it, with Jim unconscious on the sledge and with limbs
+frozen, all the dogs gone but two, the leathers over the Indian's
+shoulders as he fell against the gate of the post with a shrill cry that
+roused the factor and his people within, together with Sergeant Sewell,
+who had been sent out from headquarters to await Jim's arrival there.  It
+was Sewell's hand which first felt Jim's heart and pulse, and found that
+there was still life left, even before it could be done by the doctor
+from headquarters, who had come to visit a sick man at the post.
+
+For hours they worked with snow upon the frozen limbs to bring back life
+and consciousness.  Consciousness came at last with half delirium, half
+understanding; as emerging from the passing sleep of anaesthetics, the
+eye sees things and dimly registers them, before the brain has set them
+in any relation to life or comprehension.
+
+But Jim was roused at last, and the doctor presently held to his lips a
+glass of brandy.  Then from infinite distance Jim's understanding
+returned; the mind emerged, but not wholly, from the chaos in which it
+was travelling.  His eyes stood out in eagerness.
+
+"Brandy!  brandy!" he said hungrily.
+
+With an oath Sewell snatched the glass from the doctor's hand, put it on
+the table, then stooped to Jim's ear and said hoarsely: "Remember--Nancy.
+For God's sake, sir, don't drink."
+
+Jim's head fell back, the fierce light went out of his eyes, the face
+became greyer and sharper.  "Sally--Nancy--Nancy," he whispered, and his
+fingers clutched vaguely at the quilt.
+
+"He must have brandy or he will die.  The system is pumped out.  He must
+be revived," said the doctor.  He reached again for the glass of spirits.
+
+Jim understood now.  He was on the borderland between life and death; his
+feet were at the brink.  "No--not--brandy, no!" he moaned.  "Sally-
+Sally, kiss me," he said faintly, from the middle world in which he was.
+
+"Quick, the broth!" said Sewell to the factor, who had been preparing
+it.  "Quick, while there's a chance."  He stooped and called into Jim's
+ear: "For the love of God, wake up, sir.  They're coming--they're both
+coming--Nancy's coming.  They'll soon be here."  What matter that he
+lied, a life was at stake.
+
+Jim's eyes opened again.  The doctor was standing with the brandy in
+his hand.  Half madly Jim reached out.  "I must live until they come,"
+he cried; "the brandy--give it me!  Give it--ah, no, no, I must not!"
+he added, gasping, his lips trembling, his hands shaking.
+
+Sewell held the broth to his lips.  He drank a little, yet his face
+became greyer and greyer; a bluish tinge spread about his mouth.
+
+"Have you nothing else, sir?" asked Sewell in despair.  The doctor put
+down the brandy, went quickly to his medicine-case, dropped into a glass
+some liquid from a phial, came over again, and poured a little between
+the lips; then a little more, as Jim's eyes opened again; and at last
+every drop in the glass trickled down the sinewy throat.
+
+Presently as they watched him the doctor said: "It will not do.  He must
+have brandy.  It has life-food in it."
+
+Jim understood the words.  He knew that if he drank the brandy the
+chances against his future were terrible.  He had made his vow, and he
+must keep it.  Yet the thirst was on him; his enemy had him by the throat
+again, was dragging him down.  Though his body was so cold, his throat
+was on fire.  But in the extremity of his strength his mind fought on--
+fought on, growing weaker every moment.  He was having his last fight.
+They watched him with an aching anxiety, and there was anger in the
+doctor's face.  He had no patience with these forces arrayed against him.
+
+At last the doctor whispered to Sewell: "It's no use; he must have the
+brandy, or he can't live an hour."
+
+Sewell weakened; the tears fell down his rough, hard cheeks.  "It'll ruin
+him-it's ruin or death."
+
+"Trust a little more in God, and in the man's strength.  Let us give him
+the chance.  Force it down his throat--he's not responsible," said the
+physician, to whom saving life was more than all else.
+
+Suddenly there appeared at the bedside Arrowhead, gaunt and weak, his
+face swollen, the skin of it broken by the whips of storm.
+
+"He is my brother," he said, and, stooping, laid both hands, which he had
+held before the fire for a long time, on Jim's heart.  "Take his feet,
+his hands, his, legs, and his head in your hands," he said to them all.
+"Life is in us; we will give him life."
+
+He knelt down and kept both hands on Jim's heart, while the others, even
+the doctor, awed by his act, did as they were bidden.  "Shut your eyes.
+Let your life go into him.  Think of him, and him alone.  Now!" said
+Arrowhead in a strange voice.
+
+He murmured, and continued murmuring, his body drawing closer and closer
+to Jim's body, while in the deep silence, broken only by the chanting of
+his low monotonous voice, the others pressed Jim's hands and head and
+feet and legs--six men under the command of a heathen murderer.
+
+The minutes passed.  The colour came back to Jim's face, the skin of his
+hands filled up, they ceased twitching, his pulse got stronger, his eyes
+opened with a new light in them.
+
+"I'm living, anyhow," he said at last with a faint smile.  "I'm hungry--
+broth, please."
+
+The fight was won, and Arrowhead, the pagan murderer, drew over to the
+fire and crouched down beside it, his back to the bed, impassive and
+still.  They brought him a bowl of broth and bread, which he drank
+slowly, and placed the empty bowl between his knees.  He sat there
+through the night, though they tried to make him lie down.
+
+As the light came in at the windows, Sewell touched him on the shoulder,
+and said: "He is sleeping now."
+
+"I hear my brother breathe," answered Arrowhead.  "He will live."
+
+All night he had listened, and had heard Jim's breath as only a man who
+has lived in waste places can hear.  "He will live.  What I take with one
+hand I give with the other."
+
+He had taken the life of the factor; he had given Jim his life.  And when
+he was tried three months later for murder, some one else said this for
+him, and the hearts of all, judge and jury, were so moved they knew not
+what to do.
+
+But Arrowhead was never sentenced, for, at the end of the first day's
+trial, he lay down to sleep and never waked again.  He was found the next
+morning still and cold, and there was clasped in his hands a little doll
+which Nancy had given him on one of her many visits to the prison during
+her father's long illness.  They found a piece of paper in his belt with
+these words in the Cree language: "With my hands on his heart at the post
+I gave him the life that was in me, saving but a little until now.
+Arrowhead, the chief, goes to find life again by the well at the root
+of the tree.  How!"
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+On the evening of the day that Arrowhead made his journey to "the well
+at the root of the tree" a stranger knocked at the door of Captain
+Templeton's cottage; then, without awaiting admittance, entered.
+
+Jim was sitting with Nancy on his knee, her head against his shoulder,
+Sally at his side, her face alight with some inner joy.  Before the knock
+came to the door Jim had just said, "Why do your eyes shine so, Sally?
+What's in your mind?"  She had been about to answer, to say to him what
+had been swelling her heart with pride, though she had not meant to tell
+him what he had forgotten--not till midnight.  But the figure that
+entered the room, a big man with deep-set eyes, a man of power who had
+carried everything before him in the battle of life, answered for her.
+
+"You have won the stake, Jim," he said in a hoarse voice.  "You and she
+have won the stake, and I've brought it--brought it."
+
+Before they could speak he placed in Sally's hands bonds for five million
+dollars.
+
+"Jim--Jim, my son!" he burst out.  Then, suddenly, he sank into a chair
+and, putting his head in his hands, sobbed aloud.
+
+"My God, but I'm proud of you--speak to me, Jim.  You've broken me up."
+He was ashamed of his tears, but he could not wipe them away.
+
+"Father, dear old man!" said Jim, and put his hands on the broad
+shoulders.
+
+Sally knelt down beside him, took both the great hands from the tear-
+stained face, and laid them against her cheek.  But presently she put
+Nancy on his knees.
+
+"I don't like you to cry," the child said softly; "but to-day I cried
+too, 'cause my Indian man is dead."
+
+The old man could not speak, but he put his cheek down to hers.  After a
+minute, "Oh, but she's worth ten times that!" he said as Sally came
+close to him with the bundle he had thrust into her hands.
+
+"What is it?" said Jim.
+
+"It's five million dollars--for Nancy," she said.  "Five-million--what?"
+
+"The stake, Jim," said Sally.  "If you did not drink for four years--
+never touched a drop--we were to have five million dollars."
+
+"You never told him, then--you never told him that?" asked the old man.
+
+"I wanted him to win without it," she said.  "If he won, he would be the
+stronger; if he lost, it would not be so hard for him to bear."
+
+The old man drew her down and kissed her cheek.  He chuckled, though the
+tears were still in his eyes.  "You are a wonder--the tenth wonder of the
+world!" he declared.
+
+Jim stood staring at the bundle in Nancy's hands.  "Five millions--five
+million dollars!"--he kept saying to himself.
+
+"I said Nancy's worth ten times that, Jim."  The old man caught his hand
+and pressed it.  "But it was a damned near thing, I tell you," he added.
+"They tried to break me and my railways and my bank.  I had to fight the
+combination, and there was one day when I hadn't that five million
+dollars there, nor five.  Jim, they tried to break the old man.  And if
+they'd broken me, they'd have made me out a scoundrel to her--to this
+wife of yours who risked everything for both of us, for both of us, Jim;
+for she'd given up the world to save you, and she was playing like a soul
+in Hell for Heaven.  If they'd broken me, I'd never have lifted my head
+again.  When things were at their worst I played to save that five
+millions,--her stake and mine,--I played for that.  I fought for it as a
+man fights his way out of a burning house.  And I won--I won.  And it was
+by fighting for that five millions I saved fifty--fifty millions, son.
+They didn't break the old man, Jim.  They didn't break him--not much."
+
+"There are giants in the world still," said Jim, his own eyes full.
+He knew now his father and himself, and he knew the meaning of all the
+bitter and misspent life of the old days.  He and his father were on a
+level of understanding at last.
+
+"Are you a giant?" asked Nancy, peering up into her grandfather's eyes.
+
+The old man laughed, then sighed.  "Perhaps I was once, more or less, my
+dear--" saying to her what he meant for the other two.  "Perhaps I was;
+but I've finished.  I'm through.  I've had my last fight."
+
+He looked at his son.  "I pass the game on to you, Jim.  You can do it.
+I knew you could do it as the reports came in this year.  I've had a
+detective up here for four years.  I had to do it.  It was the devil in
+me.
+
+"You've got to carry on the game, Jim; I'm done.  I'll stay home and
+potter about.  I want to go back to Kentucky, and build up the old place,
+and take care of it a bit-your mother always loved it.  I'd like to have
+it as it was when she was there long ago.  But I'll be ready to help you
+when I'm wanted, understand."
+
+"You want me to run things--your colossal schemes?  You think--?"
+
+"I don't think.  I'm old enough to know."
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+I don't think.  I'm old enough to know
+Knew when to shut his eyes, and when to keep them open
+Nothing so popular for the moment as the fall of a favourite
+That he will find the room empty where I am not
+The temerity and nonchalance of despair
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NORTHERN LIGHTS, V2, BY PARKER ***
+
+********* This file should be named 6187.txt or 6187.zip **********
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