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+The Project Gutenberg EBook Northern Lights, v3,  by Gilbert Parker
+#16 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+  Contents:
+    When the Swallows Homeward Fly
+    George's Wife
+    Marcile
+
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+Title: Northern Lights, Volume 3.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6188]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on September 6, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NORTHERN LIGHTS, v3, 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 3.
+
+
+WHEN THE SWALLOWS HOMEWARD FLY
+GEORGE'S WIFE
+MARCILE
+
+
+
+
+WHEN THE SWALLOWS HOMEWARD FLY
+
+The arrogant sun had stalked away into the evening, trailing behind him
+banners of gold and crimson, and a swift twilight was streaming over the
+land.  As the sun passed, the eyes of two men on a high hill followed it,
+and the look of one was like a light in a window to a lost traveller.
+It had in it the sense of home and the tale of a journey done.  Such a
+journey this man had made as few have ever attempted, and fewer
+accomplished.  To the farthermost regions of snow and ice, where the
+shoulder of a continent juts out into the northwestern Arctic seas, he
+had travelled on foot and alone, save for his dogs, and for Indian
+guides, who now and then shepherded him from point to point.  The vast
+ice-hummocks had been his housing, pemmican, the raw flesh of fish, and
+even the fat and oil of seals had been his food.  Ever and ever through
+long months the everlasting white glitter of the snow and ice, ever and
+ever the cold stars, the cloudless sky, the moon at full, or swung like a
+white sickle in the sky to warn him that his life must be mown like
+grass.  At night to sleep in a bag of fur and wool, by day the steely
+wind, or the air shaking with a filmy powder of frost; while the
+illimitably distant sun made the tiny flakes sparkle like silver--a
+poudre day, when the face and hands are most like to be frozen, and all
+so still and white and passionless, yet aching with energy.  Hundreds
+upon hundreds of miles that endless trail went winding to the farthest
+North-west.  No human being had ever trod its lengths before, though
+Indians or a stray Hudson's Bay Company man had made journeys over part
+of it during the years that have passed since Prince Rupert sent his
+adventurers to dot that northern land with posts and forts, and trace
+fine arteries of civilisation through the wastes.
+
+Where this man had gone none other had been of white men from the Western
+lands, though from across the wide Pacific, from the Eastern world,
+adventurers and exiles had once visited what is now known as the Yukon
+Valley.  So this man, browsing in the library of his grandfather, an
+Eastern scholar, had come to know; and for love of adventure, and because
+of the tale of a valley of gold and treasure to be had, and because he
+had been ruined by bad investments, he had made a journey like none ever
+essayed before.  And on his way up to those regions, where the veil
+before the face of God is very thin and fine, and men's hearts glow
+within them, where there was no oasis save the unguessed deposit of a
+great human dream that his soul could feel, the face of a girl had
+haunted him.  Her voice--so sweet a voice that it rang like muffled
+silver in his ears, till, in the everlasting theatre of the Pole, the
+stars seemed to repeat it through millions of echoing hills, growing
+softer and softer as the frost hushed it to his ears-had said to him late
+and early, "You must come back with the swallows."  Then she had sung a
+song which had been like a fire in his heart, not alone because of the
+words of it, but because of the soul in her voice, and it had lain like a
+coverlet on his heart to keep it warm:
+
+              "Adieu!  The sun goes awearily down,
+               The mist creeps up o'er the sleepy town,
+               The white sail bends to the shuddering mere,
+               And the reapers have reaped and the night is here.
+
+               Adieu!  And the years are a broken song,
+               The right grows weak in the strife with wrong,
+               The lilies of love have a crimson stain,
+               And the old days never will come again.
+
+               Adieu!  Where the mountains afar are dim
+               'Neath the tremulous tread of the seraphim,
+               Shall not our querulous hearts prevail,
+               That have prayed for the peace of the Holy Grail.
+
+               Adieu!  Sometime shall the veil between
+               The things that are and that might have been
+               Be folded back for our eyes to see,
+               And the meaning of all shall be clear to me."
+
+It had been but an acquaintance of five days while he fitted out for his
+expedition, but in this brief time it had sunk deep into his mind that
+life was now a thing to cherish, and that he must indeed come back;
+though he had left England caring little if, in the peril and danger of
+his quest, he ever returned.  He had been indifferent to his fate till he
+came to the Valley of the Saskatchewan, to the town lying at the foot of
+the maple hill beside the great northern stream, and saw the girl whose
+life was knit with the far north, whose mother's heart was buried in the
+great wastes where Sir John Franklin's expedition was lost; for her
+husband had been one of the ill-fated if not unhappy band of lovers of
+that civilisation for which they had risked all and lost all save
+immortality.  Hither the two had come after he had been cast away on the
+icy plains, and as the settlement had crept north, had gone north with
+it, always on the outer edge of house and field, ever stepping northward.
+Here, with small income but high hearts and quiet souls, they had lived
+and laboured.  And when this newcomer from the old land set his face
+northward to an unknown destination, the two women had prayed as the
+mother did in the old days when the daughter was but a babe at her knee,
+and it was not yet certain that Franklin and his men had been cast away
+for ever.  Something in him, his great height, his strength of body,
+his clear, meditative eyes, his brave laugh, reminded her of him--her
+husband--who, like Sir Humphrey Gilbert, had said that it mattered little
+where men did their duty, since God was always near to take or leave as
+it was His will.  When Bickersteth went, it was as though one they had
+known all their lives had passed; and the woman knew also that a new
+thought had been sown in her daughter's mind, a new door opened in her
+heart.
+
+And he had returned.  He was now looking down into the valley where the
+village lay.  Far, far over, two days' march away, he could see the
+cluster of houses, and the glow of the sun on the tin spire of the little
+Mission Church where he had heard the girl and her mother sing, till the
+hearts of all were swept by feeling and ravished by the desire for "the
+peace of the Holy Grail."  The village was, in truth, but a day's march
+away from him, but he was not alone, and the journey could not be
+hastened.  Beside him, his eyes also upon the sunset and the village,
+was a man in a costume half-trapper, half-Indian, with bushy grey beard
+and massive frame, and a distant, sorrowful look, like that of one whose
+soul was tuned to past suffering.  As he sat, his head sunk on his
+breast, his elbow resting on a stump of pine--the token of a progressive
+civilisation--his chin upon his hand, he looked like the figure of Moses
+made immortal by Michael Angelo.  But his strength was not like that of
+the man beside him, who was thirty years younger.  When he walked, it was
+as one who had no destination, who had no haven towards which to travel,
+who journeyed as one to whom the world is a wilderness, and one tent or
+one hut is the same as another, and none is home.
+
+Like two ships meeting hull to hull on the wide seas, where a few miles
+of water will hide them from each other, whose ports are thousands of
+miles apart, whose courses are not the same, they two had met, the elder
+man, sick and worn, and near to death, in the poor hospitality of an
+Indian's tepee.  John Bickersteth had nursed the old man back to
+strength, and had brought him southward with him--a silent companion, who
+spoke in monosyllables, who had no conversation at all of the past, and
+little of the present; but who was a woodsman and an Arctic traveller of
+the most expert kind; who knew by instinct where the best places for
+shelter and for sleeping might be found; who never complained, and was
+wonderful with the dogs.  Close as their association was, Bickersteth had
+felt concerning the other that his real self was in some other sphere or
+place towards which his mind was always turning, as though to bring it
+back.
+
+Again and again had Bickersteth tried to get the old man to speak about
+the past, but he had been met by a dumb sort of look, a straining to
+understand.  Once or twice the old man had taken his hands in both of his
+own, and gazed with painful eagerness into his face, as though trying to
+remember or to comprehend something that eluded him.  Upon these
+occasions the old man's eyes dropped tears in an apathetic quiet, which
+tortured Bickersteth beyond bearing.  Just such a look he had seen in the
+eyes of a favourite dog when he had performed an operation on it to save
+its life--a reproachful, non-comprehending, loving gaze.
+
+Bickersteth understood a little of the Chinook language, which is
+familiar to most Indian tribes, and he had learned that the Indians knew
+nothing exact concerning the old man; but rumours had passed from tribe
+to tribe that this white man had lived for ever in the farthest north
+among the Arctic tribes, and that he passed from people to people,
+disappearing into the untenanted wilderness, but reappearing again among
+stranger tribes, never resting, and as one always seeking what he could
+not find.
+
+One thing had helped this old man in all his travels and sojourning.
+He had, as it seemed to the native people, a gift of the hands; for when
+they were sick, a few moments' manipulation of his huge, quiet fingers
+vanquished pain.  A few herbs he gave in tincture, and these also were
+praised; but it was a legend that when he was persuaded to lay on his
+hands and close his eyes, and with his fingers to "search for the pain
+and find it, and kill it," he always prevailed.  They believed that
+though his body was on earth his soul was with Manitou, and that it was
+his soul which came into him again, and gave the Great Spirit's healing
+to the fingers.  This had been the man's safety through how many years--
+or how many generations--they did not know; for legends regarding the
+pilgrim had grown and were fostered by the medicine men who, by giving
+him great age and supernatural power, could, with more self-respect,
+apologise for their own incapacity.
+
+So the years--how many it was impossible to tell, since he did not know
+or would not say--had gone on; and now, after ceaseless wandering, his
+face was turned towards that civilisation out of which he had come so
+long ago--or was it so long ago--one generation, or two, or ten?  It
+seemed to Bickersteth at times as though it were ten, so strange, so
+unworldly was his companion.  At first he thought that the man remembered
+more than he would appear to acknowledge, but he found that after a day
+or two everything that happened as they journeyed was also forgotten.
+
+It was only visible things, or sounds, that appeared to open the doors of
+memory of the most recent happenings.  These happenings, if not varied,
+were of critical moment, since, passing down from the land of unchanging
+ice and snow, they had come into March and April storms, and the perils
+of the rapids and the swollen floods of May.  Now, in June, two years and
+a month since Bickersteth had gone into the wilds, they looked down upon
+the goal of one at least--of the younger man who had triumphed in his
+quest up in these wilds abandoned centuries ago.
+
+With the joyous thought in his heart, that he had discovered anew one of
+the greatest gold-fields of the world, that a journey unparalleled had
+been accomplished, he turned towards his ancient companion, and a feeling
+of pity and human love enlarged within him.  He, John Bickersteth, was
+going into a world again, where--as he believed--a happy fate awaited
+him; but what of this old man?  He had brought him out of the wilds, out
+of the unknown--was he only taking him into the unknown again?
+Were there friends, any friends anywhere in the world waiting for him?
+He called himself by no name, he said he had no name.  Whence came he?
+Of whom?  Whither was he wending now?  Bickersteth had thought of the
+problem often, and he had no answer for it save that he must be taken
+care of, if not by others, then by himself; for the old man had saved him
+from drowning; had also saved him from an awful death on a March day when
+he fell into a great hole and was knocked insensible in the drifting
+snow; had saved him from brooding on himself--the beginning of madness--
+by compelling him to think for another.  And sometimes, as he had looked
+at the old man, his imagination had caught the spirit of the legend of
+the Indians, and he had cried out, "O soul, come back and give him
+memory--give him back his memory, Manitou the mighty!"
+
+Looking on the old man now, an impulse seized him.  "Dear old man," he
+said, speaking as one speaks to a child that cannot understand, "you
+shall never want, while I have a penny, or have head or hands to work.
+But is there no one that you care for or that cares for you, that you
+remember, or that remembers you?"
+
+The old man shook his head though not with understanding, and he laid a
+hand on the young man's shoulder, and whispered:
+
+"Once it was always snow, but now it is green, the land.  I have seen it
+--I have seen it once."  His shaggy eyebrows gathered over, his eyes
+searched, searched the face of John Bickersteth.  "Once, so long ago--
+I cannot think," he added helplessly.
+
+"Dear old man," Bickersteth said gently, knowing he would not wholly
+comprehend, "I am going to ask her--Alice--to marry me, and if she does,
+she will help look after you, too.  Neither of us would have been here
+without the other, dear old man, and we shall not be separated.  Whoever
+you are, you are a gentleman, and you might have been my father or hers
+--or hers."
+
+He stopped suddenly.  A thought had flashed through his mind, a thought
+which stunned him, which passed like some powerful current through his
+veins, shocked him, then gave him a palpitating life.  It was a wild
+thought, but yet why not--why not?  There was the chance, the faint,
+far-off chance.  He caught the old man by the shoulders, and looked him
+in the eyes, scanned his features, pushed back the hair from the rugged
+forehead.
+
+"Dear old man," he said, his voice shaking, "do you know what I'm
+thinking?  I'm thinking that you may be of those who went out to the
+Arctic Sea with Sir John Franklin--with Sir John Franklin, you
+understand.  Did you know Sir John Franklin--is it true, dear old boy, is
+it true?  Are you one that has lived to tell the tale?  Did you know Sir
+John Franklin--is it--tell me, is it true?"
+
+He let go the old man's shoulders, for over the face of the other there
+had passed a change.  It was strained and tense.  The hands were
+outstretched, the eyes were staring straight into the west and the coming
+night.
+
+"It is--it is--that's it!" cried Bickersteth.  "That's it--love o' God,
+that's it!  Sir John Franklin--Sir John Franklin, and all the brave lads
+that died up there!  You remember the ship--the Arctic Sea--the ice-
+fields, and Franklin--you remember him?  Dear old man, say you remember
+Franklin?"
+
+The thing had seized him.  Conviction was upon him, and he watched the
+other's anguished face with anguish and excitement in his own.  But--but
+it might be, it might be her father--the eyes, the forehead are like
+hers; the hands, the long hands, the pointed fingers.  "Come, tell me,
+did you have a wife and child, and were they both called Alice--do you
+remember?  Franklin--Alice!  Do you remember?"
+
+The other got slowly to his feet, his arms outstretched, the look in his
+face changing, understanding struggling for its place, memory fighting
+for its own, the soul contending for its mastery.
+
+"Franklin--Alice--the snow," he said confusedly, and sank down.
+
+"God have mercy!" cried Bickersteth, as he caught the swaying body, and
+laid it upon the ground.  "He was there--almost."
+
+He settled the old man against the great pine stump and chafed his hands.
+"Man, dear man, if you belong to her--if you do, can't you see what it
+will mean to me?  She can't say no to me then.  But if it's true, you'll
+belong to England and to all the world, too, and you'll have fame
+everlasting.  I'll have gold for her and for you, and for your Alice,
+too, poor old boy.  Wake up now and remember if you are Luke Allingham
+who went with Franklin to the silent seas of the Pole.  If it's you,
+really you, what wonder you lost your memory!  You saw them all die,
+Franklin and all, die there in the snow, with all the white world round
+them.  If you were there, what a travel you have had, what strange things
+you have seen!  Where the world is loneliest, God lives most.  If you get
+close to the heart of things, it's no marvel you forgot what you were,
+or where you came from; because it didn't matter; you knew that you were
+only one of thousands of millions who have come and gone, that make up
+the soul of things, that make the pulses of the universe beat.  That's
+it, dear old man.  The universe would die, if it weren't for the souls
+that leave this world and fill it with life.  Wake up!  Wake up,
+Allingham, and tell us where you've been and what you've seen."
+
+He did not labour in vain.  Slowly consciousness came back, and the grey
+eyes opened wide, the lips smiled faintly under the bushy beard; but
+Bickersteth saw that the look in the face was much the same as it had
+been before.  The struggle had been too great, the fight for the other
+lost self had exhausted him, mind and body, and only a deep obliquity and
+a great weariness filled the countenance.  He had come back to the verge,
+he had almost again discovered himself; but the opening door had shut
+fast suddenly, and he was back again in the night, the incompanionable
+night of forgetfulness.
+
+Bickersteth saw that the travail and strife had drained life and energy,
+and that he must not press the mind and vitality of this exile of time
+and the unknown too far.  He felt that when the next test came the old
+man would either break completely, and sink down into another and
+everlasting forgetfulness, or tear away forever the veil between himself
+and his past, and emerge into a long-lost life.  His strength must be
+shepherded, and he must be kept quiet and undisturbed until they came to
+the town yonder in the valley, over which the night was slowly settling
+down.  There two women waited, the two Alices, from both of whom had gone
+lovers into the North.  The daughter was living over again in her young
+love the pangs of suspense through which her mother had passed.  Two
+years since Bickersteth had gone, and not a sign!
+
+Yet, if the girl had looked from her bedroom window, this Friday night,
+she would have seen on the far hill a sign; for there burned a fire
+beside which sat two travellers who had come from the uttermost limits of
+snow.  But as the fire burned--a beacon to her heart if she had but known
+it--she went to her bed, the words of a song she had sung at choir--
+practice with tears in her voice and in her heart ringing in her ears.
+A concert was to be held after the service on the coming Sunday night,
+at which there was to be a collection for funds to build another mission-
+house a hundred miles farther North, and she had been practising music
+she was to sing.  Her mother had been an amateur singer of great power,
+and she was renewing her mother's gift in a voice behind which lay a
+hidden sorrow.  As she cried herself to sleep the words of the song which
+had moved her kept ringing in her ears and echoing in her heart:
+
+              "When the swallows homeward fly,
+               And the roses' bloom is o'er--"
+
+But her mother, looking out into the night, saw on the far hill the fire,
+burning like a star, where she had never seen a fire set before, and a
+hope shot into her heart for her daughter--a hope that had flamed up and
+died down so often during the past year.  Yet she had fanned with
+heartening words every such glimmer of hope when it came, and now she
+went to bed saying, "Perhaps he will come to-morrow."  In her mind, too,
+rang the words of the song which had ravished her ears that night, the
+song she had sung the night before her own husband, Luke Allingham, had
+gone with Franklin to the Polar seas:
+
+"When the swallows homeward fly--"
+
+As she and her daughter entered the little church on the Sunday evening,
+two men came over the prairie slowly towards the town, and both raised
+their heads to the sound of the church-bell calling to prayer.  In the
+eyes of the younger man there was a look which has come to many in this
+world returning from hard enterprise and great dangers, to the familiar
+streets, the friendly faces of men of their kin and clan-to the lights of
+home.
+
+The face of the older man, however, had another look.
+
+It was such a look as is seldom seen in the faces of men, for it showed
+the struggle of a soul to regain its identity.  The words which the old
+man had uttered in response to Bickersteth's appeal before he fainted
+away, "Franklin--Alice--the snow," had showed that he was on the verge;
+the bells of the church pealing in the summer air brought him near it
+once again.  How many years had gone since he had heard church-bells?
+Bickersteth, gazing at him in eager scrutiny, wondered if, after all, he
+might be mistaken about him.  But no, this man had never been born and
+bred in the far North.  His was a type which belonged to the civilisation
+from which he himself had come.  There would soon be the test of it all.
+Yet he shuddered, too, to think what might happen if it was all true, and
+discovery or reunion should shake to the centre the very life of the two
+long-parted ones.
+
+He saw the look of perplexed pain and joy at once in the face of the old
+man, but he said nothing, and he was almost glad when the bell stopped.
+The old man turned to him.
+
+"What is it?" he asked.  "I remember--" but he stopped suddenly, shaking
+his head.
+
+An hour later, cleared of the dust of travel, the two walked slowly
+towards the church from the little tavern where they were lodged.  The
+service was now over, but the concert had begun.  The church was full,
+and there were people in the porch; but these made way for the two
+strangers; and, as Bickersteth was recognised by two or three present,
+place was found for them.  Inside, the old man stared round him in a
+confused and troubled way, but his motions were quiet and abstracted and
+he looked like some old viking, his workaday life done, come to pray ere
+he went hence forever.  They had entered in a pause in the concert, but
+now two ladies came forward to the chancel steps, and one with her hands
+clasped before her, began to sing:
+
+              "When the swallows homeward fly,
+               And the roses' bloom is o'er,
+               And the nightingale's sweet song
+               In the woods is heard no more--"
+
+It was Alice--Alice the daughter--and presently the mother, the other
+Alice, joined in the refrain.  At sight of them Bickersteth's eyes had
+filled, not with tears, but with a cloud of feeling, so that he went
+blind.  There she was, the girl he loved.  Her voice was ringing in his
+ears.  In his own joy for one instant he had forgotten the old man beside
+him, and the great test that was now upon him.  He turned quickly,
+however, as the old man got to his feet.  For an instant the lost exile
+of the North stood as though transfixed.  The blood slowly drained from
+his face, and in his eyes was an agony of struggle and desire.  For a
+moment an awful confusion had the mastery, and then suddenly a clear
+light broke into his eyes, his face flushed healthily and shone, his arms
+went up, and there rang in his ears the words:
+
+              "Then I think with bitter pain,
+               Shall we ever meet again?
+               When the swallows homeward fly--"
+
+"Alice--Alice!" he called, and tottered forward up the aisle, followed
+by John Bickersteth.
+
+"Alice, I have come back!" he cried again.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE'S WIFE
+
+"She's come, and she can go back.  No one asked her, no one wants her,
+and she's got no rights here.  She thinks she'll come it over me, but
+she'll get nothing, and there's no place for her here."
+
+The old, grey-bearded man, gnarled and angular, with overhanging brows
+and a harsh face, made this little speech of malice and unfriendliness,
+looking out on the snow-covered prairie through the window.  Far in the
+distance were a sleigh and horses like a spot in the snow, growing larger
+from minute to minute.
+
+It was a day of days.  Overhead, the sun was pouring out a flood of light
+and warmth, and though it was bitterly cold, life was beating hard in the
+bosom of the West.  Men walked lightly, breathed quickly, and their eyes
+were bright with the brightness of vitality and content.  Even the old
+man at the window of this lonely house, in a great lonely stretch of
+country, with the cedar hills behind it, had a living force which defied
+his seventy odd years, though the light in his face was hard and his
+voice was harder still.  Under the shelter of the foothills, cold as the
+day was, his cattle were feeding in the open, scratching away the thin
+layer of snow, and browsing on the tender grass underneath.  An arctic
+world in appearance, it had an abounding life which made it friendly and
+generous--the harshness belonged to the surface.  So, perhaps, it was
+with the old man who watched the sleigh in the distance coming nearer,
+but that in his nature on which any one could feed was not so easily
+reached as the fresh young grass under the protecting snow.
+
+"She'll get nothing out of me," he repeated, as the others in the room
+behind him made no remark, and his eyes ranged gloatingly over the cattle
+under the foothills and the buildings which he had gathered together to
+proclaim his substantial greatness in the West.  "Not a sous markee," he
+added, clinking some coins in his pocket.  "She's got no rights."
+
+"Cassy's got as much right here as any of us, Abel, and she's coming to
+say it, I guess."
+
+The voice which spoke was unlike a Western voice.  It was deep and full
+and slow, with an organ-like quality.  It was in good keeping with the
+tall, spare body and large, fine rugged face of the woman to whom it
+belonged.  She sat in a rocking-chair, but did not rock, her fingers busy
+with the knitting-needles, her feet planted squarely on the home-made
+hassock at her feet.
+
+The old man waited for a minute in a painful silence, then he turned
+slowly round, and, with tight-pressed lips, looked at the woman in the
+rocking-chair.  If it had been anyone else who had "talked back" at him,
+he would have made quick work of them, for he was of that class of tyrant
+who pride themselves on being self-made, and have an undue respect for
+their own judgment and importance.  But the woman who had ventured to
+challenge his cold-blooded remarks about his dead son's wife, now
+hastening over the snow to the house her husband had left under a cloud
+eight years before, had no fear of him, and, maybe, no deep regard for
+him.  He respected her, as did all who knew her--a very reticent,
+thoughtful, busy being, who had been like a well of comfort to so many
+that had drunk and passed on out of her life, out of time and time's
+experiences.  Seventy-nine years saw her still upstanding, strong, full
+of work, and fuller of life's knowledge.  It was she who had sent the
+horses and sleigh for "Gassy," when the old man, having read the letter
+that Cassy had written him, said that she could "freeze at the station"
+for all of him.  Aunt Kate had said nothing then, but, when the time
+came, by her orders the sleigh and horses were at the station; and the
+old man had made no direct protest, for she was the one person he had
+never dominated nor bullied.  If she had only talked, he would have worn
+her down, for he was fond of talking, and it was said by those who were
+cynical and incredulous about him that he had gone to prayer-meetings,
+had been a local preacher, only to hear his own voice.  Probably if there
+had been any politics in the West in his day, he would have been a
+politician, though it would have been too costly for his taste, and
+religion was very cheap; it enabled him to refuse to join in many forms
+of expenditure, on the ground that he "did not hold by such things."
+
+In Aunt Kate, the sister of his wife, dead so many years ago, he had
+found a spirit stronger than his own.  He valued her; he had said more
+than once, to those who he thought would never repeat it to her, that
+she was a "great woman"; but self-interest was the mainspring of his
+appreciation.  Since she had come again to his house--she had lived with
+him once before for two years when his wife was slowly dying--it had been
+a different place.  Housekeeping had cost less than before, yet the
+cooking was better, the place was beautifully clean, and discipline
+without rigidity reigned everywhere.  One by one the old woman's boys
+and girls had died--four of them--and she was now alone, with not
+a single grandchild left to cheer her; and the life out here with Abel
+Baragar had been unrelieved by much that was heartening to a woman; for
+Black Andy, Abel's son, was not an inspiring figure, though even his
+moroseness gave way under her influence.  So it was that when Cassy's
+letter came, her breast seemed to grow warmer, and swell with longing to
+see the wife of her nephew, who had such a bad reputation in Abel's eyes,
+and to see George's little boy, who was coming too.  After all, whatever
+Cassy was, she was the mother of Abel's son's son; and Aunt Kate was too
+old and wise to be frightened by tales told of Cassy or any one else.
+So, having had her own way so far regarding Cassy's coming, she looked
+Abel calmly in the eyes, over the gold-rimmed spectacles which were her
+dearest possession--almost the only thing of value she had.  She was not
+afraid of Abel's anger, and he knew it; but his eldest son, Black Andy,
+was present, and he must make a show of being master of the situation.
+
+"Aunt Kate," he said, "I didn't make a fuss about you sending the horses
+and sleigh for her, because women do fool things sometimes.  I suppose
+curiosity got the best of you.  Anyhow, mebbe it's right Cassy should
+find out, once for all, how things stand, and that they haven't altered
+since she took George away, and ruined his life, and sent him to his
+grave.  That's why I didn't order Mick back when I saw him going out with
+the team."
+
+"Cassy Mavor," interjected a third voice from a corner behind the great
+stove--"Cassy Mavor, of the variety-dance-and-song, and a talk with the
+gallery between!"
+
+Aunt Kate looked over at Black Andy, and stopped knitting, for there was
+that in the tone of the sullen ranchman which stirred in her a sudden
+anger, and anger was a rare and uncomfortable sensation to her.  A flush
+crept slowly over her face, then it died away, and she said quietly to
+Black Andy--for she had ever prayed to be master of the demon of temper
+down deep in her, and she was praying now:
+
+"She earnt her living by singing and dancing, and she's brought up
+George's boy by it, and singing and dancing isn't a crime.  David danced
+before the Lord.  I danced myself when I was a young girl, and before I
+joined the church.  'Twas about the only pleasure I ever had; 'bout the
+only one I like to remember.  There's no difference to me 'twixt making
+your feet handy and clever and full of music, and playing with your
+fingers on the piano or on a melodeon at a meeting.  As for singing, it's
+God's gift; and many a time I wisht I had it.  I'd have sung the
+blackness out of your face and heart, Andy."  She leaned back again and
+began to knit very fast.  "I'd like to hear Cassy sing, and see her dance
+too."
+
+Black Andy chuckled coarsely, "I often heard her sing and saw her dance
+down at Lumley's before she took George away East.  You wouldn't have
+guessed she had consumption.  She knocked the boys over down to Lumley's.
+The first night at Lumley's done for George."
+
+Black Andy's face showed no lightening of its gloom as he spoke, but
+there was a firing up of the black eyes, and the woman with the knitting
+felt that--for whatever reason--he was purposely irritating his father.
+
+"The devil was in her heels and in her tongue," Andy continued.  "With
+her big mouth, red hair, and little eyes, she'd have made anybody laugh.
+I laughed."
+
+"You laughed!" snapped out his father with a sneer.
+
+Black Andy's eyes half closed with a morose look, then he went on.  "Yes,
+I laughed at Cassy.  While she was out here at Lumley's getting cured,
+accordin' to the doctor's orders, things seemed to get a move on in the
+West.  But it didn't suit professing Christians like you, dad."  He
+jerked his head towards the old man and drew the spittoon near with his
+feet.
+
+"The West hasn't been any worse off since she left," snarled the old man.
+
+"Well, she took George with her," grimly retorted Black Andy.
+
+Abel Baragar's heart had been warmer towards his dead son George than
+to any one else in the world.  George had been as fair of face and hair
+as Andrew was dark; as cheerful and amusing as Andrew was gloomy and
+dispiriting; as agile and dexterous of mind and body as his brother was
+slow and angular; as emotional and warm-hearted as the other was
+phlegmatic and sour--or so it seemed to the father and to nearly all
+others.
+
+In those old days they had not been very well off.  The railway was not
+completed, and the West had not begun "to move."  The old man had bought
+and sold land and cattle and horses, always living on a narrow margin of
+safety, but in the hope that one day the choice bits of land he was
+shepherding here and there would take a leap up in value; and his
+judgment had been right.  His prosperity had all come since George went
+away with Cassy Mavor.  His anger at George had been the more acute,
+because the thing happened at a time when his affairs were on the edge of
+a precipice.  He had won through it, but only by the merest shave, and it
+had all left him with a bad spot in his heart, in spite of his "having
+religion."  Whenever he remembered George, he instinctively thought of
+those black days when a Land and Cattle Syndicate was crowding him over
+the edge into the chasm of failure, and came so near doing it.  A few
+thousand dollars less to put up here and there, and he would have been
+ruined; his blood became hotter whenever he thought of it.  He had had to
+fight the worst of it through alone, for George, who had been useful as a
+kind of buyer and seller, who was ever all things to all men, and ready
+with quip and jest, and not a little uncertain as to truth--to which the
+old man shut his eyes when there was a "deal" on--had, in the end, been
+of no use at all, and had seemed to go to pieces just when he was most
+needed.  His father had put it all down to Cassy Mavor, who had unsettled
+things since she had come to Lumley's, and being a man of very few ideas,
+he cherished those he had with an exaggerated care.  Prosperity had not
+softened him; it had given him an arrogance unduly emphasised by a
+reputation for rigid virtue and honesty.  The indirect attack which
+Andrew now made on George's memory roused him to anger, as much because
+it seemed to challenge his own judgment as cast a slight on the name of
+the boy whom he had cast off, yet who had a firmer hold on his heart than
+any human being ever had.  It had only been pride which had prevented him
+from making it up with George before it was too late; but, all the more,
+he was set against the woman who "kicked up her heels for a living"; and,
+all the more, he resented Black Andy, who, in his own grim way, had
+managed to remain a partner with him in their present prosperity, and had
+done so little for it.
+
+"George helped to make what you've got, Andy," he said darkly now.  "The
+West missed George.  The West said, 'There was a good man ruined by a
+woman.' The West'd never think anything or anybody missed you, 'cept
+yourself.  When you went North, it never missed you; when you come back,
+its jaw fell.  You wasn't fit to black George's boots."
+
+Black Andy's mouth took on a bitter sort of smile, and his eyes drooped
+furtively, as he struck the damper of the stove heavily with his foot,
+then he replied slowly:
+
+"Well, that's all right; but if I wasn't fit to black his boots, it ain't
+my fault.  I git my nature honest, as he did.  We wasn't any cross-
+breeds, I s'pose.  We got the strain direct, and we was all right on her
+side."  He jerked his head towards Aunt Kate, whose face was growing
+pale.  She interposed now.
+
+"Can't you leave the dead alone?" she asked in a voice ringing a little.
+"Can't you let them rest?  Ain't it enough to quarrel about the living?
+Cassy'll be here soon," she added, peering out of the window, "and if I
+was you, I'd try and not make her sorry she ever married a Baragar.  It
+ain't a feeling that'd make a sick woman live long."
+
+Aunt Kate did not strike often, but when she did, she struck hard.  Abel
+Baragar staggered a little under this blow, for, at the moment, it seemed
+to him that he saw his dead wife's face looking at him from the chair
+where her sister now sat.  Down in his ill-furnished heart, where there
+had been little which was companionable, there was a shadowed corner.
+Sophy Baragar had been such a true-hearted, brave-souled woman, and he
+had been so impatient and exacting with her, till the beautiful face,
+which had been reproduced in George, had lost its colour and its fire,
+had become careworn and sweet with that sweetness which goes early out of
+the world.  In all her days the vanished wife had never hinted at as much
+as Aunt Kate suggested now, and Abel Baragar shut his eyes against the
+thing which he was seeing.  He was not all hard, after all.
+
+Aunt Kate turned to Black Andy now.
+
+"Mebbe Cassy ain't for long," she said.  "Mebbe she's come out for what
+she came out for before.  It seems to me it's that, or she wouldn't have
+come; because she's young yet, and she's fond of her boy, and she'd not
+want to bury herself alive out here with us.  Mebbe her lungs is bad
+again."
+
+"Then she's sure to get another husband out here," said the old man,
+recovering himself.  "She got one before easy, on the same ticket."  With
+something of malice he looked over at Black Andy.
+
+"If she can sing and dance as she done nine years ago, I shouldn't
+wonder," answered Black Andy smoothly.  These two men knew each other;
+they had said hard things to each other for many a year, yet they lived
+on together unshaken by each other's moods and bitternesses.
+
+"I'm getting old,--I'm seventy-nine,--and I ain't for long," urged Aunt
+Kate, looking Abel in the eyes.  "Some day soon I'll be stepping out and
+away.  Then things'll go to sixes and sevens, as they did after Sophy
+died.  Some one ought to be here that's got a right to be here, not a
+hired woman."
+
+Suddenly the old man raged out.
+
+"Her--off the stage, to look after this!  Her, that's kicked up her heels
+for a living!  It's--no, she's no good.  She's common.  She's come, and
+she can go.  I ain't having sweepings from the streets living here as if
+they had rights."
+
+Aunt Kate set her lips.
+
+"Sweepings!  You've got to take that back, Abel.  It's not Christian.
+You've got to take that back."
+
+"He'll take it back all right before we've done, I guess," remarked Black
+Andy.  "He'll take a lot back."
+
+"Truth's truth, and I'll stand by it, and--"
+
+The old man stopped, for there came to them now, clearly, the sound of
+sleigh bells.  They all stood still for an instant, silent and attentive,
+then Aunt Kate moved towards the door.
+
+"Cassy's come," she said.  "Cassy and George's boy've come."
+
+Another instant and the door was opened on the beautiful, white,
+sparkling world, and the low sleigh, with its great warm buffalo robes,
+in which the small figures of a woman and a child were almost lost,
+stopped at the door.  Two whimsical but tired eyes looked over a rim of
+fur at the old woman in the doorway, then Cassy's voice rang out.
+
+"Hello, that's Aunt Kate, I know!  Well, here we are, and here's my boy.
+Jump, George!"
+
+A moment later, and the gaunt old woman folded both mother and son in her
+arms and drew them into the room.  The door was shut, and they all faced
+each other.
+
+The old man and Black Andy did not move, but stood staring at the trim
+figure in black, with the plain face, large mouth, and tousled red hair,
+and the dreamy-eyed, handsome little boy beside her.
+
+Black Andy stood behind the stove, looking over at the new-comers with
+quizzical, almost furtive eyes, and his father remained for a moment with
+mouth open, gazing at his dead son's wife and child, as though not quite
+comprehending the scene.  The sight of the boy had brought back, in some
+strange, embarrassing way, a vision of thirty years before, when George
+was a little boy in buckskin pants and jacket, and was beginning to ride
+the prairie with him.  This boy was like George, yet not like him.  The
+face was George's, the sensuous, luxurious mouth; but the eyes were not
+those of a Baragar, nor yet those of Aunt Kate's family; and they were
+not wholly like the mother's.  They were full and brimming, while hers
+were small and whimsical; yet they had her quick, humourous flashes and
+her quaintness.
+
+"Have I changed so much?  Have you forgotten me?" Cassy asked, looking
+the old man in the eyes.  "You look as strong as a bull."  She held out
+her hand to him and laughed.
+
+"Hope I see you well," said Abel Baragar mechanically, as he took the
+hand and shook it awkwardly.
+
+"Oh, I'm all right," answered the nonchalant little woman, undoing her
+jacket.  "Shake hands with your grandfather, George.  That's right--don't
+talk too much," she added, with a half-nervous little laugh, as the old
+man, with a kind of fixed smile, and the child shook hands in silence.
+
+Presently she saw Black Andy behind the stove.  "Well, Andy, have you
+been here ever since?" she asked, and, as he came forward, she suddenly
+caught him by both arms, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him.  "Last time I
+saw you, you were behind the stove at Lumley's.  Nothing's ever too warm
+for you," she added.  "You'd be shivering on the Equator.  You were
+always hugging the stove at Lumley's."
+
+"Things was pretty warm there, too, Cassy," he said, with a sidelong look
+at his father.
+
+She saw the look, her face flashed with sudden temper, then her eyes fell
+on her boy, now lost in the arms of Aunt Kate, and she curbed herself.
+
+"There were plenty of things doing at Lumley's in those days," she said
+brusquely.  "We were all young and fresh then," she added, and then
+something seemed to catch her voice, and she coughed a little--a hard,
+dry, feverish cough.  "Are the Lumleys all right?  Are they still there,
+at the Forks?" she asked, after the little paroxysm of coughing.
+
+"Cleaned out--all scattered.  We own the Lumleys' place now," replied
+Black Andy, with another sidelong glance at his father, who, as he put
+some more wood on the fire and opened the damper of the stove wider,
+grimly watched and listened.
+
+"Jim, and Lance, and Jerry, and Abner?" she asked almost abstractedly.
+
+"Jim's dead-shot by a U. S. marshal by mistake for a smuggler," answered
+Black Andy suggestively.  "Lance is up on the Yukon, busted; Jerry is one
+of our, hands on the place; and Abner is in jail."
+
+"Abner-in jail!" she exclaimed in a dazed way.  "What did he do?  Abner
+always seemed so straight."
+
+"Oh, he sloped with a thousand dollars of the railway people's money.
+They caught him, and he got seven years."
+
+"He was married, wasn't he?" she asked in a low voice.  "Yes, to Phenie
+Tyson.  There's no children, so she's all right, and divorce is cheap
+over in the States, where she is now."
+
+"Phenie Tyson didn't marry Abner because he was a saint, but because he
+was a man, I suppose," she replied gravely.  "And the old folks?"
+
+"Both dead.  What Abner done sent the old man to his grave.  But Abner's
+mother died a year before."
+
+"What Abner done killed his father," said Abel Baragar with dry emphasis.
+"Phenie Tyson was extravagant-wanted this and that, and nothin' was too
+good for her.  Abner spoilt his life gettin' her what she wanted; and it
+broke old Ezra Lumley's heart."
+
+George's wife looked at him for a moment with her eyes screwed up, and
+then she laughed softly.  "My, it's curious how some folks go up and some
+go down!  It must be lonely for Phenie waiting all these years for Abner
+to get free.  .  .  .  I had the happiest time in my life at Lumley's.
+I was getting better of my-cold.  While I was there I got lots of
+strength stored up, to last me many a year when I needed it; and, then,
+George and I were married at Lumley's.  .  .  ."
+
+Aunt Kate came slowly over with the boy, and laid a hand on Cassy's
+shoulder, for there was an undercurrent to the conversation which boded
+no good.  The very first words uttered had plunged Abel Baragar and his
+son's wife into the midst of the difficulty which she had hoped might,
+after all, be avoided.
+
+"Come, and I'll show you your room, Cassy," she said.  "It faces south,
+and you'll get the sun all day.  It's like a sun-parlour.  We're going to
+have supper in a couple of hours, and you must rest some first.  Is the
+house warm enough for you?"
+
+The little, garish woman did not reply directly, but shook back her red
+hair and caught her boy to her breast and kissed him; then she said in
+that staccato manner which had given her words on the stage such point
+and emphasis, "Oh, this house is a'most too warm for me, Aunt Kate!"
+
+Then she moved towards the door with the grave, kindly old woman, her
+son's hand in her own.
+
+"You can see the Lumleys' place from your window, Cassy," said Black Andy
+grimly.  "We got a mortgage on it, and foreclosed it, and it's ours now;
+and Jerry Lumley's stock-riding for us.  Anyhow, he's better off than
+Abner, or Abner's wife."
+
+Cassy turned at the door and faced him.  Instinctively she caught at some
+latent conflict with old Abel Baragar in what Black Andy had said, and
+her face softened, for it suddenly flashed into her mind that he was not
+against her.
+
+"I'm glad to be back West," she said.  "It meant a lot to me when I was
+at Lumley's."  She coughed a little again, but turned to the door with a
+laugh.
+
+"How long have you come to stay here--out West?" asked the old man
+furtively.
+
+"Why, there's plenty of time to think of that!" she answered brusquely,
+and she heard Black Andy laugh derisively as the door closed behind her.
+
+In a blaze of joy the sun swept down behind the southern hills, and the
+windows of Lumley's house at the Forks, catching the oblique rays,
+glittered and shone like flaming silver.  Nothing of life showed, save
+the cattle here and there, creeping away to the shelter of the foothills
+for the night.  The white, placid snow made a coverlet as wide as the
+vision of the eye, save where spruce and cedar trees gave a touch of
+warmth and refuge here and there.  A wonderful, buoyant peace seemed to
+rest upon the wide, silent expanse.  The birds of song were gone South
+over the hills, and the living wild things of the prairies had stolen
+into winter quarters.  Yet, as Cassy Mavor looked out upon the exquisite
+beauty of the scene, upon the splendid outspanning of the sun along the
+hills, the deep plangent blue of the sky and the thrilling light, she saw
+a world in agony and she heard the moans of the afflicted.  The sun shone
+bright on the windows of Lumley's house, but she could hear the crying of
+Abner's wife, and of old Ezra and Eliza Lumley, when their children were
+stricken or shamed; when Abel Baragar drew tighter and tighter the chains
+of the mortgage, which at last made them tenants in the house once their
+own.  Only eight years ago, and all this had happened.  And what had not
+happened to her, too, in those eight years!
+
+With George--reckless, useless, loving, lying George--she had left
+Lumley's with her sickness cured, as it seemed, after a long year in the
+West, and had begun life again.  What sort of life had it been?  "Kicking
+up her heels on the stage," as Abel Baragar had said; but, somehow, not
+as it was before she went West to give her perforated lung to the healing
+air of the plains, and to live outdoors with the men--a man's life.  Then
+she had never put a curb on her tongue, or greatly on her actions, except
+that, though a hundred men quarrelled openly, or in their own minds,
+about her, no one had ever had any right to quarrel about her.  With a
+tongue which made men gasp with laughter, with as comic a gift as ever
+woman had, and as equally comic a face, she had been a good-natured
+little tyrant in her way.  She had given a kiss here and there, and had
+taken one, but always there had been before her mind the picture of a
+careworn woman who struggled to bring up her three children honestly, and
+without the help of charity, and, with a sigh of content and weariness,
+had died as Cassy made her first hit on the stage and her name became a
+household word.  And Cassy, garish, gay, freckled, witty and whimsical,
+had never forgotten those days when her mother prayed and worked her
+heart out to do her duty by her children.  Cassy Mavor had made her
+following, had won her place, was the idol of "the gallery"; and yet she
+was "of the people," as she had always been, until her first sickness
+came, and she had gone out to Lumley's, out along the foothills of the
+Rockies.
+
+What had made her fall in love with George Baragar?
+
+She could not have told, if she had been asked.  He was wayward, given to
+drink at times, given also to card-playing and racing; but he had a way
+with him which few women could resist and which made men his friends; and
+he had a sense of humour akin to her own.  In any case, one day she let
+him catch her up in his arms, and there was the end of it.  But no, not
+the end, after all.  It was only the beginning of real life for her.  All
+that had gone before seemed but playing on the threshold, though it had
+meant hard, bitter hard work, and temptation, and patience, and endurance
+of many kinds.  And now George was gone for ever.  But George's little
+boy lay there on the bed in a soft sleep, with all his life before him.
+
+She turned from the warm window and the buoyant, inspiring scene to the
+bed.  Stooping over, she kissed the sleeping boy with an abrupt
+eagerness, and made a little awkward, hungry gesture of love over him,
+and her face flushed hot with the passion of motherhood in her.
+
+"All I've got now," she murmured.  "Nothing else left--nothing else at
+all."
+
+She heard the door open behind her, and she turned round.  Aunt Kate was
+entering with a bowl in her hands.
+
+"I heard you moving about, and I've brought you something hot to drink,"
+she said.
+
+"That's real good of you, Aunt Kate," was the cheerful reply.  "But it's
+near supper-time, and I don't need it."
+
+"It's boneset tea--for your cold," answered Aunt Kate gently, and put it
+on the high dressing-table made of a wooden box and covered with muslin.
+"For your cold, Cassy," she repeated.
+
+The little woman stood still a moment gazing at the steaming bowl, lines
+growing suddenly around her mouth, then she looked at Aunt Kate
+quizzically.  "Is my cold bad--so bad that I need boneset?" she asked in
+a queer, constrained voice.
+
+"It's comforting, is boneset tea, even when there's no cold, 'specially
+when the whiskey's good, and the boneset and camomile has steeped some
+days."
+
+"Have you been steeping them some days?" Cassy asked softly, eagerly.
+
+Aunt Kate nodded, then tried to explain.
+
+"It's always good to be prepared, and I didn't know but what the cold you
+used to have might be come back," she said.  "But I'm glad if it ain't,
+if that cough of yours is only one of the measly little hacks people get
+in the East, where it's so damp."
+
+Cassy was at the window again, looking out at the dying radiance of the
+sun.  Her voice seemed hollow and strange and rather rough, as she said
+in reply:
+
+"It's a real cold, deep down, the same as I had nine years ago, Aunt
+Kate; and it's come to stay, I guess.  That's why I came back West.  But
+I couldn't have gone to Lumley's again, even if they were at the Forks
+now, for I'm too poor.  I'm a back-number now.  I had to give up singing
+and dancing a year ago, after George died.  So I don't earn my living any
+more, and I had to come to George's father with George's boy."
+
+Aunt Kate had a shrewd mind, and it was tactful, too.  She did not
+understand why Cassy, who had earned so much money all these years,
+should be so poor now, unless it was that she hadn't saved--that she and
+George hadn't saved.  But, looking at the face before her, and the child
+on the bed, she was convinced that the woman was a good woman, that,
+singer and dancer as she was, there was no reason why any home should be
+closed to her, or any heart should shut its doors before her.  She
+guessed a reason for this poverty of Cassy Mavor, but it only made her
+lay a hand on the little woman's shoulders and look into her eyes.
+
+"Cassy," she said gently, "you was right to come here.  There's trials
+before you, but for the boy's sake you must bear them.  Sophy, George's
+mother, had to bear them, and Abel was fond of her, too, in his way.
+He's stored up a lot of things to say, and he'll say them; but you'll
+keep the boy in your mind, and be patient, won't you, Cassy?  You got
+rights here, and it's comfortable, and there's plenty, and the air will
+cure your lung as it did before.  It did all right before, didn't it?"
+She handed the bowl of boneset tea.  "Take it; it'll do you good, Cassy,"
+she added.
+
+Cassy said nothing in reply.  She looked at the bed where her boy lay,
+she looked at the angular face of the woman, with its brooding
+motherliness, at the soft, grey hair, and, with a little gasp of feeling,
+she raised the bowl to her lips and drank freely.  Then, putting it down,
+she said:
+
+"He doesn't mean to have us, Aunt Kate, but I'll try and keep my temper
+down.  Did he ever laugh in his life?"
+
+"He laughs sometimes--kind o' laughs."
+
+"I'll make him laugh real, if I can," Cassy rejoined.  "I've made a lot
+of people laugh in my time."
+
+The old woman leaned suddenly over, and drew the red, ridiculous head to
+her shoulder with a gasp of affection, and her eyes were full of tears.
+
+"Cassy," she exclaimed, "Cassy, you make me cry."  Then she turned and
+hurried from the room.
+
+Three hours later the problem was solved in the big sitting-room where
+Cassy had first been received with her boy.  Aunt Kate sat with her feet
+on a hassock, rocking gently and watching and listening.  Black Andy was
+behind the great stove with his chair tilted back, carving the bowl of a
+pipe; the old man sat rigid by the table, looking straight before him and
+smacking his lips now and then as he was won't to do at meeting; while
+Cassy, with her chin in her hands and elbows on her knees, gazed into the
+fire and waited for the storm to break.
+
+Her little flashes of humour at dinner had not brightened things,
+and she had had an insane desire to turn cart-wheels round the room,
+so implacable and highly strained was the attitude of the master of the
+house, so unctuous was the grace and the thanksgiving before and after
+the meal.  Abel Baragar had stored up his anger and his righteous
+antipathy for years, and this was the first chance he had had of visiting
+his displeasure on the woman who had "ruined" George, and who had now
+come to get "rights," which he was determined she should not have.  He
+had steeled himself against seeing any good in her whatever.  Self-will,
+self-pride, and self-righteousness were big in him, and so the supper had
+ended in silence, and with a little attack of coughing on the part of
+Cassy, which made her angry at herself.  Then the boy had been put to
+bed, and she had come back to await the expected outburst.  She could
+feel it in the air, and while her blood tingled in a desire to fight this
+tyrant to the bitter end, she thought of her boy and his future, and she
+calmed the tumult in her veins.
+
+She did not have to wait very long.  The querulous voice of the old man
+broke the silence.
+
+"When be you goin' back East?  What time did you fix for goin'?" he
+asked.
+
+She raised her head and looked at him squarely.  "I didn't fix any time
+for going East again," she replied.  "I came out West this time to stay."
+
+"I thought you was on the stage," was the rejoinder.
+
+"I've left the stage.  My voice went when I got a bad cold again, and I
+couldn't stand the draughts of the theatre, and so I couldn't dance,
+either.  I'm finished with the stage.  I've come out here for good and
+all.
+
+"Where did you think of livin' out here?"
+
+"I'd like to have gone to Lumley's, but that's not possible, is it?
+Anyway, I couldn't afford it now.  So I thought I'd stay here, if there
+was room for me."
+
+"You want to board here?"
+
+"I didn't put it to myself that way.  I thought perhaps you'd be glad to
+have me.  I'm handy.  I can cook, I can sew, and I'm quite cheerful and
+kind.  Then there's George--little George.  I thought you'd like to have
+your grandson here with you."
+
+"I've lived without him--or his father--for eight years, an' I could bear
+it a while yet, mebbe."
+
+There was a half-choking sound from the old woman in the rocking-chair,
+but she did not speak, though her knitting dropped into her lap.
+
+"But if you knew us better, perhaps you'd like us better," rejoined Cassy
+gently.  "We're both pretty easy to get on with, and we see the bright
+side of things.  He has a wonderful disposition, has George."
+
+"I ain't goin' to like you any better," said the old man, getting to his
+feet.  "I ain't goin' to give you any rights here.  I've thought it out,
+and my mind's made up.  You can't come it over me.  You ruined my boy's
+life and sent him to his grave.  He'd have lived to be an old man out
+here; but you spoiled him.  You trapped him into marrying you, with your
+kicking and your comic songs, and your tricks of the stage, and you
+parted us--parted him and me for ever."
+
+"That was your fault.  George wanted to make it up."
+
+"With you!"  The old man's voice rose shrilly, the bitterness and passion
+of years was shooting high in the narrow confines of his mind.  The
+geyser of his prejudice and antipathy was furiously alive.  "To come back
+with you that ruined him and broke up my family, and made my life like
+bitter aloes!  No!  And if I wouldn't have him with you, do you think
+I'll have you without him?  By the God of Israel, no!"
+
+Black Andy was now standing up behind the stove intently watching, his
+face grim and sombre; Aunt Kate sat with both hands gripping the arms of
+the rocker.
+
+Cassy got slowly to her feet.  "I've been as straight a woman as your
+mother or your wife ever was," she said, "and all the world knows it.
+I'm poor--and I might have been rich.  I was true to myself before I
+married George, and I was true to George after, and all I earned he
+shared; and I've got little left.  The mining stock I bought with what
+I saved went smash, and I'm poor as I was when I started to work for
+myself.  I can work awhile yet, but I wanted to see if I could fit in out
+here, and get well again, and have my boy fixed in the house of his
+grandfather.  That's the way I'm placed, and that's how I came.  But
+give a dog a bad name--ah, you shame your dead boy in thinking bad of me!
+I didn't ruin him.  I didn't kill him.  He never came to any bad through
+me.  I helped him; he was happy.  Why, I--" She stopped suddenly, putting
+a hand to her mouth.  "Go on, say what you want to say, and let's
+understand once for all," she added with a sudden sharpness.
+
+Abel Baragar drew himself up.  "Well, I say this.  I'll give you three
+thousand dollars, and you can go somewhere else to live.  I'll keep the
+boy here.  That's what I've fixed in my mind to do.  You can go, and the
+boy stays.  I ain't goin' to live with you that spoiled George's life."
+
+The eyes of the woman dilated, she trembled with a sudden rush of anger,
+then stood still, staring in front of her without a word.  Black Andy
+stepped from behind the stove.
+
+"You are going to stay here, Cassy," he said; "here where you have rights
+as good as any, and better than any, if it comes to that."  He turned to
+his father.  "You thought a lot of George," he added.  "He was the apple
+of your eye.  He had a soft tongue, and most people liked him; but George
+was foolish--I've known it all these years.  George was pretty foolish.
+He gambled, he bet at races, he speculated--wild.  You didn't know it.
+He took ten thousand dollars of your money, got from the Wonegosh farm he
+sold for you.  He--"
+
+Cassy Mavor started forwards with a cry, but Black Andy waved her down.
+
+"No, I'm going to tell it.  George lost your ten thousand dollars, dad,
+gambling, racing, speculating.  He told her--Cassy-two days after they
+was married, and she took the money she earned on the stage, and give it
+to him to pay you back on the quiet through the bank.  You never knew,
+but that's the kind of boy your son George was, and that's the kind of
+wife he had.  George told me all about it when I was East six years ago."
+
+He came over to Cassy and stood beside her.  "I'm standing by George's
+wife," he said, taking her hand, while she shut her eyes in her misery--
+had she not hid her husband's wrong-doing all these years?  "I'm standing
+by her.  If it hadn't been for that ten thousand dollars she paid back
+for George, you'd have been swamped when the Syndicate got after you,
+and we wouldn't have had Lumley's place, nor this, nor anything.  I guess
+she's got rights here, dad, as good as any."
+
+The old man sank slowly into a chair.  "George--George stole from me--
+stole money from me!" he whispered.  His face was white.  His pride and
+vainglory were broken.  He was a haggard, shaken figure.  His self-
+righteousness was levelled in the dust.
+
+With sudden impulse, Cassy stole over to him, and took his hand and held
+it tight.
+
+"Don't!  Don't feel so bad!" she said.  "He was weak and wild then.
+But he was all right afterwards.  He was happy with me."
+
+"I've owed Cassy this for a good many years, dad," said Black Andy, "and
+it had to be paid.  She's got better stuff in her than any Baragar."
+
+                    .........................
+
+An hour later, the old man said to Cassy at the door of her room: "You
+got to stay here and git well.  It's yours, the same as the rest of us
+--what's here."
+
+Then he went downstairs and sat with Aunt Kate by the fire.
+
+"I guess she's a good woman," he said at last.  "I didn't use her right."
+
+"You've been lucky with your women-folk," Aunt Kate answered quietly.
+
+"Yes, I've been lucky," he answered.  "I dunno if I deserve it.  Mebbe
+not.  Do you think she'll git well?"
+
+"It's a healing air out here," Aunt Kate answered, and listened to the
+wood of the house snapping in the sharp frost.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MARCILE
+
+That the day was beautiful, that the harvest of the West had been a great
+one, that the salmon-fishing had been larger than ever before, that gold
+had been found in the Yukon, made no difference to Jacques Grassette, for
+he was in the condemned cell of Bindon Jail, living out those days which
+pass so swiftly between the verdict of the jury and the last slow walk
+with the Sheriff.
+
+He sat with his back to the stone wall, his hands on his knees, looking
+straight before him.  All that met his physical gaze was another stone
+wall, but with his mind's eye he was looking beyond it into spaces far
+away.  His mind was seeing a little house with dormer windows, and a
+steep roof on which the snow could not lodge in winter-time; with a
+narrow stoop in front where one could rest of an evening, the day's work
+done; the stone-and-earth oven near by in the open, where the bread for a
+family of twenty was baked; the wooden plough tipped against the fence,
+to wait the "fall" cultivation; the big iron cooler in which the sap from
+the maple trees was boiled, in the days when the snow thawed and spring
+opened the heart of the wood; the flash of the sickle and the scythe hard
+by; the fields of the little narrow farm running back from the St.
+Lawrence like a riband; and, out on the wide stream, the great rafts with
+their riverine population floating down to Michelin's mill-yards.
+
+For hours he had sat like this, unmoving, his gnarled red hands clamping
+each leg as though to hold him steady while he gazed; and he saw himself
+as a little lad, barefooted, doing chores, running after the shaggy,
+troublesome pony which would let him catch it when no one else could,
+and, with only a halter on, galloping wildly back to the farmyard, to be
+hitched up in the carriole which had once belonged to the old Seigneur.
+He saw himself as a young man, back from "the States" where he had been
+working in the mills, regarded austerely by little Father Roche, who had
+given him his first Communion--for, down in Massachusetts he had learned
+to wear his curly hair plastered down on his forehead, smoke bad cigars,
+and drink "old Bourbon," to bet and to gamble, and be a figure at horse-
+races.
+
+Then he saw himself, his money all gone, but the luck still with him,
+at Mass on the Sunday before going to the backwoods lumber-camp for the
+winter, as boss of a hundred men.  He had a way with him, and he had
+brains, had Jacques Grassette, and he could manage men, as Michelin the
+lumber-king himself had found in a great river-row and strike, when
+bloodshed seemed certain.  Even now the ghost of a smile played at his
+lips, as he recalled the surprise of the old habitants and of Father
+Roche when he was chosen for this responsible post; for to run a great
+lumber-camp well, hundreds of miles from civilisation, where there is no
+visible law, no restraints of ordinary organised life, and where men, for
+seven months together, never saw a woman or a child, and ate pork and
+beans, and drank white whisky, was a task of administration as difficult
+as managing a small republic new-created out of violent elements of
+society.  But Michelin was right, and the old Seigneur, Sir Henri
+Robitaille, who was a judge of men, knew he was right, as did also
+Hennepin the schoolmaster, whose despair Jacques had been, for he never
+worked at his lessons as a boy, and yet he absorbed Latin and mathematics
+by some sure but unexplainable process.  "Ah! if you would but work,
+Jacques, you vaurien, I would make a great man of you," Hennepin had said
+to him more than once; but this had made no impression on Jacques.  It
+was more to the point that the ground-hogs and black squirrels and
+pigeons were plentiful in Casanac Woods.
+
+And so he thought as he stood at the door of the Church of St. Francis on
+that day before going "out back" to the lumber-camp.  He had reached the
+summit of greatness--to command men.  That was more than wealth or
+learning, and as he spoke to the old Seigneur going in to Mass, he still
+thought so, for the Seigneur's big house and the servants and the great
+gardens had no charm for him.  The horses--that was another thing; but
+there would be plenty of horses in the lumber-camp; and, on the whole, he
+felt himself rather superior to the old Seigneur, who now was Lieutenant-
+Governor of the province in which lay Bindon Jail.
+
+At the door of the Church of St.  Francis he had stretched himself up
+with good-natured pride, for he was by nature gregarious and friendly,
+but with a temper quick and strong, and even savage when roused; though
+Michelin the lumber-king did not know that when he engaged him as boss,
+having seen him only at the one critical time, when his superior brain
+and will saw its chance to command, and had no personal interest in the
+strife.  He had been a miracle of coolness then, and his six-foot-two of
+pride and muscle was taking natural tribute at the door of the Church of
+St. Francis, where he waited till nearly everyone had entered, and Father
+Roche's voice could be heard in the Mass.
+
+Then had happened the real event of his life: a blackeyed, rose-checked
+girl went by with her mother, hurrying in to Mass.  As she passed him
+their eyes met, and his blood leapt in his veins.  He had never seen her
+before, and, in a sense, he had never seen any woman before.  He had
+danced with many a one, and kissed a few in the old days among the flax-
+beaters, at the harvesting, in the gaieties of a wedding, and also down
+in Massachusetts.  That, however, was a different thing, which he forgot
+an hour after; but this was the beginning of the world for him; for he
+knew now, of a sudden, what life was, what home meant, why "old folks"
+slaved for their children, and mothers wept when girls married or sons
+went away from home to bigger things; why in there, in at Mass, so many
+were praying for all the people, and thinking only of one.  All in a
+moment it came--and stayed; and he spoke to her, to Marcile, that very
+night, and he spoke also to her father, Valloir the farrier, the next
+morning by lamplight, before he started for the woods.  He would not be
+gainsaid, nor take no for an answer, nor accept, as a reason for refusal,
+that she was only sixteen, and that he did not know her, for she had been
+away with a childless aunt since she was three.  That she had fourteen
+brothers and sisters who had to be fed and cared for did not seem to
+weigh with the farrier.  That was an affair of le bon Dieu, and enough
+would be provided for them all as heretofore--one could make little
+difference; and though Jacques was a very good match, considering his
+prospects and his favour with the lumber-king, Valloir had a kind of fear
+of him, and could not easily promise his beloved Marcile, the flower of
+his flock, to a man of whom the priest so strongly disapproved.  But it
+was a new sort of Jacques Grassette who, that morning, spoke to him
+with the simplicity and eagerness of a child; and the suddenly conceived
+gift of a pony stallion, which every man in the parish envied Jacques,
+won Valloir over; and Jacques went "away back" with the first timid kiss
+of Marcile Valloir burning on his cheek.
+
+"Well, bagosh, you are a wonder!" said Jacques' father, when he told him
+the news, and saw Jacques jump into the carriole and drive away.
+
+Here in prison, this, too, Jacques saw--this scene; and then the wedding
+in the spring, and the tour through the parishes for days together, lads
+and lasses journeying with them; and afterwards the new home with a
+bigger stoop than any other in the village, with some old gnarled crab-
+apple trees and lilac bushes, and four years of happiness, and a little
+child that died; and all the time Jacques rising in the esteem of
+Michelin the lumber-king, and sent on inspections, and to organise camps;
+for weeks, sometimes for months, away from the house behind the lilac
+bushes--and then the end of it all, sudden and crushing and unredeemable.
+
+Jacques came back one night and found the house empty.  Marcile had gone
+to try her luck with another man.
+
+That was the end of the upward career of Jacques Grassette.  He went out
+upon a savage hunt which brought him no quarry, for the man and the woman
+had disappeared as completely as though they had been swallowed by the
+sea.  And here, at last, he was waiting for the day when he must settle
+a bill for a human life taken in passion and rage.
+
+His big frame seemed out of place in the small cell, and the watcher
+sitting near him, to whom he had not addressed a word nor replied to a
+question since the watching began, seemed an insignificant factor in the
+scene.  Never had a prisoner been more self-contained, or rejected more
+completely all those ministrations of humanity which relieve the horrible
+isolation of the condemned cell.  Grassette's isolation was complete.  He
+lived in a dream, did what little there was to do in a dark abstraction,
+and sat hour after hour, as he was sitting now, piercing, with a brain at
+once benumbed to all outer things and afire with inward things, those
+realms of memory which are infinite in a life of forty years.
+
+"Sacre!" he muttered at last, and a shiver seemed to pass through him
+from head to foot; then an ugly and evil oath fell from his lips, which
+made his watcher shrink back appalled, for he also was a Catholic, and
+had been chosen of purpose, in the hope that he might have an influence
+on this revolted soul.  It had, however, been of no use, and Grassette
+had refused the advances and ministrations of the little good priest,
+Father Laflamme, who had come from the coast of purpose to give him the
+offices of the Church.  Silent, obdurate, sullen, he had looked the
+priest straight in the face and had said in broken English, "Non, I pay
+my bill.  Nom de diable, I will say my own Mass, light my own candle, go
+my own way.  I have too much."
+
+Now, as he sat glooming, after his outbreak of oaths, there came a
+rattling noise at the door, the grinding of a key in the lock, the
+shooting of bolts, and a face appeared at the little wicket in the door.
+Then the door opened and the Sheriff stepped inside, accompanied by a
+white-haired, stately old man.  At sight of this second figure--the
+Sheriff had come often before, and would come for one more doleful walk
+with him--Grassette started.  His face, which had never whitened in all
+the dismal and terrorising doings of the capture and the trial and
+sentence, though it had flushed with rage more than once, now turned a
+little pale, for it seemed as if this old man had stepped out of the
+visions which had just passed before his eyes.
+
+"His Honour, the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Henri Robitaille, has come to
+speak with you.  .  .  .  Stand up," the Sheriff added sharply, as
+Grassette kept his seat.
+
+Grassette's face flushed with anger, for the prison had not broken his
+spirits; then he got up slowly.  "I not stand up for you," he growled at
+the Sheriff; "I stand up for him."  He jerked his head towards Sir Henri
+Robitaille.  This grand Seigneur, with Michelin, had believed in him in
+those far-off days which he had just been seeing over again, and all his
+boyhood and young manhood was rushing back on him.  But now it was the
+Governor who turned pale, seeing who the criminal was.
+
+"Jacques Grassette!" he cried in consternation and emotion, for under
+another name the murderer had been tried and sentenced, nor had his
+identity been established--the case was so clear, the defence had been
+perfunctory, and Quebec was very far away.
+
+"M'sieu'!" was the respectful response, and Grassette's fingers
+twitched.
+
+"It was my sister's son you killed, Grassette," said the Governor in a
+low, strained voice.
+
+"Nom de Dieu!" said Grassette hoarsely.
+
+"I did not know, Grassette," the Governor went on "I did not know it was
+you."
+
+"Why did you come, m'sieu'?"
+
+"Call him 'your Honour,"' said the Sheriff sharply.  Grassette's face
+hardened, and his look turned upon the Sheriff was savage and forbidding.
+"I will speak as it please me.  Who are you?  What do I care?  To hang
+me--that is your business; but, for the rest, you spik to me differen'.
+Who are you?  Your father kep' a tavern for thieves, vous savez bien!"
+It was true that the Sheriff's father had had no savoury reputation in
+the West.
+
+The Governor turned his head away in pain and trouble, for the man's rage
+was not a thing to see--and they both came from the little parish of St.
+Francis, and had passed many an hour together.
+
+"Never mind, Grassette," he said gently.  "Call me what you will.  You've
+got no feeling against me; and I can say with truth that I don't want
+your life for the life you took."
+
+Grassette's breast heaved.  "He put me out of my work, the man I kill.
+He pass the word against me, he hunt me out of the mountains, he call--
+tete de diable! he call me a name so bad.  Everything swim in my head,
+and I kill him."
+
+The Governor made a protesting gesture.  "I understand.  I am glad his
+mother was dead.  But do you not think how sudden it was?  Now here, in
+the thick of life, then, out there, beyond this world in the darkin
+purgatory."
+
+The brave old man had accomplished what everyone else, priest, lawyer,
+Sheriff and watcher, had failed to do: he had shaken Grassette out of his
+blank isolation and obdurate unrepentance, had touched some chord of
+recognisable humanity.
+
+"It is done--well, I pay for it," responded Grassette, setting his jaw.
+"It is two deaths for me.  Waiting and remembering, and then with the
+Sheriff there the other--so quick, and all."
+
+The Governor looked at him for some moments without speaking.  The
+Sheriff intervened again officiously.
+
+"His Honour has come to say something important to you," he remarked
+oracularly.
+
+"Hold you--does he need a Sheriff to tell him when to spik?" was
+Grassette's surly comment.  Then he turned to the Governor.  "Let us
+speak in French," he said in patois.  "This rope-twister will not
+understan'.  He is no good--I spit at him."
+
+The Governor nodded, and, despite the Sheriff's protest, they spoke in
+French, Grassette with his eyes intently fixed on the other, eagerly
+listening.
+
+"I have come," said the Governor, "to say to you, Grassette, that you
+have still a chance of life."
+
+He paused, and Grassette's face took on a look of bewilderment and vague
+anxiety.  A chance of life--what did it mean?
+
+"Reprieve?" he asked in a hoarse voice.
+
+The Governor shook his head.  "Not yet; but there is a chance.  Something
+has happened.  A man's life is in danger, or it may be he is dead; but
+more likely he is alive.  You took a life; perhaps you can save one now.
+Keeley's Gulch--the mine there."
+
+"They have found it--gold?" asked Grassette, his eyes staring.  He was
+forgetting for a moment where and what he was.
+
+"He went to find it, the man whose life is in danger.  He had heard from
+a trapper who had been a miner once.  While he was there, a landslip
+came, and the opening to the mine was closed up--"
+
+"There were two ways in.  Which one did he take?" cried Grassette.
+
+"The only one he could take, the only one he or anyone else knew.  You
+know the other way in--you only, they say."
+
+"I found it--the easier, quick way in; a year ago I found it."
+
+"Was it near the other entrance?" Grassette shook his head.  "A mile
+away."
+
+"If the man is alive--and we think he is--you are the only person that
+can save him.  I have telegraphed the Government.  They do not promise,
+but they will reprieve, and save your life, if you find the man."
+
+"Alive or dead?"
+
+"Alive or dead, for the act would be the same.  I have an order to take
+you to the Gulch, if you will go; and I am sure that you will have your
+life, if you do it.  I will promise--ah yes, Grassette, but it shall be
+so!  Public opinion will demand it.  You will do it?"
+
+"To go free--altogether?"
+
+"Well, but if your life is saved, Grassette?"
+
+The dark face flushed, then grew almost repulsive again in its
+sullenness.
+
+"Life--and this, in prison, shut in year after year.  To do always what
+some one else wills, to be a slave to a warder.  To have men like that
+over me that have been a boss of men--wasn't it that drove me to kill?--
+to be treated like dirt.  And to go on with this, while outside there is
+free life, and to go where you will at your own price-no!  What do I care
+for life!  What is it to me!  To live like this--ah, I would break my
+head against these stone walls, I would choke myself with my own hands!
+If I stayed here, I would kill again, I would kill--kill."
+
+"Then to go free altogether--that would be the wish of all the world,
+if you save this man's life, if it can be saved.  Will you not take the
+chance?  We all have to die some time or other, Grassette, some sooner,
+some later; and when you go, will you not want to take to God in your
+hands a life saved for a life taken?  Have you forgotten God, Grassette?
+We used to remember Him in the Church of St. Francis down there at home."
+
+There was a moment's silence, in which Grassette's head was thrust
+forwards, his eyes staring into space.  The old Seigneur had touched a
+vulnerable corner in his nature.
+
+Presently he said in a low voice: "To be free altogether.  .  .  .  What
+is his name?  Who is he?"
+
+"His name is Bignold," the Governor answered.  He turned to the Sheriff
+inquiringly.  "That is it, is it not?" he asked in English again.
+
+"James Tarran Bignold," answered the Sheriff.
+
+The effect of these words upon Grassette was remarkable.  His body
+appeared to stiffen, his face became rigid, he stared at the Governor
+blankly, appalled, the colour left his face, and his mouth opened with a
+curious and revolting grimace.  The others drew back, startled, and
+watched him.
+
+"Sang de Dieu!" he murmured at last, with a sudden gesture of misery and
+rage.
+
+Then the Governor understood: he remembered that the name just given by
+the Sheriff and himself was the name of the Englishman who had carried
+off Grassette's wife years ago.  He stepped forwards and was about to
+speak, but changed his mind.  He would leave it all to Grassette; he
+would not let the Sheriff know the truth, unless Grassette himself
+disclosed the situation.  He looked at Grassette with a look of poignant
+pity and interest combined.  In his own placid life he had never had any
+tragic happening, his blood had run coolly, his days had been blessed by
+an urbane fate; such scenes as this were but a spectacle to him; there
+was no answering chord of human suffering in his own breast, to make him
+realise what Grassette was undergoing now; but he had read widely, he had
+been an acute observer of the world and its happenings, and he had a
+natural human sympathy which had made many a man and woman eternally
+grateful to him.
+
+What would Grassette do?  It was a problem which had no precedent, and
+the solution would be a revelation of the human mind and heart.  What
+would the man do?
+
+"Well, what is all this, Grassette?" asked the Sheriff brusquely.  His
+official and officious intervention, behind which was the tyranny of the
+little man, given a power which he was incapable of wielding wisely,
+would have roused Grassette to a savage reply a half-hour before, but now
+it was met by a contemptuous wave of the hand, and Grassette kept his
+eyes fixed on the Governor.
+
+"James Tarran Bignold!" Grassette said harshly, with eyes that searched
+the Governor's face; but they found no answering look there.  The
+Governor, then, did not remember that tragedy of his home and hearth, and
+the man who had made of him an Ishmael.  Still, Bignold had been almost a
+stranger in the parish, and it was not curious if the Governor had
+forgotten.
+
+"Bignold!" he repeated, but the Governor gave no response.
+
+"Yes, Bignold is his name, Grassette," said the Sheriff.  "You took a
+life, and now, if you save one, that'll balance things.  As the Governor
+says, there'll be a reprieve anyhow.  It's pretty near the day, and this
+isn't a bad world to kick in, so long as you kick with one leg on the
+ground, and--"
+
+The Governor hastily intervened upon the Sheriff's brutal remarks.
+"There is no time to be lost, Grassette.  He has been ten days in the
+mine."
+
+Grassette's was not a slow brain.  For a man of such physical and bodily
+bulk, he had more talents than are generally given.  If his brain had
+been slower, his hand also would have been slower to strike.  But his
+intelligence had been surcharged with hate these many years, and since
+the day he had been deserted, it had ceased to control his actions--a
+passionate and reckless wilfulness had governed it.  But now, after the
+first shock and stupefaction, it seemed to go back to where it was before
+Marcile went from him, gather up the force and intelligence it had then,
+and come forwards again to this supreme moment, with all that life's
+harsh experiences had done for it, with the education that misery and
+misdoing give.  Revolutions are often the work of instants, not years,
+and the crucial test and problem by which Grassette was now faced had
+lifted him into a new atmosphere, with a new capacity alive in him.
+A moment ago his eyes had been bloodshot and swimming with hatred and
+passion; now they grew, almost suddenly, hard and lurking and quiet,
+with a strange, penetrating force and inquiry in them.
+
+"Bignold--where does he come from?  What is he?" he asked the Sheriff.
+
+"He is an Englishman; he's only been out here a few months.  He's been
+shooting and prospecting; but he's a better shooter than prospector.
+He's a stranger; that's why all the folks out here want to save him if
+it's possible.  It's pretty hard dying in a strange land far away from
+all that's yours.  Maybe he's got a wife waiting for him over there."
+
+"Nom de Dieu!" said Grassette with suppressed malice, under his breath.
+
+"Maybe there's a wife waiting for him, and there's her to think of.  The
+West's hospitable, and this thing has taken hold of it; the West wants to
+save this stranger, and it's waiting for you, Grassette, to do its work
+for it, you being the only man that can do it, the only one that knows
+the other secret way into Keeley's Gulch.  Speak right out, Grassette.
+It's your chance for life.  Speak out quick."
+
+The last three words were uttered in the old slave-driving tone, though
+the earlier part of the speech had been delivered oracularly, and had
+brought again to Grassette's eyes the reddish, sullen look which had made
+them, a little while before, like those of some wounded, angered animal
+at bay; but it vanished slowly, and there was silence for a moment.  The
+Sheriff's words had left no vestige of doubt in Grassette's mind.  This
+Bignold was the man who had taken Marcile away, first to the English
+province, then into the States, where he had lost track of them, then
+over to England.  Marcile--where was Marcile now?
+
+In Keeley's Gulch was the man who could tell him, the man who had ruined
+his home and his life.  Dead or alive, he was in Keeley's Gulch, the man
+who knew where Marcile was; and if he knew where Marcile was, and if she
+was alive, and he was outside these prison walls, what would he do to
+her?  And if he was outside these prison walls, and in the Gulch,
+and the man was there alive before him, what would he do?
+
+Outside these prison walls-to be out there in the sun, where life would
+be easier to give up, if it had to be given up!  An hour ago he had been
+drifting on a sea of apathy, and had had his fill of life.  An hour ago
+he had had but one desire, and that was to die fighting, and he had even
+pictured to himself a struggle in this narrow cell where he would compel
+them to kill him, and so in any case let him escape the rope.  Now he
+was suddenly brought face to face with the great central issue of his
+life, and the end, whatever that end might be, could not be the same in
+meaning, though it might be the same concretely.  If he elected to let
+things be, then Bignold would die out there in the Gulch, starved,
+anguished, and alone.  If he went, he could save his own life by saving
+Bignold, if Bignold was alive; or he could go--and not save Bignold's
+life or his own!  What would he do?
+
+The Governor watched him with a face controlled to quietness, but with
+an anxiety which made him pale in spite of himself.
+
+"What will you do, Grassette?" he said at last in a low voice, and with
+a step forwards to him.  "Will you not help to clear your conscience by
+doing this thing?  You don't want to try and spite the world by not doing
+it.  You can make a lot of your life yet, if you are set free.  Give
+yourself, and give the world a chance.  You haven't used it right.  Try
+again."
+
+Grassette imagined that the Governor did not remember who Bignold was,
+and that this was an appeal against his despair, and against revenging
+himself on the community which had applauded his sentence.  If he went
+to the Gulch, no one would know or could suspect the true situation,
+everyone would be unprepared for that moment when Bignold and he would
+face each other--and all that would happen then.
+
+Where was Marcile?  Only Bignold knew.  Alive or dead?  Only Bignold
+knew.
+
+"Bien, I will do it, m'sieu'," he said to the Governor.  "I am to go
+alone--eh?"
+
+The Sheriff shook his head.  "No, two warders will go with you--and
+myself."
+
+A strange look passed over Grassette's face.  He seemed to hesitate for
+a moment, then he said again: "Bon, I will go."
+
+"Then there is, of course, the doctor," said the Sheriff.
+
+"Bon," said Grassette.  "What time is it?"  "Twelve o'clock," answered
+the Sheriff, and made a motion to the warder to open the door of the
+cell.
+
+"By sundown!" Grassette said, and he turned with a determined gesture to
+leave the cell.
+
+At the gate of the prison, a fresh, sweet air caught his face.
+Involuntarily he drew in a great draught of it, and his eyes seemed
+to gaze out, almost wonderingly, over the grass and the trees to the
+boundless horizon.  Then he became aware of the shouts of the crowd--
+shouts of welcome.  This same crowd had greeted him with shouts of
+execration when he had left the Court House after his sentence.  He stood
+still for a moment and looked at them, as it were only half comprehending
+that they were cheering him now, and that voices were saying, "Bravo,
+Grassette!  Save him, and we'll save you."
+
+Cheer upon cheer, but he took no notice.  He walked like one in a dream,
+a long, strong step.  He turned neither to left nor right, not even when
+the friendly voice of one who had worked with him bade him: "Cheer up,
+and do the trick."  He was busy working out a problem which no one but
+himself could solve.  He was only half conscious of his surroundings; he
+was moving in a kind of detached world of his own, where the warders and
+the Sheriff and those who followed were almost abstract and unreal
+figures.  He was living with a past which had been everlasting distant,
+and had now become a vivid and buffeting present.  He returned no answers
+to the questions addressed to him, and would not talk, save when for a
+little while they dismounted from their horses, and sat under the shade
+of a great ash-tree for a few moments, and snatched a mouthful of
+luncheon.  Then he spoke a little and asked some questions, but lapsed
+into a moody silence afterwards.  His life and nature were being passed
+through a fiery crucible.  In all the years that had gone, he had had an
+ungovernable desire to kill both Bignold and Marcile if he ever met them,
+a primitive, savage desire to blot them out of life and being.  His
+fingers had ached for Marcile's neck, that neck in which he had lain his
+face so often in the transient, unforgettable days of their happiness.
+If she was alive now--if she was still alive!  Her story was hidden there
+in Keeley's Gulch with Bignold, and he was galloping hard to reach his
+foe.  As he went, by some strange alchemy of human experience, by that
+new birth of his brain, the world seemed different from what it had ever
+been before, at least since the day when he had found an empty home and a
+shamed hearthstone.  He got a new feeling toward it, and life appealed to
+him as a thing that might have been so well worth living.  But since that
+was not to be, then he would see what he could do to get compensation for
+all that he had lost, to take toll for the thing that had spoiled him,
+and given him a savage nature and a raging temper, which had driven him
+at last to kill a man who, in no real sense, had injured him.
+
+Mile after mile they journeyed, a troop of interested people coming
+after, the sun and the clear sweet air, the waving grass, the occasional
+clearings where settlers had driven in the tent-pegs of home, the forest
+now and then swallowing them, the mountains rising above them like a
+blank wall, and then suddenly opening out before them; and the rustle and
+scamper of squirrels and coyotes; and over their heads the whistle of
+birds, the slow beat of wings of great wild-fowl.  The tender sap of
+youth was in this glowing and alert new world, and, by sudden contrast
+with the prison walls which he had just left behind, the earth seemed
+recreated, unfamiliar, compelling and companionable.  Strange that in all
+the years that had been since he had gone back to his abandoned home to
+find Marcile gone, the world had had no beauty, no lure for him.  In the
+splendour of it all, he had only raged and stormed, hating his fellowman,
+waiting, however hopelessly, for the day when he should see Marcile and
+the man who had taken her from him.  And yet now, under the degradation
+of his crime and its penalty, and the unmanning influence of being the
+helpless victim of the iron power of the law, rigid, ugly and
+demoralising--now with the solution of his life's great problem here
+before him in the hills, with the man for whom he had waited so long
+caverned in the earth, but a hand-reach away, as it were, his wrongs had
+taken a new manifestation in him, and the thing that kept crying out in
+him every moment was, Where is Marcile?
+
+It was four o'clock when they reached the pass which only Grassette knew,
+the secret way into the Gulch.  There was two hours' walking through the
+thick, primeval woods, where few had ever been, except the ancient tribes
+which had once lorded it here; then came a sudden drop into the earth,
+a short travel through a dim cave, and afterward a sheer wall of stone
+enclosing a ravine where the rocks on either side nearly met overhead.
+
+Here Grassette gave the signal to shout aloud, and the voice of the
+Sheriff called out:  "Hello, Bignold!
+
+"Hello!  Hello, Bignold!  Are you there?--Hello!"  His voice rang out
+clear and piercing, and then came a silence-a long, anxious silence.
+Again the voice rang out: "Hello!  Hello-o-o!  Bignold!  Bigno-o-ld!"
+
+They strained their ears.  Grassette was flat on the ground, his ear to
+the earth.  Suddenly he got to his feet, his face set, his eyes
+glittering.
+
+"He is there beyon'--I hear him," he said, pointing farther down the
+Gulch.  "Water--he is near it."
+
+"We heard nothing," said the Sheriff, "not a sound."  "I hear ver' good.
+He is alive.  I hear him--so," responded Grassette; and his face had a
+strange, fixed look which the others interpreted to be agitation at the
+thought that he had saved his own life by finding Bignold--and alive;
+which would put his own salvation beyond doubt.
+
+He broke away from them and hurried down the Gulch.  The others followed
+hard after, the Sheriff and the warders close behind; but he outstripped
+them.
+
+Suddenly he stopped and stood still, looking at something on the ground.
+They saw him lean forwards and his hands stretch out with a fierce
+gesture.  It was the attitude of a wild animal ready to spring.
+
+They were beside him in an instant, and saw at his feet Bignold worn to a
+skeleton, with eyes starting from his head, and fixed on Grassette in
+agony and stark fear.
+
+The Sheriff stooped to lift Bignold up, but Grassette waved them back
+with a fierce gesture, standing over the dying man.
+
+"He spoil my home.  He break me--I have my bill to settle here," he said
+in a voice hoarse and harsh.  "It is so?  It is so--eh?  Spik!" he said
+to Bignold.
+
+"Yes," came feebly from the shrivelled lips.  "Water!  Water!" the
+wretched man gasped.  "I'm dying!"
+
+A sudden change came over Grassette.  "Water--queeck!" he said.
+
+The Sheriff stooped and held a hatful of water to Bignold's lips, while
+another poured brandy from a flask into the water.
+
+Grassette watched them eagerly.  When the dying man had swallowed a
+little of the spirit and water, Grassette leaned over him again, and the
+others drew away.  They realised that these two men had an account to
+settle, and there was no need for Grassette to take revenge, for Bignold
+was going fast.
+
+"You stan' far back," said Grassette, and they fell away.
+
+Then he stooped down to the sunken, ashen face, over which death was fast
+drawing its veil.  "Marcile--where is Marcile?" he asked.
+
+The dying man's lips opened.  "God forgive me--God save my soul!" he
+whispered.  He was not concerned for Grassette now.
+
+"Queeck-queeck, where is Marcile?" Grassette said sharply.  "Come back,
+Bignold.  Listen--where is Marcile?"
+
+He strained to hear the answer.  Bignold was going, but his eyes opened
+again, however, for this call seemed to pierce to his soul as it
+struggled to be free.
+
+"Ten years--since--I saw her," he whispered.  "Good girl--Marcile.  She
+loves you, but she--is afraid."  He tried to say something more, but his
+tongue refused its office.
+
+"Where is she-spik!" commanded Grassette in a tone of pleading and agony
+now.
+
+Once more the flying spirit came back.  A hand made a motion towards his
+pocket, then lay still.
+
+Grassette felt hastily in the dead man's pocket, drew forth a letter,
+and with half-blinded eyes read the few lines it contained.  It was dated
+from a hospital in New York, and was signed:  "Nurse Marcile."
+
+With a moan of relief Grassette stood staring at the dead man.  When the
+others came to him again, his lips were moving, but they did not hear
+what he was saying.  They took up the body and moved away with it up the
+ravine.
+
+"It's all right, Grassette.  You'll be a freeman," said the Sheriff.
+
+Grassette did not answer.  He was thinking how long it would take him to
+get to Marcile, when he was free.
+
+He had a true vision of beginning life again with Marcile.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Being a man of very few ideas, he cherished those he had
+Self-will, self-pride, and self-righteousness were big in him
+Tyranny of the little man, given a power
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NORTHERN LIGHTS, V3, BY PARKER ***
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